It was something utterly different

Historian James Holland made a strong and elegant case for the P-51 Mustang being “the most decisive aircraft in history”, but let me offer an alternative: the Douglas SBD Dauntless.

Thanks for reading Hush-Kit Aviation Newsletter! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

If ‘decisive’ means producing the greatest strategic effect at the moment when the outcome genuinely remained in doubt, I think the answer is the Douglas SBD Dauntless. It was not sexy like the Mustang; it was ‘mid’. Presumably the Battle of Midway was so-called because the US Navy’s most significant aircraft was mid. The Dauntless weighed the same as a fully loaded 17-seater minibus. It was not fast like the Mustang; it pootled around at speeds around 100 mph slower than the Zero fighters it had to survive. Its crews joked that SBD stood for “Slow, But Deadly”.

In June 1942, at Midway, the Dauntless proved itself capable of doing something very few combat aircraft have ever achieved: in a matter of hours, it helped destroy the operational heart of an enemy fleet and fundamentally altered the course of a war. Its first notable success had come only days after America’s entry into the war, when US power was at its lowest ebb. On 10 December 1941, Dauntlesses from USS Enterprise attacked the Japanese submarine I-70. The first attack damaged it and prevented it from submerging; later that day, another Dauntless returned and sank it. This was three days after Pearl Harbor.

Then came Midway. By June 1942, Japan had enjoyed an extraordinary run of victories across the Pacific. Pearl Harbor had crippled the American battleship fleet; Singapore and the Philippines had fallen; Japanese forces had swept through South-East Asia and into the Dutch East Indies. The Imperial Japanese Navy appeared to possess the initiative everywhere, and at Midway, it sought to extend that advantage. Instead, it lost four of its fleet carriers: Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, and Hiryū—the very striking force, four carriers of the six-carrier force that had attacked Pearl Harbor. The crucial blow came from American carrier dive-bombers, principally the Dauntless.

On the morning of 4 June, Japanese carriers were caught in an acutely vulnerable state. American torpedo-bomber attacks had driven some Japanese fighters down toward sea level, while the carriers were recovering from earlier operations, rearming and refuelling aircraft. The attacking force enjoyed excellent luck in its timing. When Dauntlesses arrived above the force, they found their targets exposed. The ensuing attack was devastating. SBDs from Enterprise fatally damaged Akagi and Kaga, while Yorktown‘s Dauntlesses wrecked Sōryū. Later that afternoon, Dauntlesses from Enterprise found and mortally damaged Hiryū.