Stanwell (extending my #234),
...we had a rude awakening...
First, it turned out that "a properly handled capital ship could
not beat off air attack". This opened the door for the Jap armies to complete their conquest of colonial Asia (to this day, no one really knows why they stopped at the back door of India [for there was little to stop them going on]; the most probable explanation is that their LoC were just
too long to stretch any further).
Even so, if they had pushed on just the short distance North to take Chittagong, it would have made the eventual reconquest of Burma much harder, for they then would have had a deep-water port to ship in supplies and reinforcements.
Then do you remember how we chuckled at the funny little Jap motorcycles when they first appeared in UK ? Then we woke up one day to find that we didn't have a motorcycle industry any more ? Much the same happened in the air. The "flimsy litle things which would fall apart if hit" turned out to be the carrier-based Mitsuibishi "Zero" and its similar, but less glamourous land based Nakajima "Oscar", the bane of our lives in Burma.
...In spite of its drawbacks, the Ki-43 [Oscar] shot down more Allied aircraft than any other Japanese fighter and almost all the JAAF's aces achieved most of their kills in it. (Wiki) [citation needed]...
The Japanese designers had taken to heart Igor Sikorski's famous exhortation: "Simplicate and add more lightness" (we tend to favour the opposite view). The result was that the Zeros and Oscars could "Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee" (to coin a phrase ?) They could run rings round our more heavily armed and heavier fighters. In our case, the Hurricane IICs could blow an Oscar to bits if they could only get it in their sights - but the Jap pilot would need to be asleep for that to happen. It was only the strange myopia of the Japanese Army Commanders which saved our VVs being massacred in the air like the Battles in France (or the Wirraways in Rabaul).
They held the Oscars on the ground, wasting them in ineffective "sweeps" to strafe opportunity targets on our side. Why they did this is another of the unanswered questions of the war. It was not until the Spitfires came out in number that we had an answer to the Oscar.
Danny.