Japanese Airfields, Equipment & more #7 - revised

IJAAF & IJNAF tail wheel towbars & draggers

It seems that Kawasaki, at least in their central factories, used a certain type of tail wheel towbar found in a series of photos featuring a Kawasaki Ki-100.

And a Kawasaki Ki-45 "Toryu" prototype. I haven't spotted it in combat unit photos, so I don't think it was that common.

There is also this photo, staged for the camera, showing pilot cadets of the "Rikugun Koku Shikan Gakko" (Army Air Academy or Army Air Officer's School) moving around a Mitsubishi Ki-21 Model 1 Ko "Sally" bomber. The tail wheel towbar is definitely larger than the one seen in the Ki-100 and Ki-45 photos.

Curiously I also spotted a tail wheel towbar lying on the tarmac behind an IJNAF Zero fighter. 

On the other hand, tail wheel draggers were extremely common with types without tail wheels like the "Nate" or with types with more delicate ones like the trainers Tachikawa Ki-9 "Akatonbo" (Spruce) and Tachikawa Ki-55 "Ida". Not uncommon with "Hayabusa" too or other combat types with the tail wheels damaged, for example, during hard landings. The metal frame was pretty much standard but, as you can see in this series of photos, the wheels were not. I don't know if there was a certain manufacturer that built these for the Army but I suspect the crew used whatever spare wheels were around.

For years I was trying to figure out what was inside the "pot" where the tail wheel rested, since in all photos the wheel is already in, until I finally discovered this photo; nothing. The wheel was simply placed inside the empty "pot" and that's it.

Tail wheel draggers were common only with early IJNAF types with tail skids, like this Nakajima A2N, on the deck of an aircraft carrier. It would be preferable to minimize the damage on the wooden flying deck by the metal tail skid, right?

Other than that, I wasn't able to spot even one Pacific War IJNAF photo with a tail wheel dragger.

From April 1944 until the end of the war, a Women's Volunteer Corpse comprising 17 young women, was mobilized to carry out maintenance tasks at the IJAAF airfield of Kasugadai in Choshi City, Chiba Prefecture where a branch school of the Shimoshizu Army Flying School was based.

A movie about them titled "Otome no Iru Kichi" (The Girls of the Air Base) was produced by Shochiku in 1945.

The short news clip from the NHK collection introduces the girls and shows them using a tail wheel dragger to move around a Mitsubishi Ki-46 "Dinah". Note also the ladder, mentioned in previous posts.