I think men like him are just plain amazing....I have absolutely no doubt that if they found themselves somehow transported back in time they would hobble out to a P40, climb in and do their duty without a backwards glance....although most would clearly need help getting to the aircraft and into the seat.
Talking to these guys and reading first hand reports shows clearly to me that the majority of 'historians' never spent much time talking to the pilots...neither did the leaders of the day.
Most of the senior officers had not flown combat at all, or the few who had had last done so in 1918....an era when aircraft did not have the performance to do anything much besides race around in circles and the one with the better turning performance won. As usual they were fighting the last war not the current one
I guess people who are not experienced pilots tend to hear that the Zero could turn on a sixpence and assume therefore it was extremely manouverable...but if attaining the bank angle takes 3 times as long as an aircraft with a fast roll rate but less pitch response the slow rolling aircraft is still left behind.
This from an article written by Eric Shilling...an AVG ace.
in a short but informative interview with Saburo Sakai, Japans leading living Ace, I asked, "Commander, what was the Zero's top speed?" His answer amazed me when he said, "The A6M2 had a top speed of 309 mph. and a maximum allowable dive speed of 350 mph. It became extremely heavy on the controls above 275 mph, and approaching 350 mph, the Zero's controls were so heavy it was impossible to roll. A further comment by Sakai was that the skin on the wings started to wrinkle, causing the pilot great concern, since a number of Zero's had shed their wings in a dive." A captured Zero tested by Americans military, showed its top speed to be 319 mph, this was a later model, the AM6M5, and was tested without guns or ammunition. Therefore Saburo Sakai's statement that the top speed of the A6M2 and A6M3 of 309 mph would seem to be correct.
Saburo Sakai, in an interview made on August 11, 1996, admitted that, after flying the P-51 he had changed his mind and now rated the Zero as number two, where as before he thought it was the best. He said, "the P-51 could do everything the Zero could do and more." My comment to him would have been that it's too bad you never got the opportunity to fly the P-40.
Compare this to the P-40's 355 mph, and he the maximum allowable dive speed of 480 mph, (occasionally our pilots dove as fast as 510 mph) 130 mph faster than the Zero. The P-40's roll rate at 260 mph was 96 degrees per second, three times that of the Zero's mere 35 degrees at the same speed.
Japanese pilots were taught the antiquated importance of Dogfighting, or turning combat as used in WW I. Unfortunately our military pilots were taught the same thing, dogfighting. But the Americans didn't have the equipment with which to be successful. When the Japanese encountered Chennault's hit and run tactics, they were at loss. It wasn't in their book, and they didn't know how to handle the situation.
And this quote from Eric Shilling;
Although subsequent model P-40s did fall behind the newer model Me.109s and British Spitfires, however in every case, each new model Zero that came out remained inferior to its contemporary model P-40.
Now why in the hell would anyone consider the Zero to be the best fighter of the war?
Hell, it didn't even start out that way. . .
The above is not just my opinion, but garnered from available facts, and flying the P-40 in combat.
What was truly obsolete happened to be the turning or dogfighting combat that had been used during of WW I.
This from another AVG Ace, Dick Rossi.
The record of the AVG: We were in actual combat for seven months; we had less than 300 people. As of Dec 2, 1941, there were 82 pilots and of the original 100 P-40s sent out to Chennault, 78 remained with 62 in commission, 68 with radios and 60 with armament. There were shortages of just about everything and no spare parts to speak of. The group has a confirmed count of 299 combat victories with another probable 600 aircraft destroyed on the ground. Our losses were 4 pilots lost in aerial combat, 7 shot down and killed by anti-aircraft fire during strafing runs, 8 killed in operational and training accidents unrelated to enemy action. Four were MIA and 3 of those were found to be POWs. Three died from Japanese bombing raids. One was shot down and seen alive, but no word as to his fate. The American Fighter Aces Association confirms 20 AVG pilots as Aces with another 6 pilots achieving Ace status during the next few years.
Imagine the difference if that knowledge had been available to RAAF P40 pilots in the first mths of their war which essentially followed the AVG experience.