![]() ![]() Source: YouTube/Smithsonian ChannelĮvery dive-bombing run in a Dauntless was a death-defying act. The only way to improve the accuracy of delivering a one thousand pound bomb was to use the airplane itself to “aim” the bomb. Smart bombs were still decades away from the arsenals of any military forces at that time. Ships appear only as specks on the wide ocean from 20,000 ft and they are moving at top speeds and are capable of maneuvering fairly rapidly, making it close to impossible to hit them with high altitude bombings. Bombing even a large ship like a carrier from high altitude during WWII was difficult enough already. They were not built for speed, but for accuracy in the particular mission of destroying and sinking enemy naval vessels. If you have seen the recent movie, “Midway,” about the decisive two day battle only a couple short months after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, you have a good sense of what it was like to fly one of these Dauntless dive bombers in battle. It proved to be a formidable weapon in the Pacific against the Japanese naval forces. built the SBD for the United States Navy as a carrier based dive bomber and torpedo plane. ![]() However, the A-24s were only ever deployed to the Pacific, serving during the New Guinea campaign as well as in the Aleutians.The Douglas Aircraft Co. Impressed by the performance of German dive bombers during the blitzkrieg phase in Europe, the USAAF hoped to replicate the capabilities of the Luftwaffe. The Marine Air Groups assigned to the recapture of the Philippines were mostly equipped with SBDs even as the Navy re-equipped with SB2Cs.ĭauntless bombers were also supplied to the US Army Air Force, which re-designated them the A-24 Dauntless. Problems with the intended successor to the SBD, the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, meant that the SBD remained the primary naval dive bomber through 1943 and the advance up the Solomons chain, and well into 1944. Thereafter, Navy and Marine Dauntlesses saw significant action at Guadalcanal, helping to secure that island in the face of enormous Japanese counter-attacks. Then, at Midway in June, SBDs were responsible for sinking all four of the Japanese carriers lost at that battle. At the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, SBDs helped to sink the carrier Shōhō, before badly damaging the Shōkaku the next day. The Dauntless achieved immortality thanks to its exploits during the carrier battles of 1942. Several SBDs were destroyed in the air and on the ground when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but Dauntlesses were thereafter at the forefront of the initial counterattacks, taking part in the carrier raids on several Japanese-controlled islands during the early part of 1942. The first Douglas variant of the aircraft, re-designated the SBD, featured a complete redesign of the landing gear, a new tail, a more powerful engine, as well as numerous other small improvements.īy December the SBD equipped all of the Pacific Fleet’s front line scout-bomber squadrons, and several of the Marine Corps squadrons were beginning to receive the type as well. Northrop sold the rights to the BT-1 and the El Segundo plant that produced the aircraft to the Douglas Aircraft Company. The XBT featured numerous innovations, including split dive flaps with perforations to reduce buffeting during a dive.ĥ4 production model BT-1s were eventually ordered, but the improved BT-2 was destined never to be produced. The entrants were the Brewster XSBA, the Vought XSB2U and the Northrop XBT, which eventually won the competition with the Vought design seeing limited production as a backup. In 1934 the US Navy ran several design competitions for new aircraft, among them one for a two-seat scout bomber. ![]()
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