Douglas TBD Devastator - Operational History

Operational History

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 Island and Marcus Island, 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 Shōhō on 7 May, but failed to hit the Shōkaku the next day.

Problems were discovered with the Mark 13 torpedo at this point. Many were seen to hit the target yet fail to explode; there was also a tendency to run deeper than the set depth. It took over a year for the problems 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, a majority of the type still operational, were launched from Hornet, Enterprise and Yorktown to attack the Japanese fleet. The sorties were not well coordinated, in part because Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance ordered a strike on the enemy carriers immediately after they were discovered, rather than spending time assembling a well-coordinated attack involving the different types of aircraft - fighters, bombers, torpedo planes - reasoning that attacking the Japanese would prevent a counterstrike against the US carriers. The TBDs from Hornet and Enterprise lost contact with their fighter escort and started their attacks without fighter protection.

The Devastator proved to be a death trap for its crews: slow and scarcely maneuverable, with light defensive weaponry and poor armor relative to the weapons of the time; its speed on a glide-bombing approach was a mere 200 mph (320 km/h), making it easy prey for fighters and defensive guns alike. The aerial torpedo could not even be released at speeds above 115 mph (185 km/h). 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 make sharp evasive maneuvers. Furthermore, the actions of the Devastator aircrews that day drew the Japanese air cover out of position. This window of opportunity was exploited by the late-arriving Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers led by Lieutenant Commander C. Wade McClusky and Max Leslie, and three of the four Japanese carriers were fatally damaged shortly afterwards.

The Navy immediately withdrew the TBD from front-line units after Midway; in any case, there were only 39 aircraft left. They remained in service briefly in the Atlantic and in training squadrons until 1944. The original prototype finished its career at NAS Norman, Oklahoma, and the last TBD in the U.S. 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 at Midway. The Avengers' only successes in 1942 would be against the light carrier Ryūjō and the battleship Hiei In the initial part of the Pacific War, the poor performances of US torpedo bombers was due to the vulnerability of that type in general against AAA fire 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 discovered and 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.

After the debacle at Midway, the surviving TBD Devastators in VT-4 and VT-7 remained in service for a short time before being shipped back to the United States where the aircraft were relegated to training duties for pilots and mechanics or were destroyed following use as instructional airframes for fire-fighting training. By late 1944, no TBD Devastators were left in the US Navy inventory.