ErikinWest Posted January 28, 2005 Share Posted January 28, 2005 I'm looking to find a book about Japans military; Air, Naval, Ground (Tanks, Guns, and experimental weapons) for the Japanese in WW2. If anyone knows the title of the book please give it to me so I can see if I can find it! Thnx for your time, Erik 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tar Posted January 28, 2005 Share Posted January 28, 2005 Well, the standard reference work for Japan's aircraft is Rene Francillon's Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War, ISBN 0-87021-313-X. It covers the planes with a little bit of their operational history, but little about the organization of the air forces and their use during the war. I'll let others respond about the other elements of the Japanese military. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Kettler Posted January 28, 2005 Share Posted January 28, 2005 ErikinWest, I believe your first stop should be TM-E-30-451? Handbook on Japanese Military Forces, either in book form or on CD-ROM. At the time it was first published (during the War), it was a classified compendium on everything we knew/thought we knew about that topic. The first civilian print run was pricey and small, but it's been reprinted several times since then. If you search under my member number, you should also turn up one or more posts detailing Naval Intelligence ship and aircraft pubs available on CD-ROM (will probably say "grog find" in it and is NOT the one posted a few days ago). Regards, John Kettler 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErikinWest Posted January 29, 2005 Author Share Posted January 29, 2005 Just a quick question: What did the Japanese use to kill tanks? They don't seem to have a Rocket like weapon and there tanks were really crappy so just wondering... Erik 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
offtaskagain Posted January 29, 2005 Share Posted January 29, 2005 Mainly satchel charges and 47mm AT guns. The satchel charge was usually a suicide attack. The 47mm guns on Okinawa proved to be very effective when it could catch a sherman's flank. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannon-fodder Posted February 11, 2005 Share Posted February 11, 2005 What did the Japanese use to kill tanks? They don't seem to have a Rocket like weapon and there tanks were really crappy so just wondering...Yeah it wasn't just the tanks that were crappy... Japanese military technology was seriously useless (except I think their navy). In their defence, though, it would have been nigh on impossible to use any real armour in Japan itself, due to the difficult terrain... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John D Salt Posted February 11, 2005 Share Posted February 11, 2005 Originally posted by panzerwerfer42: Mainly satchel charges and 47mm AT guns. The satchel charge was usually a suicide attack. The 47mm guns on Okinawa proved to be very effective when it could catch a sherman's flank. The Japanese also fielded some pretty ineffectual 37mm AT guns, such as the Type 94 and Type 97 (the latter being a licence-built copy of the PaK 36 with a dinky little dolly wheel added under the trails). Then there was the 20mm Type 97 anti-tank rifle, a 150-lb monster theoretically capable of automatic fire from its 7-round mag. Another German weapon the Japanese copied was the Gewehr Panzergranate, known as the Type 2, with versions in 30 and 40mm calibres fired from a discharger cup on the end of a rifle. Hand grenades included hollow-charge drogue bombs in various sizes, the drogue being a tail of hemp strands rather than the usual parachute. There was also the Type 99 magnetic charge, a dinky little thing consisting of a circular packet of TNT 4.75 inches in diameter with four magnets and a time fuze attached. There were also some distinctively Japanese anti-tank weapons. One such was a frangible glass grenade filled with hydrogen cyanide (known to have been used on at least one occasion in Burma). Then there was the famous lunge-mine, a big hollow-charge warhead on the end of a pole, actuated by poking the thing against the target tank, which meant the operator was unlikely to survive a successful attack. A similar weapon was produced by mounting a Type 93 anti-tank mine on the end of a bamboo pole. Other such suicidal methods included clambering underneath a tank and actuating a 15-20lb box of explosive carried on the shoulders, or hiding in a concealed hole on a track or road with a mine or bomb to initiate when an Allied tank drives over. I have seen one reference in a PRO document to a Panzerfaust-type weapon being under development at the end of the war, but this may have been nothing more than speculation by intelligence officers. Given the extreme simplicity of the Panzerfaust and the fact that the Japanese had already copied the German rifle grenades and PaK 36, I can't really imagine why they didn't copy it too. All the best, John. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patrick Brazil Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Originally posted by ErikinWest: Just a quick question: What did the Japanese use to kill tanks? They don't seem to have a Rocket like weapon and there tanks were really crappy so just wondering... Erik I believe they used mine dogs. In Japanese, Chow Mines or Chow Mein. The type I 'Chow Mine' was mostly ineffectual due to their Japanese handlers cooking and eating them before deployment. Seriously, I didn't think that the Japs encountered many tanks, as they mostly fought in very inhosbitable tank terrain. Mabey (obviously) tank busting weapons weren't on their to-do list. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sivodsi Posted February 13, 2005 Share Posted February 13, 2005 Dog meat is not part of Japanese cuisine. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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