Japanese forces

Hi.

I don´t think it was a G4M as these bombers were too useful as Okha-carrier. And the impact hole is small (compared with the men above), too small for a bomber aircraft.

Yours

tom!

 

Plus it seems to be made by a low-winged single-engined monoplane.

 

Unfortunately all it's really possible to tell from that picture is that it probably was a single engine low wing monoplane or maybe a small twin (Look at the sailors standing on the railing and look at the smudges of where the wings hit, the wings appear to be roughly two sailors long which allowing for the fuselage appears to put the wingspan somewhere (Very!) broadly around the 30ft mark, or about the size of a Zero/Zeke type aircraft and much smaller than a Betty whose wingspan is around 80ft), but which doen't exactly narrow it down to any kind of appreciable degree.

The extra smudges on the wing, which I think you took for the impact of engines in all likelihood are probably where wing fuel tanks exploded and burnt.

Given all and in the absence of any more information it may be possible to write a shortlist of around two dozen or more likely contenders but if I were a gambling man I'd probably put my money on a Zero, AFAIK it's the most widely produced Japanese aircraft which fits the broad criteria.

 

The ship was the USS Hinsdale.

I wouldn't say it was a single-engined plane, because you can see the outline of where the two engines, on the wings have his the ship, and on the left you can see the prop marks.

 

Where? I can't see any prop marks at all, the line on the left is far too off centre to have been a propeller. Personally I don't think the damage offset from the fuselage is caused by engines striking, I think that they were either bombs or fuel tanks.

A quick check of my books shows that all the Japanese twin types were significantly larger than that mark seems to indicate, wing spans typically twice or greater than what we appear to be looking at here so it simply isn't big enough to have been a twin.

 

The only hole either side of the fuselage hole is very small, and a fair distance below the level of the wing. Unless you think that the big hole with the square top is made by an engine, and the rest is somewhere below the waterline??

 

Hard to tell from the photograph.

 

My bet is that the big hole above the waterline is the fuselage impact, if you look above the wing line you can see two shorter parallel marks which I'd guess are where the horizontal stabilisers of the tail hit. Can't say what happened to the vertical stabiliser, but it's entirely possible the whole tail ripped off after that impact leaving no mark for the vertical.

 

Yeah, I guess so.

 

A definite possibility.