Reply To: Chickenhawks Over New Guinea

[Whirlwind]

Yes, all true, but it goes back to my initial comments about the aircraft performance.  With the Wildcat, you can see how and why it would struggle.  With the P40, keeping the speed up, climb/dive rather than turn and use the better high-speed roll should have worked reasonably well, so I suspect a mixture of a relative lack of training and experience and some early faulty tactics were the root cause.