Chapter 5

None so Blind

Much has been made of the ‘failure’ of British and American Air Intelligence to forewarn the Allies of what they might face from the new Japanese Navy fighter. Just what was known of the A6M pre-December 1941 then? Actually a considerable dossier of descriptions, eyewitness accounts, reports and other data flowed into Allied hands between 1937 and 1941. Some eighteen months prior to Pearl Harbor reports began to be received by Western Intelligence Agencies about the new Japanese fighter. Initial response was often disbelief but, contrary to accepted myth, many of these details were distributed to the front-line units, though only few at the sharp end seem to have absorbed them thoroughly.

Let us examine some of them, first the Americans.

The Assistant US Naval Attaché was James M. ‘Jimmie’ McHugh who had served in China with the American Legations at Peking and Shanghai, on-and-off for twenty years and was present in that post from 1937 when the Chinese Incident developed into a full-scale war. He became fluent in Mandarin and, as a major, was assigned his post on 30 October 1937.¹ He had close personal contacts with Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek and the power behind the throne herself, Madame Chiang (Soong May-ling) and was close to Chiang’s political advisor, W. H. Donald. He remained in China until August 1940 and learned much and when brought home to Quantico that month was almost immediately sent back to China once more. As a lieutenant-colonel he became the full naval representative at the Chinese Government and fulfilled his brief to report back all he saw and learnt. One historian noted how, ‘McHugh had always been fearless in making reports whenever he felt the good of the United States was concerned.’²

McHugh had filed not but two reports on the A6M to the ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) pre-war, the first in December 1940 and a second in June 1941. The first report was built on the Chinese interrogation of a Japanese

Navy pilot captured after his A6M was shot down by AA fire. Herein the speed, rate of climb and armament were accurately described. The second report was amplification with information gleaned from another A6M shot down near Chengdu City, north of Chongqing, on 20 May 1941, along with a carefully detailed analysis and drawings of what was described as a ‘Sea Fighter 0-1, Model 1’. The sketches were not totally accurate because the AA shells had blown off the aircraft’s tail and this section had to be guessed at (the Chinese filled it in by copying a Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa) and was misleading. Other data, obtained by careful measurement supplemented by interrogations, was revealing and shows exactly what was known of the A6M at least eighteen months prior to Pearl Harbor. The engine was described as an air-cooled, two row 14-cylinder 840-hp Kinsei X. The aircraft’s wingspan was 39.36ft (12m), length 28.40ft (8.65m), and the height 9.02ft (2.75m) with a surface area of 256ft² (23.76m²). The weights were given as 3,705lb (1,684.3kg) unladen; 5,126lb (2,334.6kg) gross; 5,739lb (2,608kg) with an outer tank. The maximum level flying speed with (5m turbo pressure HP 9025) was given as 314mph (505km/h), or with maximum rated HP 840 at 305mph (491km/h). The cruising speed with drop tank was 267mph (430km/h), and with the drop tank 261mph (420km/h). Maximum altitude was recorded as 13,120ft (4,000m). The cruising range was listed as 698 miles (1,120km) or 1,207 miles (1,940km) with the drop tank. The climbing rate at sea level was 3,022ft/min (921m/min) and the time to climb to 13,120ft (4,000m) was 4.3 minutes. The fighter’s ceiling was listed as 35,860ft (10,930m). Landing speeds with flaps deployed were, normal loading, 62.7mph (101km/h) or overloaded 65.5mph (103.3km/h). The take-off distance with normal loading was 364 ft (111m) or in overload condition 421ft (128m). Armament was listed as two 7.7mm fixed machine-guns, with 600 rounds and two 20mm fixed machine-guns (sic), with 60 rounds.³

Nor was this the only detailed report on the A6M to arrive on the ONI’s desk in Washington at this time. Another was filed by Major Ronald Boone, USMC, in July/August 1941, three or four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, with very similar details and probably from the same source. This report also contained very accurate details of this aircraft’s speed, climb rate and range, although it was way out in its estimation of the manoeuvrability of the fighter. Far from being suppressed Boone’s report was, in fact, distributed to the fleet in the US Navy’s Fleet Air Tactical Bulletin dated 22 September 1941, distributed by the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer). In this format it was available to be read and studied by front-line service personnel. Indeed it was read by many, including by one Lieutenant-Commander John S. Thach, the commanding officer of VF-3, at that time based at San Diego. From it he worked his famous ‘Beam Defense Position’ tactic that much later Lieutenant-Commander James H. Flatley of VF-10 assigned the title of the ‘Thach Weave’, which he used at the Midway battle. This unofficial manoeuvre proved to be a tactic far more celebrated in print and discussion than ever used in combat as it required special conditions for it to be applied, and only a few pilots managed to learn it, with even fewer having the opportunity to actually put it into practice, no matter how ‘celebrated’ it later became by some historians. It was, moreover, first-and-foremost a defensive a tactic designed to preserve the F4F when they should have been concentrating on the enemy bombers. However, that fact does not invalidate Thach’s reaction to information that he received and it shows that some Navy front-line pilots took note of the information dissembled to them, even if many did not.⁴

The last pre-war US Naval Air Attaché Lieutenant (j.g.) Stephen Jurika, Jr, had submitted two reports pre-war. That dated 9 November 1940, concerned what he termed the ‘Mitsubishi Type Zero 1940 Fighter’, an identification that he based on Chinese reports of a ‘Type 100’ airframe. He described the machine as a twin-engined aircraft based on the Dutch Fokker D-23.⁵ What he was in fact describing appears to have been the Japanese Army Type 100 fast bomber, the Mitsubishi Ki-46 (later allocated the Allied code name ‘Dinah’).

A second report, dated 7 April 1941, concerned his attendance at a public donation ceremony (termed Hokoku by the Navy, Aikoku by the Army) at Hanada airfield in January 1941 where he had apparently actually been permitted to sit in the cockpit of what he described as on a new ‘Type Zero Zero’ fighter aircraft, which was, in his estimation, a ‘… new version of the old Type 97 – the Ki-27 - singer seat fighter with retractable wheels and increased power’. He noted it had two ‘droppable’ auxiliary wing tanks emplaced.⁶ Among the side plates there he is alleged to have found the aircraft nameplate, written in English with other details such as design clues, landing gear operation and the composition of the airframe and wings. He made a mental note of some figures, from which he concluded that the A6M weighed about half as much as the contemporary American Navy F4F Wildcat fighter, but the engines’ horsepower was approximately the same. He reasoned that this ratio would mean that the Japanese fighter would therefore have better speed, climb rate and manoeuvring than her American opposite number. One account stated: ‘About three months after he submitted his report, ONI chided him that he should be more careful in reporting the characteristics and estimated weight of Japanese aircraft.’⁷ In other words, he was entirely disbelieved.

This may because his reports were so confusing. He could not have sat in the cockpit of a A6M during a Hokoku ceremony because the first public presentation of that aircraft,⁸ actually took place in November 1941, not January.

This was the mountain of reports than reached the Navy. But the United States Army was also receiving equally disturbing information from China. These were famously the reports submitted over the same pre-war period by Claire Lee Chennault. It is a fact, even if a fact that is more ignored than admitted, that the Curtiss P-40B Tomahawks of the American Volunteer Group (AVG) at no time were ever engaged with the Japanese Navy’s A6M over China. The aircraft that tangled with Chennault’s mercenaries were Japanese Army aircraft, notably the Oscar. Chennault’s initial reports on the A6M, notably one dated 12 December 1940 directed to no less than General George Caslett Marshall, Jr, Chief of Staff of the US Army, were based almost solely on interrogations of surviving Chinese pilots who had duelled with the A6M and survived the experience, and were made long before the AVG was much more than a gleam in Chennault’s eye, let alone the ‘Flying Tigers’ of American newspaper headlines.⁹ He had been in China since May 1937, ever since he was ‘retired’ (or rather pressurized out) from the Army Air Service, where he had been overseeing the training of Chinese fighter pilots. At this later date Chennault was beginning to make his case in the US to aid and assist the Chinese Air Force, which was in dire straits. That this was so was, as we have seen, largely due to the introduction of the A6M and this Chennault made clear to Marshall.

Later, Chennault appeared to have much the same detailed and insider access to the Chinese data from the same shot down and largely intact A6M fighters that his Marine Corps fellow countrymen did, and he also dutifully filed back the information to his former colleagues. Again, far from dismissing such information out of hand as often alleged, Marshall had the good sense to recognize sound intelligence straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, and at a subsequent meeting propagated Chennault’s information. Whereas Chennault might still be regarded as persona non grata in the ranks of the still predominant heavy bomber clique, at least his news got a hearing. In February 1941 Marshall also sent direct warning to Major-General Walter Campbell Short, in charge of the USAAC units based at Hawaii, of what he might have to face should the growing tensions in the Far East terminate in conflict between Japan and the United States. Again much of the information was accurate, although Marshall credited the A6M with rather higher top speed than she was capable of, and with armour protection and self-sealing fuel tanks, while he did not emphasize the remarkable agility of the Japanese machine. Tellingly Marshall told Short that although the number of his Pursuit squadrons had been tripled and beefed up with new aircraft, which improved both numbers and quality, ‘When compared to the performance of the present carrier based Japanese plane the deficiencies are only too evident. Incidentally, the new Japanese plane is rated at 322 miles an hour, with a very rapid climb, with leak-proof tanks¹⁰ and armor, and with two 20mm machine guns [sic] and two .30 caliber guns.’¹¹ Marshall also sent the same details to General George Grunert, who commanded the Philippine Department in 1941. Whether Grunert took this information on board seriously or not was negated by General Douglas MacArthur who shortly afterwards had been dug out of retirement and appointed in command in the Philippines, and who promptly abolished Grunert’s command and sent him packing back to the States.

Post-war Chennault, re-instated as an Army Air Force Lieutenant-General, was alleged (again by Burton) to have claimed some of the material he had sent to Washington DC had been rejected as unrealistic by US analysts and destroyed. However, this does not appear to have been the case in every instance, for, just like the Navy, the USAAS published a series of information manuals that gave known details of the A6M well in advance of actual hostilities. In March 1941, the Army issued an updated edition of their Identification series featuring known Japanese aircraft. The A6M had a fairly detailed, although not fully comprehensive, entry under the heading ‘Fighter 100’. It described the new machine as a single-seater monoplane with hooded cockpit and retractable landing gear. Armament was correctly identified as being two 20mm cannon wing guns and two fixed machine-guns whose calibre was not listed. The power plant was given as a single 14-cylinder, twin-row, radial, which was air-cooled, but the manufacturer and type was not listed. The rate of climb was listed as ‘Fast’, with a maximum ceiling of 10,000 metres or 6.2 miles, with a maximum endurance of 6 to 8 hours with a belly tank containing 150 gallons while total fuel capacity was given as 1,200 litres or 324 gallons. They noted that a radio telephone was fitted. This was pretty good information, although the accompanying notes let the whole accuracy down. While commenting that the fighter ‘… can operate from carrier’, which one would assume was a basic given for any naval fighter, the originator added that the aircraft ‘… avoids use of acrobatics’.¹² Never was an assessment more inaccurate. In fact after a brief period of warfare in which they experienced the A6M’s superior turn and climb, the most appropriate slogan adopted by western aviators was ‘Never dogfight a Zero!’ Some of these major errors were repeated and enhanced in a subsequent edition, which appeared a year later, when the war had been underway for three months and more factual information should have been available from combat reports from US forces. Here the A6M is mentioned as a Zero (albeit as ‘Nagoya Zero’) but listed solely in the Japanese Army section; one wonders just how the author figured a land-based fighter managed to reach Pearl Harbor!

Not that the British Intelligence Service in the Far East or the RAF’s way of dealing with it, was notable. Their cause was not embellished by the fact that one of their own, Captain Patrick Heenan, a New Zealand-born sympathizer of the Irish Republican Army terrorist campaigns, serving with Air Intelligence Liaison Section, was a Japanese spy who supplied them with detailed information of RAF strength and dispositions both prior and during the Malayan campaign.¹³ Nor was the view from London an enlightened one, being largely racial. While discussing the possibility of a Japanese attack on British colonies in the Far East as early as May 1941 the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) dismissed reports of the large numbers of both shore and carrier-based aircraft the Japanese had readily available. These numbers, far exceeding any British military aviation strengths in that region, were discounted because, ‘… the operational value of the Japanese Air Force is probably akin to that of the Italians’.¹⁴ Such a view equated with Winston Churchill’s equally ignorant remarks that the Japanese were ‘… the Wops [a derogatory term for the Italians] of the East’.¹⁵

The British had also been in receipt of Claire Chennault’s reports on the new Japanese fighter but they made even less use of it than their American counterparts and for mostly the same reasons. The first report was received from Chennault by the British Air Liaison Officer (ALO) based at Hong Kong as early as October 1940, over a year before war broke out in the Pacific.¹⁶ On 6 February 1941, Wing-Commander James Warburton, RAF, the British Air Attaché (AA) at Chungking, received detailed information from the Chinese Air Force on a fierce aerial battle that had involved thirty-one Chinese-piloted I-15-3 fighters against twelve A6Ms. The results of this encounter saw twelve of the Chinese fighters shot down against a claimed loss of four of the Japanese machines (in fact, no A6M was lost). Again, rather than take heed that the new Japanese fighter was a formidable opponent, Warburton’s subsequent report, as well as the Air Intelligence Division (AID) summary of the battle, stressed the inefficiency of the Chinese pilots rather than the potency of their opponents.¹⁷

Even when the Intelligence Officers managed to obtained detailed information on the A6M their findings and information were not always well received or passed on down the line to the fighting aircrews in the obsolete Brewster Buffalo and Hawker Hurricane fighters. Post-war Air Commodore Stanley Jackson Marchbank, who served on the Air Staff HQ Far East between 1938 and 1943, informed Sir George Neville Maltby at the Foreign Office on 21 September 1954, that all such details were kept at Air HQ and were not passed down to the RAF squadrons themselves!¹⁸ The men at the top later blamed lack of Intelligence, the former C-in-C Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, under interrogation post-war on why the information received about the A6M was not handled more efficiently merely commented that, ‘… what we lacked was a good secret service established years before’.¹⁹

However, Brooke-Popham cannot be allowed to get away with that because he early on revealed that he knew a great deal about the A6M (after all Chennault had several times met with him and advised him about this aircraft), enough about it to give him great concern even before the battle commenced. In his dispatch he was to record, ‘What we were particularly on the look-out for was any indication of the movements of long distance bombers or of the Zero type fighters with detachable petrol tanks.’ This remark, a group of American specialists noted, was ‘… a statement which suggests a concern felt about the Zero that was not evident when, only a few weeks before, in Australia, he had vouched for the superiority of the Buffalo; and a reminder, perhaps, that campaign dispatches are written after the fighting’.²⁰

As far as the British and Australians in Malaya, the British and AVG in Burma, the British in India and the Chinese at this period of the war, most of this concern about the A6M was academic anyway. Despite the scores, if not hundreds, of descriptions of Allied aircraft being outflown and outfought by the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the fact is that hardly any true Navy Zero fighters took part in any of these operations.²¹ What all these Allies were being outfought and outflown by was not the A6M but the Japanese Army Air Force Nakajima Ki-27 (‘Nate’) and Ki-43 (‘Oscar’) fighters, persistently misidentified (both then and since) as the ‘Zero’. Looking ahead briefly, we can see that the real and true combat strengths of the Japanese in all this theatres of war during 1941–42 were as follows:

Malaya

1 Sentai – 42 Ki-27Bs; 11 Sentai – 39 Ki-27Bs, 59 Sentai – 24 Ki-43b/c aircraft, 64 Sentai – 35 Ki-43b/c aircraft and 77 Sentai – 27 Ki-27Bs; a total of 167 Army fighters. Attached to the Japanese Navy 22 Kōkū Sentai’s Genzan, Mihoro and Kanoya bombers units, based near Saigon, were eighteen A6Ms, operational of 22 Kokutai based at Soc Tang. During the famous mission of 10 December 1941 when the new battleship Prince of Wales and the old unmodernized battle-cruiser Repulse were both sunk, some of these A6Ms were belatedly dispatched to provide fighter protection to the bomber forces, but they arrived too late to take part in the action. Allied Brewster F2A Buffalo fighters also arrived too late to participate, but there was no contact between the two sets of fighters.²²

Singapore

1 Sentai – 42 Ki-27Bs, 11 Sentai – 39 Ki-27Bs, 47 Independent chūtai – 9 Ki-44 pre-production fighters, 59 Sentai – 24 Ki-43 1c aircraft, 64 Sentai – 35 Ki-43 1c all Army fighters, plus 22 Kōkū Sentai’s Fighter Group, 26 A6M2 Model 21s; a total of 145 Army fighters and 26 Navy fighters.

Sumatra

59 Sentai – 24 Ki-43 1c aircraft, 64 Sentai – 35 Ki-43 1c Army fighters, plus carrier Ryūjō with 9 A5M4 fighters embarked for a total of 59 Army and 9 Navy fighters, none of them A6Ms.

Burma

On 25 December 1941 Japanese fighter forces in Burma were 64 Sentai – 10 Ki-43s, 77 Sentai – 32 Ki-27s, a total of 42 Army fighters. By 22 January Major Yoshioka Hiroshi’s 77 Sentai had been reduced to 25 Ki-27s, but had been reinforced by 50 Sentai (Major Makinō Yasuo) with 31 Ki-27s. Due to bomber losses Lieutenant General Michio Sugawara, commanding the 3 Hikoshidan, ordered the 64 Sentai with 18 Ki-43s to Raheng and part of the 47 Independent chūtai equipped with Nakajima Ki-44 Shoki (codenamed ‘Tojo’) Tojos to Don Muang, a transfer that cost the 47th three fighters en route with only four machines arriving safely, the majority of the unit being diverted to Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. By 20 March further reinforcements in the shape of 1 Sentai with 15 Ki-27s and 11 Sentai with 14 Ki-27s had arrived on station, being freed up by the fall of Singapore.²³

The only time the Navy A6M was anywhere remotely near the air fighting in Burma at this period of the war, was when eighteen of them were detached briefly from the 22nd Genzan Kōkū Sentai and moved to newly captured RAF Mingaladon air base²⁴ on 30 March in order to provide a land-based back-up reserve to Vice-Admiral Nagumo’s Kidō Butai’s planned excursion into the Indian Ocean but more so should air cover be required for that associated raid into the Bay of Bengal by Vice-Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s raiding force between 4 April and 10 April. This latter attack on shipping off the eastern coast of India by the carrier Ryūjō, five heavy and one light cruiser and eight destroyers netted a total of 92,000 tons of British shipping without loss to themselves. Eighteen Mitsubishi G3M bombers (codenamed ‘Nell’) from the Mingaladon base attacked Calcutta (now known as Kolkata) and Akyab (now known as Sittwe) on 5 April sinking the Indian Navy Sloop Indus at the latter port. The A6Ms flew escort missions for these attacks but encountered no aerial opposition.

In short, the impact of the A6M on the Allies was that this fighter was seen and reported everywhere, even when none of them were ever present.

In sharp contrast to the above areas of ‘phantom’ A6M combat, it was the air battles over the Philippines and Java that saw the involvement of those A6Ms that were not with the Kidō Butai carriers attacking Pearl Harbor and Wake Island. Here they did indeed prove a decisive factor.

The Philippines

3 Kōkūtai – 45 A6M2 Model 21s, Tainan Kaiguan Kōkūtai – 45 A6M2 Model 21s, and carrier Ryūjō – 9 A5M4 fighters with the Army following up after the Luzon landings with 24 Sentai – Ki-27Bs and 50 Sentai – 36 Ki-27Bs, both second-string Army fighters; for a total of 90 A6M2s and 9 other Navy fighters plus 60 Army fighters.

Java

11 Sentai – 39 Ki-27Bs, 59 Sentai – 24 Ki-43 1c aircraft and 64 Sentai – 35 Ki-43 1c aircraft, all Army fighters; plus 3 Kōkūtai – 45 A6M Model 21s and the 22 Kōkū Sentai Fighter Group – 26 A6M Model 21s. A total of 98 Army fighters and 71 Navy A6Ms.

It must be borne in mind that the figures for each unit as above, are, of course, the initial deployment numbers, with losses being replenished as they were taken. The actual full strength complements of the A6M in both Formosabased units 3 Kōkūtai and Tainan Kōkūtai were seventy-two aircraft, plus eighteen reserve machines for a total of 180+ aircraft. However, even bearing that in mind, none of these figures indicate an overwhelming Japanese numerical superiority in fighter aircraft. The Japanese aerial dominance was achieved on a shoe-string, no wonder they subsequently developed contempt for their enemies as a consequence.

The most pungent summary of the western attitudes to the Japanese and the A6M aircraft in particular, were made by historian Hedley Paul Willmott. His final comments on the impact the A6M made deserve to be quoted in full as they encapsulate perfectly why they were so devastating:

Western observers in Japan and China, and the French in Indo-China, had reported the appearance of an exceptionally maneuverable fighter with great powers of endurance. Photographs and sketches had been made available to Western governments and services. The American pilots with the Chinese Air Force had even devised tactics to try to take advantage of some of the aircraft’s known weaknesses, not that these tactics had achieved very much. In the period September 1940 to August 31 1941 thirty A6Ms had destroyed 266 confirmed Chinese aircraft. Such information was ignored. Western agencies chose to consider that Japanese fighter and pilots were, ipso facto, inferior to those of the West. The revelation of the quality of the Zero-sen was possibly the most psychologically damaging catastrophe to befall the Allies; Westerners simply could not understand that the Japanese could equal or surpass their own best efforts in various fields at certain times. At this time there were widely believed stories that German pilots flew Japanese aircraft; anything was done to deny the Japanese credit, to nurture the belief in white supremacy.²⁵ Some post-war historians have aided the confusion by referring to both the A6M and the Ki-43 as the ‘Zero-type fighter’ The RAF and AVG reports are full of eyewitness accounts of duels with ‘Navy O’s’ and similar, made by professional pilots, but they were almost all totally delusional.²⁶

There were stories that the designs of the Zero-sen had been drawn up but rejected by a Western power – normally given as the United States, but this varied. Nothing was further from the truth. In these ways were the Japanese aided even by their enemies. The failure to take the Japanese seriously before the war, the refusal to recognize that in the situation in which she found herself in late 1941 Japan was forced to go to war, and the inability to see the high quality of Japanese equipment and professionalism all combined to create for the Allies a situation that, in a matter of days after the start of hostilities, was pregnant with disaster.²⁷