ZERO Myth, Mystery, and Fact

A test pilot compares the A6M5 Zero to U.S. fighters

- CORKY MEYER

Anyone who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s learned very quickly that “Made in Japan” meant cheap price and poor quality. Almost everything bought in the five-and-dime stores had that tag. It seemed impossible to purchase anything imported from Japan that would not wear out or break after a very short useful life.

That fact and the secrecy of the Japanese in the years before WW II regarding their military buildup anesthetized all of us regarding their real might. The average American believed that in battle, Japanese military forces would crumble as fast as their products had. We were obviously wrong. They overran country after country and their air forces were superior to anything that could be put against them. Americans learned to respect the term “Jap Zero” as defining the epitome of aerial superiority. Just one day after December 7, 1941, “Made in Japan” had an entirely different meaning.

When I arrived at Grumman on November 11, 1942, and started flying the Wildcat fighter, I was immersed in the life-and-death struggle that the Wildcat, the only U.S. Navy fighter, was having with the Zero. All we heard from the communiqués was that we couldn’t build and deliver the Wildcat fast enough. The story was still very fresh in everyone’s mind how “Grummanites” had volunteered to work around the clock for seven days after the Battle of Midway to deliver the much-needed 39 additional Wildcats to the fleet to replace some of the aircraft lost during that pivotal battle. The reason that Grumman could not deliver more at that time was that we had run out of engines. So, I felt somewhat ambivalent when I had the chance to fly the vaunted Zero in October of 1944 at the Joint Services Fighter Conference at the Patuxent Naval Air Test Center.