June fourth, nineteen forty-two. ten twenty-two in the morning. Roughly one hundred fifty miles northwest of Midway Atoll. The first of forty-eight Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers from the carriers Enterprise and Yorktown rolls over and drops into a seventy-degree dive from nearly twenty thousand feet. Below them steams the First Carrier Striking Force of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Four fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu. Two battleships, Haruna and Kirishima. Two heavy cruisers. A light cruiser and twelve destroyers. Roughly two hundred fifty aircraft, flown by the most experienced carrier aircrews on earth. In six months of war, this force had struck Pearl Harbor, Darwin, and Ceylon and had not lost a ship. In the previous hour, forty-one American torpedo bombers had attacked it. thirty-five were shot down. Not a single torpedo hit.

The airplane now diving on the Japanese fleet was, by the United States Navy's own planning, obsolete. The Navy had signed the production contract for the Dauntless in April nineteen thirty-nine. One month later, on the fifteenth of May, it ordered the prototype of the aircraft meant to replace it. Top speed, two hundred fifty miles per hour. The Zero fighters defending the fleet below could do three hundred thirty-one. And fifty-five days after this morning, the United States Army would send seven of the very same airframe against a Japanese convoy off New Guinea, lose six, and pull the type out of combat as too slow, too short-legged, and too lightly armed to survive.

Six minutes after ten twenty-two, Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu were burning from end to end. Shortly after five o'clock that afternoon, Hiryu was burning too. By nine twelve the next morning, all four were on the floor of the Pacific. An aircraft the Navy had already scheduled for replacement had destroyed the core of the Japanese carrier fleet in a single day. That is the paradox at the center of this story. How did an airplane the experts had written off do what the torpedo bombers, the heavy bombers, and the submarines could not? The answer is not the airplane. The answer is what the United States Navy had spent sixteen years building around it.

By the spring of nineteen forty-two, the balance of the Pacific war rested on a handful of hulls. Japan had opened the war with six fleet carriers. The United States had been knocked down to three. Lexington had been sunk at the Coral Sea on the eighth of May. Saratoga had taken a submarine torpedo in January and was still under repair. Yorktown had been bombed at the Coral Sea and needed repairs that should have taken weeks. Pearl Harbor Navy Yard gave her three days. Admiral Yamamoto's plan was to seize Midway, draw the surviving American carriers out to defend it, and sink them. If it worked, Hawaii lay open and the United States would have no carrier force in the Pacific for a year. Admiral Nimitz's codebreakers had read enough of the Japanese naval cipher to know the target and roughly the date. He put Enterprise, Hornet, and the patched Yorktown northeast of the atoll, in position for an ambush. But an ambush only works if the weapon at the end of it kills. And every weapon the Americans could bring to Midway had a problem.

The torpedo bomber was supposed to be the ship-killer. Navy doctrine said bombs wrecked a carrier's deck, and torpedoes sent her to the bottom. The aircraft that would deliver them was the Douglas TBD Devastator, designed in nineteen thirty-four, which had to fly straight and level at little more than one hundred knots, a few dozen feet above the water, to launch its weapon. Against a fleet with more than forty Zeros overhead, that was a death sentence. On the morning of June fourth, it was.

The heavy bomber was the Army's answer. Since Billy Mitchell's tests of nineteen twenty-one, the Army had argued that high-altitude bombers could sink any fleet afloat. Army B seventeens flew fifty-five sorties against the Japanese from Midway between the third and the fifth of June. Their crews claimed twenty-two direct hits. Postwar examination of the Japanese records found the true number. Zero.

And then there was the dive bomber. On paper, it was the weakest of the three. The Dauntless had been an interim aircraft from the day it was delivered. Its replacement, the Curtiss S B two C Helldiver, had been ordered as a prototype on the fifteenth of May, nineteen thirty-nine. The first Dauntless did not reach a Marine squadron until nineteen forty, and the Navy's carrier squadrons did not get theirs until the last weeks of that year. Everyone in the Bureau of Aeronautics expected the Helldiver to take over by nineteen forty-two. The Dauntless was a placeholder. A placeholder with a one thousand horsepower engine and a top speed of two hundred fifty miles per hour, against a fighter that did three hundred thirty-one and could out-climb and out-turn it with ease. At Midway, the dive bombers flew without a single fighter escort. The Wildcats went with the torpedo planes.

The Army had already delivered its verdict on the aircraft. Its version, the A twenty-four Banshee, was the same airframe with the tailhook removed. The Army had flown it from Java in February and early March nineteen forty-two and lost two shot down and three wrecked beyond repair. On the twenty-ninth of July, nineteen forty-two, seven A twenty-fours attacked a Japanese convoy off Buna, New Guinea. Five were shot down. A sixth was so badly damaged it never made it home. One aircraft survived. The Army's pilots judged the type too slow, too short-ranged, and too poorly armed to live, and the Banshee was relegated to training and target-towing.

Even the Marines on Midway proved the point. Marine Scout Bombing Squadron two forty-one flew sixteen Dauntlesses against the Japanese carriers on the morning of June fourth, hours before the Navy squadrons arrived. Its pilots were too new to the aircraft to attempt a proper dive. They attacked in shallow glides instead. Major Lofton Henderson, the commanding officer, was shot down. Eight of the sixteen came home. They scored no hits at all. Same airplane. Same morning. Same targets. Nothing.

So on the fourth of June, nineteen forty-two, the numbers were clear. The Dauntless was slow, already replaced on paper, flying unescorted, and had just failed in Army hands and in Marine hands. What the numbers could not show was what the Navy had built into the machine and into the men who flew it.

It began with a technique, not an airplane. In late nineteen twenty-six, Lieutenant Commander Frank Wagner's Fighting Squadron Two took its Curtiss F six C Hawk fighters out over San Diego and dove them almost vertically at a target one hundred feet long and forty-five feet wide. They dropped forty-five bombs and hit with nineteen. Rear Admiral Joseph Reeves reported the results to Washington on the thirteenth of December, nineteen twenty-six. Seven months later, on the sixteenth of July, nineteen twenty-seven, Major Ross Rowell led five Marine de Havilland D H four biplanes in the first organized dive-bombing attack ever made against troops in combat, breaking up a rebel assault on the Marine garrison at Ocotal, Nicaragua. The rest of the world took notes. Japan ordered the Heinkel H E fifty dive bomber from Germany in nineteen thirty-one, and the line of development from it ran through the Aichi D one A to the Aichi D three A Val that bombed Pearl Harbor. In September nineteen thirty-three, the German Air Ministry wired funds to the Curtiss factory in Buffalo, New York, for two Hawk two fighters at Ernst Udet's request. They reached Germany in October. The Junkers J U eighty-seven Stuka first flew on the thirteenth of September, nineteen thirty-five. By the time the Second World War began, every major navy and air force had copied dive bombing from the United States Navy. The United States Navy had been practicing it for thirteen years.

That practice shaped the fleet. By nineteen forty-one, every American fleet carrier carried two eighteen-plane Dauntless squadrons, one for scouting and one for bombing. Nearly half of each air group was dive bombers. Their pilots trained to find a fleet at the end of a two hundred mile search leg, climb to fifteen thousand or twenty thousand feet, push over at seventy degrees, hold the dive for thirty to forty seconds, and release between two thousand and fifteen hundred feet above a maneuvering ship.

The aircraft that let them do it came out of the Northrop plant at El Segundo, California. Design work on the Northrop B T one began in nineteen thirty-five under a young engineer named Ed Heinemann. Douglas absorbed Northrop's El Segundo division in nineteen thirty-seven, and the modifications ordered in November nineteen thirty-seven turned the B T one into the SBD. The production machine was an all-metal, stressed-skin monoplane with a nine-cylinder Wright R eighteen twenty dash fifty-two Cyclone radial of one thousand horsepower. Wingspan, forty-one feet six inches. Length, thirty-three feet. Empty weight, six thousand three hundred forty-five pounds. Loaded, ten thousand four hundred pounds. Maximum speed, two hundred fifty miles per hour. Range with a bomb aboard, thirteen hundred forty-five miles. The wings did not fold. Douglas chose structural strength over deck space, because a dive bomber pulling out at the bottom of a seventy-degree dive needed a wing that would not come off.

The hidden capability was on the trailing edge of that wing. The B T one had been fitted with split flaps that opened above and below the wing to act as dive brakes. In testing they set up a violent buffet that shook the tail and ruined the pilot's aim. The fix was simple and brilliant. The flaps were drilled full of holes. Air bled through the perforations, the turbulent wake behind the flaps broke up, and the buffeting stopped. With the flaps open, the Dauntless would hold a dive at a steady two hundred forty knots, roughly two hundred seventy-five miles per hour, with the nose pointed almost straight down. The pilot was no longer fighting a runaway aircraft. He was riding a stable gun platform for half a minute, with the target growing in the telescopic sight in front of his face.

Beneath the fuselage hung the weapon. A one thousand pound bomb for the bombing squadrons. A five hundred pounder, with two one hundred pound bombs under the wings, for the scouts. The bomb did not simply drop. It rode a hinged steel crutch that swung it down and forward through a ninety-degree arc, clear of the propeller, before letting it go. At seventy degrees, a bomb released straight from the belly could have gone through the propeller disc. The crutch made the steep dive possible, and the steep dive made the bomb accurate.

The S B D three, the version the carrier squadrons flew at Midway, added self-sealing fuel tanks, armor plate, two fifty-caliber machine guns in the cowling, and a pair of thirty-caliber guns on a flexible mount for the rear gunner. five hundred eighty-four of that version were built. The Japanese equivalent, the Aichi D three A Val, had fixed landing gear, a top speed of about two hundred forty miles per hour, and carried a two hundred fifty kilogram bomb, five hundred fifty-one pounds. The Dauntless's standard ship-killing bomb weighed nearly twice as much.

And the replacement that had made the Dauntless obsolete on paper? The Helldiver prototype first flew on the eighteenth of December, nineteen forty. On the twenty-first of December, nineteen forty-one, two weeks after Pearl Harbor, it shed a wing in a dive test and was destroyed. The Navy demanded eight hundred eighty design changes before it would accept the aircraft. Those changes added forty-two percent to its weight. The Helldiver did not fly its first combat mission until the eleventh of November, nineteen forty-three, against Rabaul. For the first twenty-three months of the Pacific war, the placeholder fought alone.

At four thirty on the morning of June fourth, Vice Admiral Nagumo's four carriers launched one hundred eight aircraft against Midway in seven minutes. Shortly after five thirty, a Catalina flying boat reported the Japanese carriers roughly one hundred eighty miles northwest of the atoll. A few minutes after seven, Enterprise and Hornet began launching. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the Enterprise air group commander, left the ship with thirty-three Dauntlesses, the one thousand pound bombs of Bombing Six and the five hundred pounders of Scouting Six, and was ordered to proceed without waiting for the torpedo squadron. Hornet's thirty-four dive bombers took a different heading, never found the enemy, and played no part in the battle. Yorktown began launching at eight thirty-eight. Her contribution was seventeen Dauntlesses of Bombing Three under Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie, twelve Devastators, and six Wildcats.

The torpedo bombers found the Japanese first. At nine twenty, Hornet's Torpedo Eight attacked alone. All fifteen aircraft were shot down. One man survived out of thirty. At nine forty, Enterprise's Torpedo Six went in with fourteen aircraft and lost ten. Just after ten, Yorktown's Torpedo Three attacked with twelve and lost ten. Not one torpedo struck. But the slaughter had a consequence the Japanese did not see coming. More than forty Zeros of the combat air patrol had been drawn down to wave-top height to kill the Devastators. Nobody was watching the sky above fifteen thousand feet.

McClusky, meanwhile, had reached the end of his search leg at nine twenty and found empty ocean. His squadrons had been in the air for more than an hour and a half. By his own calculation he could hold the search for fifteen more minutes before fuel would force him home. He turned north. At nine fifty-five, through a gap in the clouds, he saw the long white wake of a single Japanese destroyer, Arashi, running at high speed toward the northeast. She had been chasing the American submarine Nautilus and was hurrying to rejoin the fleet. McClusky followed her. A few minutes later, the wakes of the carrier force spread across the sea ahead of him. Two of his aircraft had already dropped out with fuel trouble. The rest, thirty-one Dauntlesses, began their run at nearly twenty thousand feet. Admiral Nimitz would later write that McClusky's decision to keep searching had decided the fate of the American carrier force and of the battle.

At ten twenty-two, the Enterprise squadrons pushed over. A garbled order sent both Scouting Six and most of Bombing Six down on the same ship, Kaga, thirty-eight thousand two hundred tons, the largest carrier in the Japanese force. twenty-five Dauntlesses dove on her. Lieutenant Richard Best, commanding Bombing Six, saw the pile-up, pulled his own three-plane section out of the dive, and swung toward Akagi, the flagship.

Kaga was hit at least four times. One five hundred pound bomb struck near the aft elevator and set the crew spaces below on fire. A second went through the forward elevator into the upper hangar and detonated among armed and fueled aircraft. A third burst on the island, destroyed the bridge, and killed Captain Jisaku Okada and most of his staff. Then a one thousand pound bomb from Bombing Six hit amidships, punched through the flight deck, and exploded inside the upper hangar. The fire mains broke. The emergency generator failed. The carbon dioxide fire suppression system went down. Aviation fuel poured from ruptured lines into a hangar holding roughly eighty thousand pounds of bombs and torpedoes, stacked around the deck because Nagumo's crews had been changing the loads on their aircraft all morning. The hangar sides blew outward.

At ten twenty-six, Best's three aircraft reached Akagi. One bomb fell sixteen to thirty-three feet off her port side. One went into the water beside her stern. The third, a one thousand pounder, landed at the aft edge of the middle elevator and went off in the upper hangar among fully armed and fueled torpedo bombers. One bomb, in exactly the wrong place for the Japanese. At ten forty, as Akagi twisted away from the burning Kaga, her rudder jammed thirty degrees to starboard. The near miss by the stern had done it. At ten forty-six, with the bridge filling with smoke, Nagumo left his flagship.

At ten twenty-five, Leslie's Bombing Three went down on Soryu. Four of his seventeen aircraft, his own among them, had lost their bombs on the way in. A faulty electrical arming switch had dropped them into the sea when the pilots armed them. Leslie dove anyway and strafed the flight deck with his cowl guns. The thirteen that still had bombs put three one thousand pounders into Soryu. One penetrated to the lower hangar amidships. Two burst in the upper hangar, one forward and one aft. Steam lines ruptured in the boiler rooms. Soryu lost way at ten forty. Her crew was ordered to abandon ship at ten forty-five.

Six minutes. Three carriers. The Japanese fighters, down at sea level, had not seen the Dauntlesses until the bombs were already falling. The Dauntless crews paid for it on the way home. Of the thirty-three aircraft Enterprise had launched, eighteen did not return. Most of them never saw a Zero. They ran their tanks dry on the long flight back and ditched in the open Pacific.

Hiryu, screened by a rain squall to the north, was untouched. Rear Admiral Yamaguchi hit back. At ten fifty-four she launched eighteen Vals and six Zeros. Seven of the dive bombers reached Yorktown and put three bombs into her. At thirteen thirty she launched ten Kates and six Zeros, and two torpedoes opened Yorktown's side, knocked out three boilers, and cut her electrical power. At fifteen hundred Yorktown was abandoned. But that afternoon a Yorktown scout had found Hiryu. At fifteen twenty-five, Enterprise launched twenty-four Dauntlesses, ten of her own and fourteen of Yorktown's orphans, aircraft that had landed aboard because their own deck was gone. At seventeen oh one they came down on Hiryu through more than a dozen Zeros. Four one thousand pound bombs hit her, three on the forward flight deck and one on the forward elevator. The forward half of the flight deck collapsed into the hangar. A section of the elevator was thrown against the bridge. Fires spread through the aircraft on the hangar deck and could not be controlled.

The results came in through the night. Soryu went down shortly after seven that evening. seven hundred eleven of the eleven hundred and three men aboard went with her. Kaga sank at seven twenty-five after her escorts torpedoed the burning hulk. eight hundred eleven of her crew were dead. Akagi burned until four fifty on the morning of the fifth, when Yamamoto ordered her scuttled. Four destroyers fired one torpedo each. She went down bow first at five twenty with two hundred sixty-seven of her crew. Hiryu's engines had stopped at eleven twenty-three the night before. Her crew abandoned her at three fifteen, a destroyer torpedoed her at five ten, and she sank at nine twelve on the morning of June fifth. three hundred eighty-nine men were still aboard. Two days later, the Dauntlesses of Enterprise and Hornet found the heavy cruiser Mikuma, crippled in a collision during the retreat, and sank her as well.

The ledger of Midway. Japan lost four fleet carriers totaling one hundred nineteen thousand one hundred tons, one heavy cruiser, two hundred forty-eight aircraft, and three thousand fifty-seven men. two thousand one hundred eighty-one of the dead were carrier crew. one hundred ten of them were veteran aviators, close to a quarter of the aircrew embarked. The United States lost Yorktown, the destroyer Hammann, about one hundred fifty aircraft, and three hundred seven men.

Now set the weapons side by side. The torpedo bombers, forty-one launched, thirty-five lost, no hits. The B seventeens, fifty-five sorties, twenty-two hits claimed, no hits scored. The Marine glide-bombers, sixteen Dauntlesses flown without dive training, no hits. The submarine Nautilus fired four torpedoes at the burning Kaga that afternoon. One hit her and failed to explode. The Navy's carrier dive bombers scored at least twelve direct hits on four carriers and killed every one of them. Every ship Japan lost at Midway was sunk by the same aircraft type, the one the Navy had already ordered replaced.

Midway was not an isolated result. On the tenth of December, nineteen forty-one, three days after Pearl Harbor, a Scouting Six Dauntless from Enterprise sank the submarine I seventy, the first Japanese warship destroyed by American aircraft in the war. On the seventh of May, nineteen forty-two, Dauntlesses and Devastators from Lexington and Yorktown sank the light carrier Shoho in the Coral Sea, and the next day put bombs into the fleet carrier Shokaku that kept her out of Midway. On the twenty-fourth of August, Saratoga's dive bombers and torpedo planes sank the carrier Ryujo at the Eastern Solomons. On the fourteenth of November, Dauntlesses from Enterprise and Henderson Field sank the heavy cruiser Kinugasa and most of an eleven-ship convoy carrying the troops meant to retake Guadalcanal. By the end of the war the Dauntless was credited with six aircraft carriers, fourteen cruisers, six destroyers, and fifteen transports and cargo ships. From Pearl Harbor through April nineteen forty-four it flew one million one hundred eighty-nine thousand four hundred seventy-three operational hours, about a quarter of all American carrier flight time in that period. Its crews called it Slow But Deadly, from its initials, and the name dates from Midway.

Its replacement never earned a name like that. When the Helldiver finally reached the fleet, crews found it heavier, larger, and shorter-ranged than the aircraft it replaced, with an electrical system that failed and a reputation they summed up as the Beast. The Dauntless's last carrier strike came on the twentieth of June, nineteen forty-four, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. two hundred fifteen aircraft launched at extreme range against the Japanese fleet at dusk. one hundred of them never made it back to a flight deck, most ditched in the dark with empty tanks. twenty-six Dauntlesses flew that strike. All twenty-six came home.

Douglas built five thousand nine hundred thirty-six of them. The last rolled out of El Segundo on the twenty-first of July, nineteen forty-four. By then, the airplane had changed how the Japanese Navy went to sea. After Midway, Japanese carriers fueled and armed their aircraft on the flight deck instead of in the hangar, drained their fuel lines when not in use, and built their new carriers with better firefighting systems. None of it replaced the one hundred ten aviators lost in a single morning or the four decks they had flown from. The Japanese carrier force never recovered the quality it had on the third of June, nineteen forty-two.

Return to ten twenty-two on the morning of June fourth. A two hundred fifty mile-per-hour aircraft the Navy had ordered replaced three years earlier, with no fighter cover, at the end of its fuel, rolls over above a fleet that has never been beaten. Six minutes later, three carriers are on fire. The same airframe in Army hands at Buna lost six of seven. The same airframe in Marine hands that morning hit nothing. The spec sheet had measured the speed. Combat measured the hits. What delivered the hits was a dive-bombing doctrine sixteen years in the making, two squadrons of trained dive-bomber pilots on every carrier, a set of perforated flaps that turned a terrifying dive into a stable one, and a steel crutch that swung a one thousand pound bomb clear of the propeller at seventy degrees. None of that showed up in a comparison of top speeds. All of it showed up on the hangar decks of Kaga, Akagi, Soryu, and Hiryu.

The experts who called the Dauntless obsolete were right about the airplane and wrong about the war. The Army that gave up on it was measuring the wrong thing. The Navy that kept it, and kept the men who knew how to use it, won the decisive battle of the Pacific with the weapon everyone else had already written off. Obsolete is a judgment about hardware. Victory is a judgment about institutions. On the fourth of June, nineteen forty-two, the institution was the one that had been diving on targets since nineteen twenty-six.