One hundred and sixty-four feet below the surface of Lake Michigan, the aircraft slowly broke free from the muck in which it had been settled upright for more than fifty years. The plane bore the white side number B-7, and on its cowling was stenciled the name Midway Madness. Wrapped in cables attached by a diver, she was carefully lifted to the surface by a powerful crane, and thereafter went through a careful restoration process.1
The magnificent result is now a prized piece on display in the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. It is truly one of a kind. This Douglas SBD-2 Dauntless dive-bomber—thirty-three feet long and weighing more than three tons without fuel or ordnance—is the only extant SBD-2 that saw combat operation during the first six months of the Pacific War. What’s more, this Dauntless, officially Bureau Number 2106, was parked on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor during the surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy on December 7, 1941.
Having escaped destruction during that infamous onslaught, BuNo 2106 was soon embarked on the United States Navy’s second aircraft carrier, USS Lexington, for offensive operations against the Japanese. Flown by Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Mark Whittier in March 1942, it participated in dive-bombing attacks against enemy shipping in the New Guinea harbors of Lae and Salamaua. Three months later, the Dauntless was flown by a Marine crew at the Battle of Midway, where the dive-bomber was riddled with more than two hundred bullet holes. BuNo 2106 was then returned to an Illinois air base to be used as a training aircraft. The plane was lost in June 1943 when its crew was forced to ditch it in the cold freshwaters of Lake Michigan.
The Douglas Dauntless dive-bomber made history for America during the first six months of World War II. This ruggedly built carrier bomber was in it from the first moments of war. Pacific Payback is the odyssey of two Dauntless squadrons—Scouting Squadron Six (VS-6) and Bombing Squadron Six (VB-6)—that were based on board the carrier USS Enterprise.
Dick Best and Earl Gallaher assumed command of these two SBD squadrons during the months following Pearl Harbor. Each man possessed a burning desire to pay back the Japanese for what they had done at Hawaii. The ultimate vengeance for carrier aviators like Best and Gallaher would be to destroy the very flight decks that had launched the Pearl Harbor strikes.
It was no small feat, however, to score a direct hit on a moving vessel with a dive-bomber. Dauntless pilots pushed over into their dives from a height of more than two miles above enemy warships. The initial descent was vertical—ninety degrees. The pilot generally pulled back the angle to seventy degrees as his SBD reached a point between five thousand and thirty-five hundred feet above the target, allowing him to safely toggle his bomb to clear the propeller. There was no use of the plane’s tail rudder, which could cause the bomb to yaw and miss the target. The pilot kept his target ship in line simply by using the stick to spin the airplane like a corkscrew to line up the target’s advance on the ocean floor below.
This effort more often than not took place as both the pilot and rear seat gunner were being subjected to murderous antiaircraft fire from below, while fighter planes slashed at them from behind and above. Even against practice targets, successful bomb drops required precise execution; in combat drops against enemy shipping while under fire, the pilots often did not exceed a twenty-five percent hit ratio.
Dive-bombing had first been practiced by U.S. Marine aviators in 1919, as they learned to release a bomb from a steeply descending aircraft. The first American aircraft carrier, USS Langley (CV-1), was commissioned in 1922, but it was another four years before the first true dive-bomber aircraft were tested. The Navy assessed new Vought 02U Corsair biplanes with mixed results. Improvements in bomb release equipment were made, and other dive-bombers were introduced during the 1930s, including the Northrop BT-1 and the Vought SB2U-1.2
In 1938, the entry of an innovative product from the Douglas Aircraft Factory would soon prove to be the clear winner for all-around efficiency in U.S. carrier operations. The new Douglas SBD-1 (Scout-Bomber by Douglas) began deployment operation with Navy and Marine squadrons in 1939, and the dive-bomber soon became popularly known by its brand name, “Dauntless.”
The first Douglas SBDs to begin carrier operations were actually of the second model variety, the SBD-2, which were built with fifty percent more fuel capacity for extended flight time. The first carrier squadron to be completely equipped with the new SBD-2 had been Bombing Squadron Two on board the USS Lexington (CV-2) in 1941. Each plane sported twin .30-caliber machine guns for the pilot’s use, which were mounted in the nose above the engine and fired through the propeller arc, plus a single .30-caliber machine gun mount in the rear cockpit for the use of the radioman. Deliveries began in March 1941 of a newer SBD-3 model, which had a top speed of 216 knots, or 250 mph, from each plane’s thousand-horsepower Wright Cyclone engine—although actual cruising speed on combat missions was normally 140 to 160 knots to preserve fuel. The range of a Dauntless with a thousand-pound bomb was safely 200 to 225 miles, or 250 to 275 miles with a five-hundred-pound bomb.
The Douglas SBD Dauntless was a much improved dive-bomber for the Navy’s use. Although some would later nickname the SBD “Slow But Deadly,” it actually had an aerial speed superior to the German Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber, and comparable to the Japanese Aichi D3A and the British Fleet Air Arm Blackburn B-24 Skua. Aside from any shortcomings the Dauntless might possess in aerial speed, it would prove to be the Navy’s most successful dive-bomber of the Pacific War.3
The Dauntless was indeed a formidable aircraft, and in the hands of the skilled pilots and gunners of VS-6 and VB-6, it helped alter the course of World War II.
