Mitsubishi Babs Vol. 2

Mitsubishi Babs Vol. II – the world’s first high-speed strategic reconnaissance aircraft – completes the history of Japan’s revolutionary high-speed strategic reconnaissance aircraft design. This second volume describes the Imperial Japanese Navy’s flawed attempts to develop its own high-speed strategic reconnaissance aircraft and their decision to ultimately adopt the Army’s magnificent Ki-15 design into Navy service as the C5M/Type-98 Reconnaissance Plane (Allied codename Babs).

Across eight chapters Mitsubishi Babs Vol. II outlines the unit histories and the operational deployment of Navy C5M aircraft during the Sino-Japanese and Pacific War, and how, through Army support and training, the Navy was finally able to perform its own long-range strategic reconnaissance missions deep into mainland China and Australia.

A major portion of Vol. II is devoted to the first highly detailed technical description of this aircraft to be compiled since the Mitsubishi engineering department completed the final Babs airframe in August 1941. Individual coverage of the Ki-15-I, civilian Karigane-I, Ki-15-II, Karigane-II, C5M1, C5M2 and Ki-15-III provides aviation historians and modellers alike with an in-depth understanding of individual airframe systems and reconnaissance equipment, all lavishly supported with custom artwork, cutaways, original engineering drawings and detailed photographs.

A chapter is also devoted to the pilot’s operating manual, which describes exactly how to fly this high performance aircraft.

The often inaccurately reported capabilities of Babs are reviewed across two chapters which outline what the Allied intelligence teams believed about the aircraft, supported by crash investigations and technical reports. And to counter these numerous technical inaccuracies and half-truths, two chapters are devoted to reassessing various technical aspects of the aircraft, with the hope of correcting the history books once and for all. The first deals with the all important performance figures, while the second reveals the somewhat absurd manufacturing and assembly details of the Army and Navy airframes, the true production figures and decoding the Babs Construction numbers and prefix codes.

The book also contains a small chapter on the history of Babs model kits and surviving memorabilia.