Navy continued to work on improvements to the plane. The skipper of the second USS Yorktown, “Jocko” Clarke, refused to take Helldivers into combat in late 1943, and went instead with the older SBD’s.īut Curtiss and the U.S. naval officers recommended that the Helldiver program be cancelled entirely. Problems were so numerous that the Helldiver was the focus of a Truman Committee investigation, and several high-ranking U.S. Another common nickname was “The Big-Tailed Beast”, often shortened to simply “The Beast.” In a derogatory play on the SB2C designation, the Helldiver was at times referred to as the ‘Son of a Bitch, 2 nd Class,’. Early versions of the Helldiver were prone to structural failures, and one example was a habit of the tail breaking off during a hard landing. The Helldiver is one example of a plane that got off to a rough start, and that’s putting it mildly. The aircraft had an internal bomb bay and could carry a variety of bombs as well as depth charges. Early versions of the Helldiver were armed with a single machine gun in each wing, while later versions carried a 20mm cannon in each wing instead of machine guns. The Helldiver carried a crew of two- a pilot, and a rear-gunner who doubled as the radioman. “SBF” was the designation given to Helldivers built by Fairchild Canada, and “SBW” was the designation given to Helldivers which were build by the Canadian Car and Foundry company.Ī total of 7,140 Helldivers were built before production ended in 1945, and 1,136 of them were Canadian-built. In order to keep up with demand, two Canadian companies were contracted to build the plane as well. SB2C stands for ‘Scout, Bomber, second dive bomber contract from Curtiss’, and the ‘C’ was the letter assigned by the US Navy to all aircraft built by the Curtiss Aircraft Corporation. The first Helldiver flew on December 18, 1940, but SB2C’s would not reach fleet service in significant numbers until mid-1944. Navy already knew that the speed, range, and payload of the Dauntless could be improved upon. When the Dauntless went into production in 1938, the U.S. By Pierre Kosmidis Photos, text and research submitted by Dan Farnham, used by permissionĭesigned in 1939, the Curtiss SB2C ‘Helldiver’ was a dive-bomber intended as the replacement for the earlier Douglas-built SBD ‘Dauntless’.
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