Customer Reviews

Destined for Glory: Dive Bombing, Midway, and the Evolution of Carrier Airpower

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DESTINED FOR GLORY: DIVE BOMBING, MIDWAY AND THE EVOLUTION OF CARRIER AIRPOWER. The title is a bit missleading, Midway is barely covered. Instead Thomas Wildenberg creates an excellent story on the development of dive bombing as a weapon and doctrine.

Unfortunately when he comes to the first six months of WWII he goes flat. The chance to tie all the operational and tactical developments together and relate them to Coral Sea and Midway is muffed. The two chapters dealing with the first carrier battles are little more than simple walk throughs of the action. I sense the editors at Naval Institute Press told him to cut a hundred pages or so. Good thing he cut the battle stuff (if he did) as the first 17 chapters as invaluable in understanding the VS and the VB way of war. If you've read Lundstrom's Coral Sea and Midway chapters then this book will give you the back ground to understand those actions even better.

This book goes on my must read list for those wishing to understand more than teh surface of the naval war in the Pacific.

Ben Those who fail to study History are doomed to never get the joke.

DESTINED FOR GLORY seems to be a well researched book on the development of dive bombing in the USN during the `20s and `30s. Unfortunately, the book contains numerous errors, probably the result of sloppy proof reading rather than ignorance of the subject. I hope that Mr. Wildenberg will correct the errors and that a corrected version of DESTINED FOR GLORY will be published. It is an important book. However, the recognizable errors cause me to wonder how much of it is documented fact.

Pilots who fly low enough and slow enough to aim at a defended target get killed. So they don't aim.

There was an exception for a short time and in a limited space. From mid-1941 to 1945, a few pilots had a doctrine and a platform that allowed them to aim, hit and survive.

The technique was dive bombing, and Thomas Wildenberg, a fellow of the National Air and Space Museum, tells the backstory in "Destined for Glory."

America was the only nation to develop dive bombing: the German Stuka and the Japanese Aichi 99 (called the Val) were really glide bombers.

They story begins on Oct. 22, 1926, when a daredevil Navy flyer, Lt. Cmdr. Frank Wagner, nosed his Curtiss Hawk fighter into a vertical, full power dive. The overengineered Hawk survived.

Though Wildenberg does not speculate, who knows? Perhaps Japan lost the Pacific War because in the '20s it didn't offer its pilots a plane they could trust as much as Wagner trusted his Hawk.

It took more than a decade to develop a weapon and a technique usable against real targets. The great moment for the dive bombers came at Midway in June 1942. Dropping out of the sun from more than three miles up, unseen and unstoppable, they shattered the decks of Japan's four big fleet carriers.

The six minutes at Midway are well known, but the background has seldom been told before now. What "Destined for Glory" leaves out is the drama.

There have been several memoirs by dive bomber pilots, from Clarence Dickerson's wartime "The Flying Guns" to Hal Buell's later "Dauntless Helldiver." But no pilot (to my knowledge) has ever conveyed what it felt like to "nose over" from 18,000 feet up and dive at full power in the fastest machine yet devised by man.

In an afterword reassessing naval aviation's contribution to American victory, Wildenberg decides that "only dive bombers and the aerial doctrine under which they were deployed were ultimately responsible for sinking the enemy ships of the Imperial Navy's First Carrier Strike Force."

His argument is sound but, unfortunately, he does not put it in context.

In almost all histories of the dispute between Army Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell and the Navy over bombing, the nod goes to Mitchell. The fact is that the kind of bombing advocated by Mitchell never sank, or even inconvenienced, a capital ship steaming at war readiness.

Dive bombing, though, really was a war winning weapon.