If you can be a soldier or a mercenary in any empire throughout history...

Modern Day Merc, or French Foreign Legion.

 

This is what I was thinking. Maybe I'd fly a P40 Warhawk with the Flying Tigers?

 

Don't forget the enemy is flying "flying zippos".

"We don't know how to build metal planes so we're just going to have plywood planes with 6,500 liters (1,710 gallons) of fuel and one medium sized bomb of 800kg (1,800lb). They're also going to be slow, unarmored and the fuel tanks are not self sealing ones. If it gets to drop it's bomb it's not going to do much damage but if it gets hit by anything such as flare gun or a single tracer it all goes up in flames."

No offense to the Japanese but they really ought not to go to war with such crappy planes. On the other hand if they believed in honorable death at least their planes reflected this mentality - it was really difficult to survive given the pilots themselves had no armor either and the planes burned up really fast and broke apart making bailing difficult even if the crew weren't riddled by bullets.

None of their enemies came up with just using flare guns against them as AA.

I can imagine the instructors giving advice to the pilots:
"You're fine as long as the enemy doesn't hit your wings or any other part of your plane with a single bullet. Just don't get hit at all."

 

I believe the G4M utilised the same aluminium alloy as the A6M but I'm not completely sure on that.

They traded self sealing fuel tanks and protection for longer range and increased speed. When doing medium to high altitude bombing. They could often appear from any direction, drop their bombs and then leave before any planes could intercept. Also, if they somehow managed to avoid catching fire they would often be able to return home with heavy damage or running on just 1 engine.

The Japanese had some of the best planes by the start of the war. They were still very competitive by the end of the war.

 

They just never developed the kinds of engines that Germans and Americans had. As such they always had to compromise a lot more in their designs.

Want to be as fast as the enemy? Drop all armor and half the weapons. But Americans will have a lot of armor and three times the firepower and eventually develop their engines to become faster with all that on board.

Japanese even had to take radios off of their fighters early war to keep them light.

As a result they lost most of their experienced pilots pretty soon.

 

The Japanese lacked superchargers but that was about it. Their engines were mostly on par with the Americans.

The Japanese bombers were faster and had heavier defensive weaponry then the Americans. Lack of armor was only on the earlier planes.

I need more information about the radios. Was it the army or navy that did it? I can't seem to find anything about it.

A large reason the Japanese lost their pilots was due to the Americans changing their tactics and the Japanese were unable to adapt to it.

 

I'm not sure which branch it was, Saburo Sakai mentioned lacking radios and he never flew from carriers because he didn't learn to master carrier landings (iirc).

But I do think that American pilots having often armor dedicated for the pilot and better armored planes did have a huge impact on pilot survival rates. Having radios helped too as Saburo iirc noted that he would sometimes see someone from his flight get attacked and couldn't warn them other than trying to fire a salvo or so which doesn't really work in mid combat.

I don't think American success was simply down to tactics - tactics are important but you also need radios to coordinate them and you need to practice those tactics.

Japanese pilots had an altogether different mindset about going into dogfight. Whereas Americans in civil favored individualism and Japanese favored sort of collectivism and sacrifice, in aerial combat Japanese and Americans turned those things upside down with Americans heavily emphasizing team based tactics and Japanese heavily emphasizing dogfights as series of individual duels, sort of like personal combat against the enemy. To this end they thought that individual pilot skills were most important and things like radios could be discarded to reduce weight and improve the odds of outmaneuvering the enemy in one on one fight.

This also initially impacted their views on armor etc. to an extent.

And their pilot training before engaging Americans was really really strict. They disqualified a ton of great candidates while emphasizing things such as martial skills etc. Some aspects of their training involved hanging from top of a pole for long times or hand to hand sparring where the losing fighter would stay in ring and face fresh challengers.

But as soon as they started fighting Allies their casualty rates rocketed and they had to drop their training standards very rapidly from exhaustive to non-existing.

By the way have you seen The Wind Rises? I know it's not necessarily the most historic of movies but it does have some aspects of the Japanese mentality - they're trying to be this great imperial super power and their plane prototypes are being pulled to their grass "tarmac" makeshift "airfield" by oxen. The plane designers are simply stunned upon their visit to Germany by the resources, infrastructure and technology that they witnessed.

They tried their best but they were simply out of their league when it came to economics, technology and infrastructure.

 

That would be the navy then. Saburo Sakai was a navy pilot. I believe he flew a A5M followed by a A6M then a J2M.

I don't really know that much about the Navy. Most of my focus have been on the Army.

 

please lets mythologize the past some more.

 

One of the reasons Japanese pilots went one on one is because they were seen and represented as the modern day samurai.

You can also thank Japan for the reason aircraft aluminum was discovered/invented.

It's why the zeroes were so light.

 

Well, one of the biggest differences is that Navy has ships and other marine vessels and they operate primarily at sea whereas army operates on land.
Both can have infantry though Navy calls them marines. Both can also have their own air component as well.

Mythological aircraft specifications and spreadsheets!

 

Speaking of military, Italian carabinieri and the guardia di finanza are one of the oddest things ever in my opinion.

The carabinieri are military police but police both military and civilians. They are part of the military. They resisted Mussolini's take over, they were disbanded by the nazis and then became the biggest part in the Italian resistance against Mussolini in World War II. They are still part of the Italian military today.


The guardia di finanza are military police but not part of the military, if that makes sense. They are basically the IRS, customs, Police, all rolled into one but on steroids.