Dogfights: The Zero Killer
 |
 |
The F6F Hellcat.
 |
Oct. 5, 1943. Hellcats move towards Wake Island.
 |
The Japanese Zero.
 |
Robert Duncan is flying one of the Hellcats. He spots a Japanese Zero, but, since his radio isn't working, he can't notify any one else in the flight group, so he heads after the Zero himself.
 |
He opens fire in front of the Zero so the plane will fly into the bullets, and he succeeds in destroying in. Duncan was the first man flying a Hellcat to ever shot down a Zero.
 |
 |
The F4F Wildcat.
 |
The film describes the disadvantages of the Wildcat, including the fact that the
Zero had a longer range.
 |
Essex-class carriers, part of a new approach to war in the Pacific, emphasizing carriers rather than battleships on the part of the U.S.
 |
A Zero attacks Duncan's plane. It's piloted by a Japanese ace who has 9 kills.
 |
The video then goes over the tactics that the Japanese pilot was using, and the fact that the tactics depended on the U.S. aircraft being the older Wildcat model, and was not suited for the newer Hellcat model.
 |
The video then talks about the initial development of the plane.
The plane had armor plating around the engine and the cockpit. This allowed the plane to take more damage than a Japanese plane could, and keep on flying.
November 11, 1943: U.S. planes attack Rabaul.
A Hellcat piloted by Hamilton McWhorter strafes a Japanese cruiser.
A Zero had been discovered downed in the Aleutians, and that gave the U.S. military a chance to learn a lot about the plane.
The Zero was rebuilt, given U.S. markings, and flight tested.
He shoots down a Zero that was attacking another Hellcat. By the end of the war Hellcats had shot down around 5300 Japanese planes.
The videos in the series have diagrams like this which explain specific maneuvers the planes made.
The Japanese lose 130 planes in the air and 74 more are destroyed on the ground in the battle. 8 Hellcats are downed, mostly by anti-aircraft fire.
On the second day of the attack, U.S. bombers sink 47 Japanese ships. The Hellcat ended up with a kill ratio of 19:1 by the end of the war.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
|
|
