Listen Now

The latter half of 1943 in the Solomons saw US Navy and Marine dive bomber units equipped with the SBD Dauntless engaged in dozens of strikes against Japanese installations on the islands of the archipelago.  Flying in company with Avenger torpedo planes, the Dauntlesses struck airfields, harbors and engaged in close support of land battles and amphibious assaults throughout the island chain.  As the Americans invaded the last big island in the Solomons, Bougainville, carrier-based squadrons began their campaign to neutralize the center of Japanese air and naval strength in the area, the base complex at Rabaul on the island of New Britain.Sources:https://historynet.com/World=war-ii-raids-on-rabaul-in-november-1943.htmSBD Dauntless Units of World War 2 - Barret TillmanDouglas SBD Dauntless - Peter C. SmithSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/markseven

In mid-1943 the Soviet opposition facing the Finnish Air Force was improving.  The fighter pilots of squadron LeLv 24, flying the Brewster model 239, continued to battle it out with the Soviets.  While their combat record remained outstanding, losses both in combat and due to wear and tear on their planes caused their numbers to dwindle.  By mid-1944, however, new fighters began to reach the Finns in the form of Bf-109Gs provided by their German co-belligerents.  The Brewsters remained in the fight alongside the newer planes right up until the end of the war with the Russians.  Even after the truce, the 239s were in action, now deployed against the Luftwaffe forces stationed in Lapland.  This episode concludes the survey of the Brewster's service with the Finns.Support the show:https://www.patreon.com/marksevenSources:Brewster Buffalo by Christopher ShoresBrewster F2A Buffalo by Andre ZbiegniewskiBrewster Buffalo Aces of WWII by Kari Stenman and Andrew ThomasJoe Baugher's Aviation Pages at joebaugher.com/navy_fighters/f2a3.htm

In mid-1942, Finnish squadron LeLv 24, using the Brewster 239 export variant of the Buffalo, was tasked with opposing Soviet naval aviation over the Gulf of Finland.  Flying from Karelian bases, the Finnish pilots confronted Russian aircraft operating out of the naval base at Kronstadt and the surrounding area.  Newer Soviet aircraft, including advanced fighters like the Yakovlev Yak series, were appearing to oppose the veteran pilots of LeLv and their Brewster fighters.  In addition to the enemy opposition itself, the Finns contended with difficulties in maintaining their American-built fighters, cut off as they were from supplies of replacement parts.Support the show:https://www.patreon.com/marksevenSources:Brewster Buffalo by Christopher ShoresBrewster F2A Buffalo by Andre ZbiegniewskiBrewster Buffalo Aces of WWII by Kari Stenman and Andrew ThomasJoe Baugher's Aviation Pages at joebaugher.com/navy_fighters/f2a3.htm

In the early months of 1943, after the end of the battle for Guadalcanal, the campaign in the Solomons Islands was still far from over.  The American forces in the archipelago would spend the remainder of the year fighting their way through the islands to Bougainville and  towards the Japanese base at Rabaul on New Britain beyond.  As the troops fought their way from island to island,  dive-bomber units of the US Navy and Marine Corps flew against Japanese reinforcement convoys at sea and carried out close support missions against land forces.  By November, American carrier forces fielding newer aircraft were in the theater launching heavy raids against Rabaul.  The Dauntless played a decisive role in these strikes, which effectively eliminated the Japanese naval threat to the Allied advance.

As the end of 1941 came near, the Finnish armies took back most of the territory lost the previous year at the end of the Winter War.  As the front stabilized from the Gulf of Finland northwards to the White Sea, air combat continued to rage between the Finnish Air Force and the Soviet air units in the theater.  Squadron Llv 24, one of the Finn's best fighter units, flew against the Russians with great success in their Brewster model 239 fighters.  The pace of winter air combat in the far north was dictated by the weather, but when it permitted battles between the Finnish Brewsters and Russian formations of bombers and attack planes escorted by fighters were a frequent occurence.  As the months wore on, the Finnish fighters began to encounter Soviet units equipped with lend-lease Hawker Hurricanes, pitting two Allied fighter types against one another above the lakes and forests of the frozen Karelian frontier.Support the show:patreon.com/markseven

Though the Brewster F2A Buffalo saw little service with the American forces, the design was exported to other nations, in whose services it saw much more action.  One of these was Finland, who purchased the fighter, or rather the Model 239 export variant, for its air force as the threat of war with the Soviet Union came closer and closer in late 1939.  Though they arrived too late to have much impact in the Winter War, these aircraft would form the backbone of the Finnish fighter force in the Continuation War that commenced along with Germany's Operation Barbarossa in July of 1941.  In the hands of the Finnish pilots of squadron Llv 24, the Brewster would battle Russian planes over Karelia and the Gulf of Finland as the Finnish Army attempted to take back the territory lost to Stalin's armies in the previous year.

A great deal of the pioneering work in the modern technique of the assault from the sea was carried out by the Japanese military in the years between the world wars.  Most of this was the work of the Imperial Japanese Army, which led the way in the development of the doctrine and equipment needed to take a defended beach on a hostile shore.  The Navy also created an amphibious force of its own, specialized in the kind of warfare likely to be fought between the Empire and the Americans in the Pacific.  

In the mid-1930s the world's air forces were discarding their biplanes and acquiring all-metal monoplane aircraft in front line service.  The United States Navy was no exception.  American  naval aircraft for shore-based use, as well as floatplanes and carrier aircraft, underwent a similar type of development as their counterparts in the Army.  By 1935, prototypes were being produced to replace the Navy's biplane fighters.  This would result in the F2A Buffalo, a product of the new Brewster Aeronautical Corporation.  This fighter would gain an unfavorable reputation in the historiography of the Second World War, but in fact saw very little service with the Americans, in whose squadrons it was  replaced by the Grumman F4F Wildcat shortly after the Pearl Harbor.

During the decades between the world wars, a great deal of military innovation was undertaken.  One field in which advances occurred was that of the assault from the sea, the landing of attack forces on defended shores.  The second world war would see many such operations in almost all theaters.  With their history of seapower, the British in particular were in a position to exploit such a capability.  Budgetary constraints, doctrinal considerations, and the difficulties of coordinating the actions of the Army, Navy and Air Force acted to curtail this effort. The tragic legacy of the Great War, in which the largest British amphibious campaign, that at the Dardanelles, had resulted in a costly failure, also deterred the use of scarce resources in this area.  As a result no major effort was made until after the fall of France, when an attack of this kind became all but necessary for a return of the Allies to the Continent.  In the meantime, a force of highly skilled troops was assembled to conduct a kind of maritime guerilla warfare against the Axis, destroying coastal installations in hit and run raids designed to keep the enemy off balance and force him to commit his troops to defend otherwise quiet areas.  These Commandos, as they became known in 1940, harassed the Axis from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean.

Though the German and Italian contingents sent to fight in the Spanish Civil War are perhaps better known, the contribution of Spanish pilots to the aerial battles above their homeland was not negligible.  On the rebel side, the fighter force grew from a handful of pilots and planes to a formidable organization.  The top-scoring Spanish fighter pilot of the war, Joaquin Garcia-Morato, flew hundreds of combat missions beginning with the first days of the war and continuing through the final victory.  He and his comrades in the so-called Blue Patrol and its successor units flew Nieuport, Heinkel, and Fiat fighters against their Republican counterparts using French and Russian aircraft.   Eventually credited with 40 confirmed air-to-air victories, Garcia-Morato was considered a war hero by Franco's side in the conflict.

The Allied campaigns of the Second World War involved dozens if not hundreds of amphibious landings on hostile beaches.  These operations could only be effected through the use of specialized landing craft designed to transport troops, vehicles and supplies onto the enemy coast.  At the beginning of the war, the United States possessed very few landing craft.  Many thousands would be built in the following three years, and storm ashore on beaches in the European and Pacific theaters of war.

Though the great majority of the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber's wartime service took place in the Pacific against the Japanese, the aircraft was not absent from the European theater.  Flying from land bases as well as carrier decks, the Dauntless flew against the European Axis from the coast of Africa to the frigid Arctic waters off the northern Norwegian coast.  The Americans were not the only one of the Allied powers to fly this formidable aircraft into battle.  Following the landings of the Americans and British in North Africa, the French forces which rallied to the Allied standard employed the Dauntless in the battle to liberate their homeland.  Both the French Navy and Air Force would fly the type against the Germans, and continue to do so after the war, as they struggled to hold onto their prewar colonial territories in Indochina.

The conversion of the huge American automotive industry to mass production of weapons was one of the key factors in the Allied victory against the Axis.  Not only were the weapons of war turned out in massive quantities by American factories, but many of the original prewar designs were extensively modified to make them more suitable for mass production.  A good representative example of this was the well-known Oerlikon 20mm cannon, originally a Swiss design that was produced under license by most of the belligerents.  In American hands, the Oerlikon design was considerably simplified.  This  resulted in a weapon with the same excellent combat characteristics as the original, but that was easier and quicker to manufacture, and required fewer resources in terms of raw materials, machine tools, time, and money.

Two major carrier battles were fought between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the US Pacific Fleet in the second half of 1942 in the southwest Pacific.  These two actions, the Battle of the Eastern Solomons and the Battle of Santa Cruz, saw the air groups of Yamamoto's forces pitted against the Enterprise, Saratoga, and Hornet .  These were fought in conjunction with the land campaign on Guadalcanal and in the Solomon Islands, and represent the last credible attempts of the Japanese to win back control of the sea and air before the tremendous American industrial advantage came into play and made remote  their prospects for victory in the Pacific.  I both of these actions the Dauntlesses were right in the middle of the fighting, as they had been throughout all phases of the campaign in the Southwest Pacific.

While the Navy and Marine Corps fielded squadrons of dive bombers, flying both from aircraft carriers and shore bases, the interwar US Army had no dive bombers of its own.  As the early-war experience in Europe showed the devastating accuracy and effectiveness of this type of aircraft in a close support role, the Army considered outfitting some of its attack units with such a plane.  As no Army aircraft were suitable for this kind of mission, modified versions of the SBD were acquired.  These were known as A-24 Banshees, and units equipped with these land-based variants of the Dauntless worked up and began to deploy abroad in the weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Caught by the outbreak of war not yet fully prepared, the Army dive-bomber crews would perform prodigies of improvisation and courage in pitting their handful of aircraft against the oncoming tidal wave of Japanese expansion in the Dutch East Indies and on New Guinea during the desperate 1942 battles in the Southwest Pacific.

The American counteroffensive in the southwest Pacific began in August 1942 with the landings at Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, with the primary mission of taking the incomplete Japanese airfield there.  After its capture by the Marines, this field would be completed and become the base of operations for the so-called Cactus Air Force.  This mixed force of Navy and Marine airmen flew fighters, torpedo planes, and the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber from this strip in support of the American battle against the Japanese in the Bismarck Archipelago.  For six bloody months the American dive bombers would be in constant action against Japanese troops and shipping in the island.  The aerial threat presented to the Japanese by these hard-fighting squadrons would dictate the terms of the air-sea battles in the area, and go a long way to securing American victory in these exhausting battles, in which the war machines of the Japanese Empire and the United States were most evenly matched.

The two heavy blows of the French offensive from the south and the Spanish landing from the sea at Alhucemas Bay had decisively turned the tide of war against the Riffian alliance.  However, it had not brought about their defeat, and Abdel Krim, along with the hard core of his army, had retreated deep into the inaccessible heart of his people's mountainous territory.  A further bloody campaign would be necessary to bring about the surrender of the rebel leader, and the submission of the insurgency.  The struggle to put down pockets of local resistance and the forces of diehard rebels holding out in the more remote regions of the protectorate would go on long after the defeat of the Riffians themselves.  The battle against the last of the Riffians and their Jebali and Gomari allies would involve the Spanish and thier French partners in operations well into 1927, when the last of the rebels were finally defeated and the survivors driven out of Spanish territory.

In 1925 a major change came to the war in Morocco.  Just as the prospects of the Riffian cause seemed brightest and their goal of independence from Spanish control seemed, most assured a new and very powerful threat appeared.  The expansion of Abdel Krim's control in the region brought him into conflict with the French, a much more formidable opponent.  The entry of this new factor into the war would combine with a brilliant Spanish amphibious campaign to decisively turn the tide of war in the Protectorate.

In June of 1942 one of the most consequential naval battles in all of military history was fought in the waters of the central Pacific.  The opponents facing off in this hard-fought battle near the atoll of Midway were the carrier air groups of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States Pacific Fleet, supplemented by Marine Corps aircraft based on the islands.  This huge battle was the Japanese Empire's best chance of forcing a decision in thier favor before the Americans' enormous industrial potential was brought to bear against them.  The SBD Dauntless, a relatively untested carrier bomber, which had proved its potential against the Japanese in the early actions of 1942 and the Battle of the Coral Sea, now faced its first, and most important, large-scale action.  Their success or failure in these vital actions would determine the fate of the Pacific for the next three years.

The Moroccan War in 1923-24 was changed by the accession to power of Primo de Rivera, a popular general who would overthrow the decaying constitutional government and become dictator in September 1923.  This man would attempt to break the impasse in the protectorate by a redeployment of his armies behind more defensible lines.  Though this idea was opposed by the more warlike Spaniards, it was partially implemented in 1924, when the Spanish withdrew from most of their territory in the western half of the protectorate.  This operation was fraught with danger, and resulted in another terrible bloodletting, and completely changed the power structure in the regions of the Jebala and the Gomara.