In the 1980s, Jane's of London initiated an art project. It teamed great writers and a magician of light and shadow to profile famous WW II airplanes while telling combat episodes of their pilots.
Zero: From the first page, the color of green tea, the Zero begins service with a Japanese attack on Chungking in 1940. Air battles were one-sided- the Chinese had nothing as good. By 1941, pilots knew that they could outclimb, outturn and fly farther than any allied fighter. Foldout on p.10-12 is a clean, but undistinguished, design. It sacrificed pilot protection and self-sealing gas tanks to have such performance on only 950 horsepower (while the U.S. Navy Wildcat, a future opponent, had 1200 hp). It became a fearsome archenemy. Not until a lightly damaged Zero was recovered in the Aleutians could that reputation be judged against newly designed Allied fighters in 1942. Knowing relative strength and weaknesses, any fighter pilot could 'mix it up' with Japanese and enforce Allied control over a battlezone. Mitsubishi's improvements to the Zero never made up for the power and equipment on Corsairs, Hellcats, Thunderbolts and Mustangs. Look on p. 46 for a detailed look at the cockpit, p. 42-44 & 53-54 for related designs that never realized full potential.
Buy this for reference when you read Japanese memoirs such as Zero,Zero, The Story of Japan's Air War in the Pacific-as Seen by the Enemy.
Possibly the best book on the Zero out there. The author does a great job of covering the events and aircraft leading up to the creation of the Zero, and the picture quality is superb. A full engine diagram consumes one page entirely, and there are several fold out color profiles of Zeros and the aircraft that followed the Zero, like the J2M3 Raiden. Quotes from pilots and engineers make for great reading, and one section is dedicated to the fly off reports conducted by the US with a captured Zero, flown against contemporary US types at NAS San Diego in December ’42.
Every Zero model is summarized. The color renderings are amazing -- and they were hand created, not computer generated (the book was first published in 1981). There are two and three page color fold-outs of the A6M Zero Model 21, Zero Model 52, J2M Raiden, A7M Reppu, N1K1 Shiden, and J7W Shinden.
The text discusses design specifications, armament, fuselage design, and engine selection. There are also tabulations of dimensions, weights, and performance characteristics for every model (page 33).
There is also a complete discussion of the Zero that was recovered from the Aleutian island of Akutan and then subsequently repaired and flight tested at the US Naval Air Station (NAS) in San Diego in 1942.