Japan's Best "Heavy" Bomber Wasn't Very Heavy: Mitsubishi Ki-67 Hiryu

Video Description

In this video, we take a look at the Mitsubishi Ki-67 Hiryu, a Japanese heavy bomber design from World War II. We first ramble a bit about Age of Empires III and my love of it, before then talking about how countries produce weaponry and why they produce the weapons they do. We talk about the focuses of militaries like Germany and Japan in WW2, and how that shaped what their forces looked like. We talk about Japan's outfit of bombers and their relatively smaller sizes. We then talk about the early subpar performance of Japan's bombers - like the G4M, Ki-21, and Ki-49 - early in the war, and how that necessitated the creation of a new, higher power bomber in the Ki-67. We talk about the technological advancements of the Ki-67 over Japan's other bombers, the size (or lack thereof) and how it compared to other bombers, and how it performed amazingly well in testing. We then talk about the bizarre delay in production that ended up significantly reducing the impact of the Ki-67, and how that delay made the performance of the Ki-67 almost irrelevant in the face of advancing allied forces. We end by talking about some successors to the Ki-67, in a kamikaze plane and the Ki-109 heavy fighter.