Pilots brought it home with fifty holes in the wings, holes in the fuel tank, and pieces shot off all over. And it kept flying.
It was slow and it was outdated, but it sank more Japanese shipping than any other Allied aircraft of the Pacific war.
They called it Slow But Deadly.
This is the story of the SBD Dauntless..🧵1/6
The SBD Dauntless was not supposed to be a legend.
Its name came from Scout Bomber Douglas, and by the time the war began, the Navy already considered it outdated. It was slow, it was underpowered, and its own crews gave it a nickname that was half insult, half affection. Slow But Deadly, a play on the letters SBD.
But the Dauntless was a dive bomber, and it did one thing better than almost any aircraft in the world. It could point its nose almost straight down at an enemy ship and fall out of the sky in a near-vertical dive, holding steady all the way down, before releasing its bomb with deadly accuracy and pulling out at the last moment.
The secret was a clever set of perforated flaps on its wings, full of holes that let air pass through and stopped the aircraft from shaking itself apart in the dive. It let the Dauntless drop like a stone, steady as a rock, and put a bomb almost exactly where the pilot wanted it.
That accuracy was about to change the entire war.
On the morning of June 4 1942, at the Battle of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers, the same ships that had attacked Pearl Harbor, were preparing to crush the American fleet.
The first American attacks were a disaster. Wave after wave of slow, low-flying torpedo planes came in against the carriers and were slaughtered almost to the last aircraft. It looked like the battle was being lost.
But those doomed attacks had pulled the defending Japanese fighters down low, to sea level, chasing the torpedo planes.
And high above, unnoticed, the Dauntless dive bombers had arrived.
At about 10:22 in the morning, they pushed over into their dives, screaming down onto the crowded, dangerously exposed flight decks below.
What happened next took only about six minutes.
The Dauntlesses planted their bombs onto the Japanese carriers just as their hangars and decks were crowded with aircraft, fuel, bombs, and torpedoes being handled for strikes. In minutes, three of the four enemy carriers, the Akagi, the Kaga, and the Soryu, were turned into blazing wrecks. That afternoon, the Dauntlesses came back and fatally hit the fourth, the Hiryu.
In a single day, this slow, outdated dive bomber had sunk all four of Japan's finest aircraft carriers.
It was one of the most decisive moments in the history of warfare. Before Midway, Japan was on the attack across the Pacific. After Midway, it was on the defensive for the rest of the war. Few aircraft types have ever changed the course of a war so completely, in so little time.
Midway was its most famous day, but it was only part of the story.
Across the Pacific, from Coral Sea to Guadalcanal to the Solomons, the Dauntless kept sinking ships. By the end of the war it was credited with sending more Japanese shipping to the bottom than any other Allied aircraft in the Pacific, including several aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and other vessels, more than 300,000 tons in all.
And it did all of this while being famously tough to kill. Crews told stories of flying home in Dauntlesses riddled with dozens of holes, with pieces of wing and tail shot away, and still landing safely. It had the lowest loss ratio of any US Navy carrier-based combat aircraft of the war.
It was even dangerous to enemy fighters. Its rear gunner faced backward with his own machine guns, and Dauntless crews were credited with an unusually strong air-to-air record for a bomber, a rare thing for an aircraft built to attack ships.
The Dauntless was never the fastest or the newest aircraft in the sky. It was replaced later in the war by bigger, faster dive bombers, and yet many crews still preferred the old Dauntless, because it was reliable, accurate, and it brought them home.
For a plane that cost around 29,000 dollars and was considered obsolete before the fighting even started, it left a record almost no aircraft in history can match. It won the pivotal battle of the Pacific, sank more Japanese shipping than any other Allied plane in that ocean, and did it all while earning a reputation as one of the toughest aircraft ever to fly off a carrier deck.
Slow but deadly. Its crews meant it as a joke. History proved it was simply the truth.
This was the story of the SBD Dauntless.
I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.
areudirty
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
