- 2 days ago
In 1942, no Allied pilot wanted to dogfight a Japanese Zero. By 1944, Japanese pilots couldn't survive one.
For eleven months after Pearl Harbor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero dominated every fighter it faced — faster in a climb, tighter in a turn, with a range so extraordinary that American intelligence refused to believe their own reports. The pilots inside those cockpits had over 700 hours of training. They were the best in the world.
Then something broke. On a single day over the Philippine Sea, American Hellcat pilots shot down more than 350 Japanese aircraft and lost 23. A Navy pilot called it "an old-time turkey shoot." The most feared fighter force on earth had been reduced to target practice — in less than two years.
This isn't a story about one airplane replacing another. It's about a captured Zero in an Alaskan bog, a tactic invented with matchsticks on a kitchen table, and two systems that made opposite bets on how to win an air war. One bet paid off. The other led to the darkest decision in aviation history.
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For eleven months after Pearl Harbor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero dominated every fighter it faced — faster in a climb, tighter in a turn, with a range so extraordinary that American intelligence refused to believe their own reports. The pilots inside those cockpits had over 700 hours of training. They were the best in the world.
Then something broke. On a single day over the Philippine Sea, American Hellcat pilots shot down more than 350 Japanese aircraft and lost 23. A Navy pilot called it "an old-time turkey shoot." The most feared fighter force on earth had been reduced to target practice — in less than two years.
This isn't a story about one airplane replacing another. It's about a captured Zero in an Alaskan bog, a tactic invented with matchsticks on a kitchen table, and two systems that made opposite bets on how to win an air war. One bet paid off. The other led to the darkest decision in aviation history.
Subscribe for forgotten WW2 stories ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@ww2dossierr
Like if you think this story deserves to be remembered.
Comment below — where are you wat
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LearningTranscript
00:00August 7th, 1942, 20,000 feet above Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, Lieutenant Commander Tadashi
00:07Nakajima, one of the most experienced Zero pilots in the Imperial Japanese Navy, had
00:12just locked onto the tail of an American wildcat.
00:15He had done this hundreds of times, over China, over the Philippines, over the Dutch East
00:20Indies.
00:21The routine never changed.
00:23Get behind a slower, clumsier enemy fighter.
00:26Hold the turn, fire, watch it burn.
00:29But this time, something happened that Nakajima had never seen.
00:33The wildcat he was chasing suddenly turned, not away from him, but directly toward a second
00:38wildcat coming from the opposite direction.
00:40The two American planes crossed paths in front of him, and before Nakajima could adjust his
00:45aim, that second wildcat had swung around and was boring straight at him from the beam,
00:51guns blazing.
00:52He had no shot, he had to dive and run for safety.
00:55When Nakajima landed back at Rabal, 560 miles to the north, he was furious.
01:01He had gotten on the tail of an inferior aircraft, in the cockpit of the best fighter on earth.
01:06He had done everything right, and he had been forced to run.
01:09He did not know that what he had just encountered had been invented on a kitchen table in Coronado,
01:14California, with a handful of matchsticks.
01:17He did not know that the man who invented it had never once seen a Zero fly.
01:21And he did not know that this single, failed pass over a jungle airstrip was the first crack
01:26in something that had seemed unbreakable.
01:29Because for the first 11 months of the Pacific War, no Allied pilot wanted to dogfight a Zero.
01:35The Mitsubishi A6M was the most feared fighter in the Pacific.
01:38Lighter, faster in a climb, tighter in a turn than anything the Americans, the British, the Dutch,
01:45or the Australians could put in the air.
01:47From Pearl Harbor to the fall of Singapore, from the Philippines to the Indian Ocean,
01:52the Zero had not just won dogfights.
01:54It had ended them before they started.
01:56Allied pilots who tried to turn with a Zero died.
01:59The ones who survived learned a single rule and never forgot it.
02:03Do not engage.
02:04And yet, by the summer of 1944, less than two years after Nakajima's furious landing
02:11at Rabaul, Japanese pilots had stopped trying to dogfight American fighters altogether.
02:16Not because they chose to, because they could not survive it.
02:19The kill ratio had inverted so completely that on one single day over the Philippine Sea,
02:25American Hellcat pilots shot down more than 350 Japanese aircraft and lost 23.
02:31A pilot aboard the USS Lexington looked around at the wreckage falling from the sky and said
02:36it was like an old-time turkey shoot back home.
02:39How did that happen?
02:40How did the most dominant fighter pilots in the world go from untouchable to unable to
02:45fight?
02:45What American pilots did next, to crack the Zero wide open, is a story that deserves to
02:51be told.
02:51A like and a subscribe help it reach the people who care.
02:55That question, how did they go from untouchable to unable to fight, does not have a simple answer.
03:00It was not one thing.
03:02It was not just that America built a better airplane, though it did.
03:06It was not just that American pilots learned new tactics, though they did that too.
03:10What happened between 1942 and 1944 was a collision between two completely different ways of building
03:17an air force.
03:18One side treated its best pilots as sacred warriors, irreplaceable, kept in combat until
03:24they died or were crippled.
03:25The other side treated its best pilots as seed corn, pulled them out of combat at peak
03:30skill, and sent them home to grow a hundred more just like them.
03:34The side that chose to protect its aces lost them all.
03:37The side that chose to sacrifice its aces multiplied them.
03:41But that answer is the end of the story.
03:43The beginning is the Zero itself, and why the Americans were so terrified of it.
03:48In December 1941, when the first Zeros appeared over Pearl Harbor, American intelligence had
03:54almost no hard data on the aircraft.
03:56They knew it existed.
03:57They had scattered reports from China where the Zero had been destroying Soviet-built fighters
04:02since 1940.
04:03But they did not know its actual speed, its climb rate, its turning radius, or its range.
04:09And that last number, range, was so extraordinary that American analysts refused to believe their
04:15own sighting reports.
04:17Zeros kept appearing so far from any known Japanese base that Navy intelligence concluded
04:22Japan must have secret aircraft carriers they hadn't found yet.
04:26The truth was simpler and far more unsettling.
04:29The Zero could fly over a thousand nautical miles on a single tank.
04:33Nothing in the American inventory came close.
04:35And the men flying those Zeros were the best-trained combat pilots on Earth.
04:40The Imperial Japanese Navy's pilot program accepted roughly 75 men per class, 25 graduated.
04:48Those who survived emerged with 700 hours of flight time, beaten into shape by a training
04:53regime that included full-contact wrestling, underwater endurance tests of 90 seconds or more,
04:59and acrobatic flying without safety nets.
05:01One of those graduates, a farmer's son from Saga named Saburo Sakai, received a silver watch
05:07from Emperor Hirohito himself for finishing first in his class in 1937.
05:13By December 1941, the average Japanese Navy pilot had more than double the flight hours
05:18of his American counterpart.
05:20Better airplane.
05:21Better pilots.
05:23And for 11 months, the results proved it.
05:25But here is the number I need you to hold onto, because it is going to come back, and when
05:30it does, it will mean something very different than it means right now.
05:34700 hours.
05:35That is what it cost the Imperial Japanese Navy to produce a single combat-ready pilot.
05:40And in 1941, Japan had no plan, none, for what would happen when those pilots started dying
05:47faster than they could be replaced.
05:49The answer to that question was already sitting in an Alaskan bog, half-buried in mud, with
05:54a dead 19-year-old still strapped in the cockpit.
05:56The Americans just didn't know it yet.
05:59June 4, 1942.
06:01Akutan Island, Alaska Territory.
06:04Petty Officer Tadayoshi Koga was 19 years old and running out of time.
06:08His Zero had taken a hit during the raid on Dutch Harbor.
06:11A .50 caliber round had severed the oil return line, and a dark trail of smoke was bleeding
06:16from the engine.
06:17He had minutes, maybe less, before the motor seized.
06:21His section leader, Chief Petty Officer Makoto Endo, spotted a flat green strip on Akutan Island,
06:27half a mile inland from the coast.
06:29It looked firm.
06:30It looked like a good place to put a plane down.
06:32The Japanese had designated this island for emergency landings, and a submarine was waiting
06:37offshore to pick up downed pilots.
06:39Koga lowered his landing gear and came in.
06:42The green strip was not firm.
06:44It was a bog.
06:45The wheels caught in the muck, and the Zero flipped end over end and came to rest upside
06:50down in the grass.
06:51Koga's neck broke on impact.
06:53He was dead before the engine stopped ticking.
06:55Now, here is the moment that changed the Pacific Air War, and it was not a battle.
07:00It was a decision made by two men circling above a wreck.
07:04Endo and the third pilot in the section, Petty Officer Tsuguo Shikata, had standing orders.
07:09Every Japanese pilot knew the rule.
07:11If a Zero goes down intact in enemy territory, destroy it.
07:15The aircraft's secrets, its construction, its weight savings, its extraordinary range,
07:20were to be protected at any cost.
07:23Endo and Shikata looked down at Koga's overturned plane.
07:26It was almost undamaged.
07:27The canopy was intact.
07:29The wings were intact.
07:31The fuselage had barely crumpled.
07:33They had guns.
07:34They had ammunition.
07:35One strafing pass would have turned it into scrap.
07:38They couldn't do it.
07:39They did not know if their friend was alive or dead inside that cockpit.
07:43They circled once more, then turned northwest and flew back to their carrier.
07:47That decision, made in grief, in five seconds, at low altitude over an Alaskan bog, handed
07:54the United States the most valuable intelligence prize of the Pacific War.
07:58For five weeks, the Zero sat in the mud, unseen.
08:02Flight lanes did not cross Accutan.
08:04Ships could not see the crash site from the water.
08:07It simply sat there, upside down, with Koga still inside, while the Battle of Midway raged
08:12a thousand miles to the south and the world's attention was elsewhere.
08:16On July 10th, a Navy PBY Catalina, piloted by Lieutenant William Thies, was flying a patrol
08:22out of Dutch Harbor.
08:24Thies was lost.
08:25He had been navigating by dead reckoning in the fog, spotted the Schumagen Islands, reoriented
08:31himself, and was cutting across Accutan on a direct heading home when he saw it.
08:35Fresh skid marks in a green field, and an overturned aircraft that was clearly not American.
08:41The recovery took weeks.
08:42The bog fought them.
08:44Salvage teams sank to their knees in mud.
08:46But by late July, the Zero was on a ship heading to San Diego.
08:50And this is where I need you to pay attention.
08:52Because what happened next did not just reveal what the Zero could do.
08:56It revealed what the Zero could not do.
08:58And that difference was worth more than a hundred intelligence reports.
09:01On September 20th, 1942, Lieutenant Commander Eddie Sanders climbed into the restored cockpit
09:08at Naval Air Station, North Island.
09:10The engine had been rebuilt.
09:12The airframe had been patched.
09:13The propeller turned.
09:15Sanders taxied to the runway, pushed the throttle forward, and became the first American to fly
09:20a Zero in American colors.
09:22He made 24 test flights in 25 days.
09:25And on the very first one, he found what no intelligence report, no wreckage analysis,
09:30no interrogation of prisoners had ever been able to tell them.
09:33The Zero's ailerons froze at speeds above 200 knots.
09:37At high speed, rolling the aircraft was slow, stiff, and demanded enormous force on the stick.
09:44The plane rolled to the left more easily than to the right.
09:46And the engine.
09:47In addition, the engine had a float type carburetor, which meant that under negative acceleration,
09:53it simply quit.
09:54Pushed the nose down hard enough, and the fuel stopped flowing.
09:57Sanders wrote it plainly.
09:59We now had the answer for our pilots who were being outmaneuvered and unable to escape a pursuing Zero.
10:05Go into a vertical power dive, using negative acceleration if possible, to open the range while the Zero's engine was
10:11stopped by the acceleration.
10:13In other words, the plane that had terrified every Allied pilot in the Pacific had a kill switch built into
10:19its own fuel system.
10:21You just had to know it was there.
10:22Within weeks, Sanders' findings were being distributed to combat squadrons across the Pacific.
10:28For the first time, American pilots had a manual.
10:31Not a guess, not a rumor from a surviving pilot, but tested, measured, confirmed data on exactly how to survive
10:38against the Zero.
10:39Dive. Roll right. Push negative G. The Zero cannot follow.
10:44But knowing the enemy's weakness is only half the problem.
10:48The other half is having an aircraft that can exploit it.
10:51And in the fall of 1942, the plain American carrier pilots were flying.
10:56The Grumman F-4F Wildcat was slower than the Zero, climbed worse than the Zero, and turned worse than the
11:02Zero.
11:03Knowing that the Zero's aileron stiffened at high speed means nothing if your own plane cannot get to high speed
11:09in the first place.
11:10The Americans needed something else.
11:12Not just knowledge, but a tactic that could turn a worse airplane into a winning one.
11:17And that tactic already existed.
11:19It had been tested in combat exactly three months before Sanders ever touched the Zero's throttle.
11:24The man who invented it had done it without ever reading a single page of intelligence on the Japanese fighter.
11:30He had done it with matchsticks, on his kitchen table, alone.
11:34In the spring of 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Commander John S. Thatch was sitting at his kitchen
11:41table in Coronado, California, reading an intelligence bulletin that most officers would have skimmed and forgotten.
11:47It was dated September 22nd from the Fleet Air Tactical Unit, and it described a Japanese fighter aircraft with a
11:55rate of climb exceeding 5,000 feet per minute and a turning radius tighter than anything in the American inventory.
12:02Thatch had never seen this aircraft.
12:04He had never fought it.
12:05But he understood immediately what those numbers meant.
12:08They meant that if an American pilot and a Wildcat tried to out-turn or out-climb this thing, he
12:14was dead.
12:14So, Thatch did something unusual.
12:17He went home every night, cleared the table, and laid out matchsticks.
12:21Two matchsticks for a pair of American fighters.
12:23One matchstick for the enemy.
12:25And he ran the problem.
12:26If the enemy is faster and turns tighter, what formation allows two slower planes to protect each other?
12:33He moved the matchsticks.
12:34He erased the result.
12:36He moved them again.
12:37The answer he found was counterintuitive.
12:39When the enemy locks onto one plane's tail, both planes turn toward each other.
12:45Not away.
12:46Toward.
12:46The paths cross.
12:48The enemy, fixated on the first target, suddenly finds the second plane swinging around to face him head-on.
12:54If he presses the attack, he flies into a stream of .50 caliber rounds.
12:59If he breaks off, the first plane is now behind him.
13:03Either way, the geometry kills him.
13:05Thatch called it the beam defense position.
13:07He tested it with the best pilot he knew, Lieutenant Edward Butch O'Hare, a man who would later receive
13:14the Medal of Honor.
13:15O'Hare played the enemy.
13:17He tried every approach angle he could think of.
13:19He could not solve it.
13:21Every time he locked on, the crossing maneuver threw him off.
13:24Every time he adjusted, the second wildcat was in firing position.
13:28After repeated attempts, O'Hare told Thatch the four-plane division was the only formation that worked.
13:35He sent two messages, one personal, one official.
13:38In the personal one, he gave the tactic its name, the Thatch Weave.
13:43Now, keep something in mind.
13:45Thatch invented this maneuver based on a single intelligence bulletin.
13:48He had not flown against a zero.
13:50He had not studied a captured one.
13:52He had not spoken with anyone who had fought one.
13:55He solved the problem purely in theory, with matchsticks, months before the war started.
14:01The theory met reality on June 4th, 1942, the same day Tadayoshi Koga was bleeding oil over Akutan Island, a
14:09thousand miles to the north.
14:11Over the Japanese fleet at Midway, Thatch led six wildcats, escorting twelve Devastator torpedo bombers.
14:17Fifteen to twenty zeros came down on them.
14:21Within seconds, Ensign Edgar Bassett's wildcat was hit and fell burning toward the sea.
14:27Thatch was outnumbered, outgunned, and flying an airplane that could not match the zero in any performance category that mattered.
14:34He called to his wingman, Ensign Ram Dibb.
14:36Dibb had never practiced the weave.
14:38His radio had been hit.
14:40He barely understood what Thatch was asking.
14:42But Thatch swung toward him.
14:44Dibb instinctively swung back.
14:46And a zero that had been closing on Dibb's tail flew directly into Thatch's gun sight.
14:51Thatch fired.
14:52The zero shed a piece of cowling and burst into flames.
14:56They kept weaving.
14:57Zeros that pressed their attacks flew into crossing fire.
15:00Zeros that broke off found wildcats behind them.
15:03Thatch personally destroyed three.
15:06Dibb got one.
15:07The zeros, confused by a maneuver they had never seen, began pulling away.
15:11When dive bombers from the Enterprise screamed down on the unprotected Japanese carriers minutes later, those zeros were too far
15:18out of position to stop them.
15:20The weave worked.
15:21But midway was only six planes.
15:23The real test came at Guadalcanal, where marine wildcat pilots flying from Henderson Field adopted the thatch weave against zero
15:31formations, flying down from Rabaul almost daily.
15:34And this is where the numbers shifted in a way that should have sent a warning through every command post
15:39in the Japanese Navy.
15:40Before Guadalcanal, the kill ratio between wildcats and zeros was roughly one and a half to one, in Japan's favor.
15:49By the end of the Guadalcanal campaign in February 1943, wildcat pilots were shooting down 5.9 zeros for every
15:57wildcat lost.
15:58The same airplane, the same engine, the same guns.
16:01The only thing that had changed was how the Americans flew it.
16:04And there is a detail buried in this that matters more than the tactic itself.
16:08The thatch weave required two things that no Japanese fighter pilot had.
16:13The first was a radio.
16:14American wildcats had them.
16:17Zeros did not.
16:18Japanese pilots could not talk to each other in the air.
16:21They could not coordinate a defense.
16:23They could not warn a wingman.
16:25Each man fought alone, and the Americans punished that isolation every single time.
16:30The second thing the weave required was a willingness to fight as a team instead of as individuals.
16:35And this is where the story stops being about airplanes, and starts being about something much deeper.
16:41Two completely different ideas about what a fighter pilot is supposed to be.
16:45Saburo Sakai, the ace who watched Nakajima come back raging from his first encounter with the weave, later made an
16:52observation that cut right to the center of it.
16:54He said that American pilots fought the way Americans played football.
16:58Not one man against one man.
17:00A system.
17:01Coordinated.
17:02Designed so that every player makes the next player more dangerous.
17:06The Japanese model was the opposite.
17:08The samurai.
17:10One warrior.
17:11Supreme in skill.
17:12Alone in the sky.
17:13In 1942, Alone in the sky was enough.
17:17But the men who made it enough, the 700-hour veterans, the aces who had been flying since China, were
17:24about to start disappearing.
17:25And what each side did next with its surviving pilots is the thing that broke the war open.
17:30August 7, 1942, the same day Nakajima raged back to Rabaul after encountering the thatch weave, Saburo Sakai almost died.
17:40He had been hunting American planes over Guadalcanal all morning.
17:44He had shot down a wildcat flown by Lieutenant James Sutherland after an extended dogfight that would later become one
17:50of the most studied one-on-one encounters of the war.
17:53Then he spotted what he thought were more wildcats.
17:56They were not wildcats.
17:57They were SBD dauntless dive bombers.
18:00Heavier, slower, but carrying rear-facing machine guns manned by trained gunners.
18:06Sakai came in from behind, which was the wrong approach for that aircraft.
18:10A burst from the rear gunner, a man named Harold Jones, came through the windscreen and hit Sakai in the
18:16head.
18:17The bullet tore away part of his skull above the left eye.
18:20Blood filled his vision.
18:22The left side of his body went numb.
18:24He could not see out of his right eye.
18:26He was 560 miles from Rabaul, alone, over open ocean.
18:31For a moment, he considered diving into an American ship.
18:34If he had to die, he would take enemies with him.
18:37Then he realized his Zero was still flyable.
18:40He could still move the stick with his right hand.
18:43He turned north.
18:44What followed was a 4-hour, 47-minute flight that ranks among the most extraordinary feats of endurance in aviation
18:51history.
18:52Sakai flew upside down periodically to keep blood from pooling in his remaining good eye.
18:57He fainted and woke.
18:59He slapped his own wounds to stay conscious.
19:01When he finally reached Rabaul and put the Zero down, the ground crew had to pull him from the cockpit.
19:07He would never see out of his right eye again.
19:09He was evacuated to Japan and spent a year in the hospital.
19:13And when he was discharged in January 1943, the Navy did not send him back to combat.
19:19They sent him to do something they desperately needed, train the next generation of pilots.
19:24What Sakai found in the training schools horrified him.
19:27The students were not like the men he had trained with in 1937.
19:31Those men had been selected from thousands, broken down and rebuilt over years,
19:36graduated with 700 hours in the cockpit,
19:39and reflexes so sharp they could identify aircraft silhouettes at distances most people could not even see.
19:45These new students had been rushed through.
19:47Many of them outranked him.
19:49They were reserve officers, college educated, assigned to flight training not because they had proven themselves,
19:55but because Japan needed bodies and cockpits.
19:58Sakai described what he saw in words that are difficult to forget.
20:02We were told to rush men through, he said.
20:04To forget the fine points, just teach them how to fly and shoot.
20:08He watched student after student wreck planes on takeoff and landing.
20:12Hardly a day passed when fire engines and ambulances did not race down the runways, sirens shrieking,
20:19to dig one or more pilots out of the plane they had wrecked.
20:22And here is where I need you to understand why this was not just a training problem.
20:26It was a design flaw in the entire Japanese system, and it had been there from the beginning.
20:31The Imperial Japanese Navy never built a rotation policy.
20:35There was no mechanism to pull a veteran pilot out of combat, send him home, and use his experience to
20:41train replacements.
20:43Japanese pilots flew until they were killed, crippled, or so sick with malaria that they could not stand.
20:49Sakai only became an instructor because a bullet had taken his eye.
20:53If Harold Jones had missed by two inches, Sakai would have stayed at Rabaul and almost certainly died in the
20:59skies over the Solomons, like so many of the men he had flown with.
21:03His closest friend, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, the man many historians consider the highest-scoring Japanese ace of the war,
21:10was briefly pulled back to Japan as an instructor in late 1942.
21:15He hated it.
21:16He told Sakai he wanted to get back into combat.
21:18But when Nishizawa returned to Rabaul in May of 1943, the world he came back to had changed.
21:25The Americans were flying differently.
21:27Their planes were tougher.
21:28Their pilots were sharper.
21:30Nishizawa told Sakai something that cuts through every myth about the Pacific Air War in a single sentence.
21:36It's not as you remember, Saburo.
21:38There was nothing I could do.
21:39There were just too many enemy planes.
21:41Just too many.
21:43Now, compare that to what the United States Navy was doing at exactly the same time.
21:47America took its best combat pilots, the men with the most kills, the most hours, the most hard-won knowledge
21:54about how to fight and survive,
21:56and pulled them out of the war.
21:57Sent them home.
21:58Put them in front of classrooms full of cadets.
22:01And those cadets absorbed everything those veterans knew before they ever saw a Japanese airplane.
22:06The numbers tell the rest.
22:08In 1943, the U.S. Navy increased its required training hours for new pilots to 500.
22:14That same year, Japan cut its program to 500.
22:17In 1944, the Americans raised the requirement to 525.
22:23Japan dropped to 275.
22:25By 1945, Japanese cadets were being sent into combat with 90 hours of flight time.
22:3190.
22:32That is not enough to learn how to land safely, let alone fight a dogfight against a man with two
22:37years of training and the best fighter-interceptor in the Pacific.
22:40Because by then, the Americans did not just have better tactics and better intelligence.
22:45They had a new airplane, one that had been designed from the first bolt to the last rivet, using the
22:51data from a wrecked zero that a 19-year-old pilot had buried in an Alaskan bog.
22:56And what that airplane did to Japanese pilots when it arrived in the Pacific is one of the most lopsided
23:01reversals in the history of air combat.
23:04September 1st, 1943.
23:06Somewhere northwest of Marcus Island, Central Pacific, a flight of Grumman F6F Hellcats from Fighting Squadron 5, operating off the
23:15new USS Yorktown, spotted a Japanese Kawanishi flying boat on patrol.
23:20They closed on it, opened fire, and destroyed it in seconds.
23:23It was not a dramatic engagement.
23:25No dogfight.
23:26No evasion.
23:27The flying boat simply came apart under a volume of fire it had no chance of surviving.
23:32It was the first time the Hellcat had fired its guns in combat, and the men who flew it already
23:36knew that something fundamental had changed.
23:39One of the Navy pilots who transitioned from the old Wildcat to the Hellcat put it as plainly as anyone
23:44could.
23:45Ensign George Orner, aboard the carrier Franklin, said,
23:49The difference between the F4F and the F6F was night and day.
23:53We had more range, more speed, more power, more everything.
23:57That phrase, more everything, is the simplest description of what the Hellcat meant.
24:01But the truth underneath it is more interesting than any spec sheet, and it explains why Japan's fighter pilots were
24:07about to walk into a catastrophe they could not escape.
24:10The Hellcat was not designed to out-turn the Zero.
24:13The men at Grumman knew, partly from combat reports, partly from the data that had come out of Eddie Sanders'
24:19test flights on the captured Zero at North Island,
24:22that trying to beat a Zero in a turning fight was a dead end.
24:25So they did not try.
24:26Instead, they built an airplane around a different idea entirely.
24:30What if the pilot does not need to out-turn the enemy?
24:33What if he just needs to hit harder, absorb more punishment, and get away faster?
24:37The Hellcat was 60 miles per hour faster than the Zero.
24:41It could out-climb the Zero above 14,000 feet.
24:44It could out-dive the Zero at any altitude.
24:46It rolled faster at combat speeds.
24:49And when a Japanese pilot finally did get a burst into it, which happened, because this was still war,
24:54the Hellcat did something the Zero could never do.
24:57It kept flying.
24:58It had armor plate behind the pilot's seat.
25:01It had a bulletproof windscreen.
25:03It had self-sealing fuel tanks lined with layers of vulcanized rubber that swelled shut around bullet holes.
25:09A Hellcat could take hits that would have turned a Zero into a fireball, absorb them, and keep fighting.
25:15The Zero had none of this.
25:17Its extraordinary agility came at a price that its designers had chosen deliberately.
25:22No armor, no self-sealing tanks, minimal structural reinforcement.
25:27Every pound saved was a pound that went toward range and maneuverability.
25:31In 1941, when the pilot's flying Zeros were the best in the world and rarely got hit, that trade-off
25:37made sense.
25:38By 1943, when the pilot's flying Zeros were increasingly men with a few hundred hours of training,
25:45and the Americans were getting better every month, it was a death sentence.
25:49Allied anti-aircraft crews had a name for Japanese bombers that caught fire at the slightest hit.
25:54They called them flying cigars.
25:56And here is the thing about the Hellcat that mattered more than its speed, more than its armor, more than
26:01its guns.
26:02It was easy to fly.
26:04Not just manageable, genuinely forgiving.
26:07It did not punish a rookie for a sloppy approach.
26:10It did not kill a student who came in too fast on a carrier deck.
26:13This was not an accident.
26:15Grumman built it that way because the Navy told them to.
26:18The Navy knew that the pilots flying this airplane would not be ten-year veterans with silver watches from the
26:24Emperor.
26:24They would be 22-year-old kids from Indiana and Nebraska and California, with two years of training and no
26:31combat experience.
26:32The plane had to make those kids dangerous on their first mission.
26:36It did.
26:37And the Grumman factory at Bethpage Long Island could build one every hour.
26:41The Hellcat's first major test came in November 1943, when carrier Hellcats engaged Japanese Zeros over Tarawa in the Gilbert
26:49Islands.
26:50Thirty Zeros were shot down.
26:53One Hellcat was lost.
26:54Days later, over Rabul, the same fortress base that Sakai and Nakajima and Nishizawa had flown from during the Solomon's
27:01campaign, Hellcats and Corsairs tore through Japanese formations in a day-long fight and claimed nearly 50 aircraft.
27:08The kill ratio was no longer a matter of tactics alone.
27:12The airplane itself had tilted the board.
27:15And the men sitting in the Japanese cockpits were no longer the 700-hour masters who had swept the Pacific
27:20in 1941.
27:22They were the men Sakai had watched wreck their planes on training runways.
27:26They were the men who had been told to forget the fine points.
27:29By early 1944, Japan's admirals understood that their pilot corps was hollowing out.
27:35But instead of stopping to rebuild, they made a decision that would destroy what little remained.
27:40Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, a man his own officers privately called Gargoyle for being the third ugliest admiral in the
27:47Imperial Navy, proposed concentrating every surviving carrier into a single striking force.
27:53One fleet.
27:54One battle.
27:55The decisive engagement the Japanese doctrine had always promised would end the war.
28:00Ozawa pulled pilots from everywhere, including training schools.
28:04Flight instructors who were supposed to be teaching the next generation were reassigned to carrier decks to fill out depleted
28:10air groups.
28:11Japan was not just spending its combat pilots.
28:14It was spending its seed corn.
28:15The men whose job was to grow more pilots.
28:18Everything was being bet on one throw.
28:21The Americans knew it was coming.
28:22They had broken the Japanese codes months earlier and had captured the actual battle plan from the wreckage of Admiral
28:28Koga's aircraft.
28:30They knew the date, the force composition, and the objective.
28:33Task Force 58, 15 carriers, nearly 900 aircraft, crewed by pilots with 500 hours of training, was waiting.
28:42What happened next took less than a day, and it ended Japanese naval aviation as a functioning fighting force.
28:48June 19, 1944.
28:516.33 in the morning.
28:52The Philippine Sea, west of the Mariana Islands.
28:56Radar operators aboard the American carriers of Task Force 58 picked up the first contacts, a mass of aircraft, bearing
29:04west, closing at roughly 150 miles.
29:07The scope was thick with blips.
29:10This was not a small raid.
29:11This was everything Japan had left.
29:14Admiral Mark Mitcher, commanding the carrier force, gave an order that was calm and absolute.
29:19Launch every fighter.
29:21Within minutes, Hellcats were climbing from 15 flight decks, stacking into a layered wall of fighters at 10, 15, 20,
29:29and 25,000 feet between the Japanese formation and the American fleet.
29:34Behind the Hellcats, Vice Admiral Willis Lee's battle line of cruisers and battleships, weighted with hundreds of anti-aircraft guns
29:42loaded with a weapon the Japanese knew nothing about.
29:46The proximity fuse.
29:47A shell that did not need to hit an aircraft to destroy it.
29:50It just had to get close.
29:52And then, the Japanese made a mistake that no veteran formation would have made.
29:57Instead of pressing the attack, driving through the intercept zone before the Americans could set up,
30:02the pilots of the first wave did something that revealed exactly how far Japanese training had fallen.
30:08They circled.
30:09At 20,000 feet, clearly visible on every American radar screen, 69 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes orbited in a
30:18holding pattern to regroup their formation.
30:21They wasted 10 minutes.
30:22It was a textbook maneuver.
30:24The kind of thing an instructor would teach on a training field.
30:27But this was not a training field.
30:29And those 10 minutes gave the Hellcats time to climb to altitude, sort their formations, and meet the Japanese raids
30:3670 miles out, miles before a single Japanese plane could threaten an American ship.
30:41The first wave lost 42 of its 69 aircraft.
30:45The second wave was larger, 128 planes.
30:49It fared worse.
30:51More than 100 were destroyed.
30:52And on the deck of the USS Lexington, a 25-year-old Lieutenant Junior Grade from East Chicago, Indiana, was
30:59about to have what he later called the most extraordinary eight minutes of his life.
31:03Alex Frashu had already shot down 12 Japanese planes in earlier engagements.
31:08He was the Navy's leading active ace.
31:10But on this morning, his Hellcat was a mess.
31:13The folding wings had been left unlocked by a deck crew mistake.
31:16His engine was misfiring and spitting oil across the windshield.
31:20He could not climb above 20,000 feet.
31:22By every measure, he should have been grounded.
31:25He was not grounded.
31:26He was airborne, leading the second division of VF-16, when he looked down and saw what he described as
31:32a swarm of bees, Japanese dive bombers, so thick against the water below that they seemed to merge into a
31:38single dark mass.
31:40Frashu pushed over and dove into them.
31:42The first three kills came fast.
31:44Yokosuka D-4Y Judy dive bombers.
31:47Slow, heavy with their bomb loads, unable to maneuver.
31:51Frashu lined each one up, fired a short burst, and watched it come apart.
31:55Oil coated his windshield so badly, he was aiming through the narrow strips he could still see through.
32:01He kept firing.
32:02A fourth Judy fell.
32:03A fifth.
32:04The sixth exploded with its bomb still attached.
32:07The blast rocked Frashu's Hellcat hard enough that he felt it in his teeth.
32:11Six kills.
32:12Eight minutes.
32:14360 rounds fired out of 2,400 available.
32:17He had used 15% of his ammunition to destroy six aircraft.
32:21When Frashu landed back on the Lexington, he stood on the flight deck and held up six fingers for the
32:27photographer.
32:28That image, a grinning pilot in a flight suit, six fingers up, oil still streaking his face, became one of
32:34the most recognized photographs of the Pacific War.
32:37But Frashu's eight minutes were only a fraction of what happened that day.
32:41Captain David McCampbell, flying off the Essex, shot down seven Japanese planes on June 19th, five Judy dive bombers, and
32:49two Zeroes.
32:50He would go on to become the Navy's all-time leading ace with 34 confirmed kills and receive the Medal
32:56of Honor.
32:57A fourth Japanese raid launched late in the morning was given the wrong coordinates for the American fleet.
33:03The pilots could not find it.
33:04They broke into scattered groups and turned for Guam and Rode to refuel.
33:0927 Hellcats caught them over a Rode field on Guam as they were trying to land.
33:1430 of the 49 Japanese planes were shot down.
33:17The rest were damaged so badly they never flew again.
33:20By nightfall on June 19th, Japan had lost more than 350 aircraft.
33:26The Americans had lost 23 Hellcats in aerial combat.
33:29Additionally, American submarines had torpedoed and sunk two of Ozawa's largest fleet carriers,
33:35the Taiho, his flagship, and the veteran Shokaku, killing more than 2,000 sailors beneath the waves.
33:42It was the most lopsided aerial battle in the history of warfare.
33:46And aboard the Lexington, when a pilot told the debrief room it had been like an old-time turkey shoot
33:51back home, nobody laughed.
33:54The name stuck because it was accurate.
33:56The Great Mariana's turkey shoot did not just destroy Japan's carrier air groups.
34:01It destroyed the last generation of men who could have rebuilt them.
34:05The flight instructors Ozawa had pulled from training schools to fill his carrier decks were among the dead.
34:10Japan had burned its pilots, its reserves, and its teachers, all in a single afternoon.
34:17Admiral Ozawa sailed west with three carriers and fewer than 35 operational aircraft.
34:23And in a headquarters building in Manila, four months later, a vice-admiral named Takejiro Onishi arrived to take command
34:30of what was left of Japanese naval air power in the Philippines.
34:33He counted his planes. He had 41. 34 of them were zeros.
34:38What Onishi decided to do with those 34 zeros is the answer to the question in the title of this
34:44video.
34:44And it is one of the darkest decisions in the history of air warfare.
34:47October 15, 1944. Mabalakat Airfield, near Manila, the Philippines.
34:54Vice Admiral Takejiro Onishi stepped off his transport and walked the flight line.
34:59He had just been given command of the 1st Air Fleet, Japan's Naval Air Forces in the Philippines.
35:05He already knew, from the briefings he had received in Tokyo, that the situation was bad.
35:10He did not yet know how bad. He counted.
35:1234 zeros, three torpedo bombers, one medium bomber, a couple of reconnaissance planes, 41 aircraft total.
35:21That was it.
35:21That was the entire force available to stop the American invasion of the Philippines,
35:26which had begun five days earlier when Allied troops stormed Suluan Island in the opening phase of the Battle of
35:32Leyte Gulf.
35:33Four months ago, Ozawa had sailed into the Philippine Sea with nine carriers and more than 400 planes.
35:40The turkey chute had gutted them.
35:42The air battles over Formosa in the weeks before the Leyte landings had killed nearly everything that was left.
35:48Over a thousand Japanese aircraft had been destroyed in the Philippines theater in recent weeks alone.
35:53Onishi had inherited not an air force, but the wreckage of one.
35:57He sat with his officers at Mabalakat and said what every man in the room already knew, but no one
36:02wanted to hear.
36:03In my opinion, there is only one way of assuring that our meager strength will be effective to a maximum
36:09degree.
36:09That is to organize suicide attack units composed of zero fighters, armed with 250 kg bombs, with each plane to
36:17crash dive into an enemy carrier.
36:19This is the sentence that answered the question in the title of this video.
36:23When Japanese pilots stopped trying to dogfight American fighters, this is what replaced it.
36:28Not a new tactic, not a better airplane.
36:30A decision that the most useful thing a Japanese pilot could do with his aircraft was die in it.
36:36And here is what makes Onishi's decision something more than desperation.
36:39It was logical. Horrifyingly, mathematically logical.
36:43He had watched the training numbers collapse for two years.
36:47He knew that his pilots, many of them teenagers with fewer than 300 hours, some with fewer than 100,
36:53could not find an American fleet, coordinate an attack run, release a bomb or torpedo accurately, and survive the return
37:01flight.
37:02Conventional strikes by poorly trained pilots were achieving hit rates so low they were functionally useless.
37:07The planes were being destroyed anyway.
37:10The pilots were dying anyway.
37:11The only variable Onishi could change was accuracy.
37:15And a pilot who does not need to pull out of his dive is more accurate than one who does.
37:20Kamikaze was not courage.
37:22It was arithmetic.
37:23On October 19th, Onishi met with officers of the 201st Flying Group at Mabalakat and asked for volunteers.
37:31Twenty-four men stepped forward.
37:33They were organized into four subunits, given names drawn from a poem about the spirit of Japan.
37:39Shikishima, Yamato, Asahi, Yamazakura.
37:43The man chosen to lead the first attack was Lieutenant Yukio Seki, a 23-year-old who had been married
37:49for less than a year.
37:50Seki reportedly told a journalist something that has been debated by historians ever since, but has never been fully refuted.
37:57He said he did not want to die.
37:59He said Japan's future was dark if it had to kill its best pilots to sink a ship.
38:03But he obeyed.
38:05In the Japanese military of 1944, obedience was not a choice.
38:09It was the only thing left.
38:11On October 25th, Seki led five zeroes, each carrying a bomb, against the American escort carrier force off Samar.
38:19His section dove through anti-aircraft fire and struck the USS St. Lowe.
38:24The bomb penetrated the flight deck.
38:26Secondary explosions ripped through the hangar.
38:29The ship sank in less than half an hour, taking 143 men with her.
38:33Twelve Japanese pilots died that morning.
38:36They killed 131 Americans and sank a carrier.
38:40From Onishi's perspective, the math worked.
38:42Twelve men and twelve planes for an escort carrier.
38:46No conventional strike by twelve poorly trained pilots could have achieved that result.
38:50Not in 1944.
38:52Not against Hellcats.
38:54And so the program expanded.
38:55What began as 24 volunteers became hundreds, then thousands.
39:00By the Battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945,
39:02more than 1,800 kamikaze sorties were flown against the American fleet.
39:08They sank 36 ships and damaged over 200, killing more than 7,000 Allied sailors.
39:14But the men flying those missions were not the 700-hour warriors who had swept the Pacific in 1941.
39:20By 1945, Japanese cadets were entering combat with 90 hours of flight time.
39:26They trained on gliders to save fuel.
39:28Some had never fired their guns in the air.
39:30An Allied observer watching a formation of kamikaze planes and their escorts described them as a flock of pelicans,
39:37each bird following the leader in a loose, ragged file, flying close to the water, unable to hold formation.
39:44They were not fighter pilots.
39:45They were young men in aircraft they barely knew how to control, aimed at a target and told to hold
39:51the dive.
39:51Saburo Sakai, the ace who had once received a silver watch from the Emperor, who had survived the bullet through
39:57the skull,
39:58who had flown 560 miles half-blind over open ocean, was assigned a kamikaze mission in July 1944 from Iwo
40:06Jima.
40:07He took off, searched for the American fleet, could not find it, and returned to base.
40:12He did not speak publicly about what he felt that day for decades.
40:16But there is one final piece of this story, a number, and a name, that ties everything together.
40:22And it goes back to where we started, to a raging pilot at Rabool, and a question that took two
40:27years and two entire air forces to answer.
40:29Saburo Sakai survived the war. He was one of very few Japanese aces who did.
40:35By August 1945, nearly every pilot he had trained with, flown with, fought beside, or tried to teach, was dead.
40:44Nishizawa, the man who told him there were just too many enemy planes, was killed in October 1944.
40:50Not in a dogfight, not in a kamikaze dive, but as a passenger in a transport plane shot down over
40:56the Philippines.
40:56He never got the fighter under his hands again.
40:59Tadashi Nakajima, the man who came back raging to Rabool after his first encounter with the Thatchweave, survived the war
41:06as well.
41:07He had been among the finest pilots Japan ever produced.
41:10But by 1944, the sky he had owned did not belong to him anymore.
41:15Onishi did not survive.
41:16On August 16, 1945, one day after the Emperor announced Japan's surrender, the man who had organized the kamikaze program
41:25knelt in his quarters and cut his own abdomen with a sword.
41:28He refused the coup de grace. It took him 15 hours to die.
41:32He left a note apologizing to the approximately 4,000 pilots he had sent to their deaths and asking the
41:38young people of Japan to work for peace.
41:41Alex Vrachu, the man who shot down six dive bombers in eight minutes with oil on his windshield, was himself
41:47shot down five months after the turkey shoot during a strafing run over a Japanese airfield in the Philippines.
41:53He parachuted into the jungle and was rescued by Filipino guerrillas, spending five weeks behind enemy lines before reaching American
42:00forces.
42:01He went home, married, raised a family, and rarely spoke about the war in public.
42:06He died in January 2015 in West Sacramento, California. He was 96.
42:12Jimmy Thatch, the man with the matchsticks, rose to the rank of full admiral.
42:16The tactic he invented on his kitchen table in Coronado was used in Vietnam, was adapted for helicopter combat in
42:23Afghanistan, and is still taught in fighter weapons schools today.
42:27He never claimed credit beyond what was true. When asked about the weave, he would say that James Flatley had
42:33named it and that the pilots at Guadalcanal had proven it.
42:36He died in 1981, and Tadayoshi Koga, the 19-year-old whose crash landing on Accutan Island handed the Americans
42:45the most valuable intelligence prize of the Pacific Air War, was buried on the island by the salvage team that
42:51recovered his zero.
42:52In 1947, an American graves registration team exhumed his body and reburied it on Adak Island, further down the Aleutian
43:01chain.
43:02They did not know who he was. They marked the grave as unidentified. In 1953, his remains were likely among
43:09the hundreds of Japanese servicemen repatriated to Japan and cremated.
43:14His wingmen, the men who could not bring themselves to strafe his plane, never knew what their decision had cost
43:19their country.
43:20Sakai, after the war, retired at the rank of lieutenant. He became a Buddhist and vowed never to kill another
43:27living thing.
43:27He opened a small printing shop in Tokyo and hired veterans who could not find work.
43:33In his later years, he traveled to the United States and met Harold Jones, the rear gunner who had put
43:39a bullet through his skull over Guadalcanal in 1942.
43:42They shook hands. Two men who had nearly killed each other, standing in the same room, decades later, alive.
43:50Sakai spent his final years giving speeches to Japanese schools and businesses. His theme was always the same.
43:56Never give up. But he also said something else, something harder, that most of his audiences did not want to
44:03hear.
44:03He told them Japan had to accept responsibility for starting the war.
44:07Who gave the orders for that stupid war, he said.
44:10The closer you get to the emperor, the fuzzier everything gets.
44:13He died on September 22, 2000, at the age of 84.
44:18He had been invited to a formal dinner at Atsugi Naval Air Station, hosted by the United States Navy.
44:24During the meal, he collapsed from a heart attack.
44:27He died in the place where, 55 years earlier, the last dogfight of the Pacific War had been fought.
44:33So, why did Japanese pilots stop trying to dogfight American fighters?
44:38Not because of one airplane. Not because of one tactic. Not because of one battle.
44:42They stopped because Japan built an air force designed to win a short war with a small number of irreplaceable
44:48men.
44:49And America built a system designed to replace everything. The planes, the pilots, the tactics, the knowledge.
44:55When Japan's 700-hour warriors were gone, there was no one behind them.
45:00And the dogfight did not end because the Zero got worse.
45:04It ended because the men inside it were no longer the men who had made it untouchable.
45:08Thank you for staying through this entire story. It means more than you might think.
45:12If this video helped you see a piece of the war you hadn't seen before, a like genuinely helps.
45:18It tells the algorithm that this kind of deep, research-driven history is worth showing to more people.
45:23If you're not subscribed yet, subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss what's coming next.
45:28I'd love to know, where are you watching from today?
45:31And if someone in your family served in the Second World War, in the Pacific, in Europe, anywhere, tell us
45:37about them in the comments.
45:39Their service matters, and it should never be forgotten.
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