Clocks, then seaplanes

Aichi began in Nagoya in 1898 as a maker of clocks and electrical goods, Aichi Tokei Denki. It turned to aircraft in 1920, pushed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, and leaned on foreign help: seaplane know-how from Short Brothers and, above all, designs from Heinkel in Germany. That link had a cloak-and-dagger side. A Japanese attaché on the League of Nations team policing Germany’s arms ban tipped Heinkel off before inspections, so work on Aichi’s orders was never spotted.

The Val

Aichi’s most important aircraft was the D3A, the Navy Type 99 Carrier Bomber that the Allies called Val. Designed by a team under Tokuhishiro Goake, with elliptical wings echoing the Heinkel He 70 and a fixed, spatted undercarriage, it first flew in January 1938. On 7 December 1941, 126 D3As attacked Pearl Harbor. In 1942 they helped sink the carriers Lexington, Yorktown and Hornet, and the type sank more Allied warships than any other Axis aircraft. Aichi’s E13A Jake floatplane scouted for the same raid.

Seiran: a bomber in a submarine

The aircraft division was spun off as Aichi Kokuki in 1943, and its last designs were its boldest. The M6A Seiran folded up to fit the watertight hangar of the giant I-400 submarines, three to a boat, and was meant to bomb the Gatun locks of the Panama Canal. Only 28 were completed, and when the war ended on the way to Ulithi the crews pushed their aircraft into the sea. The B7A Ryūsei torpedo-dive bomber came too late as well. After 1945 the company built Cony microcars and became part of the Nissan group.

Továrny

• Nagoya works · Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture — Hit by US strategic bombing and the 1944 Tonankai earthquake

Lidé

• Tokuhishiro Goake · designer — Led the D3A design team
• Kishiro Matsuo · designer — Led the E13A design team

Rekordy a prvenství

• D3A: sank more Allied warships than any other Axis aircraft
• D3A: first Japanese aircraft to bomb American targets in the Pacific War