Comments by "bakters" (@bakters) on "Who were technologically superior? The Axis or Allies in WW2?" video.
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@yulusleonard985 "A6M zero skip alot of armor for mobility that it will easily turn into ball of fire."
That's mostly a myth. First of all, if there was a specific tradeoff with their relative lack of armor, that would be the range rather than mobility. The "fireball" exaggeration comes from that too, that is they chose not to use self sealing fuel tanks, because they decreased the range of their planes. (Interestingly, they opted for fire extinguishers instead.)
The upside was though, that with the tanks empty your plane was not weighted down with armor and sealing rubber, which allowed it to land at a slower speed.
In carrier operations there is a very solid relationship between the landing speed and accident rates. Apparently, accident rates grow with the cube of the landing speed, so adding some safety features is a double edged sword. Not even talking about the risk of running out of fuel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Anyway, armor protection is usually overrated. It protected just the pilot, only from certain angles and mostly from machinegun fire. The main reason for using it, in my opinion, was to increase the aggression of the pilots. Japanese hardly needed it.
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@brucetucker4847 " * little effort was made by the leadership to preserve their lives. Putting them in flimsy, highly combustible planes* "
That statement is pretty much false. First of all, in carrier ops there is a very steep relation between landing speed and accident rate. I think it's square, from memory, so lowering your landing speed is guaranteed to save lives.
Then it's not true that Japanese planes were flimsy. They were light, but light in aviation often means strong. If you add weight anywhere, the loads increase, so you are forced to make the structure stronger, which means heavier, and so forth. Therefore a lighter structure might and often does prove to be stronger.
Anyway, they hardly had any choice in the matter, because of the engines they had available.
Regarding "highly combustible", Japanese planes carried fire extinguishers, which apparently worked fairly well. While self sealing fuel tanks seem like a great idea, they decrease the range and increase the weight even when empty. Is the tradeoff worth it? Would you rather risk running out of fuel because you got lost on the way home in exchange for a slightly lower chance of losing a plane in combat? Would you rather land at higher speed or lower? What if you are wounded?
Hard to tell.
" American plots were a LOT more likely to survive ground looping an F4U "
I think you chose your example poorly. F4U was notoriously difficult to land, simply because you couldn't see anything in this plane. I'd much rather land an A6M2. Nice and slow. Those huge ailerons still working. A beaut.
" the Americans always had more planes and more pilots, the Japanese did not "
What if it was the other way around? Would people argue that the Americans made all the wrong compromises, with their big and clumsy planes, difficult to land, expensive to build, etc?
I think yes, people would argue that. Which means, that the final outcome should not influence our analysis too much. The war was won through numbers, first and foremost.
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@brucetucker4847 Re: armor is heavy, planes must be light
Duh!
Re: We used what we got.
Duh!
Re: Zero followed a faulty design philosophy.
You don't know what you are talking about.
Re: Self-sealing tanks.
Seafire was pressed into a service it was not designed to serve in. It was conceived as a high altitude/CAP fighter, which means it would fight with its top tank empty. It wasn't the case for carrier ops, because they tend to be at low altitude.
Regardless, they didn't make the top tank self-sealing, because it would cost them too much range. It was too costly. Therefore drop-tanks one way, and you fight with a firebomb in front of the cockpit. Tough luck.
Zero was more of a challenge in that regard. It absolutely needed huge range because of the theater. Additionally, the cost/benefit ratio for self-sealing tanks in the wings works out much worse than for a fuselage tank (but at least wing flames don't burn off your face...). Later Japanese used this safety feature, but only after the war came much closer to their home turf. Then they could afford it. Earlier on, they simply couldn't.
Re: Japanese engines.
I pointed that out. Give them double-wasps, they'd design their planes differently. I guarantee you that.
Re: Zero not superior, because it was underpowered.
Not superior to what and for what task? Most naval fighters simply could not dream of performing the missions Zekes were capable of. Over Darwin Australians, on their own home turf, lost more Spitfires due to running out of fuel than the Japanese. And it was a beast in a scrap too. Contemporary advice to the allied pilots was to go into a 6g descending spiral and hope that you survive it better than the Zeke's pilot, because the allies had those early g-suits.
Or just dive (translation - run away!).
Kind of desperate, isn't it?
" any account of any Allied pilot declining to wear a parachute "
That's most likely a myth. You simply can't pilot a Zeke without a chute. You sit on it! Maybe bomber crews? Well, in that case, I could at least entertain this possibility. Though chuting out in the middle of the Pacific, on a far ranging mission, is not necessarily a way I would like to go out either, so I could understand.
With that said, I agree that humanist ideals were alien to the Japanese civilization. It does not mean it cost them the war, though.
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Japanese aircraft were excellent. A6M2 Zero is often considered as the #1 ww2 fighter, depending on context and period. It had the range of the P51 very early in the war, snail-pace landing speed, unsurpassed maneuverability, good climb rate and good firepower.
Americans like to claim they could match it early on (no, not really) and that they totally dominated with their later constructions. It's all based on propaganda, which appears more convincing than it should due to the last-ditch Kamikaze raids with practically untrained pilots. Interestingly, even taking those extremely inflated "kill claims" at face value, later A6Ms do not look too too bad when you factor in the operational losses, which strongly depend on landing speed.
Also, the Japanese rifles were arguably the best bolt-action rifles of the war. The strongest action with the best safety features on top of it. Dead simple bolt construction. Three big pieces or so. Nice dust cover. Even their last-ditch rifles with no corners left to be cut perform satisfactorily.
The only real disadvantage those rifles had, was that they were hand-fitted. Not uncommon back then, but parts interchangeability, which we take for granted, was a major achievement of the more developed industrial powers.
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@brucetucker4847 I know what the general opinion is. I simply don't know if there are any numbers which support it. I used to be told, that hellcats had 11:1 kill/death ratio too, but I never bought it.
Similarly here, all I got from you is an opinion, and "trust me bro, I read the books". "They were losing pilots right and left, because they simply didn't care." is not a statement I will accept on that alone.
Regarding plane construction, I don't think your stance makes any sense. Self sealing tanks and cockpit armor obviously helped a little, but were not game changers. If they were, they'd do it, though even a late war Seafire had only one tank self-sealing. Does it mean that the British were some feudal death cult too?
If cockpit armor was such a useful feature, why was it so fragmentary? Were Americans a death cult, or there were reasons not to make the coverage more complete?
Though, considering the torpedo bomber losses at Midway, you could argue that Americans did not shy away from sending their top quality pilots into certain death, so maybe they were evil worshipers after all.
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