They should have changed the name to Devastating! Very factual, 5s!

IIRC, Douglas made it up with the Dauntless and the Wildcat came along too. Grumman's Avenger also took terrible losses at Midway with five of six shot down, but performed better afterwards and throughout World War II. In English service it was known as the Tarpon.

Some of the Devastator problems can be linked to the locking bolts for the wings which had an indicator in the cockpit. Too many pilots failed to check if the wings were locked and plunged from the air into the sea on take-off.

Not a good way to start combat!

Next best thing to a Brewster Buffalo. The Finns never forgave us for that one. I heard somewhere that the Navy solved its early torpedo problems by machining the firing pins from the propeller shafts of Japanese planes shot down over Pearl Harbor. I wonder if there is any film footage of a Devastator taking off with its wings unlocked. That would be a scary sight.

Patrick, the 44 Buffalos supplied to Finland had excellent records against the Soviets. The Finns used the designation B-239 and swapped engines for the 1000 hp Soviet captured M63 engines. They also changed the armament and scored the most pilot victories per unit. In the Pacific it was a different story against the Japanese. Finnish B-239s were used until 1944! After the Germans the Finns have the highest ace scores and received lots of German weapons to upgrade with :)

Too bad the US Navy didn't have some Finnish mechanics to upgrade their airplanes. A 20mm cannon beats two .30 cal MG's when you're trying to bring down enemy bombers. What sort of planes were the Russians flying in the Winter and Continuation Wars?

The Finns with Brewster B-239s shot down Il-16s, LAGG-3s, Yaks 1 and 7, Lend Lease Hurricanes, P-40s, and P-39s and a few Soviet light bombers. Of the 44 received, only 19 were lost in combat and yet they shot down almost 500 Soviet a/c. Their avg. was 26 to 1 kill rate for that plane making it the most successful in history for its low number. Of course, the Bf 109 was the greatest fighter of all time with a longevity of 10 years in Germany and with 35,000+ produced. It killed over 15,000 enemy aircraft and made hundreds of Aces/Experten. It lived on for decades after WW2 in Spain, France, Czechoslovakia, and was Israel's first fighter!!! The Germans had the edge having had practice in the Spanish Civil War. But the Finns were tough as nails and second only to the Germans as combat pilots... and NO, the Israelis don't even come close postwar with their kills by plane or by pilot. Neither does the US. No F-15 ever lost, eh? Yeah, b/c it never faced a real threat. Take a F-15C and try to fly it through the Russian or Chinese ADS NOW. A Flanker family member or MiG-35 or even Chinese J-20 will rise up to challenge and they have BVR missiles too and WILL fight with quality planes, pilots, and weapons. Can't be said of the cheap and shoddy USSR-era exports to Third World nations or Red satellites with crappy pilots under ground control and no spare parts with no good weapons! And lastly, the PTO was much different than the ETO as the Japanese were tenacious, fanatical and had both the IJA and IJN aircraft operating from carriers AND land. They took the threat to their home islands seriously. No amount of improvement for the Devastator would have helped in powerplant switch and better weapons. It was a 3-crewed glasshouse dog with slow speed and poor armament, even torps that failed to explode on contact! A redesign for a single seat machine with a high power radial and heavy cannon in the wings plus strictly BOMBs... might have been more successful, but why build that when the USN was receiving better planes already available???

As a Finn I have something to say about Brewster F2A-1. Finnish Air Force considered it as an excellent plane, and it was agile enough to tackle anything faster and faster to zoom anything more agile. Some 40 Finnish pilots became aces on Brewster, and our top ace, Ilmari Juutilainen, scored 36 of his 94 victories on Brewsters. It had few vices, and the main drawback was the weak tail wheel. As a naval plane, it had good ground handling properties, and long enough range to be deployed in the Lapland War 1944-1945. Our Air Force loved it, and the old wartime emblem of the Brewster squadron, the Leaping Lynx, is today the insignia of Karelian Wing.

Brewster wasn't a dog; it was just employed in a wrong way against a wrong enemy by wrong pilots at Midway - VMF-223 pilots were mostly green guys fresh from States.

On what comes to TBD: it was the crappy Bliss-Leavitt Mk. 13 torpedo as much its undoing as the design itself. The TBD design was sound in 1940; in 1942 it was sadly obsolete. It should have been relegated to advanced trainer.

The Bliss-Leavitt Mk.13 torpedo was inexcusably bad. It more often failed to explode than it did. The culprit was the detonator, which had a design failure. The same problem plagued the submarine launched Mk. 14 torpedo. It took USN almost a year to solve the problem. In 1943 the USN torpedoes weren't duds anymore.

The Fleet Air Arm torpedo plane, Fairey Swordfish, was obsolete already in 1939. But to credit the FAA, the British torpedoes usually worked exactly as intended.

Thanks Suzanna for your input. I've already expressed my views with the TBD, but will add that most German air-launched torpedoes were launched by bombers converted to AS duties rather than by fighters or fighter-bombers. Fw-190s were tested with torpedoes and rocket-powered Kurt roll bombs (F-8s) but not used. Germans used ASM Hs-293 and Fritz-X guided bombs and had large caliber guns installed up to Duka 88mm! The converted Piaggio P-108A Artillerieman had a 102mm gun installed in the nose! And the Kriegsmarine did fit some ships with cable rocket defense! FYI