What It Was Like to Fight Inside an SBD Dauntless’s Rear Seat at Midway

It looked like the safest seat in the dive bomber: two machine guns, and a seat that swung round to face the enemy. But the man in the rear seat of an SBD Dauntless at Midway rode into battle facing backward, and his guns could do nothing about the fuel gauge. About half of Enterprise's Dauntlesses ended up in the sea that day, from battle damage or empty tanks. Four of them, with eight men aboard, missed the carrier and vanished without a trace. This is what the rear seat of a Dauntless did to the men in it at Midway: twelve dangers, in the order they came. The fuel burned circling the ship, the cold and the thin air of the climb, the Zeros that met the Marine gunners from Midway island, an empty ocean and their own side's guns for Hornet's squadron, a second gun that came out of the Coral Sea, a dive facing the tail, ammunition belts rising like snakes, the pullout where the fighters waited, the run out at wave height, a silent intercom, finding the ship again, and, last, the water. It is told from the men who sat there and the papers written about them: the action reports of Bombing Six, Scouting Six, Enterprise, Yorktown and Hornet, Admiral Spruance's report, the oral histories of Fred Bergeron, Don Hoff and Tony Schneider, Ed Anderson's wartime diary as read by the historian Ian W. Toll, the Marine Corps' history Marines at Midway, the Navy Cross and Distinguished Flying Cross citations, and the Navy's own 1946 combat statistics. In this video: Why the man guarding a dive bomber rode into battle facing backward, and what that meant in a dive A summer flying suit at nineteen thousand feet, and an oxygen supply that ran out on the climb A Marine gunner hit in the seat, and a plane holed one hundred seventy-nine times The second gun that came after the Coral Sea, and the day it came out of its mount in a gunner's lap A helmet that hit Fred Bergeron in the back of the head halfway down on the Soryu Ammunition belts rising like snakes while Don Hoff called out the altitude An intercom that went silent at wave height Ditching: what the gunner had to do in seconds, and what happened to a gunner who stowed his guns instead A note on contested details: Eugene Card was a corporal at Midway; his Navy Cross citation, written later, calls him a sergeant. The number of holes in the second Marine plane is given as 219 by the Navy and 259 by the Marine Corps history; this video says "more than two hundred". The twin thirty-caliber mount is documented for Bombing Six at Midway; some older SBD-2s, including the Marines', may still have carried a single gun. Don Hoff's account comes from the National WWII Museum's summary of his interview. How long Glenn Holden and his pilot drifted is given differently in different accounts; this video says only that they spent at least two nights adrift. The rate of fire quoted is the cyclic rate from a 1944 Navy gunnery manual. Primary sources: Bombing Squadron Six, report of action, 4 June 1942: https://history.navy.mil/research/arc... Scouting Squadron Six, report of action, 4–6 June 1942 (transcription): https://delgensoc.org/wp-content/uplo... USS Enterprise action report, Battle of Midway: https://www.history.navy.mil/research... USS Yorktown action reports, Midway and Coral Sea: https://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ship... and https://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ship... USS Hornet action report, Midway: https://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ship... Commander Task Force 16 (R. A. Spruance) to CINCPAC, 16 June 1942: https://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/... Ian W. Toll, "Rear-Seat Gunners at Midway," Naval History, May 2013: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-... Robert J. Cressman, "Prepared for This Rendezvous," Naval History, 1988: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-... Did someone in your family fly in the back seat of a Navy or Marine dive bomber, at Midway or anywhere else? Tell us their name, their squadron and what they did in the comments. We read every one, and some of them become episodes. #BattleOfMidway #SBDDauntless #WW2 #NavalAviation #MilitaryHistory