Stephen L. Moore - Pacific Payback

Special thanks to aviation researcher Mark E. Horan, who generously shared his early Pacific War database. Mark collected interviews and personal papers from dozens of Dauntless airmen over the course of many years. His fresh material and editorial suggestions helped breathe fresh perspectives into the historic Battle of Midway.

PREFACE

O ne 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.

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-bomberthirty-three feet long and weighing more than three tons without fuel or ordnanceis the only extant SBD-2 that saw combat operation during the first six months of the Pacific War. Whats 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 Navys 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 squadronsScouting 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 verticalninety 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 planes 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 targets 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.