Harvards disguised as Zero fighters appeared in the film The Final Countdown, and on TV the same types appeared in Black Sheep Squadron and at least one episode of Fantasy Island, plus also Tales of the Gold Monkey.

I’m sure a Harvard appeared playing a Zero in the film The Flying Leathernecks, along with Hellcats playing Zeroes. And wasn’t it Harvards in the Pearl Harbor attack scenes of From Here To Eternity?

Harvards also appeared in The Tuskegee Airmen

An ex-RNZAF Harvard played an RNZAF Harvard in the NZ film ‘Absent Without Leave’. It was in a scene where the plane crashed and the lead character saved the pilot. The film was based on a true story.

bazv, your comment doesn’t add much at all as the discussion was about air to air kills of the P-40, and as it was designed as an intercept and escort fighter and did its job in those roles well for its time, that’s all we need to know. In the secondary role as a ground attack aircraft it also performed well into 1944 with the RNZAF too, pinpointing targets in the island jungles and strafing airfeilds, etc. Perhaps other Air Forces were not as successful in the ground attack roles with them, but ours were.

To compare the manoeuvrability of the P-40, on several occasions our Kittyhawk pilots were able to out-manoeuvre and escape Jap fighter formations in much greater numbers. They were also able to escape US Corsairs that attacked them on numerous occasions, though one P-40 pilot was killed by a US Corsair.

The RNZAF used Corsairs later in the war in the same role as our P-40’s had been in, though they never saw any air to air combat success. They were mainly used as dive bombers and for strafing and did the job no better than their predecessor had done. In fact I believe more Corsairs were lost on ops than P-40’s in non-air to air combat.

No average aircraft can be considered a good fighter if the pilot is poorly trained. If he is well trained, knows his aircraft, knows its limits and capabilities, and has a little luck on his side, he can make the average aircraft work very well. It is a good tool in his well trained, experienced hands.

For goodness sake, our Hudsons were able to out manouvre Jap attacks by numerous aircraft, and they were considered by the Yanks as slow, sitting duck airliners till they realised they were wrong. It came down to a combination of training, skill and design.

There are very few aircraft from WWII that the designer produced that an average pilot with little experience could hop into and be a success at. In some cases the Spitfire fits that mould but many young pilots were still killed in them. So of course it comes down to the pilot as well as the design. Are you saying that anyone could hop into a Hellcat or Focke Wulf 190 and become an ace overnight because of the aircraft’s design made it so easy?

James is correct that the P-40 was easy to maintain. Even Chinese peasants were able to do the ground maintenance on the P-40’s in China (if John Wayne’s film is to be believed).

And James is also correct that comparing type for type as better or worse is silly. But one thing I will say is the Merlin sounds better than an Allison or any radial, no matter what it’s attached to, and few can argue that.

If it helps, the Royal New Zealand Air Force P-40’s claimed 100 confirmed kills exactly. Most older books will state 99 kills but Chris Rudge discovered when he wrote his excellent book ‘Air to Air’ that by comparing the losses and the claims, one claim that was turned down was in fact a successful kill.

There was also at least one RNZAF P-40 that claimed the shooting down of another P-40 in training at home in NZ, when live rounds were loaded rather than blanks by accident. The pilot survived and the victorious P-40 had a NZ flag added next to the two Jap flags from it’s previous successes.

True. But in this case their data of what a turning cicle is like is coming from people who flew the aircraft and nowhere else, whether they were a test pilot or combat pilot. I agree with Daz’s point that if they wanted to research it in any other way, the researcher would have to fly in the aircraft themselves.