Truly obscure Japanese Seversky P-35 question

Factual Questions
1

I’ve read a bit the last few days about the Seversky P-35 (first metal, enclosed cockpit monoplane - i.e., first “modern” fighter plane in U.S. service). Seversky became Republic, partly as a result of a reorganization that occurred in the wake of their sale of 20 P-35s to Japan in ~ 1938. The P-35 is considered by some writers to be the near-direct ancestor to the P-47 Thunderbolt.

I’ve read that those 20 fighters became operational with the Japanese military and I’ve found that they were designated as Navy Type S Two-Seat Fighter or A8V1. And I’ve seen brief mention that they were engaged in combat in the Sino-Japanese war preceding WW II.

But I can’t find any unit history or combat history mention of them. Anybody know anything more?

2

Try this page:

http://sunsite.sut.ac.jp/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/airforce/p_series_fighters/p35

3

Ah, I found better info for you.

http://sunsite.sut.ac.jp/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/airforce/series.book.1/us_ftr.pm5

“Deliveries of the P-35 to the USAAC were exceedingly slow, and it was not until the spring of 1938 that the 17th, 27th, and 94th Squadrons of the First Pursuit Group actually received their first P-35s. In the meantime, the USAAC was becoming exceedingly nervous about Seversky’s tardiness in meeting production schedules and decided to hedge its bets. On July 30, 1937, the USAAC ordered 210 Curtiss P-36s, a production version of the Curtiss Model 75 which had come in second in the 1936 competition.
The last P-35 of the original order was delivered in August 1938. After flying for a few months with the 1st Pursuit Group, the P-35s were redistributed among squadrons of the 31st, 49th, 50th, 53rd, and 58th Groups, pending the arrival of the P-36 fighters into service.”

There is other info on the P-35 in this file, it is rather huge and will take a while to download, and alas, it is full of text encoding errors (although it is legible generally).

BTW, I don’t think that info is correct about the P-35 being redesignated the A8V1. Read my prior cite, it’s all in there.

Oh, and BTW, I found all this on Japanese search engines. You should see some of the cool Japanese websites like:

http://platon.co.jp/~vought/data/us/htm/p-35.htm

Hmm… looks like variants of the P-35 won the Bendix Trophy in its category from 1937-39.

I’d cite more of these pages but they wouldn’t be of much use to you unless you can read Japanese.