Imperial Japanese Aircraft

A few more pictures of the Ki-200 that I found around the internet.

The Mitsubishi G4M Bomber, designated ‘Betty’ by Allied forces.  It was infamous aircraft in the Pacific War, lauded for it’s light-weight design and vast operating range, though this came at the cost of protection of it’s crew and fuel tanks.  Among the Betty Bomber’s most famous victories are the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse on the 10th December, 1941.  As Imperial Japan lost ground in the Pacific War, some of these aircraft were fitted with the ‘Ohka’ suicide rocket-propelled flying bomb, to little effect.

A great clip of Ronald Reagan teaching us how to identify the A6M Zero.

The Mitsubishi A7M 烈風 (Reppu).  This plane was started development in 1940 and was to be an improvement over the famous A6M Zero.  In 1944, the Japanese fighter ace that tested it hailed it as the faster aircraft he’d ever seen, able to fly circles around anything else in the air, anywhere in the world.  The A6M was being rendered obsolete by newer, more advanced American planes by this point and this plane, had it reached the production-line, would have caused American aviators a nightmare.  Earthquakes and Allied bombing missions destroyed the blueprints for the A7M; only 9 were ever completed and they never saw combat before the war ended.

The Ki-200, Japan’s secret rocket propelled interceptor. Had it’s first test flight in August 1945, and full-scale production was just about to begin before Japan surrendered to Allied command in the pacific.  This is an amazing, high-tech aircraft that might have been able to change the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if production had begun just a couple months earlier.  Many dozen partially assembled Ki-200 were found in hangers hidden in mountain caves, in the aftermath of the war. 

The A6M was the mainstay of the Imperial Japanese Navy; the most advanced mass-producible aircraft at the time of it’s invention, dominating the pacific until it was made redundant by new, innovative American aircraft only a few years later.  It has an enduring legacy in Japan, used as a symbol in all kinds of media in not a dissimilar way to how the Spitfire is remembered in Britain.