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It was during the summer of 1944
when, faced with overwhelming and
fast-increasing Allied strength in the
Pacific theatre, the Japanese naval staff
first seriously entertained the concept
of employing suicide tactics to defeat
enemy attacks, and it was Ensign Mitsuo
Ohta who first produced a rough
design for a piloted flying bomb, a design
which was assigned to Yokosuka
for detailed completion. The resulting
device was a small, mainly wooden
aircraft with three solid-propellant
rockets in the rear fuselage and a 1200kg explosive warhead in the
nose. Carried aloft in the bomb bay of a
modified Mitsubishi G4M bomber and
flown towards the target area, the
Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka (cherry blossom)
bomb would be released, its
rockets fired and then flown directly to
impact on a selected target; the pilot
was sealed into his cockpit before
take-off. Initial powered flights started
at Sagami in October 1944, followed by
unmanned, powered flights the next
month. Production was put in hand,
and a total of 755 Ohkas was built before
March 1945 when production ended.
The weapon was first employed
by the 721st Kokutai on 21 March 1945,
but the carrier aircraft were intercepted
and forced to release their
flying bombs too early. On 1 April the
US battleship West Virginia and three
transport vessels were hit and damaged
by Ohkas. Limited success
attended other suicide attacks by
Ohkas, but the transport aircraft
proved fatally vulnerable in the presence
of powerful American defences
and the Japanese suicide tactic was
never a serious threat to Allied operations
in the Pacific, for all its macabre
implications.
| MODEL | MXY7 Model 11 |
| CREW | 1 |
| ENGINE | 3 x Type 4 Mk.I Model 20, 800kg |
| WEIGHTS |
| Take-off weight | 2140 kg | 4718 lb |
| Empty weight | 440 kg | 970 lb |
| DIMENSIONS |
| Wingspan | 5.12 m | 16 ft 10 in |
| Length | 6.06 m | 19 ft 11 in |
| Height | 1.16 m | 3 ft 10 in |
| Wing area | 6.0 m2 | 64.58 sq ft |
| PERFORMANCE |
| Max. speed | 650 km/h | 404 mph |
| Range | 40 km | 25 miles |
| ARMAMENT | 1200kg of explosives |
| Sgt.KAR98, 25.07.2008 BTW,what´s the difference of these two Ohkas? | | Aero-Fox, 31.03.2008 Good question. Quite simply, it didn't have the maneuverability or endurance. The motorjet engine it would have used would have been too slow to be much of a threat, though it may have increased range. Anyway, it didn't have maneuverability because the control surfaces were utterly tiny.
What I see it being used for, though, is a point-defence interceptor. Simply put some cannons in place of the warhead and give it larger tail surfaces, and send it up like an Me 163 (using RATO bottles to take off and an Ne-20 turbojet for flight). It could have ditched in the ocean to land and been a coastal-defence unit. | | Sgt.KAR98, 10.12.2007 That plane had an engine.Why it wasn´t used as a jet fighter? | | mort_faucheur, 19.08.2007 I'll have to look up the attack by Okhas on the USS West Virginia et. al., that's a fascinating irony of history, IIRC. Wasn't the USS West Virginia severely damaged at Pearl Harbor on 7 Dec. 1941?
What a fascinating little craft is the diminutive Cherry Blossom; it's essentially a piloted suicide version of the German V-1 Fiesler 103 in airframe, but minus the German pulse-jet motor. | | Robert W. Horn, DownBobbaddog(@)webtv.net, 25.02.2007 Noting that warheads such as that carried by the Ohka were intended to defeat heavily armoured warships, and thus neccessitating commitment of a significant portion of warhead weight to a heavy armour-piercing casing, i have often wondered just how much of that 1,200kg was actually HE, as opposed to AP steel? Also, the fact that the W.Va, though hit was not sunk, nor even badly damaged, makes one wonder just how effective modern cruise missiles, all sporting much smaller warheads than Ohka, can actually be, as witnessed by the USS Stark, even though the smallest class of vessel in the U.S. Navy, still handily surviving being struck by an Iraqi-launched Exocet missilesome years back? Makes one think there might just be a very good use for mini-nukes (> 0.1kt) as anti-ship warheads! RWH |
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Do you have any comments about this aircraft ?
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COMPANY
PROFILE
FACTS AND FIGURES© The Okha 11 was armed with a
1200kg (26451b) high-explosive
warhead in the nose. Later versions
had smaller warheads. © Cockpit instrumentation consisted
of only four instruments: a
compass, an airspeed indicator, an
altimeter and an inclinometer for
turn indication. © The Ohka was built by unskilled
workers using as much non-strategic
material as possible. The fuselage
was a standard aluminium structure,
but the wings were made of
moulded plywood covered in fabric. © The later Model 22 had a turbojet
engine with a small auxiliary
piston engine acting as a gas
generator. The only test flight of
the Model 22 ended in an
(unintentional) crash.
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