The Douglas SBD Dauntless, the Torpedo Squadrons Who Cleared the Sky Above Midway, and the Five Minutes That Sank Four Japanese Carriers in June of Nineteen Forty-Two

On the morning of June 4, 1942, Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers sank three Japanese fleet carriers - the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu - in approximately five minutes. A fourth carrier, the Hiryu, was destroyed later that afternoon. The Battle of Midway ended Japan’s six-month streak of Pacific dominance and stands as the most consequential single air attack in naval history.

The Aircraft Nobody Remembers

The Douglas SBD Dauntless was not a glamorous machine. Single radial engine, two-seat crew, top speed around 250 miles per hour. A Japanese Zero could run it down in level flight without breaking a sweat. By 1940, when it entered fleet service, it was already being discussed as a candidate for replacement.

What it had was a set of perforated dive flaps on the trailing edges of its wings. Open those flaps on the way down and the aircraft held a controlled 70-degree dive angle without accelerating past the point of no return. Other dive bombers of the era suffered from nose wander and shifting sight pictures in steep attacks. The Dauntless held steady. A trained pilot could track the target through the entire dive and release cleanly at around 2,000 feet.

The fleet called it Slow But Deadly. The SBD designation was officially from Douglas, but the pilots had their own interpretation, and it stuck.

Japan’s Six-Month Run and What the Americans Knew

By the spring of 1942, Japan had captured nearly every target it had aimed at. Pearl Harbor. Wake Island. The Philippines. Malaya. Singapore. Burma. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s carrier strike force, the Kido Butai, was the most battle-hardened naval air force on the planet. Its pilots had real combat time. Its ships were first-rate.

Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo commanded the Kido Butai and brought it northeast in early June toward Midway Atoll to draw out and destroy what remained of the American Pacific Fleet. His four carriers - Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu - carried over 250 aircraft combined. These were the same men and aircraft that had executed Pearl Harbor.

The Americans knew he was coming. Commander Joseph Rochefort and his team at Station HYPO in Pearl Harbor had broken enough Japanese naval code to know the general outline of Nagumo’s plan. Admiral Chester Nimitz positioned three carriers northeast of Midway before the Japanese arrived: the Enterprise, the Hornet, and the Yorktown.

The Yorktown had taken a bomb hit at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier and was told she needed 90 days in drydock. Nimitz gave her repair crew 72 hours. They worked around the clock and put her to sea in time.

The Torpedo Squadrons and What Their Deaths Accomplished

Three American carrier air groups launched against the Kido Butai on the morning of June 4. They were not coordinated. Different aircraft types flew at different speeds. Different squadrons launched from different carriers at different times. The groups arrived in separate threads rather than a unified strike.

The torpedo bombers went in first.

Torpedo Squadron Eight from the Hornet flew 15 Douglas TBD Devastators. The TBD was an older, slower aircraft that required a straight-and-level attack run at around 115 miles per hour over open water before the torpedo could run true. Every Zero above the Japanese fleet dove on them.

Fourteen of the fifteen aircraft from Torpedo Eight were shot down before they could deliver. The fifteenth went into the water after its attack run. Every pilot and aircrewman from Torpedo Eight was killed except one man - Ensign George Gay - who ended up in the Pacific hiding under a seat cushion from his flotation gear, watching the rest of the battle from the surface of the water.

Torpedo Squadron Six from the Enterprise followed. Ten of their 14 aircraft were shot down. Torpedo Squadron Three from the Yorktown: ten of 12 shot down. Not one American torpedo from any of the three squadron attacks hit a Japanese ship.

Three squadrons. Dozens of men killed. Zero torpedo hits. By any tactical measure, it was a catastrophe.

But the Zeros had followed those torpedo bombers down to wave-top level. They had chased slow, low-flying aircraft across the water until the attackers were gone. The Japanese combat air patrol was down low, out of position, burning its own fuel. At roughly 10,000 feet above the Japanese fleet, the dive bombers were arriving.

How Wade McClusky Found the Fleet

Commander Wade McClusky led the Enterprise’s two dive bomber squadrons. He navigated to the expected intercept point and found empty ocean. His pilots were burning fuel. The standard calculation said turn back.

McClusky pressed on. He spotted a Japanese destroyer below him running at high speed, a bright white wake cutting across the dark blue Pacific. He followed that wake. There, below him, was the Kido Butai.

Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie was approaching simultaneously with Bombing Three from the Yorktown, coming from a different direction, with no direct coordination with McClusky over the target. The two formations arrived at essentially the same moment.

The Five Minutes

Admiral Nagumo had spent the morning in a command debate that cost him everything. An earlier strike on Midway Island needed a follow-up attack, but intelligence suggested American carriers might be somewhere to his east. He ordered his aircraft rearmed, switching from land-attack bombs to torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs for a possible naval strike. The change was not complete. Weapons sat on hangar deck floors. Fuel lines ran across the decks. Aircraft were half-armed, half-ready.

McClusky pushed over into his attack.

Commander Dick Best, executive officer of Bombing Six, saw the rest of his squadron following McClusky’s group toward the Kaga. Best broke away, took his section of three aircraft, rolled in on the Akagi - Nagumo’s flagship - and put one bomb directly through her flight deck. One bomb from one section of three Dauntlesses. The Akagi was fatally wounded.

The Kaga took four hits from McClusky’s main group. The Soryu, targeted by Max Leslie’s Bombing Three from the Yorktown, took three hits. The Soryu’s fires reached her stored munitions and she began breaking apart within hours.

Three carriers in approximately five minutes.

The Kaga and Akagi burned through the day. Nagumo had to be persuaded by his staff to transfer his flag, nearly physically removed from a ship he refused to abandon. The Akagi was scuttled that evening. The Hiryu survived the morning attack and launched counterstrikes that found and damaged the Yorktown. That afternoon, dive bombers from the Enterprise located the Hiryu. Four bomb hits. She burned through the night and sank the following morning.

Japan lost four carriers in one day.

The Yorktown’s End

The Yorktown - the ship Nimitz had pushed back to sea in 72 hours - was hit by the Hiryu’s counterstrikes and had to be abandoned. She was later taken under tow, still afloat, when the Japanese submarine I-168 found her and put two more torpedoes into her. The Yorktown finally went under on June 6, 1942.

What Midway Actually Changed

Japan never again launched a naval offensive that threatened the central Pacific. The four carriers, the experienced aviators, the trained aircrewmen who had been flying together since before the war - they were not replaceable on any reasonable timeline. Japan’s naval aviation program never fully recovered.

The direct line runs from the torpedo bomber crews to every bomb that hit the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu. Torpedo Eight hit nothing. But they and the other torpedo squadrons pulled the Zeros down low, burned the fighters’ fuel, and cleared the sky above the fleet. Without that sacrifice, McClusky’s dive bombers arrive to find a full fighter screen waiting at altitude.

George Gay, the one man from Torpedo Eight who came home from that attack, spent the rest of the war as a flight instructor. He talked about what he saw from the water for the rest of his life. He died in 1994.

Dick Best, the man who put that bomb on the Akagi, never flew combat again. The oxygen system on his aircraft had been incorrectly serviced before the mission - an absorbent canister filled with caustic soda instead of the correct material. Best inhaled the fumes during the attack, contracted tuberculosis, and spent the next two years recovering in a hospital. He lived to be 91 years old and died in 2001.

The Dauntless After Midway

The Douglas SBD Dauntless went on to serve throughout the Pacific and ultimately sank more Japanese shipping than any other Allied aircraft in the war. The Navy began replacing it with the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver starting in 1943. Many of the pilots preferred the Dauntless. They had seen what it could do.

A handful of Dauntlesses survive in museums. The National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola has one. The National Air and Space Museum has another. Standing under one, the perforated dive flaps on the trailing edge of the wing are easy to overlook. They are not easy to forget once you understand what they made possible.

Key Takeaways

The SBD Dauntless sank three Japanese fleet carriers in approximately five minutes on June 4, 1942, and a fourth that same afternoon - a strategic blow Japan’s naval aviation never recovered from
Commander Wade McClusky found the Kido Butai only by pressing past his calculated fuel limit and following the wake of a Japanese destroyer; standard doctrine would have sent him home to empty ocean
All three American torpedo squadrons were effectively destroyed without scoring a single hit - but their low-level attacks pulled the Japanese fighter screen out of position, leaving the dive bombers with open sky above the fleet
Dick Best’s single bomb strike on the Akagi came from a three-plane section breaking away from the main group; one correctly-placed hit on a fleet carrier proved fatal
The Yorktown, repaired in 72 hours when she needed 90 days, survived long enough to contribute Bombing Three’s attack on the Soryu before being torpedoed by submarine I-168 on June 6

Sources: Gordon Prange, Miracle at Midway; Walter Lord, Incredible Victory; John Lundstrom, The First Team.