, 24 February 1942 , Horace F. Dobbs CRMP) taking off from , 4 June 1942. The twin .30 caliber machine guns in the rear were unique to VT-8. In the early days of the Pacific war, the TBD acquitted itself well during February and March 1942, with TBDs from
Enterprise and
Yorktown attacking targets in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands,
Wake and
Marcus Islands, while TBDs from
Yorktown and
Lexington struck Japanese shipping off
New Guinea on 10 March. In the
Battle of the Coral Sea Devastators helped sink the Japanese aircraft carrier on 7 May, but failed to hit another carrier, the , the next day. Many faults were discovered with the
Mark 13 torpedo at this point. Many were seen to hit the target yet failed to explode; there was also a tendency to run deeper than the set depth. It took over a year for the defects to be corrected. These problems were not fixed by the time of the
Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942. At Midway, a total of 41 Devastators, the majority of the type still operational, were launched from
Hornet,
Enterprise and
Yorktown to attack the Japanese fleet. The Devastator proved to be a death trap for its crews: slow and hardly maneuverable, with poor armor for the era; its speed on a glide-bombing approach was a mere , making it easy prey for fighters and defensive guns alike. The aerial torpedo could not even be released at speeds above . Torpedo delivery requires a long, straight-line attack run, making the aircraft vulnerable, and the slow speed of the aircraft made them easy targets for the
Mitsubishi A6M Zeros. Only four TBDs made it back to
Enterprise, none to
Hornet and two to
Yorktown, without scoring a torpedo hit. Nonetheless, their sacrifice was not completely in vain, as several TBDs managed to get within a few ship-lengths range of their targets before dropping their torpedoes, being close enough to be able to strafe the enemy ships and force the Japanese carriers to take sharp evasive maneuvers. By obliging the Japanese to keep their flight decks clear and to continually cycle and reinforce their
combat air patrols, they prevented any Japanese counter-attacks against the American carriers, just as Spruance had anticipated. These windows of opportunity were exploited by the late-arriving Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers led by
Lieutenant Commanders
C. Wade McClusky and
Max Leslie, which dive-bombed and fatally damaged three of the four Japanese carriers about one hour after the first TBD torpedo attacks had developed. While the Devastators faced the stiff defenses of the carriers and their fighters, their attacks served to distract the Japanese attention from the Dauntless dive bombers' strikes, resulting in relatively lighter resistance from the IJN carriers' defensive fighter patrols, and more effective American attacks that crippled the IJN carrier forces.
Obsolescence The Navy immediately withdrew the 39 remaining TBDs from frontline units after the failure at Midway. The surviving Devastators in
VT-4 and VT-7 remained in service briefly in the Atlantic and in training squadrons until 1944. Many were relegated to training duties for pilots and mechanics or were destroyed following use as instructional airframes for firefighting training. By late 1944, no TBD Devastators were left in the US Navy inventory. The original prototype finished its career at
NAS Norman,
Oklahoma; the last TBD in the US Navy was used by the Commander of Fleet Air Activities-West Coast. When his TBD was scrapped in November 1944, there were no more. None survived the war and there are none known to exist on dry land today. In fairness to the Devastator, the newer TBF Avengers were similarly ineffective in 1942, losing five out of six aircraft without scoring a hit during the Battle of Midway. The Avengers' only successes in 1942 would be against the light carrier and the battleship . In the initial part of the Pacific War, the poor performance of US torpedo bombers was due to the vulnerability of that type in general against fire from
anti-aircraft artillery and defending fighters, plus the inexperience of American pilots and lack of coordinated fighter cover, as well as serious defects in US torpedoes which were not officially corrected until the fall of 1943. It took growing American air superiority, improved attack coordination, and more experienced pilots, before the Avengers were able to successfully accomplish their roles in subsequent battles against Japanese surface forces. ==Variants==