They Called It IMPOSSIBLE — Japan's Zero Won Its Fights 12 To 1, Then Its Perfection DOOMED It!

The Navy's demands were so extreme that a rival aircraft company declared them impossible and walked away. One quiet engineer stayed, and built the most feared fighter of the Pacific War. In 1937 the Imperial Japanese Navy asked for a carrier fighter that was faster, longer-legged and far more heavily armed than anything it had, and still as nimble as the light fighter it replaced. Nakajima concluded the specification could not be met and withdrew. Jiro Horikoshi of Mitsubishi found one way through: weight. Armor plate behind the pilot: struck out. Self-sealing fuel tanks: struck out. The result flew in April 1939, ran straight past the Navy's requirements, and as the A6M "Zero" won its fights at a rate of 12 to 1 in the opening months of the Pacific War. In the West, the warnings had been set aside. Japan, the assumption went, could copy other nations' airplanes but could not out-design them. Then Zeros flew from Taiwan to the Philippines and back, a trip American planners believed no single-engine fighter could make. But the qualities that made the Zero so dominant were exactly what cost Japan the war in the air. A 19-year-old pilot came down in an Alaskan bog, and the airplane the Americans pulled out of it gave away the whole manual. A Navy pilot worked out how to fight it with matchsticks on his kitchen table. Grumman built the Hellcat with the captured Zero's test data in hand. And on 19 June 1944, near the Mariana Islands, the fighter that had once appeared out of nowhere was watched on radar from the moment it formed up. This is the story of the finest fighter of its day, the engineer who designed it, the pilots who flew it, and why its perfection was the problem. CHAPTERS 00:00 The Ox Cart 03:04 The Impossible Specification 09:45 A Ghost over China 14:35 The Edges of the Envelope 21:11 The Zero in the Bog 28:09 Sixty to One 33:54 The Answer from Grumman 37:08 A Wall in the Sky 40:47 Beautiful, Cursed Dreams Did someone in your family fly or serve in the Pacific? Tell us about them in the comments. The men in the cockpits are the real subject of this story, on both sides. SOURCES AND CREDITS Archival film and photographs, all in the public domain: U.S. National Archives (U.S. Navy films, series 428-NPC; U.S. Army Air Forces training film 111-TF-3302; captured Japanese newsreel), U.S. Navy photographs (80-G series; National Museum of the U.S. Navy; National Museum of Naval Aviation), Naval History and Heritage Command, NACA / NASA Langley Research Center, U.S. Army Air Forces, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, Library of Congress, Imperial War Museums (A 31015), Technical Air Intelligence Center (TAIC Manual No. 1, via Internet Archive), and Japanese photographs of 1937–45 (Imperial Japanese Navy, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries; photographers Yoshio Shiga and Hajime Yoshida; Nippon News). Thumbnail portrait: Saburo Sakai, wartime photograph. Technical drawings and animation: Design Under Fire. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. #WW2 #ZeroFighter #Documentary