The search for our SBD’s history reads like any great detective investigation. Researching other official Navy records, historians and researchers identified the Bureau Number error and proceeded to unravel the fascinating history of our SBD-2P. This created a conundrum for aviation historians. Handwritten notations on the aircraft’s history cards recorded 2173 instead of 2179. The SBD-3 crashed in an incident while assigned to the USS Hornet. Numbering 2,965 units, the SBD-5 had a 1,200 hp engine and increased ammunition capacity. The largest number of Dauntless dive bombers manufactured was the SBD-5. Of the 87 SBD-2s built, only 14 were configured for photoreconnaissance. Along with the design changes, sub-categories designate the versatile aircraft’s warfare applications.įor instance, the P in our SBD-2P designation indicates the original configuration the Navy ordered from the Douglas Aircraft plant for this aircraft to support photo-reconnaissance.
The design of the SBD evolved through six iterations during the war, adding self-sealing fuel tanks, armor, and increasing the number of machine guns. The Museum’s SBD-2P, a Pacific WWII veteran, was sent to our friends at the Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where they have been working to restore the aircraft to its former glory. Because it was going to take a fair bit of time to restore Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum’s SBD-2P Bureau Number 2173, NNAM loaned us its SBD-5 Bureau Number 36711, which is currently on display in our Battle of Midway exhibit. The recovery effort at Lake Michigan was funded by former McDonald’s Chairman Fred Turner, as part of a tribute to his friend RADM James “Jig Dog” Ramage. Our SBD-2P stood nose-down for nearly 65 years in the cold depths of Lake Michigan.
The prized addition of a Douglas Dauntless SBD-2P to Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum’s collection would have been far less likely were it not for a carburetor icing incident over Southern Lake Michigan on February 18, 1944. Even fewer were preserved in a “time machine-like” condition. Of the 5,936 storied Scout/Dive Bombers built between 19, only a fraction survived the intervening 81 years.
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