← The Naval Aviation Ready Room Podcast with Ryan Keys
The Naval Aviation Ready Room Podcast with Ryan Keys
Slow But Deadly - Flying the SBD Dauntless into Combat
00:34:01
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You're 23 years old. You're already a veteran of two years of heavy combat. You're sitting in a small cockpit at 15,000ft above the Pacific Ocean. Behind you, facing the opposite direction, is your radioman and gunner looking for enemy fighters. The massive engine in front of you is deafening rumbling like 15 Cadillacs in a railway tunnel. But you slide the canopy open anyway. You feel the chill air seep through your thin cotton flight suit. Cradled underneath you is a thousand pound bomb. In front of you is your flight lead. And behind are three more just like you who will follow you down on the ride of your life, down the silver waterfall of death and destruction. And somewhere below, tiny as a potion stamp, is your target, an enemy aircraft carrier. And you are about to point your airplane straight at it from 15,000ft. One, two.
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You know, the big battles, the famous names, the headlines. But what about the stories history forgot? I'm Ryan Keys, host of the Ready Room podcast, and in this special series, Footnotes of History, retired Navy Captain Tim Kinsella discusses the obscure, the overlooked, and sometimes downright unbelievable chapters of military history. Here's Lucky.
- [01:19]
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You're 23 years old. You're already a veteran of two years of heavy combat. You're sitting in a small cockpit at 15,000ft above the Pacific Ocean. And behind you, facing the opposite direction, is your radioman and gunner looking for enemy fighters. The massive engine in front of you is deafening rumbling like 15 Cadillacs in a railway tunnel. The air temperature is freezing, but you slide the canopy open anyway to prevent your bomb site from fogging up. You feel the chill air seep through your thin cotton flight suit and into your leather flying helmet. Over your parachute harness is a Mae west inflatable life vest. Underneath it, the grip of your.45 caliber M1911 automatic pistol is rubbing uncomfortably against your ribcage. Cradled underneath you is a thousand pound bomb. You and your SBD Dauntless are its delivery mechanism like a rifle is to a bullet. In front of you is your flight lead. And behind are three more just like you who will follow you down on the ride of your life, down the silver waterfall of death and destruction. And somewhere below, tiny as a potion stamp, is your target, an enemy aircraft carrier. And you are about to point your airplane straight at it from 15,000ft. So welcome, folks. Today is kind of an exciting episode, one that I've been looking forward to. Today we're going to climb inside one of the most consequential aircraft in the history of naval warfare, the Douglas SBD Dauntless. We're gonna talk about how it was built, where it came from, why it mattered, and what it felt like to fly one into combat. I think this is gonna be fun. But we're also gonna visit a specific airplane, one that survived, one that you can stand right next to right now in Pensacola, Florida, an artifact which I think stands next to Nelson's victory as one of the most important artifacts of naval warfare in the entire world. And by the time we're done, I think you'll understand exactly why. The men who flew it considered the Dauntless the ugliest, most reliable, most terrifying, and most beloved machine they've ever flown. So let's start at the beginning. To understand the SBD Dauntless, you have to understand a particular philosophy of warfare that gripped naval strategists in the interwar years due to the advent of naval aviation. And with the help of Billy Mitchell's demonstration of what air power could do to a ship, the idea that the best way to sink a ship by lobbing shells at it from the horizon had given way to dropping a bomb directly onto it from above. And it sounds simple, but it's not as far from it. The physics, they're brutally challenging. A bomb dropped from level flight, at speed, it'll travel horizontally as it falls, drifting away from its target like a slow motion tracer. But a bomb released from a near vertical dive, that's another matter. It travels almost straight down. The targeting becomes far more achievable, more like shooting a bullet straight out of a gun. So the US Navy, they'd been experimenting with dive bombing since the mid-1920s. By 1934, they put in a formal request for a dedicated dive bomber, an aircraft purpose built to survive the insane aerodynamic stresses of plunging nearly straight down at high speed, release its bomb with accuracy, and then pull out without tearing its wings off. Now, the man who first answered that call was a brilliant, often cantankerous engineer at Northrop named Jack Northrop. Though by the time the aircraft would become the Dauntless legend, the design had moved to Douglas aircraft, refined by a team led by Ed Heinemann. Now, Heinemann, he's one of those figures in aviation history who pops up all the time, and he doesn't get nearly enough credit. He had a gift for elegant, honest design aircraft that did exactly what they were supposed to do. Nothing more, nothing wasteful. He would later design the A4 Skyhawk, which flew its wings off in Vietnam. But that's a whole other story for another episode so the XBT one, which was the name first given to this experimental aircraft, it flew in 1935. The XBT2 followed. And by the time the Navy officially designated the sbd, which stands for Scout Bomber Douglas, and placed it into production in 1940, the aircraft had evolved into something that looked kind of ungainly. Pilots, they liked their planes to look the part. They want them sleek and they want them sexy. The Dauntless had a wide fuselage, perforated, split dyed flaps that folded up like the wings of a beetle. A large round radial engine up front. And that certainly wasn't sleek and it wasn't fast. Fighter pilots who saw it on the deck of a carrier sometimes called it the slow but deadly. You know, get it sbd, Slow it deadly. And they meant it as a joke. But the men who flew it, they actually took it as a compliment. So what made it special? What made the Dauntless such a special aircraft? Here's something that the Dauntless had that other aircraft didn't have. Dive flaps. Those perforated, hydraulically operated split flaps on the trailing edge of the wing. They were the aircraft's defining feature and its greatest innovation. It took a lot of trial and error to get it right. At first, the tail would shudder violently in a dive. But after a lot of experimentation, Heinemann figured out what worked. When you're in a near vertical dive, the natural tendency of the aircraft and of human instinct is to accelerate. Gravity wants to take you. The air rushing past a fuselage wants to take you. Without some kind of mechanism to bleed off that speed from such a great height, the dive, it becomes a death sentence. Either you pull out so violently that the wings separate or you hit the water before you have a chance to pull out. So the Dauntless split flaps, they created drag and it was controlled and it was predictable drag. They limited the dive speed to roughly about 280 to down to 250 knots. Fast enough that anti aircraft gunners, they struggle to track you, but slow enough that you could actually aim. And slow enough that the pullout forces, while severe, were survivable at around six GS, sometimes up to nine GS. That's six or to nine times the force of gravity. A trained pilot could get through the pullout with his vision intact and his consciousness more or less preserved. More or less. And there was also the two man crew. You had a pilot up front and you had a radioman and rear gunner in the back seat. And you're both separated by a fuel tank. The rear seat man operated a twin 30 caliber machine gun mount and he served as the aircraft's eyes behind its tail. In an era when the Japanese Zero fighters were among the most maneuverable aircraft in the world, that rear gunner was often the only thing standing between the crew and oblivion. Now, the Dauntless had first entered fleet service in 1940, replacing the older Curtiss SBC Helldiver biplane. And by the time the bombs fell in Pearl harbor way back in December 7, 1941, the SBD was the primary offensive strike aircraft in the United States Navy. So that's what the aircraft was. That's where it came from. But now I. I want to put you inside the aircraft. I want to reconstruct as faithfully as the historical record allows what a strike mission actually felt like for the folks inside this aircraft. Drawing from the diaries, the letters, oral histories and memoirs of the men who flew these missions. Some of it is composite and some of it draws directly from documented accounts, but all of it is grounded in the procedural reality of what these men did. So follow along with me. Close your eyes if you can. If you're driving, don't close your eyes and imagine yourself a young aviator on the USS Hornet in the South Pacific. You're a couple of years into the war, so the morning of a strike, it begins before dawn. You eat what you can, which often isn't much. Your stomach is churning in anticipation like before big football match against your number one rival. There's a briefing in the hot, smoky ready room. Your strike leader standing in front of a chart pointing to a position, a course, an estimated target speed. You're given a rendezvous point, a time on target, a radio frequency. You memorize what you can and you write the rest on your knee pad in grease pencil. You swallow the last of the coffee in your cup as your squadron mate in the chair next to you grabs your shoulder and wishes you good luck. And then you walk to your airplane. She's squatting on the flight deck in the gray pre dawn. Over a thousand hours of flight time in this cockpit has given you a quiet confidence in this stubby but awesome aircraft. You're as familiar with her as anything in your life. You know its nuances, its shortfalls. That she's nose heavy, rolls slowly and flies slow, but she can take a pounding and she's steady when you need her to be. It feels more like strapping her to your back rather than climbing into the cockpit. She's a party of you and you of her. A thousand pound general purpose bomb hangs from the displacement gear under her belly. You check the shackle. You check the arming wire. You check the pitot tube, the control surfaces, the tires, your rear seat. Crewman, your radioman, your gunner, your second half. He's already in the cockpit, threading his harness, checking his gun map. You nod at each other. There are no speeches necessary. You both know what needs to be done. The engine catches with a sound like the world clearing its throat, and then it settles into its rhythm, a deep mechanical pulse that you feel in your spine. You taxi to your spot in the launch lineup. Ahead of you, aircraft are being flung off the bow one by one, by the catapult, disappearing into the darkness. And then it's your turn. The launch itself is a controlled violence. The catapult, in later versions of the war, or simply the running start on a long enough deck, accelerates the aircraft from zero to flying speed in a very short distance. Pilots describe the moment of launch as being simultaneously exhilarating and utterly terrifying. Because if something goes wrong, if the engine coughs, if a control locks, there's nothing below you but the carrier's bow wave and the cold, deep Pacific. But nothing went wrong. Not this morning. The engine is at maximum power, and as the catapult pulls you at breakneck speed, you feel the tug in your stomach like your belly button is touching your backbone and the pressure suddenly released. As soon as your wheels leave the deck, you breathe, pull back a little power and start your climb. The climb to altitude takes time. The Dauntless is not in a hurry about it. Around a thousand feet per minute. You use the time. You check your engine instruments. You watch the cylinder head temperature. You lean the fuel mixture as the air gets thin behind you. Your rear seat crewman is already scanning the sky, his gun mount moving in small arcs. He'll spot the enemy fighters before you do, almost every time, because you're looking forward and he's looking back. The Zeros, they like to sneak up from behind or from the sides. At 15,000ft, the ocean looks like a hammered tin sheet far below, dimples reflecting in the hot Pacific sun. The other Dauntlesses are around you in formation, Dark shapes against the early morning sky. You can see the strike leader's aircraft 300 yards ahead. And then someone's voice crackles in your headset. Target, two o', clock, 15 miles. You look. It's small at first, a dark shape with a white brushstroke wake behind it, destroyers flaking it like shepherds. And as you watch, the formation begins to maneuver. They've seen you Too. The sky ahead begins to fill with black puffs. Anti aircraft fire. Each puff is a shell detonating at altitude, spraying steel fragments in a lethal sphere roughly 40ft across. Your mouth goes dry but your hands are steady on the stick. Fear and control. Both things keep you alive. The strike leader rocks his wings. The signal to attack. And here is where the SPD dauntless does the thing that only it can do. You are lined up behind the strike leader and you see him begin his dive. You wait a few moments and you throttle back and you lift the nose. You open the dive flaps. You push the stick forward to 70 degrees. Nose down. And the world rotates. The horizon climbs through your windscreen and keeps climbing until it's above you. And now you are pointed almost straight at the earth. And the aircraft is screaming. Not the engine, the wind. The air rushing over the fuselage at 260 knots makes a sound that you cannot describe to someone who hasn't heard it. It's a shriek. It's a howl. It's the sound of physics trying to kill you. You're hanging in your straps, looking at the ship getting bigger and bigger. The altimeter unwinds. The Crewman calls out altitudes. 15,000ft. 12,000, 10,000. The ship is growing in size. It was a thumbnail, now it's a fist. Now it's filling your entire gun sight. You work the rudder pedals. Small inputs like your flight instructor said so long ago. Happy nimble feet, soft and quick like Fred Astaire. Keep the target centered. The crosshairs drift left. A touch of right rudder steady. The anti aircraft fire is close enough now that you can see the muzzle flashes on the ship's deck. They are shooting directly at you. That makes you mad, more determined. The black bursts are close enough that concussions knock the aircraft sideways and you correct for them the way you'd correct for a gust of wind. 8,000ft. 6,000. Your thumb is on the bomb release. The ship is enormous. Now you can see individual gun turrets. You can see the bow wave breaking wide against the hull. 2,000ft. Now the bomb release triggers the displacement gear. A fork like arm that physically swings the bomb forward and clear the propeller arc before releasing it. The thousand pound bomb falls away. The aircraft lurches with the loss of so much weight and you haul back on the stick with everything you have. The G forces arrive like a physical blow to your chest. The blood drains out of your head and towards your feet and the edges of your vision go gray, tunneling inward and you are working entirely on instinct now, stick back, throttle forward, nose coming up through the horizon, banking hard left to clear the ship, to give the anti aircraft gunners a moving, climbing target. And then, if God is willing and your aim was true, you feel a thump. Not loud, almost gentle. A concussion that travels through the airframe. You crane your neck over your shoulder, fire. Black smoke. The ship is burning. Your rear seat man keys the interphone. She's listening. I think we got her. You allow yourself one slow breath, the first full breath you've taken in six minutes. Then you turn for home, your rear gunner scanning for enemy planes. I mentioned briefly the crewman in the backseat. His experience of that same dive is entirely different and in some ways far more psychologically demanding. The radium and gunner sits facing backwards. He cannot see the target, he cannot see the ship rushing up. He has no control over the aircraft's trajectory. No stick, no throttle, no rudder. What he does have is a twin 30 caliber machine gun mount, an excellent view of everything the aircraft has just flown over, and complete and total dependence on the man in front of him. In the dive, as the world tilts and the nose drops and the engine noise builds towards that shriek, the rear seat gunner is watching the sky you came from while also calling out altitudes. In the dive, he's watching for Zero fighters, which had learned very early in the war that the most vulnerable moment for Dauntless was during the dive itself. The pilot is fixated on his target. The aircraft is on a predictable near vertical path. A skilled Zero pilot could intercept that path and make a firing pass that the Dauntless pilot would never see coming. The gunner saw it coming. The gunner's job was to make it expensive. Aviation Radioman 2nd Class Bruno Guido became briefly famous in the months before Midway for an act of almost insane courage. When an enemy aircraft was diving towards his carrier, Gaido ran across the flight deck and he climbed into the rear cockpit of a parked Dauntless and began firing at the attacking plane, deflecting its bomb run and saving the ship. Admiral Halsey personally promoted him on the spot. That moment was recreated in the recent movie Midway. Quite well, I might add. Guido flew at Midway, but he was shot down and captured by the Japanese and he was later executed at sea. That is the rear seat man's war. In a few sentences, the Dauntless, it flew 57,000 combat missions in the Pacific. Many rear seat gunners flew every one of those missions without their names appearing in a single headline. They held on through 7G pullouts. Facing backwards, they fought off Zeros While their aircraft dove at the earth at 260 knots, they called out altitudes and spotted targets and managed the radio and prayed and came home. And often nobody ever asked them what it was like. So now let me shift for a moment and tell you about the morning of June 4th, 1942, from the perspective of two specific men and the Dauntless. Bureau number 2106. And that's the aircraft that you can see in Pensacola. It's the actual physical machine that two men flew into the most dangerous airspace in the Pacific on what turned out to be the most important morning of the naval war. Their names were First Lieutenant Daniel Iverson and Private First Class Wallace J. Reed. Iverson was a pastor's son from Miami, Florida. Reed had grown up in Washington State, and both were United States Marines assigned to Marine scout bombing squadron 241, VMSB 241, stationed on Midway Atoll. And here's the first thing you need to understand about them and about every man who flew that morning. They were profoundly unprepared, and they knew it. Bureau number 2106 had arrived on Midway just nine days before the battle, transported on the aircraft transport USS Kitty Hawk, along with 18 other SBD2s that had been turned in by the Enterprise Air Group as they upgraded to newer models. The Marines of VMSB241 had been flying a different aircraft. The older slore vought sb2u vindicator. And the Dauntless was new to most of them. Iverson had about four hours of flight time in type before June 4th. Four hours hours in the Dauntless. Some of his fellow pilots had even fewer. One gunner, asked later about his combat training, said that the only time he'd fired his gun before the battle was when his pilot let him shoot at white caps on the ocean during an anti submarine patrol. He said the first moving aerial target he had ever fired at was a Zero that was also shooting at him. And that who was in the cockpit, that's who we're talking about. So the morning of June 4, 0530, Midway's radar picked up the incoming Japanese strike force at 0555. By 0605, the island's aircraft, every flyable machine they had, were airborne. To avoid being caught on the ground, the dive bombers split into two groups, were ordered to attack the Japanese carrier fleet, which had been spotted approximately 150 miles to the northwest. Sixteen SBD2 Dauntlesses, they took off under the command of Major Lofton Henderson. His name might be familiar to You. Iverson and Reid were among them in Buno 2106, coated with the fuselage number 6 behind them as they climbed out over the Pacific, the island they'd just left was already burning under the Japanese air attack they'd narrowly escaped. The mess hall was gone, the powerhouse demolished. Midway itself under assault. Massive craters in the Runway. This is Iverson's account. The enemy fighters found us before we found a fleet. I watched the first attacks go in against Major Henderson. At the head of the formation, he took hits. His left wing started to burn. I could see it clearly, his plane going out of control, falling away. His wingman followed him down. And then he was shot down, too. The formation was coming apart around us. Three more aircraft on my left. I watched them catch fire and go into the sea. One after another. The Zeros were working down the line, picking on their targets. We were slow. We were in dive bombers over open ocean with no fighter escort. We were exactly what the Zeros were designed to kill. I kept flying. You keep flying. There's nothing else to do. Eight of the 16 Daunuses that launched from Midway that morning would not return. Major Henderson was killed in his dive. Others were shot down over the fleet. Even though half of VMS B241 was destroyed, the remainder of the squadron pressed home the attack under insurmountable odds. Remember, this was the first taste of combat for most of these men. Iverson later described what he saw when the Japanese fleet finally came into view. Carriers with the rising sun painted on their flight decks, gleaming pale yellow in the morning light. Destroyers, cruisers, the most powerful carrier force Japan had ever assembled. And he rolled in. This is Iverson again. I peeled off through a thin cloud and selected my target, a carrier with two rising suns on the flight deck. Two enemy fighters followed me into the dive. I could hear Reed firing behind me, burst after burst, his gun hammering away as we went nearly straight down. He was firing at them the whole way. They were firing back. I released. At 300ft, 300ft above the ship, you can see faces. At 300ft, I pulled out close to the water, closed the dive flaps, opened the cowl flaps, and pushed the throttle as far forward as it would go. The engine went to 2,300 rpm. I pointed the nose at the horizon and ran 300ft. For context, the dive in the previous chapter described releasing at 1500ft. Iverson held his bomb until he was nearly scraping the flight deck. Whether this was training desperation or a young man's absolute refusal to miss, we cannot Know his own account is characteristically spare on the question of what was going through his mind. What we do know is what happened next. Here's Iverson again. As we clear the ship and rang for the deck, two more Zeros joined the ones already on us. Reed was fighting all of them. Four fighters, all making passes, all shooting. I could hear his gun. Then I could hear it stop. Then it started again. Then I felt something hit my instrument panel and the airspeed indicator went blank. Then the hydraulic system went and another bullet severed my throat mite cord. At some point, Reed was hit in the foot. He kept firing. After what seemed like a very long time, the Zeros turned back toward the fleet. I looked at the aircraft around me, what was left of the formation scattered low over the water, and I turned towards Midway. I didn't know how many of us were left. I didn't know if I'd hit the carrier. I knew the hydraulic system was gone, which meant the landing gear would not extend normally. I knew Reid was wounded. I knew the airplane felt wrong in ways I couldn't entirely account for. I flew back to Midway and made a one wheel landing. When Iverson shut down the engine and he and Reed climbed out of the aircraft, the ground crew gathered around bureau number 2106 in near silence. The airplane had 249 bullet holes in it. The fuselage, the wings, the tail surfaces, the rudder, the horizontal stabilizer perforated throughout, as though someone had taken the aircraft apart with a very systematic and very angry drill. The airspeed indicator was destroyed. The hydraulic system was severed. The instrument panel had taken a direct hit. And yet the Dauntless, that stubby, ungainly, ugly machine, had flown home. It had absorbed everything 4 Japanese Zero fighters could put into it, and it still brought its crew back. The plane Captain for Buno 2106 was Corporal Gaspar Buffer. He walked around the aircraft looking at the damage. Decades later, he still remembered the silence that fell over the flight line when the men understood what they were looking at. Half the squadron was gone. The next morning, June 5, Iverson and Reed climbed into another Dauntless and flew again. VMSB241's attack on the Hiryu that morning did not sink the carrier. Post war analysis of Japanese records suggests they achieved near misses that may have damaged the ship's screws and steering, likely Iverson's near miss. The killing blow to the Hiryu came later from Navy Dauntless's launch from Enterprise in Yorktown. The four Japanese carriers were all Sunk by the end of the day. A catastrophic war changing loss for Japan. But here's what Admiral Nimitz wrote to the Marines of Midway after the battle. And I want you to listen carefully to the language. They struck the first blow at the enemy carriers. They were the spearhead of our great victory. They have written a new and shining page in the annals of the Marine Corps. The first blow. Pilots with four hours in type, men who had never fired their guns at a moving target, going in anyway against a fleet protected by the best fighter aircraft in the Pacific. Because that was the mission and there was nobody else to fly it. For his actions that morning, Daniel Iverson was awarded the Navy Cross, the second Navy Cross earned by that aircraft bureau number 2106, the first being earned by Lieutenant JG Mark Whittier in a march on a raid on New Guinea. PFC Wallace Reed received a Distinguished Flying Cross in part because of Iverson's own written recommendation in which he specifically cited Reed's courage under fire and his wound. I also recommend, Iverson wrote in his after action report, that my gunner Wallace J. Reed, pfc, USMC be given a citation for bravery in action. He was injured in the foot. Eleven words. That's all he wrote about it. The dauntless pilot's economy of language applied to a man who fought four Zero fighters alone backwards in a burning aircraft 300ft above an enemy carrier. Both men went on to serve at Guadalcanal. Iverson was wounded again and rotated home, eventually becoming a flight instructor at Naval Air Station Vero Beach, Florida. On January 22, 1944, Major Daniel Iverson was killed in a mid air collision during a training flight. He was 27 years old. Wallace Reed was commissioned as an officer after the war. When the Korean War began, Second Lieutenant Reid deployed with the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade. He was killed in action on August 8, 1950, defending the Pusan perimeter. Neither man lived to see their aircraft come home after Midway Bureau Number 2106 was repaired, shipped back to Pearl harbor and eventually sent to the mainland United States, where she was assigned to the Carrier Qualification Training Unit at Naval Air Station Glenview in Illinois. There, student pilots practiced arrested landings on training carriers operating on Lake Michigan. The Navy had converted several Great Lakes passenger steamers for exactly this purpose. On the morning of June 11, 1943, a Marine second lieutenant named Donald A. Douglas, no relation to the aircraft's manufacturer, stalled out on his approach to the training carrier USS Sable. The aircraft spun into the cold water. Douglas was pulled from the water by a Coast Guard rescue boat, but aircraft 2106. It sank in 170ft of water and settled into the deep mud of Lake Michigan, where she remained for 50 years. In October of 1993, as part of the National Naval Aviation Museum's Underwater Aircraft Recovery Program, divers located the wreck. The cold, fresh water of Lake Michigan has preserved her far better than the open ocean ever would have. She was brought to the surface, transported to Pensacola and underwent a painstaking multi year restoration. In 2001, Bureau No. 2106 was placed on public display. Members of the Iverson and Reed families attended the ceremony. She is today the only aircraft known to have flown at the Battle of Midway that still exists anywhere in the world. Now come back to Pensacola. The National Naval Aviation Museum sits on the grounds of Naval Air Station Pensacola, which has been training naval aviators since 1914, the oldest naval air station in the United States. Hanging from the ceiling, arranged on the floor, tucked into every corner, is more than a century of United States Naval aviation, from early biplanes to space capsules to modern fighter jets. Walk past the Wildcats and the Hellcats and the Corsairs. Find the one that looks stubby and ungainly with the big round engine and the split flaps folded up. That's Bureau No. 2106. Now you know her story. Stand beside her for a moment and look at the bomb displacement gear. That fork like arm beneath the fuselage where the 500 pound bomb sat the morning of June 4, 1942. Look at the cockpit. It's small. Smaller than you imagine. Think about what it took to climb into that cockpit with four hours of type experience, knowing what you were flying toward. Think about Reid climbing into the back seat, strapping in, checking his gun. The same gun he would fire continuously at 4 Japanese Zero fighters while wounded, while the aircraft was being torn apart around them, all the way down to 300ft above the carrier deck. There are 249 bullet holes in that aircraft. 249. The restoration team found them all. You can still count them by the small square metal repair patches that cover the holes. By the end of the war, the Dauntless had been replaced by the Curtis SB2C Helldiver, a faster, more modern aircraft that the pilots who flew it with remarkable consistency hated with a passion. They called it the Beast. They called it worse things than that. Several of them wrote in their memoirs that they missed the Dauntless, the older, slower, uglier airplane, the one that just didn't let you down. Something almost Roman about that. The Grizzled soldier who prefers the simple short sword to the fancy new weapon because he knows what the simple sword can do, and he knows it has never failed him. When his life depended on it, the Dauntless sank more enemy shipping than any other Allied aircraft in the Pacific War. It was a present at every major naval engagement from Pearl harbor through the Philippine Sea. It outlasted newer aircraft in frontline service because it was reliable, forgiving, and it was honest. The average age of a Dauntless pilot at Midway was somewhere in the mid-20s. Some were younger. Many of them had been civilian college students not much earlier. The war found them, and they answered. What strikes me most, reading their accounts, the diaries, the oral histories, the letters written home to mothers and wives and sweethearts, is the absence of heroic posturing. These men are almost universally matter of fact about what they did. They describe the mechanics of the dive with the precision of engineers. They describe the fear with a detachment of men who have metabolized terror into routine. They describe their reseed men with a kind of quiet reverence, the men facing backwards, holding on, trusting you absolutely. One pilot, reflecting decades later on his time flying the Dauntless, said something that I think encapsulates the spirit of it. He said that the airplane was the honest version of the job. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't fast. It didn't make you feel like a hero. It made you feel like a craftsman, someone doing a difficult, precise, dangerous piece of work. And when you did it right, ships burned and the war got a little shorter. And maybe the man in the next cockpit over got to go home a little earlier. That's the Dauntless. That's the man who flew it. So if you find yourself in Pensacola, go stand next to Bureau No. 2106. Unlike most museums, you can even touch it. Look at the cockpit. Two men sat in there, a pastor's son from Miami and a young man from Washington State. Back to back, separated by the fuel tank, and they flew into the most heavily defended airspace in the Pacific with four hours of experience in the aircraft and nowhere else to go. They were in their mid-20s. They brought the thing home and neither of them made it to 30. So that's it for today, my friends. And as always, thanks for listening. Until next time, thanks for joining me as we explored the part of history that happened before, the history that everyone remembers.
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Thanks for tuning in to the Ready Rooms miniseries Footnotes of History, hosted by Captain Tim Kinsella, where you experience the obscure, the overlooked, and often unbelievable chapters of military history. Don't forget to like subscribe and leave a five star review. Fly Navy.