ARTICLE
GUNS OF JAPAN
The fourth in our series of articles about WW II aircraft armament looks at the
guns of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Air Services.
Japanese aircraft mounted a wide variety of cannons
This article, as per the current general consensus,
and machine guns, mostly based on licensed and
splits the difference and uses “cannon” to refer
imported weapons. Ferocious rivalry between the
to weapons with a calibre of 20 mm and above.
Imperial Japanese Army and Navy meant that
LIGHT MACHINE GUNS
each developed their own weapons with little or
no commonality. The two services even differed on
weapon classification; in the Navy, weapons of a
As was common at the time, the standard armament
calibre up to and including 20 mm were classified
for Japanese fighters of the mid-1930s was a pair of
as machine guns, whereas in the Army weapons
light machine gu