Someone who thought the Claude was a great airplane....

[Mike Scholl]

ORIGINAL: Tanaka

On the Type 96 Carrier Fighter "Claude"

That was the most incredible fighter of its day, by far. When the Zero was rolled out, we put two equal pilots in a Type 96 and a Zero and had them dogfight. The Type 96 won quite quickly. Then we had them switch planes. The Type 96 won again. Everybody thought the Zero was a failure at that point. But they liked the Zero's range. If the Type 96 had had the range of the Zero, we might have kept using that even up to Pearl Harbor and beyond. ......(Saburo Sakai)

http://www.warbirdforum.com/sakai.htm


Was it really such a piece of junk? One of the greatest of japan's aces didnt think so. It seems to be modeled that way in UV and WITP???


Anyone disagaree with Saburo??? ....I wouldn't [:)]

Problem is that by this line of reasoning a Folker Tri-Plane would have been better yet.
"Tail-chasing" was a popular sport among fighter-jocks in the 30's, and manueverability
was the name of the game. The Germans upset the applecart when they sent the Me-109
to Spain and proved that with superior speed and firepower you could own the skies
against slower more manueverable A/C. In WWII, while manueverability was always
a nice bonus, "speed kills" was more the rule.

[freeboy]

absolutely true... and two 30 cal guns ? no radio? claudes are good for scouting and maby if you could load some bombs on them asw

[freeboy]

of course to scout they would need upgrade to radio lol

[DrewMatrix]

Bergerud, in "Fire in the Sky" has a nice discussion on the difference between the Japanese view of fighting (or the means of fighting they were stuck with), basically a Flying Circus gaggle of planes each looking to duel with an enemy fighter, and the USN view, which was coordinated air combat between one group of planes hitting the anemy gaggle as a coherent whole.

Actually Bergerud regards the radio as even more important than high speed to get in and out.