Warbird Information Exchange

The original post was a lighthearted question about the false and often ludicrous historical claims that the A6M was a direct copy of a US airframe (like the Tupelov Tu-4) and not the unique design that it was.

It's now on the list - sorry to say I never have.

Agreed, but the trouble with making this point, is it is too general to be meaningful. (Almost) everyone does that, from designers of paperclips to supertankers. It's normal in business from business models to advertising and packaging. Not using peer concepts is mostly dumb, sometimes the work of genius. The latter is very rare.

The problem with the 'copy / took ideas from' is that it simply avoids addressing real quality issues - coming back to the self-reinforcing belief of 'our' organisation's superiority, and ducking the fact that if the question is being asked, your own machine is probably not as good as you need it to be - as shown in the supposed parent types of the Zero.

Now that's a very important point to make, and a critical one. Thanks. As we well know, the Zero's success was achieved by compromises that western Navies would simply not accept*. So it was a truly different machine because the design was based on different cultural concepts.

Thanks Randy!

*(For instance the Royal Navy insisted on an observer to navigate the pilot, which added a bod, which tended to slow your fighter down. See the Blackburn Skua and Fairey Fulmar...)

_________________
James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

Yes, excellent, excellent book. I first read it 25+ years ago, after it came out. It's very hard to find an inexpensive hardcover edition since it's out of print. BTW, it is printed in English, I believe translated by the University of Washington. The latter reprint softcover editions are pretty readily available though and not too expensive. The book is superb, as it gives insight into exactly what Horikoshi was thinking about and why he designed some of the things the way he did on the Zero. It's tremendously insightful and highly recommended.

How about a period piece on the topic?

This is from the British publication The Aeroplane of 1938. Apart from the ramblings of the editor, C.G.Grey, it was a respected periodical of the time, and alternative to Flight which is still going. (The modern magazine Aeroplane is a separate publication.)



Apologies for the poor quality.

Another photo has the caption: "A RUSSIAN BOMBER - A photograph from Spain of a Russian bomber evidently a copy of the American Martin bomber. It has liquid cooled motors with nose radiators. The reproduction is from the German monthly Luftwehr."

Apart from the general layout, conventional for the time, I can't see any way the Martin B.10 could be confused with the Tupolev Tu 2; but the assumption was the USSR couldn't come up with an original design, so this square peg of the Tu-2 was forced into the round hole of the B.10 in western publications. Ironically it was a good, fast bomber of the late inter war period - as effective and as able of outrunning the fighters of the period as any other design, like the Do 17, Blenheim and so forth. Of course by 1939 the fighters had caught up - literally.

Regards,

_________________
James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

Earlier this year I interviewed Don Nairn, who was the first non-US Allie to fly the Zero (he was a New Zealander in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm based in the USA, testing and developing aircraft being purchased fom the yanks for the FAA). He said that the first thing everyone noticed when they got in was it was fitted with American-designed instruments, knocked off by the Japanese.

A mate of mine has an amazing book that he got in from Japan. It has a photo of every single aircraft type that the Japanese used in WWII in their Army and Navy, and there are hundreds of different ones. Many of them are ripped off designs, including things like the Tiger Moth, Fox Moth, C-47, Hudsons, and lots of other reconisable western types they built themselves. it's a pity a few of them don't still exist now to fill some gaps, I'm sure they built their own Short Empires, didn't they?
I will try to find out the name and author of the book, if I can.

_________________
The Wings Over New Zealand Forum http://rnzaf.proboards.com

The Wings Over New Zealand Show http://www.cambridgeairforce.org.nz/WONZ_Show.html

Wings Over Cambridge http://www.cambridgeairforce.org.nz

You guys are looking at Zero design through star spangled glasses.
Every Anglophile knows that it was a copy of the Gloster F/34 of 1937.
I would claim that it is a copy of the Boomerang except that it came first, was better and wasn't based on a Wirraway.

_________________
Chris Mellor

Oh, but we can agree they are all minor objections.

_________________
James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

My favorite story of this kind of stuff is the one that the Japanese were copying a C-47/DC-3 that had been damaged on another mission, and patched. When they copied it, they copied the patch as well.

_________________
Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

The Japanese L2D Tabby (like the Russian Li-2) began as a license-built DC-3, not a reverse-engineered copy. In the late 1930s the Japanese purchased a number of production licenses for western aircraft. Perhap this fact contributed to some of the false conclusions regarding the A6M's origins.

You're right about the Zero-but I just had to post an 'original' Russian design here....................the TU-4!
-talk about reverse engineering.................!

The Tu-4 is the poster child of reverse engineering!

Just so we all remember that the door swings both ways (in reverse!), consider the Republic JB-2 Loon copy of the Fiesler Fi 103 (V-1).

Obviously, the whole thread is tongue in cheek. Irony on Wix is rare enough that missing it is certainly excusable!

The copying myth is not just a myth, it is a myth on top of another myth. It was created to try to explain why the Zero was so much better than contemporary US fighters -- the second myth. The truth was that the Zero was not so much better, if at all, than the P-40 or Wildcat; it had its advantages and weaknesses. The early Japanese successes in the air were because their airmen were so much better than those of the Allies. More carefully selected, better conditioned, better trained, better disciplined, and combat seasoned, the small but elite Japanese air corps, in a snapshot in 1941, might have been, pilot for pilot, the best of air arm of the entire war, for any country. Only the most gifted US pilots -- we know their names -- were as good as most of them, and showed what could be achieved with contemporary US hardware. But it was too humiliating, demoralizing, or just plain unbelievable to admit that the subhuman, primitive Japanese pilots were outflying us; admitting that their technology was more advanced was still humiliating, but less so. Especially if it was copied from ours.

Japanese pilot quality took a steep drop starting with the loss of many of the elite on sunken carriers in the battles of 1942, and Allied pilots progressively became as good, then better, then far better than the Japanese replacements. Later in the war, the airplane-quality myth to some extent was flipped; although the superiority of Allied airmen was recognized and loudly proclaimed, the Hellcat and Corsair were incorrectly given credit for being a lot better than planes like the N1K2, Ki-44, J2M, and Ki-84.

August

Personally, I favor stories that are not so obviously untrue.

August

dave
alot of the instruments and ancillary stuff(like wheels and brakes and prop iirc)were licensed buy the japanese before the war as were the dc3 and Lockheed 14 ,bucker jungman and a few others that i cant remember off hand.
the use of American designed stuff on the zero and other Japanese aircraft in part gave rise to the myth that the zero was a copy of various American designs(Horikoshi laughed at the claim the the zreo was a copy of the h-1)though he did say that some small parts were based on other designs (cowl fasteners for instance) but it was his design overall.
odd that someone mentioned the Gloster f/34 as i have a friend that claims that quiet a bit to unlearned friends as truth

i've heard (read maybe) this story regarding the TU4, anyone know if its true in that instance?