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Japanese tank battles ww22/19/2024 ![]() ![]() There are several sources you can consult if you want the real story on Japanese tanks, but a great and easy to digest English resource is the book Japanese tanks 1939-1945 by Steven J Zaloga. This is more palatable to an audience that recognizes the Type 95 Ha-Go from movies like The Pacific, or boardgames like Axis and Allies, but may have never heard of the U.S.’s M1A1 light tank designed around the same time. An example of the disparity in years of introduction can be seen in Men of War: Assault Squad (1 & 2) where the Type 95 Light Tank and a Type 93 Armored Car are pitted againt the M3 Half Track and M24 Chaffee respectively, both vehicles introduced roughly 10 years later. If Japan can be faulted for something in its tanks, it is that they kept some of their best designs at home while the soldiers in remote locations across the Pacific made do with older, obsolete tanks, especially once the Allies came back at them in force. It is likely in many games that Japanese anti-infantry and anti-fortification tank designs from the 1930s will reflect that situation and will be put up against US tanks from as much as 5 years later in the same “tiers.” That is hardly a fair measure of whether the Japanese were capable of manufacturing “good” versus “bad” tanks, especially in WW2, when technology jumped by leaps and bounds in a few years – from biplanes to jets. The Type 89 was a perfectly suitable tank for its time and performed well in its intended role. If the I-Go in its heyday could be defeated by a “rifle,” then so could the BT-7. It had a maximum hull thickness of 17mm, while the well-known Soviet BT-7 tank (which was produced years later) had a hull thickness of 6-20 mm, and a turret thickness of only 10-15 mm. This fallacy can be exposed with one example: The first Japanese-designed tank to be widely used in battle was the Type 89 I-Go Medium Tank, designed in 1928 and mass produced by Imperial Japan for its ambitions of territorial expansion in places like China. ![]() Casual dismissals like “almost all Japanese tanks could be defeated by a rifle” are uninformed at best. A persisting myth, especially when it comes to Japanese tanks and other ground units of World War II and the years leading up to it is that “(Imperial) Japan made “bad tanks”. ![]()
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