On the morning of June 4th, 1942, Lieutenant Commander Wade McCcluskey stared down at an empty ocean and faced a decision that would determine the fate of the Pacific War. His fuel gauge showed he had perhaps 20 minutes before he would have to turn back.

Beneath the wings of his Douglas SBD3 Dauntless, there was nothing, no Japanese carriers, no enemy fleet, only the endless blue of the Pacific stretching toward a horizon that offered no answers. 33 dive bombers followed him in formation, their pilots watching their own gauges, waiting for the order to abort. McCcluskey had been airborne for over 2 hours.

His navigation placed the Japanese striking force at coordinates that now revealed only vacant sea. The enemy had moved. What McCluskey did next, and what happened in the five minutes that followed, would sink four Japanese aircraft carriers and kill over 3,000 of the Imperial Navy’s most experienced sailors and aviators. The instrument of comet. This destruction was not a massive battleship or a swarm of fighters.

It was the aircraft McCcluskey himself was flying, a slow, unglamorous, chronically underestimated machine that American pilots had sarcastically nicknamed slow but deadly. The Douglas SBD Dauntless was by 1942 standards already verging on obsolescence. Its maximum speed was barely 250 mph. It had no self-sealing fuel tanks when the war began.

Its fixed landing gear created drag that made it a sluggish flyer compared to the sleek Japanese Zero. Yet, this aircraft would inflict more damage on the Imperial Japanese Navy than any other American weapon in the first two years of the war, more than submarines, more than battleships, more than the vaunted B7 flying fortress. At midway, in roughly 5 minutes of combat, SBD Dauntless dive bombers would destroy the offensive striking power that Japan had spent a decade building.

If you’re enjoying this deep dive into the story, hit the subscribe button and let us know in the comments from where in the world you are watching from today. The question this video seeks to answer is not simply what happened at Midway, but why this particular aircraft, dismissed by some naval aviators as a clunk and a barge, became the most lethal ship killer of the Pacific War.

The answer lies in a convergence of engineering decisions made years before Pearl Harbor, the mathematics of dive bombing versus level bombing, and a moment of desperate intuition by a pilot flying on fumes over an empty ocean. It is a story about how a weapon that looked inadequate on paper proved devastatingly effective in practice and how the Japanese Navy’s own doctrine created the conditions for its catastrophic vulnerability.

To understand why the SBD Dauntless succeeded where faster, more modern aircraft failed, one must first understand the problem it was designed to solve. In the 1930s, naval strategists faced a fundamental challenge. How to hit a moving ship from the air. A warship at sea is not a stationary target.

A carrier or battleship conducting evasive maneuvers at 30 knots can change position by several hundred yards during the time it takes a bomb to fall from high altitude. This made level bombing from 10,000 or 15,000 ft almost useless against ships. The mathematics were unforgiving. Bombardier in Army Air Force’s B7 seconds, dropping from high altitude, achieved hit rates against ships of less than 1% in combat conditions.

The bombs were accurate when they left the aircraft, but a ship that saw them coming had ample time to turn. The solution that navies developed was dive bombing, attacking nearly vertically so that the bomb’s trajectory was almost straight down, minimizing the time the target had to evade and allowing the pilot to adjust his aim until the final moment of release. But dive bombing imposed brutal demands on both aircraft and pilots.

The Douglas Aircraft Company began developing what would become the SBD in 1934 under the direction of designer Ed Heinman. The Navy wanted a two seat scout bomber that could perform reconnaissance, identify enemy fleets, and then attack them with heavy bombs delivered in steep dives.

Heinaman’s challenge was to create an aircraft strong enough to survive the tremendous structural stresses of a near vertical dive, accurate enough to hit a maneuvering ship, and rugged enough to operate from carrier decks in all weather conditions. The result was an aircraft that prioritized function over elegance.

The Dauntless had a large perforated split flap, the distinctive Swiss cheese dive brakes that extended from the trailing edge of each wing. These brakes allowed the pilot to plunge toward his target at a 70° angle without accelerating to a speed that would tear the aircraft apart or make accurate bombing impossible.

When deployed, the flaps slowed the Dauntless to a controllable 275 mph in its dive, giving the pilot time to keep his target in the bomb site and make corrections. The aircraft that entered service with the Navy in 1940 was designated the SBD1. The letters stood for scout bomber Douglas.

It carried a crew of two, pilot and rear gunner, and was armed with two forward-firing 50 caliber machine guns and twin 30 caliber guns on a flexible mount in the rear cockpit. Its bomb load was modest by later standards. A single,000lb bomb on a displacing gear beneath the fuselage, plus 250lb bombs under the wings. The displacing gear was essential.

It swung the main bomb down and away from the fuselage before release, ensuring it would clear the propeller arc during the steep dive. The SPD’s right cyclone engine produced 1,000 horsepower, enough to lift the aircraft off a carrier deck with a full combat load, but not enough to give it impressive speed or climb rate.

Compared to the fighters and attack aircraft that would arrive later in the war, the Hellcat, the Corsair, the Avenger, the Dauntless was slow and small. But it had qualities that those later aircraft could not match. Extraordinary structural strength, outstanding dive stability, and the ability to absorb tremendous punishment and still fly home.

By December of 1941, the Navy had taken delivery of several hundred SBD2 and SBD3 variants. The -3 model, which would fight at midway, incorporated lessons from combat reports out of Europe, and included self-sealing fuel tanks, armor plate behind the pilot, and an improved engine. These dauntless aircraft equipped the scout bombing and bombing squadrons aboard the carriers Enterprise, Yorktown, Lexington, Saratoga, Hornet, and Wasp.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the SBD was the standard American carrier-based dive bomber. It was also, in a sense, the only offensive weapon the Pacific fleet had left. The battleships were sunk or crippled. The carriers had survived only because they were at sea. And of the aircraft aboard those carriers, the Dauntless was the only one capable of delivering a heavy bomb accurately enough to threaten an enemy warship.

The first months of the Pacific War revealed both the strengths and the limitations of the SBD. At the Coral Sea in May of 1942, dauntless dive bombers from Lexington and Yorktown found the Japanese light carrier and sanker in minutes, planting 13 bombs and seven torpedoes into a ship that had no effective defense once the American aircraft arrived overhead.

The attack demonstrated the devastating potential of dive bombing against a carrier caught with aircraft on deck. But Coral Sea also showed the cost. The Lexington was lost. Yorktown was badly damaged and American air groupoup suffered heavy casualties from Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft fire. The SBD could deliver its bomb with precision, but getting to the target and getting home remained lethally dangerous.

The aircraft’s slow speed made it vulnerable during the approach and retirement. Its range was limited, forcing carriers to close within 200 m of the enemy to launch strikes. And the nature of dive bombing, the long exposed dive from 15,000 ft to release altitude at 2,000 ft, gave enemy gunners an extended opportunity to fill the sky with steel.

But the qualities that made the Dauntless appear inadequate on a specification sheet proved to be exactly what was needed for the decisive engagement of the Pacific War. The Battle of Midway was the product of American codereing and Japanese overconfidence. By late May of 1942, Navy crypton analysts at station hypo in Hawaii had partially broken the Japanese naval code and determined that the Imperial Navy was planning a massive operation against Midway at Admiral Isuroku Yamamoto, commander of the combined fleet intended to lure the American carriers into a trap and destroy them, eliminating the last

obstacle to Japanese control of the Pacific. He committed four fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiyu under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the same force that had attacked Pearl Harbor. These four ships represented the heart of Japan’s naval aviation capability.

Their air groups included the most experienced pilots in the world, veterans of Pearl Harbor, the Indian Ocean raid, and operations across the Pacific. Yamamoto was so confident of success that he planned to invade and occupy Midway, extending Japan’s defensive perimeter and forcing the United States to negotiate. What Yamamoto did not know was that the Americans were reading his mail.

Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, knew the target, the approximate date, and the composition of the Japanese force. He positioned his three available carriers, Enterprise, Hornet, and the hastily repaired Yorktown northeast of Midway, beyond the range of Japanese reconnaissance, and waited. The American plan was simple.

Find the Japanese carriers and hit them with everything available before they could locate and strike the American fleet. The weapon that would execute this plan was the SBD Dauntless. Enterprise carried two squadrons, bombing six and scouting six, with a total of 37 dauntless aircraft. Yorktown had bombing three and scouting five with 35 more. Hornet had bombing eight and scouting eight.

Across the three carriers, the Americans could put over 100 Dauntless dive bombers into the air, and they would need every one of them. The morning of June 4th began badly for the Americans. Nagumo’s carriers launched a strike against Midway Atoll at dawn and the American forces on the island scrambled to respond. Land-based aircraft from Midway Marine dive bombers, Army B17 Seconds, and obsolete torpedo planes attacked the Japanese fleet throughout the morning and achieved nothing. Not a single bomb hit a Japanese ship.

The B7s dropped their ordinance from high altitude and missed completely. The Marine SBD 2 seconds and Vindicators attacking without fighter escort were slaughtered by zeros and anti-aircraft fire, losing most of their number without scoring a hit. The torpedo squadron from Hornet, Torpedo 8, attacked alone at low level and was annihilated, all 15 aircraft shot down.

All but one crewman killed without putting a single torpedo into a Japanese ship. Torpedo squadrons from Enterprise and Yorktown suffered nearly as badly. By midm morning, the American attacks had been a catastrophic failure.

The Japanese carriers were unscathed, their decks swarming with activity as they prepared to launch a counter strike against the American fleet, which their scouts had finally located. But the sacrifice of the torpedo bombers had created an opportunity. The low-level attacks had pulled the Japanese combat air patrol down to sea level and disrupted the fleet defensive coordination. And at that moment, approximately 10:17 in the morning, the dauntless dive bombers from Enterprise arrived overhead at 14,000 ft, Lieutenant Commander Wade McCcluskey had made his decision.

When he found an empty ocean at the expected coordinates, he continued searching to the northwest. Fuel critical, his pilots growing anxious, McCcluskey spotted a lone Japanese destroyer racing northeast, throwing a white wake across the blue sea. The ship was the Arashi returning to the fleet after depth charging an American submarine.

McCcluskey followed her course. At 10:22, he saw them dark shapes against the ocean, the wakes of maneuvering warships, and the long rectangular flight decks of fleet carriers. The four Japanese carriers were steaming in a loose box formation. Their decks were crowded with aircraft being armed and fueled for the strike against the American fleet.

Bombs, torpedoes, fuel hoses, and ammunition carts covered the hanger decks and flight decks. Nagumo had ordered his aircraft rearmed with contactfused bombs for a second strike on midway, then changed the order when American carriers were cited, directing that torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs be loaded for ship attack.

The result was chaos. Weapons were stacked on decks and in hangers. Fuel lines were pressurized. Aviation gasoline vapors filled enclosed spaces. The carriers were at that moment floating bombs. McCcluskey divided his force. He assigned Kaga to Lieutenant Earl Gallaher’s scouting six and took bombing six against Akagi, the flagship, the dauntless aircraft pushed over into their dives.

At that altitude, the pilots could see the zeros far below, still recovering from the torpedo attacks, climbing desperately to intercept, but too late, too low. The anti-aircraft guns opened up the colored bursts of the Japanese shells filling the sky, but the dive bombers were already screaming down at nearly 300 mph. Airframes shuttering against the dive brakes, pilots fixed on the yellow flight decks growing larger in their sights.

At 10:25, the first bomb struck Kaga. The weapon was a,000 lb generalpurpose bomb fused to explode on contact. It penetrated the flight deck just forward of the island and detonated among the armed and fueled aircraft parked below. The explosion set off a chain reaction. Gasoline ignited. Bombs cooked off within seconds. Kaga’s flight deck was a massive flame.

Secondary explosions ripping through the hangers. Three more bombs hit in the next minute. The ship’s fire mains were destroyed. Damage control was impossible. Kaga was doomed. Akagi took only one direct hit. a single bomb that struck the aft edge of the flight deck and penetrated to the upper hanger.

But that one bomb landed among the torpedoes and bombs that ordinancemen had stacked there during Nagumo’s chaotic rearming orders. The explosion was catastrophic. Fires swept through the common hangers. The ship’s steering was destroyed. Within 20 minutes, Akagi was burning out of control. Her crew unable to fight the fires. Nagumo was forced to transfer his flag.

The carrier that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor was finished. At almost the same moment, 17 SBD Dauntless dive bombers from Yorktown under Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie arrived over the Japanese fleet and found Soryu.

Leslie’s aircraft attacked with precision three direct hits that turned the carrier’s packed flight deck into an inferno. Soryu burned throughout the day and sank that evening. In 5 minutes, three of Japan’s six fleet carriers had been reduced to blazing wrecks. The fourth, Hiru, escaped the initial attack only because she was steaming several miles from the other three.

Hiru launched two strikes against Yorktown over the course of the afternoon, hitting the American carrier with bombs and torpedoes and leaving her dead in the water. But that evening, dauntless dive bombers from Enterprise found Hiru and put four bombs into her flight deck. She burned through the night and was scuttled the following morning. The Battle of Midway was over.

Japan had lost four fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, 292 aircraft, and over 3,000 men, including more than 100 trained carrier pilots, and many of the maintenance and ordinance specialists who had made Nagumo’s air groups the best in the world. The United States lost Yorktown, the destroyer Hammond, 147 aircraft, and 307 men. The balance of power in the Pacific had shifted.

Japan would never again be able to launch an offensive carrier operation. The SBD Dauntless had done this. In a few minutes of diving attacks, Dauntless pilots had destroyed the weapon that had terrorized the Pacific for 6 months. The mathematics of what happened over Nagumo’s fleet that morning reveal why the SBD Dauntless succeeded, where other aircraft failed, and why dive.

Bombing, despite its dangers, was the only reliable method of killing ships from the air in 1942. The problem of hitting a moving target from altitude is fundamentally one of time and geometry. A bomb released from 15,000 ft takes approximately 38 seconds to reach the surface. During that time, a ship making 30 knots can move over 600 yards.

A competent captain watching the aircraft above and anticipating the release can begin his turn the moment he sees bombs falling and be nowhere near the point of impact by the time they arrive. This is why the B17 seconds at midway achieved nothing. They dropped their bombs accurately. The bombarders were skilled. The Nordon bomb sits precise.

But the Japanese carriers simply turned out from under them. The bombs landed in the ocean. Dive bombing solved this problem through angle and timing. A dauntless pilot attacking at a 70° angle reduced his bomb’s fall time to roughly 6 seconds from release altitude of 2,000 ft. In 6 seconds, even a ship at flank speed could move only 90 yard.

And because the pilot was aiming his entire aircraft at the target, he could adjust for the ship’s movement until the final moment before release. The pilot became the bomb site. He dove toward where the ship would be, not where it was, tracking the targets motion through his windscreen and placing the bomb with a precision that no level bomber could match.

This technique demanded extraordinary skill and nerve. The pilot had to fly directly into the concentrated anti-aircraft fire of the target ship and her escorts. He had to maintain his dive angle and air speed precisely while the aircraft bucked in turbulence and his vision narrowed from the G-forces.

He had to judge the release point correctly too high and the bomb would miss too low and he might not pull out of the dive. The margin for error was measured in seconds and hundreds of feet. The SBD Dauntless was designed specifically to make this controlled violence possible. Its perforated dive flaps were the key. When extended, these split trailing edge flaps created enormous drag that slowed the aircraft to a stable diving speed regardless of altitude or entry velocity.

A pilot could push over into his dive from any height, deploy the flaps, and know that his aircraft would decelerate to approximately 275 mph and stay there. This predictability was essential for accurate bombing. If the dive speed varied, the release point had to change. Faster meant releasing higher, slower meant releasing lower. And in the heat of combat, with anti-aircraft bursts around him and the ship growing in his sight, a pilot could not afford to calculate.

The dauntless gave him a constant. He could train to one speed, one altitude, one set of sight pictures, and trust the aircraft to deliver. The structural strength that allowed the Dauntless to survive repeated dives and pull outs at high G forces also made it a remarkably survivable combat aircraft.

The Navy had specified that scout bombers must be able to withstand loads of 9gs, nine times the force of gravity during pullout. Heinaman’s design team exceeded this requirement. The Dauntless airframe was stressed to more than 11 GS, and individual aircraft routinely survived loads that would have torn apart flimsier machines.

The wingspar was a single massive aluminum forging, immensely strong for its weight. The fuselage was built to take punishment and keep flying. Dauntless aircraft returned from missions with hundreds of holes from anti-aircraft fragments and machine gun rounds with entire control surfaces shot away with engines trailing smoke and hydraulics gone.

The aircraft absorbed damage that would have been fatal to a lighter or more delicate design. At Coral Sea and Midway, pilots brought back dauntless aircraft so badly damaged that mechanics could not believe they had remained airborne, and many of those aircraft were repaired and flew again.

The rear gunner’s position contributed both to the aircraft’s survivability and its offensive capability. The twin 30 caliber guns on their flexible mount gave the Dauntless a sting that made zero pilots cautious. A fighter approaching from a stern, the natural attack angle against a bomber, flew directly into the rear gunner’s field of fire.

The 30 caliber rounds could not bring down a zero with a single burst, but they could damage engines, wound pilots, and force attackers to break off. Japanese fighter pilots learned to respect the dauntless gunners. They developed tactics to attack from below and to the side, angles where the rear guns could not bear.

But these approaches were more difficult and less effective than the direct tail attack that worked so well against undefended bombers. The presence of the gunner bought time time for the Dauntless to reach its target. Time for it to escape after dropping its bomb. Time for other aircraft to come to its aid.

If you find this story engaging, please take a moment to subscribe and enable notifications. It helps us continue producing in-depth content like this. But survivability did not mean safety. Flying a dive bomber in the Pacific War was one of the most dangerous jobs in the American military. The casualty rates among dive bomber crews were horrific by any standard.

At midway, the American air groupoups lost over 40% of their torpedo bombers and significant numbers of dive bombers. The torpedo squadrons were effectively annihilated. Torpedo 8 lost all 15 aircraft. Torpedo 6 lost 10 of 14. Torpedo 3 lost 10 of 12. The dive bombers fared better because they attacked from altitude and benefited from the distraction created by the torpedo planes, but they still took severe losses. Bombing three from Yorktown lost four of 17 aircraft.

Scouting six lost two. Bombing six lost four. And these were losses in a victorious battle. A battle where the dive bombers found their targets and sank them. In battles where the enemy was not caught by surprise, where the combat air patrol was at altitude and the anti-aircraft guns were ready, the losses were worse. The men who flew these missions understood what they were asking their aircraft to do.

They called the Dauntless slow but deadly, and the joke cut both ways slow enough to be caught. Deadly when it reached its target. They knew that the approach to the dive point was the most dangerous phase when Zeros could slash through the formation and anti-aircraft fire could find them at their most vulnerable.

They knew that the dive itself was a commitment with no turning back, a plunge into a cone of fire that grew denser the lower they went. They knew that the pull out, when the pilot was fighting the G forces and the aircraft was at its slowest, was another moment of extreme vulnerability.

And they knew that the flight home, often over hundreds of miles of empty ocean with damaged aircraft, wounded crewmen, and failing fuel, could be as dangerous as the attack itself. At midway, several dauntless pilots ran out of fuel on the return flight and ditched at sea. Some were rescued, some were not.

The aircraft that the Navy’s dive bomber pilots took into battle had its origins in peaceime engineering decisions that proved remarkably precient. Ed Heinman’s design philosophy emphasized simplicity, strength, and reliability over raw performance. The Dauntless was not the fastest dive bomber of the war, nor did it carry the heaviest bomb load. The Japanese D3A Val was more maneuverable. The German J87uker could carry more ordinance.

The later Curtis SB2C Hell Diver was faster and could haul a torpedo internally. But the Dauntless was available in numbers when the war started. It was proven in combat when the critical battles were fought, and it worked with a dependability that more advanced designs could not match. The Hell Diver, which was supposed to replace the Dauntless in 1943, was plagued with problems, structural failures, handling vices, maintenance headaches, and many pilots who flew both aircraft preferred the older machine. They called the Hell Diver the beast,

and not as a compliment. The Douglas SBD remained in frontline service through 1944, fighting at Guadal Canal, the Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, and the Philippines Sea. At the Eastern Solomons in August of 1942, Dauntless dive bombers sank the light carrier Ryujo, another Japanese flattop added to the tally at Santa Cruz.

Two months later, SBDs damaged the carriers Shokaku and Zuiho, though the Americans lost Hornet in that engagement, and the battle was a tactical defeat. By 1943, the Dauntless was operating from Henderson Field on Guadal Canal, as well as from carriers, providing close air support for Marines and attacking Japanese shipping in the slot.

The aircraft’s ability to operate from rough fields with minimal maintenance support made it valuable in the island hopping campaign where logistics were always constrained and sophisticated equipment was hard to keep running. But by mid 1944, the Dauntless was clearly at the end of its combat life.

The battles had moved farther from American bases, requiring greater range than the SBD could provide. The Hell Diver, despite its problems, could carry a larger payload farther and faster. New aircraft like the TBF Avenger could deliver torpedoes with a crew of three and had the range for the long missions into the Philippine Sea and beyond. The last major carrier action for the Dauntless was the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944, the Great Mariana’s Turkey Shoot, where SBDs flew search missions, but played a secondary role in the strikes against the Japanese fleet. The SB2C Hell Diver

delivered most of the bombs in that battle. The era of the Dauntless was over. Yet the numbers tell a story that no other American aircraft of the Pacific War can match. During its combat career, the SBD Dauntless sank six Japanese carriers. Sho at Coral Sea, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiu at Midway, and Ryujo at Eastern Solomon’s. No other aircraft type came close to this record.

The Dauntless also sank a battleship. PA finished off at Guadal Canal in November 1942 after surface engagements had wrecked her steering, plus numerous cruisers, destroyers, transports, and auxiliary vessels. In total, SBDs were credited with sinking more enemy shipping tonnage than any other aircraft in the Pacific theater.

This was the weapon that broke Japanese naval aviation in 1942. That denied Japan the carriers and trained air crews she needed to hold her Pacific Empire. That turned the tide of the war before the factories of Detroit and Seattle had fully ramped up production of the aircraft and ships that would win it. Irony of Midway was that the battle was decided by an aircraft that had almost missed it entirely.

Wade McCcluskeyy’s decision to continue his search when his fuel was critical to fly northwest along the bearing suggested by the destroyer Arashi was a gamble that could have ended with his entire squadron ditching in the ocean. If he had turned back at the expected coordinates, if he had played it safe and preserved his aircraft, the dive bombers from Enterprise would not have arrived over the Japanese fleet at 10:22.

They might have arrived an hour later after Nagumo had launched his strike against the American carriers. They might have arrived to find the enemy flight decks clear, the aircraft gone, the opportunity lost. The Japanese might have crippled Enterprise and Hornet as they crippled Yorktown.

The battle might have been a draw or a Japanese victory, and the Pacific War would have taken a different course. Instead, McCluskey found them. He found them at the worst possible moment for the Japanese decks packed with armed aircraft, fuel hoses snaking across the hangers, ordinance stacked in the open, and he put his dive bombers onto them with a precision that the Japanese combat air patrol could not prevent, and the anti-aircraft guns could not stop.

The Dauntless was not a sophisticated weapon. It was slow and stubby, and it lacked the glamour of the fighters that got the headlines and the gun camera footage. but it could carry a,000lb bomb to a target and put it through a flight deck with an accuracy that nothing else in the American arsenal could match.

On the morning of June 4th, 1942, that was enough. The Japanese Navy never recovered from Midway. The four carriers lost that day represented the offensive core of the combined fleet, the ships and air groups that had projected Japanese power from Hawaii to son. They could not be quickly replaced.

Japanese shipyards could build new hulls, but the trained pilots and air crew who died in those burning hanger decks took years to develop and could not be manufactured in factories. At Coral Sea, a month before midway, the Japanese had lost the light carrier Sho and seen Shokaku damaged. At Midway, they lost Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiru. Six months into the war, Japan had lost five carriers to American dive bombers.

She would commission new carriers as the war progressed. Taihaho, Shinano, Enriu, and her sisters, but she would never again have the trained air groups to make them effective. The Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944 was not a battle between carrier forces of equal skill.

It was a slaughter of inexperienced Japanese pilots by American aviators who had been training for 2 years while their enemy bled out over the Solomons. The Dauntless pilots of 1942 had killed not just ships but the men who made those ships dangerous. The SBD Dauntless ended its war as a training aircraft and as a close support platform in backwater theaters. The Marines kept flying it from island air strips when the Navy had moved on to the Hell Diver.

A few soldiered on with foreign air forces after the war. Douglas had built nearly 6,000 of them in various marks, SBD1 through SBD6, plus the Army’s A24 Banshee variant, and they had served from 1940 through 1944 in every major naval engagement of the Pacific.

The aircraft was obsolete when the war started and obsolete when it ended. It was neither the fastest nor the most heavily armed nor the longest range dive bomber of the conflict. But it was available when it was needed. It was reliable when reliability mattered. And in the hands of pilots like WDE McCcluskey and Earl Gallagher and Maxwell Leslie, it had done something that no other aircraft achieved.

It had won a battle that changed the war. There is a tendency in telling the story of Midway to focus on the codereers and the admirals, the intelligence triumph that revealed Yamamoto’s plan, the decisions by Nimttz and Spruents and Fletcher that positioned the American carriers for the ambush. These were essential.

Without the codereing, there would have been no ambush. Without the command decisions, the carriers would not have been in position to strike. But intelligence and command authority do not sink ships. Pilots sink ships. And the pilots who dove on Nagumo’s carriers that morning were flying an aircraft that gave them the tools to do what had to be done.

The dive brakes to control their descent, the structural strength to survive the pull out, the bombsite picture to place their ordinance where it would kill. The SBD dauntless was not glamorous. It was simply effective. In the arithmetic of war, effectiveness is what matters. WDE McCcluskey survived midway, though he was badly wounded by a zero during the attack on Kaga. His aircraft took over 50 hits.

He recovered, continued flying, and rose to the rank of rear admiral after the war. Earl Gallagher, who led scouting six against Kaga and personally scored one of the fatal hits, also survived and finished the war as a commander. Maxwell Leslie, who led Yorktown’s bombers against Soryu, was shot down later in the battle, but was rescued. Many others were not so fortunate.

The dive bomber crews who flew at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadal Canal paid for their victories with losses that would be considered catastrophic in any other context. They flew into anti-aircraft fire that filled the sky with steel. They were bounced by zeros on the way to the target and on the way home.

They ditched in the ocean when their fuel ran out or their engines failed or their wounds were too severe to keep flying. Their names are not as famous as the fighter aces or the submarine skippers, but they broke the Japanese Navy in 1942, and they did it in an aircraft that was supposed to be too slow and too old to do the job.

The Douglas SBD Dauntless was not the best dive bomber ever built. It was not even the best American dive bomber of the war. or the Hell Diver could carry more bombs farther when it worked, but it was the right aircraft at the right time. It was available in numbers when the fleet needed it.

It was reliable under conditions that destroyed more advanced machines. It was accurate enough to hit maneuvering ships and strong enough to survive the dive and the enemy’s response. And in 5 minutes over Nagumo’s fleet on the morning of June 4th, 1942, it justified every engineering decision that had gone into its design and every hour of training that its pilots had endured. The SBD Dauntless sank four Japanese carriers at Midway.

It was the most lethal dive bomber of the Pacific War, and it changed history. Thank you for watching. For more detailed historical breakdowns, check out the other videos on your screen now.