Nakajima Kikka

By the summer of 1944 the Imperial Japanese Navy knew from its attachés in Berlin that Germany had a twin-jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 262, in production. It asked Nakajima for a small jet aircraft of its own, a special attack aircraft that could carry a 500 kg or 800 kg bomb against the American fleet, be built quickly from simple materials by unskilled labour, and fold its wings so that it could be hidden in caves and tunnels. Kazuo Ohno and Kenichi Matsumura led the design. It took the Me 262’s layout, with two jets under a straight wing, but almost none of its detail: most of the German drawings sent to Japan by submarine were lost at sea, and the design was worked out from photographs and a few documents. The Navy named it Kikka, ‘orange blossom’.

The engines were the harder problem. Early Japanese jets, the Tsu-11 motorjet and the Ne-12 turbojet, were too weak, so Osamu Nagano’s team at the Navy’s Yokosuka arsenal designed the Ne-20, an axial-flow turbojet of 475 kgf, taking their lead from a cross-section photograph of the German BMW 003. The first Kikka was finished at Nakajima’s Koizumi works in June 1945, taken in pieces to the Kisarazu naval air base on Tokyo Bay to escape the bombing, and there, on 7 August 1945, Lieutenant Commander Susumu Takaoka flew it for about 11 minutes: Japan’s first jet flight.

On the second flight, on 11 August, Takaoka tried a take-off boosted by rockets under the fuselage. The nose pitched up when they fired, he abandoned the take-off as they burnt out, and the Kikka ran off the end of the runway and was wrecked. Japan surrendered four days later, with some ten more airframes finished or being built and plans for two-seat trainers, reconnaissance aircraft and interceptors. Several unfinished airframes were taken to the United States for study, and the only one to survive, incomplete and without its engines, is held by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum at its Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.