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Mitsubishi Zero Fighter Plane

The Mitsubishi Zero Fighter Plane was a terror in the skies of the Pacific during the first few years of World War II. The Zero was not only faster—its top speed was 350 miles per hour or 565 kilometers per hour, but it also was more maneuverable than any plane the Allies produced until two years into the War. Eventually, during the closing and desperate last months of the War, many Zeros were turned into kamikaze aircraft.

The name "Zero" came from its Japanese name "Reisen Kanjikisen," which means "Zero Celebration Carrier-based Fighter Airplane." The description “Zero Celebration” was used because production of the plane began in 1940, which was the 2,600^th anniversary of the start of the reign of Japan’s first Emperor, Jimmu. Thus, the term “Zero[-year] Celebration” was used.

How It's Used

“The British also maintained that the Japanese avoided night operations on land because they were simply incapable of carrying them out well, while they avoided nighttime aerial attacks, as well as dive-bombing, for the same reasons [American military commentator Fletcher] Pratt had presented: their pilots were poor and their aircraft inferior. The persistence of the belief up to the end of 1941 is especially surprising, since from August 1940 some Japanese pilots in China had been flying the world’s most advanced fighter plane, the Mitsubishi Zero, developed under the Imperial Navy. The first actual combat test of the Zero occurred in September 1940, when thirteen of the planes downed twenty-seven Chinese aircraft in ten minutes. Between that engagement and August 31, 1941, when the revolutionary new fighter began to be mass-produced by Nakajima Aircraft, approximately thirty Zeros accounted for 266 confirmed kills in China. Yet the plane remained all but ignored in the West—to the astonishment, among others, of its designer, Horikoshi Jiro, who vainly scanned Western aviation magazines for reports about its extraordinary performance.

“Neglect of the Zero by the Western media, and indeed by top military planners, did not derive from lack of available information. The plane received a great deal of publicity in Japan following its spectacular initial victories (secrecy became tighter around January 1941), and both the Americans and the British possessed accurate intelligence reports on its capabilities. Claire Chennault, the retired U.S. Army Air Corps officer who headed the flamboyant ‘Flying Tigers’ squadron and helped rebuild the Chinese Air Force after 1937, sent detailed reports on the Zeros to British and Australian, as well as American, authorities. In mid-1941, moreover, the British actually obtained possession of a downed Zero and prepared, at the lower levels of the military, an accurate and potentially valuable analysis of the plane. Like Chennault’s reports, this was ignored. As Horikoshi later observed, it was not so much the success of the Japanese Navy in shrouding the Zero in secrecy that made its ‘sudden’ appearance against the Westerners so shocking in December 1941 as the blindness of most high-ranking Allied officers, who simply could not conceive of Japan independently designing and manufacturing an aircraft of this caliber.”

"To complain that the digital work in 'Pearl Harbor' feels cold and gray is not saying much, given that the movie is about battleships; nevertheless, too much of the hardware—the toppling gantries, the Japanese Zeros that breed like rabbits in the air—is flattened by a matte dullness, like a kid's set of see-through stickers."

"Looking for a balance between the museum's stock-in-trade of aircraft and plain fun, Dailey asked MaxFlight to design several of the simulators around the museum's holdings.

"Five are tied to aircraft that are in the museum: Spad XIII, the plane flown by World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker; Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis; the P-51 Mustang, a single-engine World War II fighter; the Mitsubishi Zero, a Japanese craft considered nearly invincible at the beginning of World War II; and Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Vega, which she flew solo across the Atlantic."

"Back then, Novena was rural. As a youngster, he caught spiders, searched for rambutans and got into fights. During World War II, he hid in the family air-raid shelter when Japanese Zero fighter planes attacked."

"In July 1943, flying a Corsair fighter, Lieutenant Swett was shot down by a Japanese Zero near the island of New Georgia and was rescued by two natives in a canoe. He was awarded the Medal of Honor in October 1943 for his 'superb airmanship and tenacious fighting spirit' in downing the seven Japanese bombers."

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