Comments on: Mirrors and lenses

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:40:47 +0000

Interesting that this is very similiar to the 1944 Rocket Powered Ohka.

By: Ian Evans

Ian Evans — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:42:39 +0000

There's Jiro Horikoshi's "Eagles of Mitsubishi" (University of Washngton Press 1981, ISBN 0-295-95826-X). He was Chief Design Engineer on the Zero so it's not a disinterested account; but suggestions of technological kamikaze are clearly a long way from reality. He had a nearly impossible task, starting a fighter design in 1937 to outfight all existing opposition, while limited to a 1000hp radial engine. He succeeded brilliantly, and weaknesses in the design can be ascribed to the customers and the specification based on their strategic vision. No armour, no self-sealing tanks? The AASF Hurricanes didn't have those in 1939 either. Horikoshi makes it clear that he used ESD to reduce weight, and, as a brand new material, it seems unlikely that he, or anyone else for that matter, knew about the stress corrosion problem. (Wasn't that what finished off the Valiant, three decades later?) Given the short operating lives of wartime fighters, it probably wouldn't have been any more important than the nasty fatigue characteristics of the Al-Zn alloys. Until late 1942 the Zero completely justified its conception and design; after that it was in the wrong war. Engineering appreciation si, stereotyping non!

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:21:50 +0000

Bob:

Sure, no views are ever held by 100% of any population. But the Japanese were underestimated just where it counted -- by the US military (among other militaries). E.g., before 7 December 1941 they did not think Japan had the ability to attack Pearl Harbor and they paid a heavy price. So, as a generalisation I think it holds water.

By: Jakob

Jakob — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:20:21 +0000

Erik: I knew that the Zero used new high-strength alloys, but not that it was the first to use it. Didn't Bob Mikesh at NASM write a book on the Zero? That may not have been a scholarly work though.

Not knowing much about Japanese strategy, was this pursuit of technological kamikaze-ism a conscious policy. knowing that Japanese industry could never compete with the US in the medium-to-long-term?

By: Bob Meade

Bob Meade — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:54:49 +0000

1. I have read extensively on the WWII Kamikaze phenomenon, and have not seen anything about it being preceded by manned suicide bombs, on China or anywhere else. Of course that does not exclude that it may have been true. I'm always willing to learn new facts.

2. On my first visit to the Australian War Memorial (which also functions as a museum) in 1977, I remember seeing a meant-to-be-life-sized dummy dressed in IJA uniform. The dummy was also dressed with thick-lensed spectacles and had buck-teeth. Even my mother who lost a beloved brother to the Japanese in New Guinea and my father, whose ship miraculously dodged Kamikaze attacks in WWII, thought this racist depiction was over-the-top.

3. Not all Americans thought Japanese military technology and tactics to be wholly inferior. Consider the battle of Tsushima Strait in 1905.
(ref. http://ahoy.tk-jk.net/macslog/RussiaversusJapan.TheBatt.html )

and particularly the subsequent 1913 feting of Admiral Togo in the USA:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?ss=2&ct=6&w=8623220@N02&q=Togo&m=text

and even Admiral Togo's laudatory 1934 obituary in Time Magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,762183,00.html

So, one of my points is that racist views of, or erroneously underestimating the military capability of a potential (or past) enemy is not homogenous across either the U.S.A or Australian population.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:27:53 +0000

Alan: Thanks, yes we are fine! Erik: Technological kamikazes -- I like that. Jonathan: It could be that Japan was being identified as part of a generic 'Asiatic horde'. But the sense that I got from the article was that it invoked a culture of suicide (which it then negated somewhat by saying you could get volunteers for suicide missions in any military) and technological inferiority. But why the war against China would necessitate such tactics is unclear to me ... Don, Chris and Nicholas: Expanding on my comment to Jonathan, maybe the 'Asiatic horde' thing fed into a 'life is cheap' perception, and so Japanese military suicides were seen (in the West) as less courageous than Western ones? I take Nicholas' point that there's a different between suicidal missions and actual suicide missions where there is no chance of survival if everything goes to plan. (I'd also note that Skinner's pigeons were not volunteers :)

By: Erik Lund

Erik Lund — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:36:55 +0000

For those that care, there's actually a monograph on automatic control in America, and bombsights and like that, by MIT historian of technology David Mindell.
We await a scholarly monograph on the Zero. Who here has heard that it was the first WWII aircraft with extra-strong High Duty aluminum alloy components (Al-Zinc, I think, but I could be recalling the alloy family wrong). And whereas its few Allied near-contemporaries used these alloys in the easily-inspected landing gears, the Zero's designer went for the gusto and used it in the main wing spar.
All that without solving the stress-corrosion problem, which exposes a recursive truth. The Japanese were not relying on superior manpower so much as a ...reckless.. flight to the future. In this (and other things), they were a nation of technological kamikazes.

By: Nicholas Waller

Nicholas Waller — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:30:07 +0000

This manned suicide bomb reminds me of the Project Pigeon devised by BF Skinner, which sounds as though it ought to be an urban myth but can't be as I heard about it on the rigorously academic TV programme QI. The pigeon took the place of the Japanese chap.

As far as suicide missions and so-dangerous-they're-practically-suicidal missions are concerned, there is a clear distinction between them. Tamil, Islamic, Japanese or other suicide bombers are training, planning and setting off with explosives strapped to them or their machines in the certain knowledge they will die if the mission is successful, and they will only live out the day if something has gone horribly wrong. The organisation that supports them is encouraging and training them to die.

By contrast, pilots (or soldiers or sailors) going on some extremely risky operation nonetheless have at least some hope of surviving - death and martyrdom is not part of the plan or purpose or moral core of the mission. If someone in the heat of battle decides to ram a ship or fall on a grenade or stand between her child and a bear that's a personal decision taken on the spur of the moment, and in most of these (except ramming a ship, I would guess) people would still hope to survive. The organisation that supports these people would also prefer them to live through the operation - along the line of the words attributed to General Patton that their job is not to die for their country but to make the other guy die for his.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:21:30 +0000

I'm with Don here. How about the VC that went to Roope? Attacking a ship ten times the size of your own by ramming it, in the nothern North Sea in April, defines 'suicidal' in my book.

Getting airminded, we've got Cheshire ordering his men to aim at his Mustang, and that Kiwi pilot who power-dived the U-boat, whose surviving crew were the ones who wrote his VC citation, given that nobody on the plane lived.

It's an irregular verb:
We: are brave beyond all measure
You: are reckless in the extreme
They: are crazies in love with death

By: Alan Allport

Alan Allport — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:02:57 +0000

Off-topic, but I hope you and all your loved ones are unaffected by the fires ...