The inhospitable chain of 120 small islands sweeps westward some 1,000 miles from mainland Alaska into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, no one knows exactly why Japan invaded the Aleutians. It’s curious, then, that Japan allocated any of its mighty fighter planes to an attack on the Aleutian Islands in June 1942 instead of saving them all for the massive campaign it was poised to mount at Midway Island. So formidable was the Zero that the official American strategy for pilots attacked by the Japanese fighter boiled down to this: run away. In that sortie, 36 Zeroes took on 60 British aircraft-and shot down 27 of them, with the loss of just a single Zero. The Zero cemented its reputation in an April 1942 battle with well-trained English pilots over Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Fast and powerful, it was known as a nearly invincible fighter plane with a 12:1 kill ratio in dogfights with the Chinese as early as 1940. Those servicemen had heard of the Zero’s reputation, though. The Poles are also claimed to have widely practised fighter tactics while flying as pairs.Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most American servicemen had never seen a plane like the “Zero,” so named not because of the prominent Rising Sun emblem painted on the side but for the manufacturer’s type designation: Mitsubishi 6M2 Type 0 Model 21. Chief amongst those claiming to be the true parent of the "Swarm" is the Finnish Air Force which apparently used the pair as the basis of fighter tactics well before the Second World War. Over the years I have received correspondence from numerous sources pointing out that the "pair" was used by various air forces in the 1930s. A NOTE: The above essay was written in the early 1990s. If you look at your hand you will see the tips of your fingers, when outstretched, approximate to the positions of the aircraft in the formation. The RAF copied the German tactics renaming the Schwarm as the "Finger-four" formation. It was the adoption of these tactics, as much as the excellent flying qualities of the 109, that gave victory to the Germans in their early campaigns. A loose formation is much harder to see against the sky than a tight one, the Schwarm would only close up to keep contact with each other when passing through cloud. A loose formation is only possible when the pilots are freed of flying close enough to see their leader's hand signals. One of the reasons that the time for this sort of formation had come was the availability of air to air radio. The leader's wingman would fly behind and low. The second pair would fly behind the leader of the first pair, stepped up away from the sun. Again the aircraft flew wide apart, the two leaders looking ahead, the two wingmen concentrating on the rear. Molders expanded it into the "Schwarm", two pairs acting together. The pair of aircraft was called a "Rotte" by the Germans. At this time there arrived in Spain Werner Molders, who took the two aircraft formation and extended its use and moulded it into the tactics needed by the new generation of aircraft such as the Bf109. When the Messerschmitt 109 was committed to the Civil War in Spain, its pilots at first flew in the old "V" formations but a shortage of the new aeroplanes forced them to fly in twos when escorting bombing raids, in order to provide cover on all sides of the bombing formations. The fashion for tight formation flying displays, at the public displays that were popular between the war, accentuated this development. First World War pilots had taken to flying this formation quite far apart to make their aircraft less easily seen and to avoid collisions, but in the "parade ground" atmosphere of peace, airforces tightened up the formations. During the First World War and the inter-war years the basic unit of aircraft was three aircraft flying in "V" formation known as a "Vic" by the RAF and a "Kette" by the Germans. One of the things the Messerschmitt Bf 109 should be remembered for is the central position it took in the formation of fighter tactics for fast metal monoplane aircraft that appeared at the end of the 1930s, the same tactics that are still in use today.
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