I just read a series of histories of the war in the Pacific by Ian Toll in which he mentioned that the Japanese never really understood how to do efficient mass production. He mentioned that one of the factories that manufactured the Zero didn’t have an airstrip or a rail line, so they had to tow the Zeros by horse to an airstrip something like 25 miles away. Near the end of the war their horses were starving, so they lost a lot of them from overwork towing what had been a state of the art war plane at the beginning of the war.
Hmmm. Can’t find it on a quick search, but weren’t planes transferred from the factory to Atsugi by rail tunnel?
“...so they had to tow the Zeros by horse to an airstrip something...”
I’ve seen but cannot find the image, of one of the WWII German jet/rocket aircraft being towed around its airfield by a team of oxen due to the fuel shortages.