Ein Blick auf die F4U – und Japan erkannte, was wahre Macht bedeutete.

Video from the channel Stimmen von WW2 about Vought F4U Corsair, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 33:11. Language: German. Video type: Documentary.

It's a German-language documentary about an F4U Corsair that went down in the sea off Japan in early 1945 after an engine failure. According to the video, Japanese specialists recovered and examined it. The case serves to compare the technical and industrial capacity of the United States and Japan at the end of the war.

The video reviews the aircraft's origins. In 1938, the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics requested a fighter capable of exceeding 400 mph. Chance Vought, with Rex Beisel as chief designer, responded with an aircraft built around the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, rated at 2,000 hp. It carried a 13-foot 4-inch propeller, and the inverted gull wing allowed the landing gear to be shortened. The XF4U-1 prototype flew on 29 May 1940 at Stratford, Connecticut, piloted by Lyman A. Bullard Jr. The documentary recalls the so-called St. Valentine's Day massacre over Bougainville: nine American aircraft were lost, two of them Corsairs, against a single Zero. After that setback, pilots adopted dive-and-escape tactics at high speed. Kenneth A. Walsh, of VMF-124, became the Corsair's first ace on 13 May 1943 and finished with 21 victories. During the Okinawa campaign, infantry troops called the Corsairs "Angels of Okinawa." The examination took place at the Yokosuka Naval Air Technical Arsenal and at the army's technical institute in Tachikawa.

The video gives a wingspan of 40 feet 11.7 inches and a length of 33 feet 4 inches. It also notes that part of the wing's outer surfaces and the control surfaces were fabric-covered. The wing's main spar was a large forged piece. The aircraft carried six .50-caliber machine guns with 2,350 rounds total, 150 pounds of armor, and a 1.5-inch bulletproof panel. It also had self-sealing fuel tanks and a Hamilton Standard Hydromatic propeller. It could also carry 1,000-pound bombs, 5-inch rockets, or napalm. By the end of the war, the Japanese had at least two captured Corsairs, with no record that they ever flew them. The video gives a tally of 2,140 kills against 189 Corsairs lost to enemy action. The aircraft later fought in Korea and in French colonial conflicts. On 17 July 1969, during the Football War, Honduran captain Fernando Soto used an F4U-5 to shoot down three Salvadoran aircraft, two of them FG-1D Corsairs.