mdiehl
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And that is exactly what I said. For the first 6 months they executed their plan to the letter (in fact things were even better than they planned) and they ruled the skies and the sea...
Fair enough. For some reason I thought (maybe because of the title of the thread) that you were implying that the Japanese pilot+plane combination was superior to the US pilot+plane combination for reasons having to do with expertise or aircraft characteristics. My error.
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In theory any tactics can be viewed as defensive and/or offensive in some degree. But you can't deny the fact that "Thach Weave" was primarily devised as a mean to save USN pilots when they encounter Zero fighters and dogfight occur (natural tendency for almost all pilots in all sides at that time in history was to enter circling dogfight)...
It was not the natural tendency of pilots to enter a circling dogfight. The beam defense was a way for two F4Fs to handle the enemy when outnumbered. The way of handling the enemy was to shoot the enemy down. Killing the enemy is an offensive move. The result of killing the enemy is that fewer of them increases your own safety. But as to the natural tendency to enter circling dogfights, for the USN that's just not the tendency. When you look in detail at the Coral Sea engagements you see F4F pilots flying boom and zoom tactics alot -- especially Thach and Flatley. You also see a high degree of situational awareness to not allow airspeed to drop and pilots routinely bugging out when they found themselves low on airspeed and returning to the combat after gaining speed and altitude. This does not mean that every pilot flew boom and zoom or that even good pilots did not at time find themselves out of airspeed. All it means is that the actual combats were, from the get go, much more complicated than the "Japan ruled the skies" point of view embraces.
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think that Japanese did quite well against USN and against British (many BoB veterans were flying against Japanese) as first class opposition.
I guess.. if "quite well" means that more Japanese A6Ms were shot down by F4Fs at the Coral Sea than F4Fs were shot down, or that more Japanese A6Ms were shot down by F4Fs at Midway than were shot down. I honestly don't know how the IJN comes off looking "quite well" when in direct, head to head, fighter vs fighter engagements, they consistently lost more planes than they shot down. That doesn't strike me as a good record, even if the Japanese could have found enough replacement pilots to recover their losses.
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Also being in combat is something that can only help
I fundamentally disagree. When you look at Coral Sea you can see some fine examples of veteran Japanese pilots losing their lives because they learned the wrong lesson in China. I can name three wrong lessons they learned as they died. 1. Don't cross ahead of an F4F within range, even at a high deflection angle, because unlike Chinese pilots, USN pilots can and routinely do kill you with a snap shot. 2. Don't engage an F4F in a head to head attack because the F4F can take what you can dish out, but the A6M can't take what the F4F can dish out. 3. Under the right circumstances, an F4F can and will turn with you or even ahead of you and kill you.
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You can only see what soldiers are made of when someone is shooting at them and trying to kill them.
"You can only see what soldiers are made of" is hyperbole. There's no there there. In ground combat, veterans can crack and run like hell. Rookies can stand and fight. Unit morale and cohesion can be there, go away, and return. Training can and does make a huge difference even in the intangible things like morale, initiative, espirit de corps. Like other false "common sense" the "experience trumps all" perspective is just crap and demonstratably so in numerous circumstances. Consider the 20th Me. In one prior combat (Fredericksburg) their only mission was to advance across an open ground, be shot and die. Not much learning there since everybody knew that frontal assaulting a fortified position sporting artillery was suicide. In their second battle (Gettysburg Day 2 L. ROund Top) they executed a series of complex maneuvers in combat that most units never used in combat. They'd never used them in combat before. These included a doubling of the interval under fire, followed by refusing the left flank, followed by a bayonet charge that began with a left forward wheel. These things worked (and resulted in the capture of some 400 CSA veterans-of-numerous-battles) solely because of intensive training.
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Training is great but only in combat you can see who is fit for war and who is not (especially true for commanders and pilots)...
It's true that combat provides the test of personal courage and skill. It is not necessarily true that surviving combat makes one either more skilled or more courageus. There's not much evidence that, for example, Montgomery, or McClellan, ver improved much as generals as a result of any lessons that they learned in combat. They started out utterly devoid of talent (McC) and mediocre (Monty) and stayed talentless and meidocre respectively.
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had very poor Air force in 1940 - let's be honest here.
That is neither substantive in its scope, correct in the broadest sense, nor honest. It's also not "1941" as stipulated in the thread title. The USN pilots of 1940 were every bit as good as any IJN pilot in 1940 and better than most other nations' pilots (in part because of their unparalleled skill at deflection shooting). By 1941, even the USAAF had absorbed many of the lessons of the Battle of Britain in consultation with UK and Commonwealth air forces. IN 1941-e.1942 the chief disasters that befell USAAFFE and the PH contingents had *nothing* to do with pilot quality and everything to do with strategic position and logistics.
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Some pilots may have been training some advanced concepts but in general USA pilots at that point in time (i.e. history) were no different in mentality than pilots in other nations...
That is manifestly and documentably different for USN pilots. No other nation trained intensively at deflection shooting. That may be one of the reasons why F4F pilots facing Me109s in the North Africa campaign shot down three German veterans per F4F lost. Not bad considering that the Me109 was definitely a better plane than either the F4F or A6M.
As for the USAAF, the basic problem there remained the use of substandard aircraft in the PTO. In North Africa, unblooded USAAF pilots in P40s acquitted themselves quite well against veteran Luftwaffe units flying Me109G2s and Italian units flying the MC in-line thingie (MC 201 or 202 I forget which) which was a pretty good plane.
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IMHO the accomplishments of Chennault was much publicized for propaganda sake while actual results were not that great (and add to that fact that they did _NOT_ encounter Zero fighters although they constantly claimed so).
When you stop reading the propaganda written in 1942 and start reading about the AVG you will see that, discounting the "confirmed kills" and taking a realistic assessment of the claims and unit records, the AVG lost 1 aircraft in combat for every six Japanese aircraft shot down by P40s. That includes AVG pilots lost in ground attack. So "actual results were not that great" is the only remaining propaganda. The Zero question is more difficult to tackle. There are some good reasons to believe that Japanese units that faced off against the AVG in the CBO had some Zeroes. The debate is really extensive and not resolvable by us.
The thing is we can predict the outcome. The P40 boom and zoom tactics used by the AVG were every bit as effective against A6Ms when non-AVG units flying in New Guinea began routinely to employ them after mid-1942. Since the AVG pilots were that much better at it (having been trained in them at the get go), I think the results of deploying A6Ms rather than Ki-43s against the AVG would not have differed substantially. The Zekes would still have the snot shot out of them and would have acquitted themselves poorly, regardless of the experience of the Japanese pilots flying them, against the AVG.
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OK... interesting...
But what aircraft were they using when training before the war (the military expansion was very very late in USA and, luckily, the war didn't start for USA in late 1939 - it started in very late 1941 or, for all practical reasoning, 1942)?
When did USA Air Force and USN actually properly equip all their squadrons with 1st class combat aircraft?
There it depends on how you view the tactical side of things. Thach and Flatley did not like the F4F-4. They really liked the F4F-3. More gun time (but fewer guns) in the latter and the F4F-3 was 500 pounds lighter. The F4F flown by the USN/USMC was adequate for the task of handling IJN units. In part this was because the A6M was a very fragile aircraft.
So I can't answer whether or not the F4F was a "first line" a/c. IMO, it was a first line a/c since it did well against *other* a/c that people call "first line." In 1942-1943 those others were primarily the A6M and the Me109 in North Africa. If the F4F was not a first line a/c, then I'd have to say that the A6M2 was not a first line a/c.
That said. GM production of F4F was converted at the last second from F4F-4s to F4F-3s with folding wings (named FM2s by the US and "Martlet" by the UK). Over the next two years the FM2s engine was upgraded with more HP. If a pilot in a 1943 FM2 had encountered a pilot in any A6M type plane, the FM2 had the distinct advantage, plane wise. But the USN was NOT satisifed in general with an a/c with 4 MGs and a bad climb rate, so the F6F began to make its extensive appearance in mid-1943 as the primary USN carrier fighter.
The P40 series also received a sequence of upgrades within variant. Early P40Es lacked a bit in high altitude performance but these problems were solved. It was never as good as the best Allied fighters, but by the end of the war the P40N for example was better than the Me109, the Zero, or the Tony hands down.
You'd have to check elsewhere to determine when the P38s arrived in the PTO in numbers. I have no reason to think Matrix has it wrong. Certainly the P38 was a "first class" a/c. Better than just about everything offered up by the Japanese.
_____________________________
Show me a fellow who rejects statistical analysis a priori and I'll show you a fellow who has no knowledge of statistics.
Didn't we have this conversation already?
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