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I've been thinking about the popular memory around the Zero fighter. It's a victim of its own success. From its entrance into service in July 1940 through much of 1942 it had overwhelming success for a multitude of reasons. It being a great plane was only one of them.
Some older histories leaned into the Zero-as-wonder-weapon mystique - pointing it out as THE factor, or at least main factor, behind early Japanese success in the air. That was flawed analysis. The Zero was a small part of a system, which itself operated in specific contexts.
To demonstrate how much context matters, all the way down to the tactical level, here is a thread where I break down the Zero's first air-to-air victories in China. An event often attributed solely to the Zero's technical characteristics. https://twitter.com/CBI_PTO_History/status/1305175878406610944
Lots of stuff talks about the various contexts around why the early successes occurred - poor Allied early warning, general weakness of Allied air power in the region (though this is overstated by some), etc. & not just in the earliest attacks, but through 1942 in some areas.
However, where popular memory of the Zero begins to go awry is where the continued success of the Zero, but now in more even (or sometimes disadvantageous) operational circumstances against unequivocally first-rate Allied fighter opposition is spun into how the Zero was "doomed."
It leads to a bizarre situation where the Zero no longer racking up extremely favourable kill ratios, and instead only holding its own, becomes "failure" in popular memory. A standard no other fighter is held to. "Holding its own" is exactly why the F4F is rightfully defended.
Instead, the course of the entire air war is placed on the reputation of a single aircraft. Basically the one people have heard of - the Zero. So the overall beating back and grinding down of Japanese air power becomes a grotesquely oversimplified story of how the Zero "failed."
But it didn't fail. It did its job well all the way through 1943. By then it was aging and needed a replacement, something the Japanese understood all the way back in 1940. The Zero's diminishing success was a symptom of gradually losing an air war, not the cause of it.
This understanding places the Zero in the wider context, not as a mysterious wonder weapon, but as a fighter. One fighter, among dozens of aircraft types. In an air war that spanned eight years (China counts too). I've treaded similar ground before. https://twitter.com/CBI_PTO_History/status/1304233021210423296
