Aussie Zeros

Pangur

Donor
I read a book by John Baxter where he mentioned that in 1940/early 1941 the Australina goverment approached the Japanese to see if it would be possible to buy Japanese aircraft. It appears that the Japanese goverment were open to the idea and offered amoung other things the Zero with the proviso that they would not be available until the end of 1941. I was wondering how things would have gone is in late 1941 say 100 Zeros had been purchased and shipped to Australia and in they were fully in service in mid 1942 when war comes . The US and Britian could get the examine a Zero earlier than the did in OTL, thats the obvious change. The RAAF would be able to challange the IJN on equal footing would be another one.
 
I have heard this one before - total myth. 1940/1 no way did aus believe that the Japanese could build anything decent.:rolleyes:
 

Pangur

Donor
I have heard this one before - total myth. 1940/1 no way did aus believe that the Japanese could build anything decent.:rolleyes:

I must admit that I was far from convinced however Australia was desperate for aircraft at the time so I could see them get over the idea that the Japanese could build decent kit

The book is "The Alternative Luftwaffe Vol3 North Africa and the Middle East (page 25 onwards)
 
I have to admit to being sceptical of Imperial Japan selling what was, to them, bleeding edge kit to a likely opponent in the near future. Older aircraft, potentially, but I doubt the zero.

On the flipside, it would be interesting to see UK and US response to the Zero - perhaps convincing enough to take Japanese aircraft more seriously before hostilities broke out.
 
I think it much more likely that the Australians would have produced the Boomerang earlier rather that go to the Japanese for aircraft. I don't think it unreasonable for them to realise durring the Battle of Britain or the Blitz that their needs would be far down the priority list and seek alternatives. They should have taken action when Churchill started shipping fighters to Russia. While the Boomerang was slow, it was manoverable and well armed so could have taken a toll on Japanese aircraft over Malaya, one hit from it's 20mm cannons would have done for the lightly built and unprotected Japanese aircraft.
 

Cook

Banned
...however Australia was desperate for aircraft at the time...
The Australian’s was desperate for aircraft to build up their defences lest the Japanese attack. Generally speaking, you don’t purchase equipment off people you consider a threat, if for no other reason than that it makes getting spare parts somewhat difficult once the fighting starts.
 
I have to admit to being sceptical of Imperial Japan selling what was, to them, bleeding edge kit to a likely opponent in the near future. Older aircraft, potentially, but I doubt the zero.

On the flipside, it would be interesting to see UK and US response to the Zero - perhaps convincing enough to take Japanese aircraft more seriously before hostilities broke out.
Sort of like the US selling F22s to Belarus today...
 
The Zero wasn't exactly great in itself: the design was fairly flawed. It had some good advantages in 1941-42 against the second-line aircraft deployed in the Pacific, mainly due to its manuverability thanks to its lack of weight, but it was very underpowered and vulnerable to damage. The manuverability and range was great leverage initially (the hardest opposition it encountered being P-40s and Hurricane Mark Is), but modern fighters as deployed in Europe (i.e Spitfire Vb) already outclassed it without such sacrifices. Of course, those weren't carrier-borne - but carrier-capable fighters superior to the Zero were standard by 1943. These designs were able to progress and improve, but the Zero was pretty much a design dead-end - it relied on low weight for its advantages, which prevented much improvement or major alteration.

Giving Zeros to the Australians would not only be unlikely, but the only difference I can think of would be that there'd be friendly-fire incidents on the 'enemy' aircraft - or incidents of Allied anti-aircraft gunners not firing on what they thought to be Australian Zeros. Having the Allies take tips from the design might also be dangerous - if they built a comparable design, they'd find it stuck in the same dead end and would have wasted a lot of resources on it.
 
How good was the Zero at durability in tropical conditions?

I believe the Spitfire in particular suffered in the tropics, and that in the Pacific air war a big advantage American planes had was that they were better able to tolerate the conditions. This is partially because of the American habit of making rather heavy airplanes and then giving them heavy engines for sheer brute power--a practice Americans could afford because they were in the period a major exporter of petroleum and could also afford the logistics of big fuel shipments. Also US oil wells, particularly the Southern California ones, yielded inherently high octane oil that could easily be enhanced to high levels, over 100, so American designers (and their British allies) could rely on such fuels and thus design engines for higher compression ratios.

But I think the real key factor was the domestic (plus colonial) geography and politics of the USA. The US spans a wide range of climate zones, and with key colonial possessions which tended not to be relegated second-string machines because of their cruciallness--Panama Canal Zone in particular, but Hawaii was also quite important and the major purpose of conquering the Philippines was to provide a major naval and later air forces base--being tropical, the US air forces, Army, Navy and Marines would be deployed in conditions ranging from Arctic (Alaska obviously, but huge swathes of the continental states suffer conditions not much different from Arctic in winter!) through arid desert to fully tropical (and again, while places like Florida are not technically tropical, they come darn close in mid-summer, so again the ultra-extremes of distant colonial possessions are nearly rivaled by CONUS conditions). Politics enhances military considerations; the democratic nature of Congress means that military funding tends to get spread out among all the states so basing, rationalized sometimes very dubiously by military scenarios, is all across the states.

So when the Army or Navy procured an airplane off the production lines, even in peacetime they knew one plane might be based in Arizona, its next neighbor on the line sent to Florida or Panama, another to Maine or Alaska. The same design then had to operate in any of these climate zones, and the aircrews and maintenance teams had decades of experience dealing with the maintenance and operational challenges all of these conditions posed. In fact not just different planes from one production line (which might conceivably be modified for their specialized environments) but the same airplane might have to cycle through all of these diverse bases, as the military tends to have exercises and contests that bring together planes from bases all across the nation.

Making a plane that can operate one week in Maine in mid-winter, and the next summer in Panama or Arizona, and the whole aeronautical industry having grown up with that challenge before it from the beginning, puts a premium on generically rugged design, which helps explain the American preference for rather heavy planes with very heavy power plants.

Contrast that to the Germans, who had just European climate zones to consider normally.

Britain and Japan are sort of intermediate cases--both are like Germany set in one limited range of climates, but the British of course had a colonial empire all over the world, with even more diversity than the Americans to deal with. Politically though those colonial possessions didn't have the clout in London even a small and peripheral American state has in Washington; strategically, the British saw their front-line military challenges in Europe itself whereas colonial warfare was ideally done on the cheap with limited forces. So even British designers, almost as much as German ones, were preoccupied with European climate conditions, whereas colonial forces typically got hand-me-down previous-generation, obsolete aircraft, originally designed for European combat and modified on a catch-as-catch can basis by underfunded (if experienced!) local maintenance crews.

So it was that OTL, it was mostly American airframes on the Allied side in the Pacific, with the local Australian designed-and-produced Boomerang being at least as important as any Spitfires the mother country could spare, which rapidly deteriorated in the tropical war zone.

Japan's war, before they escalated it to global proportions, was in China. A lot of China has conditions more like the USA than Europe--cold winters and fairly warm to perhaps hot summers in the north, very warm subtropical conditions in the south. So even if Japanese designs did suffer from some of the myopia of European ones, in combat and on station the local forces would soon learn about their limits and how to overcome them, and their experience would affect the orders their respective high commands placed with Japanese aero firms.

I'm guessing that despite being lightweight, the Zero was reasonably well tropicalized, with an initial eye on the challenges of operations in southern China as well as a speculative one on Indochina and points south and west of there.

The criticisms that focus on the folly of attempting to buy weapons from the same guys you expect you might have to fight soon, and the unlikelihood that those soon-to-be-foes will offer to sell their best stuff, are well-taken. As are the ones that point out that the Zero was a dead end.

But, given a flying corps like the Japanese carrier pilots, encouraged to think of a strong and bold offense as the best defense and to be fatalistic about their certain doom should an enemy's guns find their target, it was a very respectable weapon indeed for its day. It's all very well to say later planes would be better, but the Aussies needed planes today. A Spitfire might wipe the skies of Zeros--until it corroded, or its fuel lines rotted, in the tropical heat and humidity, or it choked on the dust that somehow shrouded the wet landing fields.

The Australians weren't going to get Zeros. If they had them though one shouldn't sneer at them.
 
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