From: fester@island.COM (Mike Fester)
Subject: Re: Death of Admiral Yamamoto
Organization: /usr/local/rn/organization
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 17:13:23 GMT

In article <jwb.713660118@capek.rdt.monash.edu.au> jwb@capek.rdt.monash.edu.au (Jim Breen) writes:
>Someone asked recently, in response to a posting of mine about the battle of
>Gaudalcanal, whether Bouginville was the place where Yamamoto was killed.
>
>Well I checked up last night, and it was. As many know, his "Betty"
>bomber was ambushed by 17 P-38 Lightnings and shot down. [It took 34
>days for the Japanese to recover his body from the jungle. It was cremated and 
>the ashes returned to Japan for a state funeral.]

I read that the flight consisted of 4 Lightnings; 17 seems a bit high.

>As a quick reference, I looked this up in Bergamini's "Japan's 
>Imperial Conspiracy". As I have commented before, Bergamini's book abounds 
>with factual errors. One jumped out at me last night:
>
>In his description of the power of the Japanese Zero fighter, Bergamini
>describes how it "flew circles around" the famous British Spitfire
>in the fall of Singapore, shooting down 17 of the Battle of Britain veterans.
>
>A fine story, but totally devoid of fact. There were *no* Spitfires at
>Singapore. The Japanese pilots might have thought it was Spitfires they
>were shooting down (Bergamini, being a journalist, never revealed his
>sources) but the few RAF planes in Singapore were obsolete Brewster
>Buffaloes and Vickers Wildebeestes.

Actually, I believe there were Hurricanes there.

>The first appearance of the Spitfire in the Pacific war occurred in March
>1943, when the 452 Squadron of the RAAF returned to Darwin with its
>(Mark III?) Spitfires after service in Britain. The Spitfires, which
>were by far the most manoeuverable Allied fighter, had no trouble
>flying circles around the Zeros they encountered.

"Flying circles around"? Doubtful. The Zero was a very lightly armored plane,
and would no doubt have been all over any Spit' foolish enough to try to
out-turn it. While the Spit WAS (a bit) more manueverable than the early Me 109s
it was not more so than the FW 190 series, which was NOT a match for the Zero
so far as "dog-fighting" was concerned. The Allies gained considerable success
against the Zero by using their advantage in rate-of-climb (for some of the
later Allied planes; the early Allied fighters couldn't climb as fast), OR by 
diving on it from above (something the early-to-mid war Spits could NOT have 
done; the Merlin carbs tended to conk out in a dive, a fact the 109s took full 
advantage of in the European war).

The Spit DID have a better(very slightly) rate of climb, but, especially the 
early Spits, were not nearly as well armed, their only guns being wing-mounted,
and therefore not providing a as stable a firing platform. 

In short, while the later model Spits were probably better than the Zero, those
available around the time of the fall of Singapore were outclassed or matched
in the areas it had superiority vs the German fighters; rate-of-climb below 
~23,000 feet and manueverability.

It should be noted here that superior tactics play a FAR more important role
in determining success in combat, assuming anything less than an order-of-magni-
tude technical superiority. The "Flying Tigers", using Curtiss P-40s, had a
kill-to-loss ratio of 300:15 over the Japanese pilots, though most would agree
that the Japanese fighters were superior machines. They simply flew at very 
high altitudes, dove on the Japanese planes, nailed a few, and dove away from
the pursuit.

Mike
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