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TBD Devastator Units of the US Navy (Osprey Combat Aircraft 20) Paperback – July 31, 2000
| Barrett Tillman (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
Enhance your purchase
- Print length96 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOsprey Publishing
- Publication dateJuly 31, 2000
- Dimensions7.22 x 0.2 x 9.68 inches
- ISBN-101841760250
- ISBN-13978-1841760254
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Pacific Carrier War: Carrier Combat from Pearl Harbor to OkinawaHardcoverFREE Shipping on orders over $25 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Tuesday, Jul 12
From the Publisher
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Full colour battlescenesBeautifully illustrated battlescenes are included to bring the narrative of the conflict to life. |
Aircraft profilesEach illustration is meticulously researched to depict the machines used in combat. The profiles are accompanied by fully detailed captions that bring their histories to life. |
PhotographsThe books feature a wide range of archival photographs sourced from official and private collections, and these provide unparalleled detail of the aircraft. |
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
About the Author
Barrett Tillman is a professional author and speaker with more than 40 nonfiction books as well as novels to his credit. His first book, published in 1976, remains in print today as do most of his subsequent titles.
He holds seven awards for history and literature including the 1996 Tailhook Association Lifetime Achievement Award and third place in the US Naval Institute Prize in 2009. Tillman has appeared in more than a dozen documentaries including The History Channel's Dogfights.
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Product details
- Publisher : Osprey Publishing (July 31, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 96 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1841760250
- ISBN-13 : 978-1841760254
- Item Weight : 11.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.22 x 0.2 x 9.68 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,000,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,444 in Aerospace Engineering
- #2,548 in Military Aviation History (Books)
- #2,620 in Naval Military History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Barrett Tillman (b. 1948) was born into a NE Oregon ranching family and developed an early interest in aviation history. He learned to fly as a teenager, was first published at age 15, and graduated from the University of Oregon with a journalism degree in 1971. He has worked as a newspaper reporter, book publisher, and magazine editor, but has been self employed all but seven years since graduating from college. Though best known for his histories of US naval aviation, he also has published six novels plus short stories, and has sold a screenplay.
Tillman continues writing nonfiction books and has written more than 550 articles in the US and abroad. He frequently appears as a commentator on TV documentaries in addition to his speaking appearances. The recipient of six writing awards, he lives with his wife in Arizona.
Tillman's web site and blog are found at www.btillman.com.
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Received email that book was sent 2 days after order with expected arrival date.
Date came and went, Contacted seller and they gave me a different ship date than
orginally. Still Have not received Book and recieved refund from seller and purchased through Amazon.com direct for slightly more, but don't regret paying more now.
Barrett Tillman's book is very good, but I feel the subject deserves a larger work. I was impressed with the photos of men like Lem Massey, Gene Lindsey, Art Ely, and etc., but seeing them brought this feeling up in me all the more.
I do recommend Mr. Tillman's book as an excellent effort overall- many people may feel as if my complaints about the shortness of an otherwise fine work is nothing more than a quibble- but I do feel the subject is worthy of the extra effort.
The battle of Midway was probably the first combat action for most of these poor souls, and was also the last.
They not only had the distinction of being the first monoplane pilots in the Navy, but also had probably the slowest and most vulnerable plane as well.
Plus, the unique characteristic of the torpedo plane meant that it came in low and long, to line up on the target ship with the torpedo, so that it had a straight track.
That also made it the ideal target for every machine gunner on the ship they were attacking, and gave them a long time to shoot at it.
Very much like the B-17 bombers on a bomb run: The Norden bomb sight meant that the plane had to keep a long and sustained flight pattern, so that the bombardier could line up on the target. And they had to stay on it until the precise moment when they could release their bombs, so the ack-ack guns had plenty of time to zero in on the planes before they could drop their bombs and turn back for home.
The difference was that the B-17 was flying very high, and could "fly between the bursts," so to speak - and unless they received a direct hit, might only suffer glancing, or peripheral damage.
A torpedo plane, on the other hand, was flying low, and directly toward, and into, the fire directed at them, and unless their torpedo succeeded in destroying the target ship, the shooters on the ship might very well destroy them.
In addition, there were a couple other things the torpedo bomber had to contend with: The Zero, Japan's superb fighter plane, was undoubtedly the fastest, most agile, and most maneuverable plane in the early part of the Pacific war, and they just happened to be the fighter that the Devastator was facing.
As if all that weren't enough, the torpedoes they carried were duds. They either veered off course and missed the target entirely, or sometimes went too low, going under the target. Either way, they were lost forever, with no ship blown up.
Of course, they didn't know this. They had no idea whatsoever that the torpedoes they carried were in any way defective, or that they would fail to deliver a devastating blow to the ship they were shooting at.
But they soon discovered that even when the torpedo did hit the target, if very often did not explode.
Or, sometimes the torpedo, when fired from a submarine, would make a big circle and come back and strike the sub that launched it, blowing it up. This was because some of them were equipped with magnetic warheads, which would seek out the closest mass of metal - which would be a ship, or sometimes, the very sub that fired it.
They were flying straight into the teeth of the enemy, but were virtually unarmed.
This was primarily a result of the fact that the US, back in the 30s, in the midst of the Depression years, when the electric torpedo was being developed, didn't have a lot of money to test torpedoes, at $10,000.00 per torpedo (in 1931).
To test a torpedo meant to actually fire it at a target, at a predetermined distance, under simulated combat conditions, to see if it would work. If it did work, it blew up, and was deemed to be successful. That was considered to be a good torpedo, and you just blew $10,000.00.
But if it missed the target, it was lost forever, and it was a bad torpedo.
However, there was no guaranteed way to know for sure whether the torpedo veered off course, or if the target ship zigged instead of zagged, or if the shooter's aim was simply bad.
But when it did hit the target, if it failed to explode, it was definitely a bad torpedo, and you just lost another $10,000.00
Every test meant using up a torpedo, to the tune of $10,000.00 each.
No matter whether it turned out to be a good torpedo (hit the target, and exploded) or a bad torpedo (either missed the target altogether, or did hit the target but failed to explode) you were out $10,000.00, either way.
This was a no-win situation, because the torpedo was not recoverable. If it missed the target and ran out into the vastness of the ocean, it was gone, and if it did hit the target and explode, it was also gone. If the torpedo missed the target, there was no way to determine what had gone wrong, and to be able to see what they needed to correct. So they just had to try different things, and fire it, and hope for the best.
This being in the midst of the Depression, they were just too expensive to use up in testing, so they did very little, or almost no, testing of torpedoes at all.
Because they were so expensive, officials were loathe to do any live torpedo testing, and they were so complicated that determining the actual problem was very difficult to do.
And so they were basically just keeping their fingers crossed.
Maybe it never occurred to them to devise tests designed to determine that the torpedoes were in fact effective, and accurate, without actually detonating a live torpedo - and thus saving the considerable amount of money that blowing up a real torpedo represented, and assuring that the finished product did work, and could be relied upon.
Torpedoes are only used in the event of an actual, shooting war, and that was not on the immediate horizon (in the early '30s) so it was pretty easy to just "kick the can down the road," because nobody was holding their feet to the fire, at that particular time.
It would seem that they just opted to pretend that there was no problem, and therefore, nothing needed to be done.
Consequently, when war did come, they were using torpedoes that had many problems, but they did not know precisely what the problems were, or how to correct them.
The nature of a torpedo is that once it is launched, if it misses the target and sails out into the open ocean, it is not possible to retrieve it and examine it to see what had gone wrong. Even if it was possible to retrieve it, once it has been armed, it could explode at any moment.
To compound the issue, there were strong differences of opinion as to what had actually caused it to malfunction - if it indeed had malfunctioned at all, or if it was simply a case of bad aim by the shooter - and a reluctance to admit that there was anything wrong with the torpedoes; that it was undoubtedly the fault of the pilot, or the sub commander, for not aiming accurately.
This could be referred to as the "head in the sand" defense.
Denying that there was any problem with the torpedoes persisted for some time, until there could finally no longer be any doubt that there definitely were problems, and only then did they seriously pursue attempts to fix whatever was wrong with them.
Incredibly, this was some two years into the war
In the meantime, not only the torpedo plane pilots, but also many submarine captains found, to their dismay, that their torpedoes did not explode. Who's to say how many American lives were lost because of this problem?
Without the ability to recover the torpedo after it was fired, there was no way to learn what had gone wrong with it, and what needed to be corrected.
The torpedo, of course, is a highly complex mechanism, composed of many intricate systems, and subject to tremendous forces of nature between the time it is fired, until it hopefully hits its target.
And so our intrepid Devastator pilots were flying into the teeth of an absolute storm of deadly fire, both from the ships and the Zeroes, and were essentially unarmed, because their primary weapon did not work.
Suffice it to say that none of them scored a hit on any Japanese ship at Midway, and almost all of them died in the attack.
But these heroes' efforts did not go in vain: While the Zeroes were down low, fighting off the Devastators, it enabled the dive bombers to approach from high above, virtually unnoticed, diving almost straight down, and score many direct hits squarely on the flight decks of the three Japanese carriers, which sent them straight to the bottom. All in about ten minutes time.
The next morning the last carrier, which had been gravely wounded, went down also, for a total of four of Japan's illustrious carriers to bite the dust.
And so the torpedo boys were equally entitled to share the glory with their brothers in the dive bomber squads, because they made it possible for the US to achieve one of the greatest victories in history.
Prior to Midway, the Japanese were running wild - absolutely out of control, and obliterating everything in their path.
Until Midway, there was very serious doubt that we would ever see a victory, and this had gone on from day one, when they started with the devastation at Pearl Harbor.
Japan had been the devastators, but now the shoe was on the other foot. From Midway on, Japan never regained the superiority they had enjoyed from the beginning, and it was a slow decline into oblivion for them.
In retrospect, we should have learned an extremely valuable lesson from this incident:
Hindsight is 20/20, so they say, and it is very true.
While a torpedo cost $10,000 in 1931, the same torpedo now costs about $160,000.00. For one torpedo.
But the issue is not the cost: The issue is that something as critical as a malfunctioning torpedo means that our fighting men are placed in extremely hazardous positions, in that they are depending on a weapons system that is not working, and they might therefore just as well be completely unarmed, for all the good the malfunctioning weapons system is doing them.
And it's not even a matter of measuring the cost of testing the torpedoes until you are satisfied that they are working right, against the value of a sailor, because you are actually talking about an unknown quantity - which could easily be an aircraft carrier or battleship full of sailors, if they are taking dud torpedoes into battle.
What is the value of avoiding losing a few test torpedoes, at $10,000 per pop, vs. losing a ship full of sailors if your torpedoes don't work?
Especially when the testing was all being done during peacetime, when there were no bullets or attacking planes coming at you.
In the middle of battle is not the ideal time to learn that you have serious problems with your ammunition not functioning correctly - or, more precisely - not functioning at all.
Better to spend whatever it takes, to guarantee beyond any doubt that the weapons you are using are doing the job, then to find out in the heat of battle that it was something that could have been fixed, if only it had been investigated and the problem discovered and rectified.
Just multiply the problem with the torpedoes by the number of other weapons systems that are involved in a battle scenario - and the fact is that everything had better work just as it is supposed to, and as it is expected to work, or we pay the price of dead soldiers and sailors.
Top reviews from other countries
Britain had its Fairey Battle and their equally brave allies in the United States Navy had the TBD Devastator, although at least the USN realised they needed fighter cover therefore enabling them to complete their missions, unfortunately with 'duff' torpedoes and sadly, high casualty rates. The RAF sent the Battle's crews on impossible bombing missions unaccompanied. I can only marvel at the men and boys that flew either aircraft.
Mein Fazit:wer sich explizit für diese Thematik interessiert, der kommt an diesem Buch nicht vorbei! Uneingeschränkt und allervollstens empfehlenswert. Nach Ende der Lektüre bin ich "Devastator-Fan" geworden....


