How Japan Trained Its Elite Zero Pilots in WW2 (Almost Nobody Graduated)

Hundreds of applicants. Only a handful will finish. And for about a year, those few would be the best pilots in the world. We look at the brutally selective naval aviation program Japan ran before the war, with stories like that of Saburo Sakai. But the model of a few near-perfect pilots had one fatal flaw: they could not be replaced. After Midway and the bloodletting at Guadalcanal, Japan ran out of them, and that path leads straight to the kamikaze program we covered in a previous video. #ZeroFighter #WW2 #Japan #NavalAviation #MilitaryHistory