The Nakajima B5N is a Japanese three-man bomber-torpedo aircraft in the low wing configuration of the Second World War. The flight of the prototype took place in 1937, and it was put into service a year later. The B5N was a response to the requirements of the Imperial Navy for the new on-board torpedo plane. Work on the construction, led by Katsuji Nakamura, continued in the years 1935-1937. When the war in the Pacific broke out, the B5N was an aircraft better than competing Allied machines, especially the TBD Devastator. The most widely produced version of the aircraft was the B5N2 Model 12, which was created in December 1939 and which used a new engine - Nakajima NK1A Sakae 11 with a power of 970KM. B5N planes took part in many battles in the Pacific and performed very well in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. From around 1943/1944, these aircraft were transferred to aviation schools and served as kamikaze aircraft. About 1150 copies of all versions were produced. Technical data (version B5N2): length: 10.3m, wingspan: 15.52m, height: 3.7m, maximum speed: 378km / h, rate of climb: 6.5m / s, maximum range: 1992km, maximum ceiling 8260m , armament: fixed-1 Type 92 machine gun cal.7.7mm, underslung-1 Type 91 torpedo weighing 800 kg or the same bomb load.
Very often, the date of birth of naval aviation in the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN for short, Japanese Nippon Kaigun) is March 16, 1923, when Lieutenant Sunishi Kira landed in his plane on board the Hosho aircraft carrier, which, moreover, entered service a year earlier (1922). It should be added, however, that in the course of the 1920s, many Japanese naval officers saw aircraft carriers as supporters of battleships and battleships, bearing in mind the great success of Admiral Heihachiro Togo at Tsushima in 1905. The technical level of the then Japanese on-board aircraft was also not the highest. However, this state of affairs began to change in the 30s of the 20th century, among others, due to the later Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who perceived the main weapon in the naval war in aircraft carriers. He was a strong supporter of the development of Japanese on-board aviation, which translated into the construction or modernization of such ships as Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu and Zuikaku. Also, Japanese aviation structures not only reached the world leaders, but began to set standards in them, including the famous Mitsubishi A6M Zeke fighter or the Nakajima B5N Kate torpedo plane. This intense development led to the fact that when the war in the Pacific broke out, the IJN had 10 aircraft carriers, on which over 500 on-board machines were based, with well-trained crews. The first months of struggle in the Pacific showed how dangerous this weapon was. It should be remembered, however, that already during that war, the IJN had considerable problems, for example, to replace the A6M Zeke plane on a mass scale or to introduce a successful B5N successor to the line, i.e. the B6N Tenzen torpedo plane. Also, the process of training sea pilots turned out to be flawed and was distanced by the solutions used in the US Navy.