Japan Never Expected the Avenger’s Belly to Open

Before 6:00 in the morning on the 4th of June 1942, six airplanes left the sand at Midway with a weapon the Japanese lookouts had not been briefed to expect. Not a new torpedo. The fish itself was the same Mark13 the Navy had already been losing with. What was new was where the fish lived. It was inside the airplane.

 The old American torpedo bomber hung that weapon under the belly in the slipstream where every zero could see it and every knot of air tried to tear it off. The new airplane swallowed it. Two hydraulic doors made a room in the fuselage large enough for one full-size aerial torpedo or four 500lb bombs.

 And then those doors closed flush so the aircraft could fly like something that was not carrying a telephone pole. The Japanese carriers that morning were expecting Devastators. They got the first six Avengers the fleet had ever sent into combat. Five of those six were in the water by a quart 7.

 The sixth came home with the doors jammed open, a dead man in the turret, and a pilot flying the elevator trim because the control cables had been shot away. That is the story this channel is going to pay. Not a full biography of every Avenger that ever launched, the room in the belly, why the Navy built it, what it cost the first six crews to open it, and why the same doors later mattered in an ocean the Japanese never saw.

The airplane the Navy was trying to replace was the Douglas TBD Devastator. In 1937, it had been modern. By 1941, it was a problem the Bureau of Aeronautics could measure. It was slow, its wings folded up, which ate hanger height, and the Mark1 13 it carried did not live in the airplane.

 It hung outside, where the air load on a long steel fish limited how fast you dared to fly and how violently you dared to maneuver. A carrier torpedo attack already asked a crew to fly straight, low, and slow through the last mile. Hanging the weapon in the wind made that last mile worse. The fish was visible. The drag was real.

 The drop had to happen inside a narrow window or the torpedo broke, brooached, or ran wild. Grumant was not a torpedo bomber company. Grant built fighters that came home with holes in them. In 1940, the Navy asked that shop for a three-man carrier bomber that could carry a Mark13 or 2,000 lb of bombs, fly faster than the Devastator, and fold into a carrier deck without standing on its wing tips.

The design team put the midwing in a place that left a deep fuselage under it. That was the decision. Everything else in this airplane, the Stowwing fold that rotated the panels back along the body instead of up, the electrically powered dorsal turret, the tunnel gun behind the bay, is downstream of that hole in the belly.

On the last day of December 1940, before the prototype had flown, the Bureau of Aeronautics ordered 285 TBF1s and one TBF2. That is how badly they wanted the Devastator gone. The first prototype flew the following August. After Pearl Harbor, the wartime order landed within days.

 What rolled out of Beth Page was heavy. Contemporary Navy descriptions called the TBF the heaviest single engine airplane the United States put up in the war. A right twin cyclone up front, a crew of three in a line under a long greenhouse. A 30 caliber in the nose on the first airplanes. A 50 in a powered turret behind the pilot. A 30 firing down and back from a hole aft of the weapons bay.

 Folded, the span came down from 54 ft to something a carrier elevator could swallow. Open the two bay doors made a cavity that would take the Navy’s standard aerial torpedo, a 22in Mark13, the same family of weapon the Devastator had been dropping, and hide it until the run-in. That is the anomaly. Not speed, not the turret, the room.

 A Japanese deck officer looking at a Devastator saw the fish looking at an Avenger with the doors shut. He saw an airplane. The weapon was a decision the pilot had not made yet. The first squadron to receive the new bomber was Torpedo 8. The timing was cruel. USS Hornet sailed for the Pacific with the old Devastators still on the flight deck.

 A detachment stayed behind to learn the TBF, then followed by air. By the time those six airplanes reached Pearl, Hornet was already gone. Yorktown went the next morning. The new bombers had a carrier and no ship. On the 1st of June, they flew them to Midway 8 hours, about 1,200 miles. Lieutenant Langden Feebelling in the lead.

 The other pilots were Oswald Gia, Albert Ernest, Victor Lewis, Charles Bron, and an enlisted naval aviation pilot named Daryl Woodside. Because the TBF crews had almost no open ocean navigation time, two of the enlisted seats were given to patrol plane officers from VP24, Jack Wilk and Joseph Hissum, so the formation could find a sandbar in the middle of the Pacific and not the empty water around it.

 They landed on Eastern Island without incident. The Navy had already given the airplane a name. Midway is when the fleet learned what the name was going to cost. Before 6 on the 4th, Midway’s radar and the Catalina reports said the Japanese strike was incoming. Every airplane that could fly was ordered off the island so it would not be destroyed on the ground.

Feebling’s six TBFs went with that scramble. They were not waiting for fighter escort that did not exist. They were not waiting for Hornet’s Devastators, which had not launched yet. They were the first Navy strike aircraft to find the Japanese carriers that morning. They cighted the force around 5 minutes to 7.

 Four carriers escorts from 15 mi. It was a geometry problem. Feebeling took the Avengers toward Hiru. Four Army B-26s, each also juryrigged with a torpedo, went for Akagi. About 30 zeros were already up. A Mark1 13 run in 1942 asked the pilot to come down, settle, and fly a straight line at a speed the early torpedo could survive. The number you will hear in the manuals and in later technical notes is roughly 130 mph.

Faster than that, the early Mark13 broke, dived, or porpused. Slower than that, a zero wrote the rest of the sentence. The Avengers doors had to be opened for the drop. That meant the room in the belly, the entire point of the airplane, became a hole the air and the gunfire could enter.

 Feebelling’s formation opened those doors in front of a fleet that had been practicing against Chinese cities and British ships and had never seen this silhouette with its stomach hanging open. By quart 7, it was finished. Five of the six Avengers were down. 16 of the 18 men in those airplanes were dead or in the water. No torpedo from the six hit a Japanese ship.

 Hiu outran what was dropped at her. Albert Ernest trying to keep a wreck in the air put his fish at the light cruiser Nagara and was not sure it had even left the racks until later. Nagara turned the torpedo missed. Ernest’s airplane is the one the photograph show. Turret smashed. J Manning the gunner killed by a 20 mm round in the chest.

 Harry Frier, the radio man in the tunnel, 17 years old, creased across the head, and for a time unconscious in a compartment that had blood in it. Nest wounded in the neck, forward gun dead, instruments gone, compass gone, elevator cables gone, hydraulics gone, one wheel would not come down. He had opened the bay doors when the first fighters hit, which is why the fish eventually left the airplane.

 When the elevator cables went, the Avenger started toward the water. At something like 20 ft, he found the trim tab still worked. He flew the rest of the way home on that tab, 200 m, and put it down on one wheel at midway, a little before 9. The Navy counted at least 64 7.7 mm holes and nine 20 mm hits in the airframe.

 Some of the cannon damage hid other holes. The airplane was shipped to Pearl to be studied. It never flew again. That is the debut of the room in the belly. It did not sink a carrier. It did not prove the Mark1 13. What it proved at a price Torpedo 8 could not afford twice was that the new bomber could eat punishment the Devastator could not and still bring two men back to an island.

Hornets 15 Devastators under John Waldron launched later that morning and flew into the same geometry. All 15 went down. George Gay floated in a life raft and watched the dive bombers arrive. The sacrifice of the torpedo planes, Avengers first, Devastators second, is the sequence the Midway histories hang the fighter cap on.

 Whether Feebelling’s decision to go immediately set the battle in motion is an argument historians can have. The hard record is simpler. Six new airplanes with closed doors and a fish inside were the first Navy strike to reach that fleet. Five did not close those doors again. If you stop the story at 0846 on the 4th of June, the Avenger looks like a beautiful way to die.

The Navy did not stop there. The room in the belly was never only a torpedo room. The same cavity took four 500lb bombs. It took a 2,000lb bomb. It took depth bombs. Later, it took a weapon the Atlantic War would treat as a secret. A slow acoustic homing torpedo the fleet called a mine on paper and pho in the ready rooms.

That is why the original instinct to hang this episode on Germany is not crazy. It is just not the first chapter. Japan met the Mark13. Germany met the same doors with different contents. After Midway, the Avenger became the Navy’s standard carrier torpedo bomber. Grman had Hellcats to build. Eastern Aircraft.

 The General Motors Division standing up in the old auto plants took the design and called it TBM. By the end of the war, the two names together account for just under 10,000 airframes. A little over 2,000 from Grumman, the rest from GM. Britain took hundreds and for a time called them tarpons. The folding wing, the bay, and the three-man crew stayed the point of the machine.

The Mark13 did not stay the same. Early drops had to be slow because the fish was fragile. That slow speed is what killed torpedo squadrons in 1942. In 1943, the warhead went from 401 lb of TNT to 600 lb of torpex. Later still, the Navy put a wooden pickle barrel shroud on the nose so the torpedo could be shoved off the racks at a speed that did not require the Avenger to crawl.

Until those fixes stuck, a lot of Avenger squadrons simply left the fish in the magazine and filled the bay with bombs. Four 500 pounders and a straight run at a deck or a column was a weapon the airplane already knew how to carry. The room did not care what you put in it.

 That is the unglamorous truth under the title. The anomaly is not that Grumman invented a magic torpedo. The anomaly is that they built a fuselage you could load like a magazine. In the Atlantic, the magazine was how escort carriers hunted yubot. A jeep carrier does not launch a devastator attack on a battleship. It parks a mix of wildcats and Avengers over a convoy and waits for a periscope or a radar paint.

 When the Avenger found a boat on the surface, the pilot came down in a glide and put depth bombs out of the same bay that had been designed around a Mark13. 250, 325, most often 500. If the boat shot back, the Wildcats went in first and tried to kill the flack so the bomber could finish the run. From the middle of 1943, the bay also carried Pho.

 The Mark 24 was not the Mark13. It was smaller, slower, and it listened. Officially, it was a mine. In the ready room, it was the thing you dropped on a boat that had just dived because the noise of the screws was the targeting system. Avenger crews mixed loads. two depth bombs, one pho a radar set, sona boys, flares, and flew them off Bogue, Card Core, Santi, and the rest of the Hunter Killer list.

American escort carrier air groupoups were credited with 35 submarine sinkings or assists in the Atlantic. The aircraft page that keeps that tally says most, perhaps all of those credits run through Avengers. That is a group number, not a pilot bypilot scorecard. And this script is not going to invent a named German captain standing on a conning tower staring up at open Bombay doors.

 What the record will carry is this. The room designed to hide a shipkilling torpedo from Japanese lookouts became the room that put depth bombs and an acoustic fish onto German boats in the Mid-Atlantic. Same doors, different war. Walk the airplane once slowly because the title only works if you can see the room.

 The pilot sat forward under the long canopy with the engine in his lap. On the first TBF1s, he had a synchronized 30 caliber firing through the propeller. Later marks put 250s in the wings and gave him something that could answer a zero on the way in. Behind him, in a powered turret Grumman bought from a General Electric lineage, a gunner tracked the high rear quadrant with a 50.

 Under the floor aft of the bay, a radio man, who was also the tunnel gunner, lay on a 30 that covered the belly and the dead cone. The turret could not see. The bay sat under the wing carry-through hydraulic doors, not a rack bolted onto the slipstream, a cavity sized for the Navy’s standard aerial torpedo, 22 in across, the Mark 13 family, or for a brick of bombs that added up to £2,000.

Four 500s was the clean load. A single 2,000 would go, depth bombs would go. A ferry tank would go if you needed to drag the airplane across an ocean and did not care that the tank was not self-sealing. Later pho would go. The wings did not fold up like a devastator. They rotated and laid back along the fuselage in Grman’s stowing geometry, so the hanger deck did not have to be tall enough for a bomber standing on its wing tips.

 That is not a footnote. Carrier airplanes are designed around elevators and overheads. A midwing deep enough to hide a torpedo only ships if the fold does not make the package impossible. Right twin cyclone in the nose. On the first airplanes, a 1,600 horsepower -8. Later a,00 horsepower-20. Contemporary figures put the early TBF1 a little over 270 mph at altitude and a cruise around 145.

 Range with a torpedo in the bay is the number the escort carrier captains cared about. More than a,000 mi on internal fuel if you believed the book. Empty weight around 10,000 lb. Loaded, it climbed through the mid teens. Heavy for a single engine. That is why the Navy kept calling it the heaviest single engine airplane they had.

 None of those numbers are why the doors matter. They are why the doors could exist. You cannot hide a Mark13 in a skinny fighter fuselage. You hide it in a bomber you were willing to make ugly. Grumman built a little over 2,000 of them and then stopped because Beth Page had hellcats to pour out of the same culture.

 Eastern Aircraft, General Motors plants that had been building cars, picked up the drawings and stamped TBM on the data plate. The TBM1 was the TBF1 with a different factory. The TBM1C put the wing guns in as standard. The TBM3 was the late war airplane. More power, more gear, more of the electronics that turned a torpedo bomber into an anti-ubmarine truck.

Add the British contracts and the leftover airframes and the plant stopped just short of 10,000. That production line is the argument that Midway did not kill the design. If the room in the belly had been a failure, GM would not have spent the rest of the war building rooms. The Mark13 is the other half of the sentence, and it has to be said without turning this into a torpedo lecture.

Early Mark13s wanted a gentle drop. Too much speed and the shell and the internals did not survive the slap. The number that shows up in the technical notes is about 130 mph. A zero in 1942 could live at that speed all day. So, the Avengers gift, hide the fish, until the last mile, was paid back the moment the doors opened because the last mile still had to be flown at a speed that made the airplane a target.

Midway is that sentence with six crews inside it. In 1943, the warhead changed. £41 of TNT became 600 lb of torpex. Later, the nose got a wooden shroud the fleet called a pickle barrel, a sacrificial cap that let the fish leave the racks at a speed that did not require the Avenger to crawl. Until those two fixes were in the fleet, a lot of squadron orders were simple.

 Leave the torpedoes in the magazine. Load bombs. The Bay did not argue. That is how you get from a debut with no hits to an aeroplane that spent most of 1943 as a level bomber and a depth bomb truck and then when the fish could finally take a beating went back to being a torpedo plane on purpose. Torpedo 8 itself did not end on the sand at Midway.

 The men who had not been in feebleing six and the men who replaced the dead took Avengers to Guadal Canal and flew them off Henderson and off Saratoga in a war that did not care about firsts. Ernest picked up a third Navy cross in that second life. The unit took a presidential unit citation for Midway and another for Guadal Canal. This script is not going to walk every strike.

 It is going to say the airplane that looked like a failure at 0715 on the 4th of June was the airplane the same squadron was still willing to take into the Solomons. The Atlantic chapter is the same doors answering a different question. A yubot on the surface is not a carrier. It is a gun deck with a hole in the water behind it.

 The Avengers job off an escort carrier was to find that deck, survive the flack, and put something out of the bay before the boat went under. Depth bombs first rockets on the wings when those reached the squadrons. Fido when the boat had already dived, and the only target left was noise. Pho was small enough that the paperwork pretended two could fit.

 In practice, the load was usually one mixed with depth bombs and the radar and the sonobo that told the next airplane where to drop. Mid 1943 is when that weapon leaves the laboratory and starts showing up in CVE after action counts. The 35 submarine credits attached to American escort carrier air groups in the Atlantic are a pile, not a pilot list.

Most of that pile runs through Avengers. British Avengers add their own column. That is as far as this script will push a German number because a group credit is not a named sinking and this desk does not mint those. What you can say without flinching is mechanical. The cavity designed around a 22-in ship killer took a 19-in listener instead, and the doors that had opened over Hiru opened over the Mid-Atlantic for a war Japan was not fighting.

 The Pacific after 1942 is the long middle of the airplane’s life, and it will not be flattened into one battle. Avengers flew from Henderson when the field was still a construction site. They flew from the new Essex decks when the fast carriers went west. They flew night searches when radar sets moved into the airframe.

 They put 5-in rockets under the wings and became something a destroyer captain could request by call sign. They were there when the Mark13 finally became a weapon you could drop without apologizing to the airplane. They were there when the Navy decided a torpedo bomber could also be an airborne early warning truck after the guns cooled.

George Bush’s TBM belongs in that later war, not in the Midway paragraph. September 1944, Chi-Chi, A Different Ocean and a Different Year. If you want him in a sequel, that is the sequel. He is not one of Feebelling’s six. By late war, the Avenger was no longer a surprise. It was furniture. That is success.

 The silhouette Japanese lookouts had not been briefed to expect. In June 1942, was by 1944 the silhouette they expected. Every time a carrier turned into the wind, the room in the belly had become ordinary. Ordinary is what you call a design that just under 10,000 factories and crews decided to keep.

 The last thing the record will support is a clean comparison and then this script will stop. Devastator. External fish. Upward fold. 179 knots on a good day in the book. No spare airframe to bring home after a 20 mm lesson. Avenger. Internal fish. Backward fold. More than 200 knots, a turret, a tunnel gun, and enough structure that nine cannon hits and 64 machine gun holes still left a pilot a trim tab and a runway.

 The last 30 seconds of a 1942 torpedo run looked the same from the front. The minute after the run did not. That is the payment. Not that Japan had never seen a torpedo. They had. Not that Germany had never seen a depth bomb. they had that the United States Navy stopped hanging the weapon in the wind, built a room for it, and then spent three years putting whatever would fit into that room.

 Mark13, 4500s, Pho, a tank, a radar package, while the plants in Beth Page and the GM shops kept welding the same doors. Six airplanes opened those doors at a/4 to 7 on a June morning. Five did not close them. The sixth came home with the doors still open. The plants built 9,000 more rooms anyway. A devastator was a rack with an airplane around it.

 An avenger was an airplane with a rack inside it. That sounds like a slogan until you put the two of them on the same morning. Waldron’s Devastators had nowhere to hide the fish and no extra knot to spend. Feebling’s Avengers hid the fish and still had to open the doors to use it, which meant the last 30 seconds of a 1942 torpedo run looked the same from Azer’s gun site.

 The difference showed up after the pass. Nest’s airframe took nine cannon shells and kept flying. The Devastators did not bring that kind of wreck home. The Japanese Combat Air Patrol on the 4th of June did not fail because they were surprised by a room. They shot five of the six airplanes that owned that room into the ocean.

 The surprise, if you want to keep the word the titles in this niche use, is earlier than the gunfight. It is in the hanger. It is a navy that looked at a torpedo hanging in the wind and paid Grumman to put a floor and two doors around it. So the next airplane would not advertise the weapon for the entire inbound leg.

 The first time those doors opened in combat, the weapon failed and the crews died. The airplane did not. That is why there were almost 10,000 of them before the plants went quiet. That is why the same bay that Miss Nagara later put depth bombs on boats that never saw a Japanese flag. And that is why a channel that lives on one visible machine can tell this one without turning it into another midway recap.

 Six airplanes left the sand with a room in their bellies. Five never shut it. The sixth came home with the doors still open, which is as close as a piece of wreckage comes to telling you what the design was