The Dauntless in Battle

Peter C. Smith

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Aviation
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781526704627
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"[An] extensively researched complete history of the famous SBD Dauntless dive bomber, hero of the Battle of Midway. Very Highly Recommended." — Firetrench
 
The Douglas SBD Dauntless, a monoplane dive-bomber designed by Ed Heinemann for the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps, arrived in service in the months just preceding America's entry into World War II. The first such aircraft were being shipped out to the USMC units just as the Japanese Task Force arrived in position to launch their attack on Pearl Harbor, while those Dauntless embarked aboard the American aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet became among the very first casualties of that surprise attack.
 
Very quickly the Dauntless established herself as a highly accurate naval bomber at sea. In the early raids on Japanese-held islands—and in 1942 at the naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, Eastern Solomons and elsewhere—she proved herself a key and decisive instrument to first halt and then turn the die against Japanese expansion. The SBD (nicknamed "Slow But Deadly") fought ashore the bitter fighting at Guadalcanal and the subsequent Solomon Island campaigns working from both shore and carrier bases.
 
The Dauntless continued to fight at sea until right up to 1944 and then carried on with the Marine Corps to provide the American Army with close air support in their conquest of the Philippines.
 
In The Dauntless in Battle, Peter Smith "traces its illustrious history throughout the second world war and beyond in vivid detail" ( Books Monthly).
 
"Lots of fine detail on both the aircraft and the crews who flew them in action." — Military Model Scene

Chapter 1

Origins

The four major naval powers that emerged from the Washington Naval Treaty in the 1920s, the United Kingdom, United States, Japan and France, all acknowledged the development of air power during the Great War, but their adoption of it into a maritime warfare scenario differed considerably. Conversion of both existing and planned battleships and battlecruisers followed and by the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 the Royal Navy possessed seven aircraft carriers1, the US Navy had commissioned seven;2 the Japanese possessed five such ships;3 and the French one.4 The Italians, allocated the same tonnage as the French, scorned carriers as their seemingly dominant position in the central Mediterranean meant they felt that they could rely totally upon land-based air power to ensure Mare Nostrum became a fact as well as a boast.5 All these navies were building new carriers at by 1939, with the Royal Navy, so often criticized for not being air minded, constructing no fewer than seven new ships;6 the Americans had just one further ship under construction;7 the Imperial Japanese Navy seven also;8 while the French had plans for two new carriers.9

Hulls were one thing but the factors that turned out to be decisive were how these carriers were equipped and used. Here the divergence of the principal users differed even more widely. France’s solitary carrier arrived late on the pre-war scene and, found to be too slow, was used mainly as an aircraft transport and not as a combat unit, although she did participate in the hunt for German raiders early in the war. The Royal Navy was faced with its two usual dilemmas, a worldwide commitment to defend the Empire against widely-differing potential opponents and a hostile treasury opposed to all attempts at increasing finances. Against Germany and Italy (the main European Axis partners) the threat came from hundreds of landbased bomber aircraft. Hence, although Ark Royal had been built without one, the need for armoured decks was by now considered essential. These were designed to keep out 500lb bombs, but, by the time the ships were completed, the Luftwaffe was using 1,000lb weapons. This protection necessarily limited the number of aircraft that could be embarked, which is why the British fleet carriers could only carry the same number of aircraft as the American light carriers of the Independence Class. The trade-off proved worse when faced with a Japanese enemy whose carrier fleet could employ hundreds of aircraft.

To the traditional British dilemmas were added two further crippling handicaps. The first was that in the period 1918 to 1938 (and in effect for even longer) all aircraft designs and allocations were in the hands of the Royal Air Force who had zero interest in Naval aviation. The quality and numbers of naval aircraft therefore deteriorated in those two decades and while it had led the way in maritime application of air power in 1918, twenty years later the Royal Navy lagged far behind in both numbers and quality. The Americans and Japanese thought very differently, both spending these years in improving quality and increasing their numerical superiority ship-for-ship, sacrificing protection for hitting power.

The three principal navies did share a common belief, and this was in the effectiveness of the dive-bomber. Since the first combat dive-bombing had taken place in 1917 by British pilots on the Western Front, the Western air forces had largely rejected it, although they tinkered with it from time to time. The navies, however, were a different matter. Here accuracy was the requirement. Re-invented by the US Marine Corps flyers in Haiti and Nicaragua, the US Navy adopted the dive -bomber wholeheartedly, as did the Japanese. The Royal Navy also believed in this weapon as the deciding factor in the any carrier-to carrier air duel. All three navies concluded that it was the landing of the first blow, and with the maximum number of aircraft, that would decide the outcome of such a contest. It must always be remembered that, although of course highly desirable, it was not deemed essential to sink the enemy carriers in the first blow; merely to put their flight decks out of action was sufficient. While torpedo bombers might put the ships down, a surprise diving attack, which was proved in numerous exercises to be impossible to prevent, would turn these hugely potent weapons into mere floating targets, powerless to either defend themselves or attack. The only way to achieve such an objective was by dive-bombing.

The Royal Navy’s answer was the Blackburn Skua monoplane. When first conceived it was a reasonable enough answer but three factors reduced its potency. Firstly, although the Navy wanted a dive-bomber first, with some fighter potential out at sea as a secondary requirement, the RAF, who controlled all such matters, reversed this priority. They themselves had rejected dive-bombing and knew little or nothing of it, and cared even less. So the Skua turned out to be a good dive-bomber but mainly used as a fighter aircraft against land-based types, in which role it was a very poor fighter. Secondly, the builders were notoriously slow at producing aircraft, and those they did build were heavy and slow. The gestation period meant that, by the time it finally appeared, design had moved on. Finally, it was only delivered in penny packets, and frequently used against impossible targets (500lb bombs against heavily-armoured battlecruisers like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were never going to do them much harm). Thus, the Royal Navy, from 1941 onward, lacked any proper dive-bomber.

The Japanese, by contrast, believed in dive-bombers and dive-bombing, had the Chinese combat experience from 1933 onward to hone their skills and fine-tune their development of this form of aerial attack, and had the almost unlimited finances to produce large numbers of such aircraft. Thus the Japanese Navy proceeded to advance both in expertise, application and refinement of tactics and machines. They went further than any other naval air force in developing a technique that, just prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War, combined several carriers (as many as six) in one united striking force. Their different carrier air groups operated together, each carrier supplying parts of the combined force with a common doctrine, with the resulting unprecedented numbers of aircraft it could concentrate against any one target. The war in China had also shown the Japanese the advantage of range and this they concentrated on. Throughout the entire war in the Pacific, Japanese naval aircraft would always outrange those of the US Navy. The Kido Butai was the ultimate use of carrier air power when it was first unleashed in 1941 and the Allies had no answer to it. At the tip of this great attack-orientated team was the dive-bomber. In 1941 the Japanese had the Aichi D3A10 crewed by highly-trained and motivated aircrew. It was manoeuvrable and strong, but had one great weakness, and that was in the payload it was able to deliver. The Val toted a 250lb bomb into combat at a time when the Royal Navy was finding a 500lb bomb inadequate and the US Navy was developing dive-bombers that could carry a 1,000lb bomb.11

The United States Navy was, in many ways, at the forefront of naval aviation, both in thinking, belief and promotion of dive-bombing as a technique. They produced whole squadrons of such aircraft motivated with a firm belief in the method, thoroughly trained, and had developed a whole tenet of application, although it differed from the Japanese methodology in many ways. They also believed in the ‘Hit First’ definition,12 which later became the accepted doctrine. These flying sailors were firmly convinced of their own prowess and many American admirals were ‘air-minded’; some were aviators themselves, others became flyers to better understand the potential of the new weapon. Pre-war exercises conducted by the Scouting Force (essentially Lexington and Saratoga) had shown that, contrary to Air Corps’ belief and preaching, naval aircraft could successfully take on, and defeat, land-based aircraft, with surprise as a main factor. The Panama Canal and Pearl Harbor itself were both subjected to successful carrier raids long before the war.

How the US Navy differed in technique from the IJN was in application. The American carriers tended to operate independently, each having their own procedures. The Japanese could fly off, assemble and despatch 140-plus aircraft from their carriers all within thirty-minutes; the Americans could take twice as long to muster and mount such an attack and each carrier would find its own solution to the problem. The ideal both navies sought, in addition to the vital one of striking the first blow with their maximum strength, was a combination of all the facets of such a strike. Torpedobombers had to go in low and deliver their ordnance and were vulnerable in the approach, but dive-bombers could appear suddenly out of the blue and evade most fighter interception and AA fire. Both were hopeful that their fighter protection would cull their opponent’s defending squadrons, although for both sides, and in particular the Americans initially, this hope tended to be rather illusory.13

In developing the dive-bomber the United States was fortunate in possessing a whole series of dedicated designers in the 1930s. A large factor in this concentration on dive bombing stemmed from the Taylor Board, named after its first President, Admiral Montgomery Meigs Taylor, set up in April 1927, which included William Veazie Pratt and William Adger Moffett, the ‘father’ of US naval aviation, which concluded that ‘General Purpose’ aircraft (which dominated Royal Navy thinking for many years, mainly due to cost restrictions) were a waste of money, even if they appeared cheaper in theory. One member of the board, Commander Newton White, was very clear, insisting that any General Purpose aircraft was ‘an inefficient hybrid in which both types were ruined’.14 Despite this some years were to pass before the separation of ‘light’ dive-bombers and ‘heavy’ dive-bombers was finally abandoned.

The biggest problem encountered in designing an all-round dive-bomber was the stress factor. Structural strength was paramount if converted fighter types were not to disintegrate in mid dive, a problem that was never fully resolved. The aircraft company of Curtiss was well-established, as was Martin, but both built a succession of biplane prototypes that were less than satisfactory in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The USMC mount, the Curtiss OC-1 Falcon, was modified from its original design and fitted with an aircooled Wasp engine, becoming the XF8C, but the prototype crashed during testing. Curtiss then built a heavier, sturdier variant, the F8C-4. Martin came up with the XT5M-1 in October 1929 but encountered problems with the wings through to March 1930. Further modifications resulted in the BM-1 which crashed during acceptance trials. Although adopted and used into service with the Navy, this aircraft, although one of the first real dive-bombers to carry an effective bomb load, incurred further accidents which told against her. The problem of the bomb striking the aircraft’s undercarriage when released in a dive required the introduction of a displacing gear arrangement, a ‘swing crutch’ which held the bomb in a pair of pivoted arms and, when deployed, swung it down and out from the aircraft’s trajectory. This invention, pioneered by Lieutenant Commander (later Vice Admiral) Arthur Clarke Miles of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Commander C.L. Schuyler and George A. Chadwick of the Bureau of Ordnance, was trialled in 1931 by Lieutenant Commander John Edwin Ostrander ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• A Note on Aircraft Names
• List of Tables
• Maps and Inserts
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter 1 Origins
• Chapter 2 Opening Rounds 1941-42
• Chapter 3 Battle of the Coral Sea, May 1942
• Chapter 4 The Battle of Midway
• Chapter 5 Derailing the Tokyo Express
• Chapter 6 Two Carrier Duels
• Chapter 7 Kiwis at Bougainville 1944
• Chapter 8 Vindication at the Philippine Sea
• Chapter 9 US Marine Corps Dauntless in the Philippines 1944-45
• Appendix 1 The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Glossary of Acronyms
• Bibliography
• Plate section