As always, very good research and presentation! One could call it "dry", but in our times of near-constant overdramatization and distortion of facts in so-called "documentaries", your style is just wholesome. Just no nonsense around here.
@@1912papa Add to that an information rich narration. I enjoy a rich 10 minutes to 30 minutes of repeated low information narrative as often seen on TV.
There's also the fact that in the long-range combat of the Pacific War, a leaking fuel tank could be almost as deadly as a completely destroyed plane. At those extreme ranges, just a couple of .50-caliber holes poked in a fuel tank could mean the difference between getting home and ditching in the sea.
True, but those incidents would be almost impossible to record and won’t reflect the statistics; likewise they probably wouldn’t change the engagement which was the primary concern here. Even a medium fuel leak wouldn’t be a priority in the middle of an intercept, especially for the IJN pilots.
Really love your channel brother. You do such a great job delivering this rare, painstaking research in such a smooth and comprehensive way that the layman can become quite the WW2 bomber expert 🤓 Keep up the great work and God speed brother!
My grandfather had a boatload of kids and got a pass on going to war.😂 Anyway, he worked at one of the aircraft plants in Southern California, working on self sealing tanks. In fairness to my grandfather, he made it to Army basic and almost graduated when he got discharged. Apparently my grandmother pitched a serious bitch and she got him a hardship discharge. It never really set right with him but orders are orders...
Your grandpa's disappointment reflects the times he lived in, where a guy with lots of family responsibilities feels compelled to go far away and probably die for his country.
Awesome. This helps explain why the U.S. stuck with the AM/M2 over the 20 mm for so long. I knew the Japanese did eventually introduce self-sealing tanks, but didn't know they were so ineffective.
the US stuck with the M2 because they made so many of them, they put them in/on everything. And 6x M2 were about equivalent in damage/effectiveness as a few 20mm.
@@SoloRenegade I was under the impression that the U.S. just couldn't get the 20mm to operate consistantly. I vaugely recall that they jammed way too often because ?headspace issues?
@@lamwen03 Many US fighters and other aircraft used 20mm and 30mm cannons in WW2 (and some sporting even larger cannons). Such as the F4U, F6F, P-51, P-38, P-39, P-63, B-29, B-25, etc. And the US operated the Supermarine Spitfire, De Havilland Mosquito, and others with cannons as well. The US produced over 3mil M2 machine guns, and put them on Jeeps, Tanks, AAA, Ships, Aircraft, mounted in fixed ground positions, amphibious craft, etc. Literally bolted them to everything that moved or didn't move.
@@SoloRenegade While overall the 20mm was more effective in firepower, the AN/M2 had far more ammo and thus endurance. At the longest ranges also, the .50 actually penetrated more armor than 20mm guns.
As my uncle, who was an U.S. Army Air Force pilot during WW2, used to tell me when I was a small boy who was fascinated by everything and anything my father and two uncles would share with me about there experiences; after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, word got around to everyone that the “jap” pilots (his terminology) were machine gunning any parachuting allied aircrew and any allied personnel floating in the water awaiting rescue. After that he said there was nothing more satisfying than seeing immediately after one of the “bastards” would fly through your burst of deflection fire, explode or erupt into a ball of streaking fire. He said because of the way they approached war, they thought they didn’t need armor or self-sealing fuel tanks because they were racially superior and would win due to their fighting spirit. Uncle and father told me everybody were in a way glad they thought that way cause they usually put themselves into situations where it was easy to kill them in large numbers. The down side was they never considered quitting the fight.
Didn't know that the US had .50cal proof self-sealing fuel tanks. That's the first time I've heard about fuel tanks being able to seal .50cal impacts. That's a huge advantage compared to tanks which normally only do well against 8mm rounds.
The .50 also has tremendous energy dumping into that tank, which he mentions as dynamic shock waves destroying the thin Japanese metal tanks. I wonder how much of the US self-sealing structure was to handle that energy dump.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 well they are made out of rubber, so they should be pretty flexible, unlike those Japanese metal tanks. But I don’t think it generally was a problem, unless it was a completely full tank, which should be rare.
I remember watching on the History channel where The American Pacific pilots said they would aim just behind the pilot and shoot rupturing a fuel tank. But by the diagrams you showed us those weren't fuel tanks they were rupturing those were oxygen tanks.
There are some ellements you have overlooked here. The Zero was a 1940 design. Its contemporaries, the Spitfire, Hurricane, ME109 etc also entered service without self sealing suel cells or armoured glass . Japenese industry was also increasingly starved of raw materials from 1943 onwards as their merchant shipping was sunk in ever greater numbers by allied submarines. What rubber was imported was directed primarily into things like tyre production.
One factor trending to large numbers of plane models adopted was the low level of wartime labor skill. This lead to widespread use of single purpose jigs. Once you had a complete set of jigs made at great expense, you couldn't easily change designs nor expand production. If you needed a new set of tooling, might as well try to make a better plane.
I think self sealing tanks were only good for stopping fuel leakage and did little against fire hazzard if hitted by API rounds. Yet, anti-leaking itself was important enough. The first ZERO fighter that US got their hands on was force downed onto a remote island due to a minor damaged fuel tank leak.
My understanding is that in a gasoline tank the fuel vapors will saturate to a point beyond the upper flammability limit, thanks to the high vapor pressure of gasoline. So to set a fuel tank on fire you need to make a hole in it, both to let fuel vapors out of the tank where they can burn in the ample oxygen outside, and to let air into the tank so that a fire can start inside. So self sealing tanks definitely help, though they are of course no guarantee against a fire.
I thought one of the downsides of self sealing fuel tanks was that it reduced range because of the volume the tank fabric etc took up within the metal fuel tank structure, reducing the amount of fuel which could be carried.. Maybe that was another consideration. Excellent channel by the way.
@@RemusKingOfRome The IL2 is kind of an exception yes. IIRC it had a massive 16% of the weight in armor alone, compared to a few % for a typical fighter or bomber. Also, it so happened that the fuel tanks were inside the armor bathtub protecting the engine and cockpit, it didn't have wing tanks at all.
One of the best feelings in War Thunder is setting a Zero, Kate or Val on fire - they can't put the fire out and they can't dive fast enough to blow it out. Nighty night, Tojo !
This channel frequently makes claims of enemy losses using wartime reports whose accuracy is likely poor and without making any efforts to validate the claims. The losses claimed in this video may be more accurate than in previous videos from this source judging mainly on the detail provided In the future, it would be useful to see some effort at validation or details concerning when and how the numbers were compiled so viewers can have a better sense of what numbers are trustworthy. Simply stating that numbers come from a certain report only serves to propagate potentially incorrect data. Maybe try to reach out to someone in Japan for corroboration. You might lean more that way on any number of things.
The issue here is a well known tendency of IJ aircraft to readily catch fire. Obviously the numbers of AC shot down are one sided estimates but the way in which these AC burned made for the easy recognition of a total loss to anyone with visual range, so those numbers and that tendency was well witnessed and unlikely to be undercounted.
As always, very good research and presentation!
One could call it "dry", but in our times of near-constant overdramatization and distortion of facts in so-called "documentaries", your style is just wholesome.
Just no nonsense around here.
No nonsense is why I subscribed.
@@1912papa Add to that an information rich narration. I enjoy a rich 10 minutes to 30 minutes of repeated low information narrative as often seen on TV.
I like my documentaries dry and my women wet. 😂 Sometimes it's better to remain silent, ...................
There's also the fact that in the long-range combat of the Pacific War, a leaking fuel tank could be almost as deadly as a completely destroyed plane. At those extreme ranges, just a couple of .50-caliber holes poked in a fuel tank could mean the difference between getting home and ditching in the sea.
True, but those incidents would be almost impossible to record and won’t reflect the statistics; likewise they probably wouldn’t change the engagement which was the primary concern here. Even a medium fuel leak wouldn’t be a priority in the middle of an intercept, especially for the IJN pilots.
That was very fine and well researched presentation. Speaks well of your work ethic and commitment to accuracy. Well done.
Excellent presentation
Awesome
Your million dollar plane and pilot is a flying bomb. Can you imagine sitting in a cardboard box surrounded by fuel drums and being shot at ??
thy
Really love your channel brother. You do such a great job delivering this rare, painstaking research in such a smooth and comprehensive way that the layman can become quite the WW2 bomber expert 🤓
Keep up the great work and God speed brother!
My grandfather had a boatload of kids and got a pass on going to war.😂 Anyway, he worked at one of the aircraft plants in Southern California, working on self sealing tanks.
In fairness to my grandfather, he made it to Army basic and almost graduated when he got discharged. Apparently my grandmother pitched a serious bitch and she got him a hardship discharge. It never really set right with him but orders are orders...
Your grandpa's disappointment reflects the times he lived in, where a guy with lots of family responsibilities feels compelled to go far away and probably die for his country.
Awesome. This helps explain why the U.S. stuck with the AM/M2 over the 20 mm for so long. I knew the Japanese did eventually introduce self-sealing tanks, but didn't know they were so ineffective.
the US stuck with the M2 because they made so many of them, they put them in/on everything. And 6x M2 were about equivalent in damage/effectiveness as a few 20mm.
Same here
@@SoloRenegade I was under the impression that the U.S. just couldn't get the 20mm to operate consistantly. I vaugely recall that they jammed way too often because ?headspace issues?
@@lamwen03 Many US fighters and other aircraft used 20mm and 30mm cannons in WW2 (and some sporting even larger cannons). Such as the F4U, F6F, P-51, P-38, P-39, P-63, B-29, B-25, etc.
And the US operated the Supermarine Spitfire, De Havilland Mosquito, and others with cannons as well.
The US produced over 3mil M2 machine guns, and put them on Jeeps, Tanks, AAA, Ships, Aircraft, mounted in fixed ground positions, amphibious craft, etc. Literally bolted them to everything that moved or didn't move.
@@SoloRenegade While overall the 20mm was more effective in firepower, the AN/M2 had far more ammo and thus endurance. At the longest ranges also, the .50 actually penetrated more armor than 20mm guns.
A lot of perspective provided here. An excellent presentation.
Thanks for watching
Liberating destructively, that's a very military way of phrasing it. Thanks for the content.
What technology Self sealing tanks were
Why not copy allied designs ?
As my uncle, who was an U.S. Army Air Force pilot during WW2, used to tell me when I was a small boy who was fascinated by everything and anything my father and two uncles would share with me about there experiences; after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, word got around to everyone that the “jap” pilots (his terminology) were machine gunning any parachuting allied aircrew and any allied personnel floating in the water awaiting rescue.
After that he said there was nothing more satisfying than seeing immediately after one of the “bastards” would fly through your burst of deflection fire, explode or erupt into a ball of streaking fire. He said because of the way they approached war, they thought they didn’t need armor or self-sealing fuel tanks because they were racially superior and would win due to their fighting spirit.
Uncle and father told me everybody were in a way glad they thought that way cause they usually put themselves into situations where it was easy to kill them in large numbers. The down side was they never considered quitting the fight.
Great detail on the US tank design, as a point of comparison with the ineffective later war IJ design.
Didn't know that the US had .50cal proof self-sealing fuel tanks. That's the first time I've heard about fuel tanks being able to seal .50cal impacts.
That's a huge advantage compared to tanks which normally only do well against 8mm rounds.
Yeah, that amazed me as well - the .50 cal is a pretty hefty round, to make a fuel cell against it self-sealing is quite remarkable.
The .50 also has tremendous energy dumping into that tank, which he mentions as dynamic shock waves destroying the thin Japanese metal tanks. I wonder how much of the US self-sealing structure was to handle that energy dump.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 well they are made out of rubber, so they should be pretty flexible, unlike those Japanese metal tanks. But I don’t think it generally was a problem, unless it was a completely full tank, which should be rare.
Interesting 🧐
Wonderfully narrated and well documented.
I remember watching on the History channel where The American Pacific pilots said they would aim just behind the pilot and shoot rupturing a fuel tank. But by the diagrams you showed us those weren't fuel tanks they were rupturing those were oxygen tanks.
multiple types of Japanese aircraft had fuselage fuel tanks as indicated in this video.
Aiming is relative. Aiming with 6 x .50 cal machineguns is different from aiming a .22 at a shooting gallery.
There are some ellements you have overlooked here. The Zero was a 1940 design. Its contemporaries, the Spitfire, Hurricane, ME109 etc also entered service without self sealing suel cells or armoured glass . Japenese industry was also increasingly starved of raw materials from 1943 onwards as their merchant shipping was sunk in ever greater numbers by allied submarines. What rubber was imported was directed primarily into things like tyre production.
One factor trending to large numbers of plane models adopted was the low level of wartime labor skill. This lead to widespread use of single purpose jigs. Once you had a complete set of jigs made at great expense, you couldn't easily change designs nor expand production. If you needed a new set of tooling, might as well try to make a better plane.
Light construction, no armour, no self sealing fuel tanks. Easy!
This channel is awesum so much knowledge
I think self sealing tanks were only good for stopping fuel leakage and did little against fire hazzard if hitted by API rounds. Yet, anti-leaking itself was important enough. The first ZERO fighter that US got their hands on was force downed onto a remote island due to a minor damaged fuel tank leak.
My understanding is that in a gasoline tank the fuel vapors will saturate to a point beyond the upper flammability limit, thanks to the high vapor pressure of gasoline. So to set a fuel tank on fire you need to make a hole in it, both to let fuel vapors out of the tank where they can burn in the ample oxygen outside, and to let air into the tank so that a fire can start inside. So self sealing tanks definitely help, though they are of course no guarantee against a fire.
I thought one of the downsides of self sealing fuel tanks was that it reduced range because of the volume the tank fabric etc took up within the metal fuel tank structure, reducing the amount of fuel which could be carried.. Maybe that was another consideration. Excellent channel by the way.
Adds .32 inch thickness to the tank, hardly much volume compared to the huge volume of fuel.
It was heavy
Just like TIE fighters
The greatest flaw of the overrated Zero.
That and it couldn't turn well at higher speeds
Surely they could of dissected shot down b29’s fuel tanks and try and copy couldn’t they?
You are a true engineer.
No self-sealing fuel tanks
Excellent, I wonder if anyone created fuel tank armor ?
Too heavy. It would be very safe though, as the aircraft would never be able to leave the ground. ;)
@@jbepsilon The IL2 sturmovik had it's engine, cockpit and fuel tank armored so it is possible.
@@RemusKingOfRome The IL2 is kind of an exception yes. IIRC it had a massive 16% of the weight in armor alone, compared to a few % for a typical fighter or bomber. Also, it so happened that the fuel tanks were inside the armor bathtub protecting the engine and cockpit, it didn't have wing tanks at all.
Very interesting
thnx
💥
One of the best feelings in War Thunder is setting a Zero, Kate or Val on fire - they can't put the fire out and they can't dive fast enough to blow it out. Nighty night, Tojo !
This channel frequently makes claims of enemy losses using wartime reports whose accuracy is likely poor and without making any efforts to validate the claims. The losses claimed in this video may be more accurate than in previous videos from this source judging mainly on the detail provided In the future, it would be useful to see some effort at validation or details concerning when and how the numbers were compiled so viewers can have a better sense of what numbers are trustworthy. Simply stating that numbers come from a certain report only serves to propagate potentially incorrect data. Maybe try to reach out to someone in Japan for corroboration. You might lean more that way on any number of things.
The issue here is a well known tendency of IJ aircraft to readily catch fire. Obviously the numbers of AC shot down are one sided estimates but the way in which these AC burned made for the easy recognition of a total loss to anyone with visual range, so those numbers and that tendency was well witnessed and unlikely to be undercounted.
Is this the same guy who complained about " dryness" ?
Fried rice!!! 😎