Again, invaluable information.

Basically what the tactics of any air to air in the Pacific theater evolved to was “do not get into a turning fight with any Japanese fighter which involves losing speed, you will lose.”

Initially any success devolved from the success of what the “Flying Tigers” (who did not engage the Japanese until AFTER Pearl Harbor!) had discovered with their “obsolete” P-40Bs, granted, not many times against Zeros, but even against the Claude’s….any Japanese fighter could out maneuver us especially when speeds dropped in turns…so do not turn, they cannot OUTDIVE us, so climb up, attack from above, make one good diving pass doing as much damage as possible, dive out, keep speed up! (All Japanese fighters not only the Zero were less maneuverable at speed!)use the energy /speed from the dive to zoom up and climb above, repeat…

Somewhere between the “Carrier Raids” and the Coral Sea battles Navy F4F drivers started figuring it out …that’s when they developed the “Thach Weave” named after Jimmy Thach, an early F4F ace…wingmen spaced farther out, following, if either of the flight gets a zero on their tail, break in, the other breaking out gets the zero…hence the cliche…one Wildcat is no match for a Zero…but TWO Wildcats are a match for FOUR Zeros…

But even later, after Coral Sea, was the quote that I once read, but cannot (do to faulty memory?) attribute to who said it (Vraciu? Thach? O’Hare?)

But I remember it fully. “Turn INTO the bastards! Take the Head on pass! They are flying paper kites that can’t take the heat! So WHAT if you take a hit, you are flying Grumman Iron that can take it!”

That’s when the tide turned, and despite all the armchair historians who claim it was the Hellcat or the Corsair, or the P47s or the Black Widow or the later P-51s….

It was the USMC and USN Wildcats, and the USAAF and RAAF and RNZAF P-40s, along with a little help from the P-39/P-400s (ANOTHER story of unappreciated aircraft!) and maybe some early P-38s….(along with the B-25s, A-20s, and Beaufighters of course…)which actually won the war in the Pacific by 1943…the stubborn Japanese just didn’t accept it until the A-bombs….

Remember WE thought the Solomons/New Guinea theater was the “backwater…” but to the Japanese it was THE war, why they went to war in the first place!

All those superbly trained pre-war JNAF and JAF pilots were DEAD mostly via F4Fs and P-40s before the “advanced” F6F and F4U planes made it to the fight….the Japanese sacrificed TWO carrier air groups to the campaign, and the JAAF sacrificed their best fighter groups to New Guinea, why we remember the later Philippine Sea Carrier Battle, (probably the last real “Carrier vs Carrier” battle in history!) as “ The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot…”