They also helped to create the outstanding lateral-control handling qualities that would make the SBD so effective at precisely altering its aim during a near-vertical dive, as well as its docile behavior during carrier landings. These slots kept the airflow attached and cured the XBT-1’s nasty stall characteristics. The XBT-2 got letterbox wing slots-not leading-edge slots but fixed flow-throughs well aft of the leading edge, mid-chord directly ahead of the ailerons. By the time Donald Douglas took over the Northrop company, Heinemann had fixed its failings and developed the much-improved XBT-2, the direct forerunner of the Dauntless. Building on this substantial foundation, Heinemann initially came up with the ill-handling Northrop XBT-1 dive bomber of 1936.

Northrop was already producing for the Air Corps the pre-SBD, Gamma-based A-17A dive bomber. Its designer, Ed Heinemann, worked for Jack Northrop, who had developed the sleek, precedential Alpha, Beta and Gamma mailplanes of the late 1920s and early ’30s. The SBD started out as a Northrop, not a Douglas. Ed Heinemann’s 1936 Northrop XBT-1 (top) handled poorly, but his Douglas XBT-2 (above) fixed many of its problems and led directly to the SBD. The Dauntless played a major role in reducing Japan’s cadre of world-class navy pilots to a bunch of low-time novices left to fling their airplanes and bodies at American ships as kamikazes. With those bombs, SBDs sank five of Japan’s eight fleet aircraft carriers and a sixth light carrier. With a wingspan half an inch narrower than the AT-6’s, the SBD-5 had exactly twice the trainer’s horsepower and only moderately better performance-40 mph more cruise speed, a 1,300-foot higher ceiling, 500 feet per minute better rate of climb-but the extra grunt gave it the ability to typically carry a 1,200-pound bombload, including a ship-killing half-tonner under the fuselage centerline. The two airplanes are nearly identical in size, shape and detail. Show someone who isn’t an aviation fan photos of a Dauntless and a North American AT-6 trainer, which first flew in 1935, and they won’t be able to tell the difference. types that flew major combat in WWII, none was as old-fashioned and low-tech as the SBD.

Name the most effective American bombers of World War II and you’ll certainly come up with the B-17, B-24 and B-29, maybe the twin-engine B-25, but how many will think to include the little Douglas SBD Dauntless on the list? The Dauntless dive bomber flew almost entirely over the Pacific, and there it did more to win the war than any other bomber type, even including the Superfort’s two atom bomb missions. Dauntless Forever: The Dive Bomber That Changed the Course of World War II Close

Dauntless air