another Zero post

The Japanese Zero and how we learned to fight it

In April 1942 thirty-six Zeros attacking a British naval base at Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), were met by about sixty Royal Air Force aircraft of mixed types, many of them obsolete. Twenty-seven of the RAF planes went down: fifteen Hawker Hurricanes (of Battle of Britain fame), eight Fairey Swordfish, and four Fairey Fulmars. The Japanese lost one Zero.

Five months after America's entry into the war, the Zero was still a mystery to U.S. Navy pilots. On May 7, 1942, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, fighter pilots from our aircraft carriers Lexington and Yorktown fought the Zero and didn't know what to call it. Some misidentified it as the German Messerschmitt 109.

A few weeks later, on June 3 and 4, warplanes flew from the Japanese carriers Ryujo and Junyo to attack the American military base at Dutch Harbor in Alaska 's Aleutian archipelago.Japan 's attack on Alaska was intended to draw remnants of the U.S. fleet north from Pearl Harbor, away from Midway Island , where the Japanese were setting a trap. (The scheme ultimately backfired when our Navy pilots sank four of Japan's first-line aircraft carriers at Midway, giving the United States a major turning-point victory.)

In the raid of June 4, twenty bombers blasted oil storage tanks, a warehouse, a hospital, a hangar, and a beached freighter, while eleven Zeros strafed at will. Chief Petty Officer Makoto Endo led a three-plane Zero section from the Ryujo, whose other pilots were Flight Petty Officers Tsuguo Shikada and Tadayoshi Koga. Koga, a small nineteen-year old, was the son of a rural carpenter. His Zero, serial number 4593, was light gray, with the imperial rising-sun insignia on its wings and fuselage. It had left the Mitsubishi Nagoya aircraft factory on February 19, only three-and-a-half months earlier, so it was the latest design.

Shortly before the bombs fell on Dutch Harbor that day, soldiers at an adjacent Army outpost had seen three Zeros shoot down a lumbering Catalina amphibian. As the plane began to sink, most of the seven-member crew climbed into a rubber raft and began paddling toward shore. The soldiers watched in horror as the Zeros strafed the crew until all were killed. The Zeros are believed to have been those of Endo, Shikada, and Koga.

After massacring the Catalina crew, Endo led his section to Dutch Harbor, where it joined the other eight Zeros in strafing. It was then (according to Shikada, interviewed in 1984) that Koga's Zero was hit by ground fire. An Army intelligence team later reported, "Bullet holes entered the plane from both upper and lower sides." One of the bullets severed the return oil line between the oil cooler and the engine. As the engine continued to run, it pumped oil from the broken line. A Navy photo taken during the raid shows a Zero trailing what appears to be smoke. It is probably oil, and there is little doubt that this is Zero 4593.

After the raid, as the enemy planes flew back toward their carriers, eight American Curtiss Warhawk P-40's shot down four VaI (Aichi D3A) dive bombers thirty miles west of Dutch Harbor. In the swirling, minutes-long dogfight, Lt. John J. Cape shot down a plane identified as a Zero. Another Zero was almost instantly on his tail. He climbed and rolled, trying to evade, but those were the wrong maneuvers to escape a Zero. The enemy fighter easily stayed with him, firing its two deadly 20-mm cannon and two 7.7-mm machine guns. Cape and his plane plunged into the sea. Another Zero shot up the P-40 of Lt. Winfield McIntyre, who survived a crash landing with a dead engine.

Endo and Shikada accompanied Koga as he flew his oil-spewing airplane to Akutan Island , twenty-five miles away, which had been designated for emergency landings. A Japanese submarine stood nearby to pick up downed pilots. The three Zeros circled low over the green, treeless island. At a level, grassy valley floor half a mile inland, Koga lowered his wheels and flaps and eased toward a three-point landing. As his main wheels touched, they dug in, and the Zero flipped onto its back, tossing water, grass, and gobs of mud. The valley floor was a bog, and the knee-high grass concealed water.

Endo and Shikada circled. There was no sign of life. If Koga was dead, their duty was to destroy the downed fighter. Incendiary bullets from their machine guns would have done the job. But Koga was a friend, and they couldn't bring themselves to shoot. Perhaps he would recover, destroy the plane himself, and walk to the waiting submarine. Endo and Shikada abandoned the downed fighter and returned to the Ryujo, two hundred miles to the south. (The Ryujo was sunk two months later in the eastern Solomons by planes from the aircraft carrier Saratoga. Endo was killed in action at Rabaul on October 12, 1943, while Shikada survived the war and eventually became a banker.)

The wrecked Zero lay in the bog for more than a month, unseen by U.S. patrol planes and offshore ships. Akutan is often foggy, and constant Aleutian winds create unpleasant turbulence over the rugged island. Most pilots preferred to remain over water, so planes rarely flew over Akutan. However, on July 10 a U.S. Navy Catalina (PBY) amphibian returning from overnight patrol crossed the island. A gunner named Wall called, "Hey, there's an airplane on the ground down there. It has meatballs on the wings." That meant the rising-sun insignia. The patrol plane's commander, Lt. William Thies, descended for a closer look. What he saw excited him.

Back at Dutch Harbor, Thies persuaded his squadron commander to let him take a party to the downed plane. No one then knew that it was a Zero.

Ens. Robert Larson was Thies's copilot when the plane was discovered. He remembers reaching the Zero. "We approached cautiously, walking in about a foot of water covered with grass. Koga's body, thoroughly strapped in, was upside down in the plane, his head barely submerged in the water. "We were surprised at the details of the airplane," Larson continues. "It was well built, with simple, unique features. Inspection plates could be opened by pushing on a black dot with a finger. A latch would open, and one could pull the plate out. Wingtips folded by unlatching them and pushing them up by hand. The pilot had a parachute and a life raft." Koga's body was buried nearby. In 1947 it was shifted to a cemetery on nearby Adak Island, and later, it is believed, his remains were returned to Japan.

Thies had determined that the wrecked plane was a nearly new Zero, which suddenly gave it special meaning, for it was repairable. However, unlike U.S. warplanes, which had detachable wings, the Zero's wings were integral with the fuselage. This complicated salvage and shipping. Navy crews fought the plane out of the bog. The tripod that was used to lift the engine, and later the fuselage, sank three to four feet into the mud. The Zero was too heavy to turn over with the equipment on hand, so it was left upside down while a tractor dragged it on a skid to the beach and a barge. At Dutch Harbor it was turned over with a crane, cleaned, and crated, wings and all. When the awkward crate containing Zero 4593 arrived at North Island Naval Air Station, San Diego, a twelve-foot-high stockade was erected around it inside a hangar. Marines guarded the priceless plane while Navy crews worked around the clock to make it airworthy. (There is no evidence the Japanese ever knew we had salvaged Koga's plane.)

In mid-September Lt. Cmdr. Eddie R. Sanders studied it for a week as repairs were completed. Forty-six years later he clearly remembered his flights in Koga's Zero. "My log shows that I made twenty-four flights in Zero 4593 from 20 September to 15 October 1942," Sanders told me. "These flights covered performance tests such as we do on planes undergoing Navy tests."

"The very first flight exposed weaknesses of the Zero that our pilots could exploit with proper tactics. The Zero had superior maneuverability only at the lower speeds used in dog fighting, with short turning radius and excellent aileron control at very low speeds. However, immediately apparent was the fact that the ailerons froze up at speeds above two hundred knots, so that rolling maneuvers at those speeds were slow and required much force on th e control stick. It rolled to the left much easier than to the right. Also, its engine cut out under negative acceleration [as when nosing into a dive] due to its float-type carburetor. We now had an answer for our pilots who were unable to escape a pursuing Zero. We told them to go into a vertical power dive, using negative acceleration, if possible, to open the range quickly and gain advantageous speed while the Zero's engine was stopped. At about two hundred knots, we instructed them to roll hard right before the Zero pilot could get his sights lined up. This recommended tactic was radioed to the fleet after my first flight of Koga's plane, and soon the welcome answer came back: "It works!'" Sanders said, satisfaction sounding in his voice even after nearly half a century.

Thus by late September 1942 Allied pilots in the Pacific theater knew how to escape a pursuing Zero.

"Was Zero 4593 a good representative of the Model 21 Zero?" I asked Sanders. In other words, was the repaired airplane 100 percent?

"About 98 percent," he replied.

The Zero was added to the U.S. Navy inventory and assigned its Mitsubishi serial number. The Japanese colors and insignia were replaced with those of the U.S. Navy and later the U.S. Army, which also test flew it. The Navy pitted it against the best American fighters of the time-the P-38 Lockheed Lightning, the P-39 Bell Airacobra, the P-51 North American Mustang, the F4F-4 Grumman Wildcat, and the F4U Chance Vought Corsair-and for each type developed the most effective tactics and altitudes for engaging the Zero.

In February 1945 Cmdr. Richard G. Crommelin was taxiing Zero 4593 at San Diego Naval Air Station, where it was being used to train pilots bound for the Pacific war zone. An SB-2C Curtiss Helldiver overran it and chopped it up from tail to cockpit. Crommelin survived, but the Zero didn't. Only a few pieces of Zero 4593 remain today. The manifold pressure gauge, the air-speed indicator, and the folding panel of the port wingtip were donated to the Navy Museum at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard by Rear Adm. William N. Leonard, who salvaged them at San Diego in 1945. In addition, two of its manufacturer's plates are in the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum in Anchorage, donated by Arthur Bauman, the photographer.

Leonard recently told me, "The captured Zero was a treasure. To my knowledge no other captured machine has ever unlocked so many secrets at a time when the need was so great." A somewhat comparable event took place off North Africa in 1944-coincidentally on the same date, June 4, that Koga crashed his Zero.

A squadron commanded by Capt. Daniel V. Gallery, aboard the escort carrier Guadalcanal, captured the German submarine U-505, boarding and securing the disabled vessel before the fleeing crew could scuttle it. Code books, charts, and operating instructions rescued from U-505 proved quite valuable to the Allies. Captain Gallery later wrote, "Reception committees which we were able to arrange as a result Š may have had something to do with the sinking of nearly three hundred U-boats in the next eleven months." By the time of U-505's capture, however, the German war effort was already starting to crumble (D-day came only two days later), while Japan still dominated the Pacific when Koga's plane was recovered.

A classic example of the Koga plane's value occurred on April 1, 1943, when Ken Walsh, a Marine flying an F4U Chance-Vought Corsair over the Russell Islands southeast of Bougainville, encountered a lone Zero. "I turned toward him, planning a deflection shot, but before I could get on him, he rolled, putting his plane right under my tail and within range. I had been told the Zero was extremely maneuverable, but if I hadn't seen how swiftly his plane flipped onto my tail, I wouldn't have believed it," Walsh recently recalled. "I remembered briefings that resulted from test flights of Koga's Zero on how to escape from a following Zero. With that lone Zero on my tail I did a split S, and with its nose down and full throttle my Corsair picked up speed fast .I wanted at least 240 knots, preferably 260. Then, as prescribed, I rolled hard right. As I did this and continued my dive, tracers from the Zero zinged past my plane's belly. "From information that came from Koga's Zero, I knew the Zero rolled more slowly to the right than to the left. If I hadn't known which way to turn or roll, I'd have probably rolled to my left. If I had done that, the Zero would likely have turned with me, locked on, and had me. I used that maneuver a number of times to get away from Zeros." By war's end Capt. (later Lt. Col.) Kenneth Walsh had twenty-one aerial victories (seventeen Zeros, three Vals, one Pete), making him the war's fourth-ranking Marine Corps ace. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for two extremely courageous air battles he fought over the Solomon Islands in his Corsair during August 1943. He retired from the Marine Corps in 1962 after more than twenty-eight years of service. Walsh holds the Distinguished Flying Cross with six Gold Stars, the Air Medal with fourteen Gold Stars, and more than a dozen other medals and honors.

How important was our acquisition of Koga's Zero? Masatake Okumiya, who survived more air-sea battles than any other Japanese naval officer, was aboard the Ryujo when Koga made his last flight. He later co-authored two classic books, Zero and Midway. Okumiya has written that the Allies' acquisition of Koga's Zero was "no less serious" than the Japanese defeat at Midway and "did much to hasten our final defeat." If that doesn't convince you, ask Ken Walsh.

INSIDE THE ZERO

The Zero was Japan's main fighter plane throughout World War II. By war's end about 11,500 Zeros had been produced in five main variants. In March 1939, when the prototype Zero was rolled out, Japan was in some ways still so backward that the plane had to be hauled by oxcart from the Mitsubishi factory twenty-nine miles to the airfield where it flew. It represented a great leap in technology. At the start of World War II, some countries' fighters were open cockpit, fabric-covered biplanes. A low-wing all-metal monoplane carrier fighter, predecessor to the Zero, had been adopted by the Japanese in the mid-1930's, while the U.S. Navy's standard fighter was still a biplane. But the world took little notice of Japan's advanced military aircraft, so the Zero came as a great shock to Americans at Pearl Harbor and afterward. A combination of nimbleness and simplicity gave it fighting qualities that no Allied plane could match. Lightness, simplicity, ease of maintenance, sensitivity to controls, and extreme maneuverability were the main elements that the designer Jiro Horikoshi built into the Zero. The Model 21 flown by Koga weighed 5,500 pounds, including fuel, ammunition, and pilot, while U.S. fighters weighed 7,500 pounds and up. Early models had no protective armor or self-sealing fuel tanks, although these were standard features on U.S. fighters. Despite its large-diameter 940-hp radial engine, the Zero had one of the slimmest silhouettes of any World War II fighter. The maximum speed of Koga's Zero was 326 mph at 16,000 feet, not especially fast for a 1942 fighter. But high speed wasn't the reason for the Zero's great combat record. Agility was. Its large ailerons gave it great maneuverability at low speeds. It could even outmaneuver the British Spitfire. Advanced U.S. fighters produced toward the war's end still couldn't turn with the Zero, but they were faster and could out climb and out dive it. Without self-sealing fuel tanks, the Zero was easily flamed when hit in any of its three wing and fuselage tanks or its droppable belly tank. And without protective armor, its pilot was vulnerable. In 1941 the Zero's range of 1,675 nautical miles (1,930 statute miles) was one of the wonders of the aviation world. No other fighter plane had ever routinely flown such a distance. Saburo Sakai, Japan's highest-scoring surviving World War II ace, with sixty- four kills, believes that if the Zero had not been developed, Japan "would not have decided to start the war." Other Japanese authorities’ echo this opinion, and the confidence it reflects was not, in the beginning at least, misplaced. Today the Zero is one of the rarest of all major fighter planes of World War II. Only sixteen complete and assembled examples are known to exist. Of these, only two are flyable: one owned by Planes of Fame, in Chino, California, and the other by the Commemorative Air Force, in Midland, Texas.

The entire article by Jim Rearden can be found here.

 

The article is by the author, Jim Rearden.
He has also authored at least two books on the subject
"Cracking the Zero Mystery: How the U.S. Learned to beat Japan's Vaunted World War II Fighter Plane"
http://www.amazon.com/dp/081172235X
and
"Koga's Zero: The Fighter That Changed the War: Found in Alaska
http://www.amazon.com/Kogas-Zero-Fighter-Changed-Alaska/dp/0929521560

The article Ken posted can be found on several websites and and webpages, but I am not sure where it was originally published.
Here is but one(working - some other links to this article are dead): http://toshmcintosh.com/2011/02/kogas-zero-by-jim-rearden/

 

Claire Chenault of the Flying TIgers sent several reports about the Zero before Pearl that were ignored and a fighter pilot Thach, developed a weave tactic to counter the Zero shortly after the start of the war.

 

It came from an American gun forum I enjoy and many of the folks there have an interest in WWII.

KTK

 

IIRC, Thatch was working on his tactics shortly before the war - I have to check Lundstrom's the Fist Team though.

Don't forget that much of the data came from the remains of a Zero that they had shot down. Not to mention that much of the focus remains on Koga's Zero that many forget that it was the Chinese that captured the first two intact A6M2 Zeroes(one heavily damaged & one lightly damaged) that had both made a forced landing on a Chinese beach. From these two aircraft, they put the lightly damaged one into flying condition and it was being flown and exercised against by members of the 23rd Fighter Group. However, given the distance and lack of transportation, the "Chinese" Zero did not make it Stateside until some time in 1943.

 

Just found this on the "Planes of Fame" video channel over on Youtube.

US Ace, Major General John A. "Johhny" Alison, relating some of his more memorable times in China. One of the stories is how he landed the "Chinese Zero" on one landing gear(this brief story begins at 22:01). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcej-fXlzVk

 

I'd say, off hand, that there are a few copyright issues with the OP.

That is mostly the work of Jim Rearden, circa 1987 or so. He wrote a two parter article for "Alaska" magazine which appeared in the September and October issues of that year. By the spring of the following year Rearden was expanding his work into a book entitled Cracking the Zero Mystery, ultimately published by Stackpole in 1990. This book was republished in 1995 with some minor edits and retitled to Koga's Zero: The Fighter that Changed World War II. There was also a Japanese language edition published in 1993. The first 3000 print run of that edition sold out in about three weeks.

I have all three of these editions, the "Alaska" articles and copies of most of the back and forth correspondence betwixt Rearden and my father, not to mention copies of most of the evaluation reports written on this plane and five or six original prints of photos taken in a hangar at NAS San Diego in 1944.

Also, "Leonard recently told me . . ." is a little difficult to believe since he died in August 2005.

 

The piece heavily quoted by the OP tells the simple story that journailsts and TV producers like. "The answer to the Zeke was all in the one captured in the Aleiutian islands. Period. " . But history is rarely as simple as a synopsys of a History Channel documentry.

Over SE Asia the allied airforces had to contend with the japanese Army's ki43 Oscar, another lightweight fighter, optimized for dog-fighting. There were several factors that made both the Oscar and the Zeke a nasty surprise.

#1 Gross underestimation of the Japanese designers. No one expected the Japanese to be capable of designing a world class aircraft. The Japanese aircraft industry was only thought to be capable of poor copies of Western designs. That persisted with the Allies misidentifying the Ki61 as a copy of the Me109. The quality of Japanese aircraft, ships and torpedoes was a nasty shock to all who met them.

#2 Gross underestimation of the Japanese ability to fly and fight. The Japanese were assumed to be an inferior race of short sighted Asiatics from a country barely out of the middle ages and unlikely to match the brightest and best from the US or British Empire. Another potentially fatal under estimate for those who faced pilots who had been flying on operations over china for nearly a decade. The 2nd Highest scoring US air ace Thomas McGuire was killed in 1945 in a dog fight with an obsolete Ki43 piloted by a man with 3,000 flying hours.

#3 These fighters were optimised in ways that challenged the conventions of US and British aircraft designers. They were very light, which gave them extraordinary performance in dog-fighting and had the endurance far greater than other singe seat fighters of the time. Other nation's air forces looked at the potential of monoplane streamlined aircraft with speeds of 300mph + they didn't think too much about dog fighting. If I recall correctly Japanese army and navy fighter designs were influenced by the views of Japanese pilots who successfully argued for a single seat monoplene which could dogfight as well as the biplanes they were used to. In the short run this helped the Japanese deliver some nasty shocks in air to air combat, but in the long run it was a bad idea. The lack of self sealing tanks and pilot armour meant the Japanese lost expereinced pilots more quickly than they could replace. These aircraft could not be used effectively as bomber interceptors or fighter bombers. Neither weas capable of carrying the battery of cannon needed to down a B17, B24 or B29, or of surviving a hit from one of their .50 calibre MGs.

The knowledge gained from the captured Zeke obviously helped the allies to refine their tactics and were of great use to the tactical training schools and aircraft manufactuirers. However, those who had faced the Oscar and Zeke had already worked most of the key lessons by June 1942, by trial and costly error. The AVG and RAF certainly had. Keep a high speed, dive and roll with a high speed turn, and NEVER try to dogfight were rules which preserved the lives of the fighter pilots in a fighter v fighter action. However, they were less helpful if the allied fighters were supposed to be escorting bombers or trying to engage japanese bombers, in which case disengagement would lead to a failed mission.

The facts were that until 1943 allied aircraft were inferior to those they faced. The F4F, the standard USN carrier fighter lacked the rate of climb or level flight speed to get away from the zeke, as did the Hurricane II used by the RAF in the far east and the less said about the F2A Brewster Buffalo the better. Even though USN pilots were some of the best trained at the time, their loss ratio is pretty grim reading in the fighter engagements in 1942-3. Of aircraft in service in early 1942 only the P40E could outrun the Zeke, and even then it was an aircraft which worked best going downhill. The advantage only swung to the allies when they introduce aircraft which have the edge in clime rate and speed - P38 - F6F- P51- P47 and spitfire.

The Thach weave is a defensive rather than offensive tactic. Effectively the F4Fs carry out a series of co-ordinated scissor manouvres to ensure that at every few seconds each weaving F4F is pointing towards the tail of his wingman.

 

My understanding was that the F4F had a loss ratio of almost 1:1 when compared to the Zero. While it was inferior in some ways it was also superior in others.

Not necessarily. The above allowed the allied fighters to reengage at at their convience.

 

Found it.

It was first published in American Heritage's "Invention and Technology Magazine", Fall 1997, Volume 13/2
http://203.197.81.56/dev-it/content/koga%E2%80%99s-zero-1



Found it thanks to the cite used in this article.
"Debunking the Myth: The Rise and Fall of the Zero"
http://www.navalofficer.com.au/debunking-the-myth-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-zero/
Although, I used Google to find Reardon's article,As the cite has the web address mistakenly split into two parts. Then when I tried to used the "fixed" address, I get a "Problem loading page - The page isn't redirecting properly" Error.

 

I think it takes a selective reading of the statistics to support that POV. Including the figures from later war when the US adadvantage of numbers doesnlt prove anything. I remember checking this for some US computer flight sim company when it was impossible to reproduce the historic results from the historic engagements after the flight model had been tweaked to support the deep blue fanboys. The loss ratios from Midway, Coral sea Guadalcanal and Eastern Solomons were heavily in the favour of the A6M2 Zeke.

 

That likely includes F4Fs lost to all causes, including those that went down with carriers Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp, and Hornet.

Not sure how I am selectively reading Table 21 in "Naval Aviation Combat Statistics-World War II"
http://www.history.navy.mil/download/nasc.pdf
1942 Carrier-based VF
Enemy Aircraft Destroyed in Combat(fighters): 112
Own losses to Enemy Aircraft: 43

1942 Land-Based VF
Enemy Aircraft Destroyed in Combat(fighters): 247
Own Losses to Enemy Aircraft: 93

So, even considering a generous 100% over-claim, The Americans still come out better than 1:1 loss ratio. We also have to take into consideration that there were "down" periods during the Guadalcanal/Solomons campaign were the American fighter pilots did take the occasional "shellacking." and they lost more fighters than they shot down.

 

The Zero was something of a mystery to US Navy pilots, but Lundstrom records in the The First Team that in their first two encounters, Coral Sea and Midway, the score was 14 Zeros downed to 10 F4Fs. Four of the Zeros came from Jimmy Thach's first application of his "Beam Defense Position" at Midway (one of Thach's flight was also lost).

According to our good friends at wiki:

"Thach had heard, from a report published in the 22 September 1941 Fleet Air Tactical Unit Intelligence Bulletin, of the Japanese Mitsubishi Zero's extraordinary maneuverability and climb rate. Before even experiencing it for himself, he began to devise tactics meant to give the slower-turning American F4F Wildcat fighters a chance in combat."

 

IIRC, the Thach quote should be from John Lundstrom's "The First Team: Pearl Harbor to Midway"

 

For what it is worth, USN F4F and IJN A6M2 losses, 1 May 1942 thru 4 June 1942. Note that these are not claims, these are the actual reported losses. USN VF squadrons did not encounter A6M2s before the Battle of the Coral Sea.

USN F4F losses (format = ship || squadron || date/number lost || cause):
CV-8 || VF-8 || 5/1/1942 || 1 || take off crash
CV-8 || VF-8 || 5/2/1942 || 1 || take off crash
CV-6 || VF-6 || 5/3/1942 || 1 || deck crash
CV-5 || VF-42 || 5/4/1942 || 2 || fuel exhausted
CV-6 || VF-6 || 5/5/1942 || 1 || deck crash
CV-2 || VF-2 || 5/7/1942 || 1 || MIA Coral Sea Night Action/Operations
CV-5 || VF-42 || 5/7/1942 || 2 || MIA Coral Sea Night Action/Operations
CV-2 || VF-2 || 5/8/1942 || 1 || fuel exhausted
CV-2 || VF-2 || 5/8/1942 || 3 || MIA Coral Sea probably shot down A6M2
CV-2 || VF-2 || 5/8/1942 || 2 || shot down A6M2 strike CAP
CV-5 || VF-42 || 5/8/1942 || 1 || forced down, battle damage A6M2
CV-6 || VF-6 || 5/15/1942 || 1 || deck crash
CV-6 || VF-6 || 5/15/1942 || 1 || take off crash
CV-6 || VF-6 || 5/25/1942 || 1 || deck crash
CV-3 || VF-2 (det) || 6/3/1942 || 1 || engine failure
CV-5 || VF-3 || 6/4/1942 || 1 || deck crash
CV-5 || VF-3 || 6/4/1942 || 3 || shot down A6M2 force CAP
CV-5 || VF-3 || 6/4/1942 || 1 || shot down A6M2 strike CAP
CV-5 || VF-3 || 6/4/1942 || 1 || forced down, battle damage A6M2
CV-6 || VF-6 || 6/4/1942 || 1 || fuel exhausted
CV-8 || VF-8 || 6/4/1942 || 10 || fuel exhausted
CV-8 || VF-8 || 6/4/1942 || 1 || fuel exhausted
CV-8 || VF-8 || 6/4/1942 || 1 || shot down A6M2 (possibly friendly fire but usually noted as air action)

Note 12 (or 11 depending how you want to count) F4Fs lost to A6M2s

A6M2 losses (format is ship || Date || Number || Cause)

Shoho || 5/7/1942 || 3 || fuel exhausted
Shoho || 5/7/1942 || 1 || shot down F4F
Shokaku || 5/8/1942 || 3 || fuel exhausted
Shokaku || 5/8/1942 || 2 || shot down F4F
Zuikaku || 5/8/1942 || 1 || fuel exhausted
Akagi || 6/4/1942 || 4 || fuel exhausted
Akagi || 6/4/1942 || 1 || AA fire Midway Island
Akagi || 6/4/1942 || 3 || shot down, various strike aircraft (non VF)
Hiryu || 6/4/1942 || 1 || forced down, battle damage SBD
Hiryu || 6/4/1942 || 1 || forced down, battle damage SBD
Hiryu || 6/4/1942 || 3 || shot down F4F CAP
Hiryu || 6/4/1942 || 1 || shot down F4F CAP
Hiryu || 6/4/1942 || 1 || shot down F4F CAP
Hiryu || 6/4/1942 || 3 || shot down SBD
Hiryu || 6/4/1942 || 2 || shot down, various strike aircraft (non VF)
Kaga || 6/4/1942 || 1 || fuel exhausted
Kaga || 6/4/1942 || 5 || fuel exhausted
Kaga || 6/4/1942 || 1 || shot down F4F (VMF 221 - land-based)
Kaga || 6/4/1942 || 5 || shot down F4F strike escort
Soryu || 6/4/1942 || 4 || fuel exhausted
Soryu || 6/4/1942 || 3 || shot down, various strike aircraft (non VF)

Note 14 A6M2s losses directly attributed to F4Fs.