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Warpaint 147 Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa

By Daniel Kowalczuk

One of the great unsung fighters of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force was Nakajima’s Ki-43 Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon). Codenamed ‘Oscar’ by the Allies, the aircraft was frequently mistaken for the Navy’s A6M2 Zero by those encountering it in combat, to the extent that it was widely referred to by its adversaries as the ‘Army 0’.

Highly regarded in Japan, where it was much more widely recognised than the Zero, the Ki-43 was the only Japanese fighter from the Pacific War to see active service with other air forces, being supplied to both Thailand and Manchukuo by the Japanese, but also seeing use by France in Indochina, and by the air forces of Indonesia, the Republic of China, and North Korea, who pressed abandoned but airworthy airframes into service, some of which survived into the early 1950s.

Author Daniel Kowalczuk has compiled a compelling narrative that puts the aircraft in context, describes its development and active service history in detail, and explains how it came to be so widely regarded by the Japanese – so much so that it is the aircraft of choice for producers of Anime rather than its better known contemporary.

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