The SBD Dauntless — the dive bomber that won the Pacific War in four minutes.

It was not a beautiful airplane. The Douglas SBD Dauntless was stubby and slow, outclassed in speed by almost every fighter it would ever encounter, its perforated dive flaps giving it the aerodynamic elegance of a screen door. Douglas engineers had designed it in the late 1930s as a utilitarian instrument — a two-seat carrier dive bomber meant to deliver a single 1,000-pound bomb from a near-vertical plunge before pulling out at mast height and running for home. It vibrated badly, its range was marginal, and Navy pilots who flew the more glamorous Wildcat fighters called it the Speedy D with the particular cruelty of men who know they are safe making the joke. But on the morning of June 4, 1942, in a patch of the North Pacific about 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu, the Dauntless did something no airplane had done before or would do again: in approximately four minutes, it broke the back of the most powerful carrier striking force ever assembled and handed the United States a victory it had no right to expect.

The Japanese plan for the summer of 1942 was built on a logic that had served Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto well since Pearl Harbor — strike fast, strike everywhere, force the Americans to fight a war of attrition they could not win before their industrial production came online. Midway Atoll, the westernmost American outpost in the Pacific, was the lure. Yamamoto believed its capture would draw out the remnants of the U.S. Pacific Fleet — specifically the two or three aircraft carriers that had escaped Pearl Harbor — and that his Kido Butai, the six-carrier strike force that had already ravaged from Hawaii to Ceylon, would annihilate them in open water. What Yamamoto did not know, because the Americans had broken his fleet codes, was that Admiral Chester Nimitz was fully aware of the plan, the timetable, and the order of battle. Task Force 16, built around Enterprise and Hornet, and Task Force 17, built around the hastily patched Yorktown, were already waiting in ambush northeast of Midway when the Japanese fleet arrived.

The Kido Butai that steamed toward Midway on June 3rd comprised four fleet carriers — Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu — screened by two battleships, three cruisers, eleven destroyers, and commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the Pearl Harbor strike and every major Japanese carrier operation since. By any reasonable accounting, Nagumo held every advantage: more carriers, more aircraft, more experienced aviators, and complete tactical flexibility. What destroyed him was a single decision made under pressure on the morning of June 4th. Having launched a first strike against Midway and received word that a second strike was needed to neutralize the island's defenses, Nagumo ordered his reserve aircraft — which were armed with torpedoes for anti-ship work — rearmed with bombs for a land attack. When a scout plane then reported American surface ships in the area, possibly including a carrier, he ordered them rearmed with torpedoes again. His flight decks were crowded with aircraft in transition, fuel lines snaking across the deck, ordnance stacked wherever there was space, when the Americans found him.

What happened before the dive bombers arrived has been called, with justice, the bravest and most futile act in American naval history. Three torpedo bomber squadrons — VT-8 from Hornet, VT-6 from Enterprise, and VT-3 from Yorktown — attacked the Kido Butai between 0930 and 1015 without fighter escort, flying at low altitude in the slow, ponderous Douglas TBD Devastator. The results were catastrophic. Of the forty-one torpedo planes that attacked, thirty-five were shot down. VT-8, under Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, lost every single aircraft; of thirty men who flew that morning, only Ensign George Gay survived, clinging to a seat cushion in the water. Not one American torpedo struck a Japanese ship. But the slaughter had an unintended consequence that the airmen could not have planned and did not live to witness: the Japanese combat air patrol, the Zero fighters that had been flying high cover, had been drawn down to low altitude to massacre the torpedo planes. When the Dauntlesses arrived from above, the sky was open.

The man who found the Kido Butai was Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McClusky, air group commander aboard Enterprise, leading thirty-three Dauntlesses from Scouting Six and Bombing Six. He had reached the expected position of the Japanese fleet and found empty ocean — Nagumo had altered course — and instead of turning back with his fuel running low, McClusky made a calculated guess and turned southwest. What he saw below him was the destroyer Arashi, racing at full speed to rejoin the main fleet after detaching to depth-charge an American submarine. McClusky followed her wake like a compass needle and, at 1002, found the four carriers of the Kido Butai spread across ten miles of sea, their flight decks crowded with fueled and armed aircraft, crews racing to complete the rearmament that Nagumo had ordered twice that morning. From altitude, McClusky could see the wakes of the turning ships and the tiny figures moving on the deck of Akagi, Nagumo's flagship. He split his attack: VS-6 would take the nearer carrier, VB-6 the farther. Almost simultaneously, fifteen Dauntlesses from Yorktown under Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie arrived from a different bearing, their navigation independent of McClusky's, their timing a coincidence that the Japanese could only have experienced as an act of God.

The attack began at approximately 1022. McClusky pushed over into his dive on Akagi; Gallaher's VS-6 rolled onto Kaga; Leslie's VB-3 selected Soryu. In the chaos of the split, Lieutenant Commander Richard Best of VB-6 saw that both VB-6 and VS-6 were converging on Kaga and peeled away with only two wingmen to strike Akagi independently. Best put one 1,000-pound bomb directly into Akagi's midship elevator, detonating the stacked ordnance below; Kaga took four hits in rapid succession, one of which destroyed her bridge and killed her captain instantly; Soryu took three hits and was abandoned within twenty minutes. The entire sequence — three fleet carriers mortally struck — consumed roughly four minutes of clock time. Nagumo was transferred off Akagi by rope as she burned. By nightfall, all three carriers had sunk. Hiryu, which had evaded the morning attack, launched a counterstrike that crippled Yorktown before Dauntlesses from Enterprise found her in the late afternoon and sent four bombs into her flight deck; she sank the following morning. Japan had lost four fleet carriers, 248 aircraft, and more than three thousand men, including a generation of experienced naval aviators it could never replace.

The SBD Dauntless went on to serve through the Solomons campaign and beyond, eventually sinking more enemy shipping than any other Allied aircraft in the Pacific theater. By the time it was retired from frontline service in 1944 — replaced by the faster Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, a plane many pilots considered inferior despite its modern lines — the Dauntless had accumulated a record unmatched by any dive bomber in any navy: six Japanese carriers sunk, fourteen other ships sent to the bottom, and the decisive battle of the Pacific War won on a fuel load so thin that McClusky landed aboard Enterprise with dry tanks. The Navy's accounting after Midway was blunt: in exchange for approximately forty Dauntlesses and their crews, the United States had eliminated Japanese naval air superiority permanently. The strategic initiative never returned to Tokyo.

The men who flew Dauntlesses trained extensively at Naval Air Station North Island on Coronado, and many of the pilots who died at Midway had spent months over San Diego Bay learning the steep attack angle — between seventy and ninety degrees — that made the dive bomber lethal and the pullout survivable. USS Midway, now berthed as a museum ship at the foot of Harbor Drive, takes her name from that battle, a ship named for the moment when the trajectory of the entire Pacific war hinged on whether thirty-odd airplanes could find their target. The carriers of the Kido Butai burned for days after June 4th, their pyres visible for miles. In the waters off Midway, beneath two and a half miles of ocean, Akagi and Kaga still lie as they fell — monuments, in their way, to the most consequential four minutes in the history of naval aviation, delivered by the ugliest, most forgettable, most essential airplane the United States Navy ever put to sea.