Midway is often called the most decisive naval battle of the 20th century, and the Dauntless was its instrument. Through the morning of 4 June 1942, wave after wave of American torpedo bombers attacked the Japanese carriers and were slaughtered — but in doing so they dragged the defending fighters down to sea level. When the SBD dive-bomber squadrons arrived overhead almost unopposed, they found the carriers at their most vulnerable: decks crowded with fuelled, armed aircraft being re-spotted for a strike.

The timing was part luck, part the doggedness of leaders like Wade McClusky, who pressed on past his planned search limit and followed the wake of a Japanese destroyer straight to the fleet. Within minutes Akagi, Kaga Ve Soryu were mortally hit; Hiryu followed hours later. Historians rightly caution against reducing so complex a battle to a single lucky interval — but it is no exaggeration that the SBD, in that window, changed the course of the war.

When Northrop and Douglas first tested the split-flap dive brake on the BT-1 lineage, deploying the flaps set up a violent buffet that shook the tail and spoiled the pilot’s aim. The fix was elegant: drill the flaps full of holes. The perforations let air bleed through and broke up the turbulent wake, damping the buffet while still providing the drag needed to hold the aircraft to a safe, steady dive speed. A Dauntless pilot could roll into a dive of around seventy degrees, track the target through his sight, and release low — the reason the type earned a reputation as the most accurate US dive bomber of the war.

For all its lack of speed, the Dauntless was remarkably hard to shoot down. Its rugged airframe absorbed damage, its crew were protected, and its rearward-firing guns gave attacking fighters a real fight. Statistically the SBD suffered the lowest attrition of any US carrier aircraft in the Pacific, and it is one of very few dive bombers ever credited with a favourable air-to-air exchange — its gunners and pilots claimed a number of Japanese aircraft. Those figures come from wartime tallies and should be read as well-supported estimates rather than exact accounts.

The Dauntless was a mass-produced wartime aircraft bought in bulk by the US government, not sold on an open market, so a single authoritative flyaway price is hard to pin down. Period figures place a Dauntless in the low tens of thousands of 1940s US dollars — an order-of-magnitude figure that varied by variant, contract and year, and that should be treated as an estimate rather than a precise quote. No credible cost-per-flight-hour number exists for the type in open sources. What is certain is that, measured against the four Japanese carriers it helped sink at Midway alone, the Dauntless was among the best military investments of the war.