In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Japanese Empire was under rapid expansion, fueled by a feudal born military economy and European technology. First invading the chain of islands north and south of its home island, fighting a bitter war with Russia for control over Manchuria and annexing Korea all before WW1.
The outbreak of World War 1 gave Japan the perfect platform to expand further, allying against Germany and taking control of German positions in the Pacific. Making Japan the dominant power in the eastern Pacific, with its sphere of influence extending from the Asian mainland to the mid-Pacific. To maintain this influence Japan had undergone rapid industrial expansion, growing from a technologically primitive feudal country, and developing the third-largest Navy in the world, with only the United States and the British Navies challenging it. With US territory in the Philippines and Hawaii, and British territory in Malaya, Hong Kong and British Borneo, conflict was inevitable tension in the Pacific was rapidly growing. On September 27th 1940 Japan entered an alliance with Germany and Italy, a clear warning to the Americans. Enter the war in Europe, and you will face war in the Pacific. This warning did not come unchallenged and the United States moved it’s pacific fleet from California to Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. From here many of us are familiar with the story.
These specifications alone were ambitious enough, but the plane also needed to be carrier-based, which limited it’s wingspan to 12metres. The specifications were so ambitious that Nakajima pulled their bid from the project, but Jiro Horikoshi persevered. His design was ingenious. Incorporating many of the most advanced techniques of the era. Thin elliptical wings minimised drag, along with state of the art flush riveting. New heat treatment knowledge obtained from the Germans allowed Horikoshi to develop all-metal structure. It’s frame entirely made from this new age-hardened aluminium and he cut holes into the frame where possible to reduce weight. All to achieve that ambitious range requirement of the Imperial Japanese Army, but that requirement forced Jiro to make some sacrifices to the design of the plane. Favouring speed, manoeuvrability and range with its lightweight construction, over heavy armouring. Its skin was only 1.2 millimetres thick over it’s thickest sections, like the leading edge of the wing, and forward fuselage to just 0.5 mm thick at it’s thinnest over the aft sections of the plane. While enemy outer skin thicknesses were not significantly thicker, the outer skin is intended to be a smooth aerodynamic surface, not protective armouring. Typically these planes would contain thicker plate armouring over key locations like the engine, fuel tank and cockpit. The zero did not. On top of this, the zero did not employ self-sealing fuel tanks, which used several layers of rubber that would swell and expand when soaked in fuel and thus seal any holes.
Weight savings even came down to the cockpit size, which was smaller than most Western designs, designed to fit the on average, shorterJapanese pilot. The zero was designed on a doctrine of training skilled pilots with nimble, lightweight planes. What use was armour if you didn’t get hit, what use was armour if you didn’t have the range to patrol your territory? The lightweight skin made it difficult to get into the plane without damaging it, so the designers incorporated footholds and handles, which sat flush to the planes surface, and could be released with a button when needed. This mechanism seen from the inside of the plane looks like a mushroom. With these rounded domes protecting an internal bag which could be inflated using a pilot-controlled valve which redirected air from the front air intake so that in the event of a crash landing into the sea the plane would not sink. The designers of this plane never intended it to be used as a disposable weapon. Yet that is exactly what happened. The Japanese Air Force met little airborne resistance in China, it’s vastly more advanced planes picked the archaic Chinese bi-planes out of the sky with ease. It would meet a far more formidable enemy on December 7th, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack aimed to cripple the USNavy and cement Japan as the most powerful navy in the Pacific.[3] A show of force to dissuade the mighty American Navy from interfering with the Empire’s domination of Asia.An ill-advised attack that had the opposite effect. America entered WW2 the same day, with two primary fighters at the time. The P-40 Warhawk, and the F4F Wildcat. Neither were as nimble as the A6M and in early battles, the Zero had a tactical advantage, despite both planes having a higher top speed. Much of this was down to the superb training of the Japanese pilots, who at the outset of the war, were among the best in the world. The Japanese focused on quality over quantity. This slowly changed throughout the war. Skilled pilots, we dying quicker than Japan could produce them, and instead Japan switched its training process into overdrive. Sending hundreds of green pilots to war. The final blow to the legendary plane would come when the US Navy captured an intact Zero and began probing it for weaknesses.[4]They soon discovered three fatal flaws that would dismantle its tactical advantage overnight. The Americans knew of the Zero’s tendency to burst into flames, due to its weak armouring and lack of self-sealing fuel tanks. It only took a few shots to disable the plane, the trouble was getting into a position to get those shots in. With American test flights of the Zero, they soon found their opening. The Zero suffered from the same problem as early Merlin engines, which powered British planes like the Spitfire and Hurricane, It utilized a float carburettor, which as we discovered in one of my early videos, made zero-g manoeuvres impossible as it caused the float valve to open. Flooding the engine and shutting it off. Unlike the Merlin engines of the Spitfirehowever, the Zero’s issues were never addressed and received little upgrades throughout the war. The last nail in the coffin for the Zero came with the discovery of it sluggish nature at high speeds, becoming much less manoeuvrable when maxed out, due to aerodynamic stiffening of the ailerons. Where high airspeeds made it difficult for pilots to extend the control surfaces with their simple manual lever control system with no help from hydraulics. With these characteristics in mind, American pilots were trained on how to deal with these. The primary rule being for Allied pilots to maintain high speed and never to try to out-manoeuvre a Zero at low speeds. With its tactical advantage gone, and no improvements to be seen, and Japan running short on skilled pilots The Zero was given the role of Kamikazebomber, along with the other outdated planes of the Japanese Air Force. For an island nation at war, running short on valuable raw materials, this was a desperate last attempt at protecting the motherland.
The common story retold was that these young men were brainwashed to absolute devotion to their emperor. The living god of Japan. All too often, the detail is lost by only listening to secondary sources. The stories told directly by Japanese pilots paint a different story. Letters from young pilots, like CaptainAdachi Takuya, paint a picture of young men sacrificing their lives for their loved ones. Perhaps the most telling of all stories come directly from the mouth of one of Japans most famous aces “Saburo Sakai”. This is a paraphrased quote from an interview before his death in 2000.“A lot of Westerners looked at the kamikaze strategy with complete shock, the idea of putting a kid in a plane and telling him to kill himself by crashing into the enemy. But even if you don't tell him to crash into something, putting a kid with only about 20hours flight time into a plane and telling him to take on U.S. pilots in Hellcats and corsairs is just as much a suicidal tactic being a kamikaze. We figured that if they're going to die anyway, the kamikaze attack will probably cause more damage to the enemy for the same price in lives. But let me tell you, all that stuff you read about "dying for the emperor ... Banzai!" that's all crap.”It should be noted that in the same interview Saburo denies the Rape of Nanjing ever happened, which is essentially on par with holocaust denial, so you may want to take any information from this primary source with a grain of salt.
These young men were often barely trained with more than a basic understanding of flight mechanics, and many of them crashed into the sea well away from enemy ships, precisely because they never learned to deal with the zero’s control surfaces becoming essentially useless at high speeds, like in a dive. Many of them died desperately pulling on their stick, not being able to overcome the force of air pushing the surface back down. I think it’s fair to say, these young men were not solely dying out of duty for their emperor, but their family, their friends, for their country. Emboldened by a culture where the group takes precedence over the individual, where suicide was viewed as a reasonable and honourable choice when faced with defeat. This wasn’t terrorism, as many western writers have stated. This was war. The most devastating Kamikaze attack on May 11th 1945, came just two months after theUnited States firebombed Tokyo, killing over100,000, displacing 1 million and cutting the industrial output of the city in half. This bombing raid was more destructive than either of the nuclear bombs.
With industrial output declining, raw materials scarce, trained men few and far between and their homeland under attack. This culture of self-sacrifice for countrymade Japan a fortress that no army wanted to invade. Made worse by President Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender, which only encouraged unconditional resistance, and so two young Japanese Pilots Kiyoshi Ogawa and Seizo Yasunori, each piloting Zeros with 250 kg bombs attached flew to their death on that day. Emerging from low cloud cover the two rookie pilots began their diving attack on the aircraft carrier the USS Bunker Hill, releasing their bombs and proceeding to crash their planes straight into the flight deck. Both bombs penetrate d the flight deck and the resulting fires and explosions claimed the lives of over 390 sailors and airmen. A devastating attack, that disabled the aircraft carrier for the rest of the war but this was a rare occurrence and the vast majority kamikaze attacks failed to hit a target. Either missing the target completely or being intercepted by anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighters. Ultimately the Japanese were being pushed back to their native Island and the B-29sthat dropped the nuclear bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima weren’t even escorted over Japanese land, as the Japanese Air Force had little resources to counter an attack like this. Their airforce had risen and fallen alongside their empire.
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