One 1,000 hp Wright R-1820-52 radial engine It crashed into the waters of Lake Michigan on 24 August 1944, after suffering an engine failure while launching from the training carrier Sable (IX-81). The SBD-4 (Bureau Number 06833) in the Sunken Treasures exhibit served in squadrons at Naval Air Station (NAS) Norfolk, Virginia, before assignment to the Carrier Qualification Training Unit (CQTU) at NAS Glenview, Illinois. An SBD-6 was also in design but Dauntless production ended in 1944, in favor of the new SB2C Helldiver. Over 2,400 SBD-5s were built, mostly at Douglas' Tulsa, Oklahoma, plant. The most produced of all SBD variants, the SBD-5 was powered by a 1,200 horsepower R-1820-60 radial engine and had a larger ammunition capacity. Subsequent variants included the SBD-4, with a 24-volt electrical system, and the SBD-5. In March 1941 the Navy started to receive the SBD-3, with self-sealing fuel tanks and increased weaponry. The first generation of SBDs deployed late in 1940 and early 1941. Initial orders were placed in April 1939. By July 1944, a total of 5,936 examples of the aircraft had rolled off Douglas assembly lines, far more than were originally planned and a testament to the ruggedness and capability of one of the outstanding Navy attack aircraft of World War II. Though the plane was relatively slow and lightly armed, SBD pilots and gunners also shot down 138 enemy aircraft. Though replaced starting in 1943, Navy and Marine Corps Dauntless pilots participated in many of the Pacific War's most significant battles, achieving their greatest victory at Midway, where they sank four Japanese carriers. entered World War II, ten squadrons operated the SBD. More commonly, he and his kind were called radioman-gunners, radio-gunners, rear-gunners, back-seat men, or rear-seaters. Aviation radioman second class was his rating.
The initial production aircraft entered service in 1940, and by the time the U.S. At the Battle of Midway in June 1942, he flew off the aircraft carrier Hornet (CV-8) in the rear seat of an SBD Dauntless dive bomber. An innovative design, the aircraft incorporated perforated dive-flaps which stabilized and slowed it during bombing runs of seventy-plus degree dives. No tactic represented Naval Aviation's rise to preeminence during World War II more than dive-bombing, and no aircraft embodied the success of this tactic more than the Douglas SBD Dauntless. It is displayed largely as it appeared while underwater. When retired from fleet service, some aircraft were sent to the training command, this example of the SBD-4 found at the bottom of Lake Michigan some fifty years after it crashed during carrier qualification training.
The Douglas SBD Dauntless was the front-line Navy and Marine Corps dive-bomber at the onset of the Pacific War, and served in combat throughout the war though in decreasing numbers as it was supplanted by the SB2C Helldiver.
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