Grumman TBF Avenger

By 1940 the US Navy’s frontline torpedo bomber, the Douglas TBD Devastator, was already obsolescent, and the Navy issued a requirement for a replacement. Grumman’s answer, the XTBF-1, first flew on 7 August 1941 — a big, deep-bellied aircraft built around an internal weapons bay, far larger than the aircraft it replaced.

Its name was chosen with grim timing. Grumman held a public ceremony to unveil the new aircraft on 7 December 1941 — the very day of the attack on Pearl Harbor — and the name “Avenger,” already selected, took on a meaning nobody had planned. Within six months it would fly its first mission, and the debut would be a disaster.

The Avenger was powered by a Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone 14-cylinder radial of about 1,700 hp, and it was big — among the largest and heaviest single-engined aircraft of the entire war, with a three-man crew of pilot, turret gunner and radioman. Its 569 kg (22-inch) Mark 13 torpedo, or up to around 900 kg of bombs, rode fully enclosed in an internal bay, keeping the aircraft clean and giving it surprisingly long legs.

Its most influential feature was defensive: the Avenger was the first US aircraft with a power-operated gun turret, a compact electro-hydraulic mount designed by Grumman’s Oscar Olsen carrying a single 12.7 mm gun, with a ventral gun below and, later, two more in the wings. The type was famously rugged and forgiving — qualities that brought a great many crews home across thousands of kilometres of empty ocean.

The Avenger’s combat debut could hardly have been worse. Six of the brand-new TBF-1s, a detachment of Torpedo Squadron 8, flew from Midway atoll against the Japanese carriers on the morning of 4 June 1942 — without fighter escort, straight into the defending Zeros and a wall of anti-aircraft fire.

Five of the six were shot down. The lone survivor, flown by Ensign Bert Earnest, limped back to Midway with one dead crewman, a jammed turret and a dead-reckoning landing on a single wheel. It was a catastrophe that mirrored the slaughter of the Devastator squadrons that same day — but where the Devastator had no future, the Avenger was only beginning. Its torpedoes would come good soon enough.

From the autumn of 1942 the Avenger became the US Navy’s standard torpedo bomber, and it fought in every major Pacific action that followed. At the Eastern Solomons in August 1942, Avengers from Saratoga helped sink the light carrier Ryūjō; through the long Guadalcanal campaign they flew from carrier decks and the mud of Henderson Field alike, striking ships by day and hunting them by night.

By 1944 the fast carriers put up Avengers in their hundreds. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, Avenger torpedoes sank the carrier Hiyō, and in October at Leyte Gulf they joined the swarms of aircraft that overwhelmed the giant battleship Musashi. It was versatile beyond its designed role — glide-bombing, mining, rocket attack and reconnaissance all fell to the big Grumman.

The Avenger helped write the last chapter of the battleship. On 7 April 1945, Avengers and Helldivers from the US fast carriers hunted down and sank Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, on her one-way sortie toward Okinawa — the torpedo bomber closing the account its own kind had opened. In the Atlantic, Avengers flew from escort carriers in hunter-killer groups, sinking dozens of U-boats.

Production was vast: around 9,839 were built, most by General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft division as the TBM. The type also served Britain’s Fleet Air Arm and New Zealand, and remained in US and foreign service long after the war. One of its many wartime pilots was a young naval aviator named George H. W. Bush, shot down over Chichijima in an Avenger in September 1944 and rescued from the sea by a submarine.

The Avenger began its war in the worst way imaginable — five of six lost on its first mission, a debut soaked in the same tragedy that destroyed the Devastator squadrons at Midway. Everything it became afterwards was earned against that beginning.

It grew into one of the most successful naval aircraft of the war: the US Navy’s torpedo bomber from the Solomons to Tokyo Bay, a U-boat killer in the Atlantic, and a share in the deaths of both the great Yamato-class battleships. Big, tough and endlessly adaptable, the Avenger outlived the war and the very type of ship it was built to sink.

• Barrett Tillman, Avenger at War (Ian Allan).
• Barrett Tillman, TBF/TBM Avenger Units of World War 2 (Osprey).
• Charles A. Mendenhall, The Grumman Story (Specialty Press).