Kit

A5M4, D1A2 & B4Y1

Brand AOSHIMA

SKU A-05944 EAN 4905083059449

Features

Nation: Japan

Period: WWII

Scale: 1/700

Type: Aircraft

Price 21,00 €

Description

1/700 Water Line Series No. 557 Japanese Carrier-borne Aircraft Type 96 A5M4, D1A2 & B4Y1

Very often, the date of birth of naval aviation in the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN for short, Japanese Nippon Kaigun) is March 16, 1923, when Lieutenant Sunishi Kira landed in his plane aboard the aircraft carrier Hosho, which moreover entered service a year earlier (1922). It should be added, however, that during the 1920s many Japanese naval officers saw aircraft carriers as supporters of battleships and battleships, keeping in mind the great success of Admiral Heihachiro Togo at Tsushima in 1905. The technical level of the then Japanese carrier aircraft was also not the highest. However, this state of affairs began to change in the 1930s, among others, due to the later Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who perceived the main weapon in naval warfare in aircraft carriers. He was a strong supporter of the development of Japanese shipboard aviation, which resulted in the construction or modernization of ships such as the Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, and Zuikaku. In addition, Japanese aviation facilities not only caught up with world leaders but also began to set the standards, including the famous Mitsubishi A6M Zeke fighter or the Nakajima B5N Kate torpedo. This intense development led to the fact that by the time the Pacific War broke out, the IJN had 10 aircraft carriers, on which more than 500 airborne machines were based, with well-trained crews. The first months of fighting in the Pacific showed how dangerous this weapon was. It should be remembered, however, that already during that war, the IJN had considerable problems, for example, in replacing the A6M Zeke aircraft on a large scale or introducing a successful B5N line successor, namely the B6N Tenzen torpedo. In addition, the training process for sea pilots proved imperfect and was distanced from the solutions used in the U.S. Navy.