Last year, a group of Internet aviation fans debated the subject of the worst fighter of World War II. Their hands-down favorite: the Brewster Buffalo.

Two books are titled The World's Worst Aircraft. The Buffalo is the only fighter from any era to have a chapter in both of them.

The Royal Air Force fobbed it onto the Fleet Air Arm and colonial squadrons; the U.S. Navy gave it to the Marines. Pilots thought it was a sweet plane to fly, but noticed that the wheel struts sometimes broke, the engine leaked oil, and the guns sometimes didn't fire. And when they flew it against the nimble fighters of Japan, too often they didn't come back.

Yet all the while, the Finns tore great holes through the Russian air force with essentially the same plane.

The Buffalo's problems began with its manufacturer. In 1932, an aeronautical engineer named James Work paid $30,000 for the aircraft division of Brewster & Co., a firm that over the years had built horse-drawn buggies, auto bodies, and aircraft assemblies, but now did little more than represent Rolls-Royce in the United States. Jimmy Work was a balding man with soulful eyes, a gentle smile, and a good suit. You might have picked him to manage your retirement account--probably not the best idea you'd ever have. Serving as president of Brewster Aeronautical, he hired himself as a consultant and leased a factory from himself. Double-dipping in this fashion, he landed contracts for seaplane floats and wing panels, mostly for the Grumman company. But what he really wanted to do was build planes on his own account.

Enter Dayton Brown. In a photo taken a few years later, when the Navy visited Brewster in an attempt to straighten out the mess Jimmy Work had made of it, the aircraft designer towers over the men around him. Brown's arms are folded, he wears a double-breasted suit and a skeptical expression, and he has little more hair than the man who hired him.

As Brewster's first product, Brown drew a slender, mid-wing dive bomber with retractable wheels and an enclosed bomb-bay. This was wonderful stuff for 1934, and the U.S. Navy bought the rights to build it as its first carrier-based monoplane. That was a nice compliment to Brewster Aeronautical, but didn't advance its hopes of becoming a force in the airframe industry.

Brown redrew his plane as a two-seat fighter, then a one-seater. Among other innovations, it had a semi-bubble canopy, giving the pilot a clear view to the rear. The Navy liked the sketch enough to start a development project for the F2A (fighter, second, Brewster).

Grumman was more conventional. Its F4F had the canopy faired into the rear fuselage, to protect the pilot if the plane flipped over. (Dayton Brown provided a roll bar behind the seat for this purpose.) And the F4F was a biplane, since two wings mean shorter wings, so more planes could be stowed on deck.

But this was 1936, the trend was toward the sleeker monoplane, and Brewster got the nod. Grumman promptly took one wing off its fighter and created what history would know as the Wildcat. Apart from its "turtleback," the F4F-2 looked rather like the Brewster fighter. Each carried one wing at midpoint on the fuselage, each had a short nose (so the pilot could see the deck in front of him), and each was distinctly plump. This was especially true of the Brewster fighter, whose engine was larger around than the Wildcat's.

Ah, that engine! Airframe manufacture was nearly a cottage industry in the 1930s, with machinists hand-crafting parts and seamstresses sewing fabric onto control surfaces. The cost of entry was so small that the United States had twenty companies turning out a dozen or so warplanes each year, but only two providers of air-cooled radial engines powerful enough for combat. Grumman designed its Wildcat around the Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp, consisting of one seven-cylinder radial engine mounted behind another, plus a two-stage supercharger to ram the fuel-air mixture into them. Brewster opted for the Wright Cyclone, an older design with one row of cylinders. It had a one-stage supercharger, and its 950 takeoff horsepower fell to 750 hp at 15,000 feet. Early Cyclones--those supplied for the Brewster fighter--also had lubrication problems.

There was also a design flaw in the Brewster fighter. If the pilot set it down hard--and hard landings are the norm on an aircraft carrier--the main wheel strut sometimes buckled, two inches below its pivot point on the wing.

These problems weren't apparent in 1938, when the Navy tested the Brewster and Grumman prototypes. The F2A handled like a sports car, the F4F-2 like a pickup truck, and the Cyclone seemed a safer bet than the complicated Twin Wasp. Brewster got the contract: 54 planes. It delivered one in May 1939, another in July, and a third in October. The pace picked up after that, but at year-end the Navy still had only 11 Brewsters, not quite enough to equip its first monoplane fighter squadron, VF-3 on the carrier Saratoga.

The factory was a major bottleneck--an old automobile plant in urban Queens, across the East River from Manhattan. Parts were manufactured on four stories, brought together by freight elevator, assembled, then taken apart so the plane could be trucked out to Long Island's Roosevelt Field (now a shopping mall) and there reassembled for flight-testing.

Grumman meanwhile installed a 1,200 hp Twin Wasp in the third variant of its fighter, the F4F-3. Brooding over the slow pace of deliveries from Brewster, the Navy decided to hedge its bets by ordering 54 of the up-engined Wildcats in August 1939.

One month later, Germany attacked Poland from the west while the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The Russians then turned on Finland, which to many Americans was a more heinous crime. I can remember my father arguing that "Little Finland" had repaid its World War I debt, unlike larger and richer countries, and therefore deserved our help in this new travail. The State Department evidently agreed, for it asked the Navy to release the rest of its Brewsters in exchange for a more powerful model the following year.

As required by the "Neutrality Act," Brewster modified the F2A by replacing its government-supplied engine, gun sight, and direction finder with export-approved equipment. It took out the life raft and arresting hook, and doubled the firepower by installing two half-inch machine guns in the wings. (Like most American fighters of the time, the F2A had two nose-mounted machine guns, synchronized to fire through the propeller arc.) Lastly, it painted out Felix, the bomb-carrying cartoon cat that was the mascot of VF-3. The company produced 44 of these "de-navalized" fighters under the designation B-239.

To test them, Brewster hired a former Navy pilot named Robert Winston. "This ship was a pilot's dream," Winston recalled in a wartime memoir, Aces Wild. He praised its cockpit layout, power ("the two-ton airplane left the ground like a skyrocket"), and stability.

The B-239s went by boat to Norway, then by train to Sweden, where they were assembled by Norwegian air force mechanics under the supervision of Brewster engineers. The Americans didn't lack for smokes or news of the Brooklyn Dodgers: their buddies in Queens had stuffed the wing panels with cigarettes, magazines, and newspapers.

In February 1940, Lt. Joppe Karhunen came over from Finland to test the first Brewster. He burned out the engine, crashed on a snow-covered field, and damaged the propeller and some plexiglass belly panels. (Like many Navy planes, the Brewster had a view window under the pilot's feet.) Robert Winston reached Sweden a few days later. Finding the Finns disenchanted with their new acquisition, Winston set up a mock dogfight with an open-cockpit Fiat Freccia from Italy.

The Fiat was faster in level flight, but the Brewster could turn in a smaller radius, allowing Winston to get on the Italian's tail and stay there until the other pilot fled the battle. "Mycket bra!" Karhunen shouted when Winston landed--very good! "Mycket damn bra!"

Alas, the "Winter War" ended in March 1940 with the Soviet Union occupying southeastern Finland, before any Brewsters reached the front.

Dayton Brown had now fitted his fighter with a 1,200 hp Wright Cyclone. This was the improved model for which the U.S. Navy had released its planes to Finland. The F2A-2 had a top speed of 340 mph and a range of 1,600 miles--longer legs than any other fighter in the world.

As allies of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany but took no real action, thereby giving Adolf Hitler the privilege of choosing the next battlefield. Fearing that he would take the easy route through the "low countries," Belgium bought 40 Brewster fighters from Alfred and Ignacio Miranda, who had previously sold arms to Bolivia, Japan, and Spain. Once again, the U.S. Navy found itself obliged to yield up its Brewsters to a small European nation.

The result was the B-339. Unfortunately, German Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers reached Belgium before it did. France took over the order, only to surrender in its turn before the planes arrived. Britain then acquired the Brewsters. The Royal Air Force assigned them to 71 Squadron, made up of Americans who had volunteered to fly for Britain.

The Yanks put the B-339 through its paces at Church Fenton in Yorkshire. Squadron Leader Walter Churchill (a Dutch-born Englishman with seven German planes to his credit, and no kin to the war-time prime minister) complained that the fighter had no armor plate and not enough guns. Worse yet, its fuel tanks were built into the wings, and the wings into the fuselage, so that a single bullet-hole could require a major rebuild. The tail wheel wobbled. The clock had no trip indicator, so the pilot couldn't tell when to switch fuel tanks. "On no account," Churchill concluded, "should this type be considered as a fighter without considerable modification." However, it would make a dandy trainer: "It behaves with the ease of a Gladiator [biplane] and is just as simple to aerobat. So far we have found no vices."

So 71 Squadron used the Belgian B-339s as trainers. A few went to the Fleet Air Arm in the Mediterranean, to serve with 805 Squadron on the beleaguered island of Crete. "A delight to fly--very maneuverable," Squadron Leader Alan Black said of the Brewster. "It would have been an excellent fighter but the guns could not be fired." The problem, Black thought, lay in frayed electrical wires in the mechanism that synchronized the nose guns with the propeller.

Only one B-339 ever set out on a combat mission, flown by a former Member of Parliament named Rupert Brabner. He turned back when the engine sounded rough, lost power before reaching the runway, and flipped the Brewster onto its back. Dayton Brown's roll bar did its job, and the former MP survived. The plane did not: with the rest of 805 Squadron's Brewsters, it was captured when German paratroopers seized Crete in May 1941.

Like them or not, the British ordered 170 more B-339s to their own specifications. They couldn't build enough Hurricanes and Spitfires to defend their far-flung colonies. Anyhow, in March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease act, and for all practical purposes the American warplanes were free of charge.

Lend-Lease posed a problem for Brewster Aeronautical. Accustomed to up-front money from foreigners, it now had to wait for the U.S. government to pay. This embarrassment was followed by others. For their arms deals in Bolivia, the Miranda brothers were sent to the Federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. And the Navy eased Jimmy Work out of the presidency, hoping to speed up production by installing a Naval Academy graduate named George Chapline.

The RAF had a tradition of fierce alliteratives: Hawker Hurricane, Gloster Gladiator, Vickers Vildebeest. It christened the B-339 "Buffalo," a name so apt that it was soon applied to all models of the Brewster fighter. Thanks to the modifications demanded by the RAF, it weighed 900 pounds more than the equivalent F2A-2. Speed dropped, along with climb rate, service ceiling, and maneuverability. To make matters worse, Brewster shipped some of the British B-339s with Wright Cyclones cannibalized from the TWA passenger fleet.

The British had a triage system for allocating warplanes, reserving the Spitfire for home defense, sending the Hurricane and the Curtiss Tomahawk (P-40, in U.S. Army service) to North Africa, and exiling the Buffalo to Southeast Asia. This was not the best place for it, to judge by the comments of test pilot Eric Brown: "Delightful maneuverability. Above 10,000 ft. labors badly. Oil and cylinder head temperatures high in temperate climates." If the Cyclone overheated in Britain, how would it fare in the tropics?

No matter! "Buffaloes are quite enough for Malaya," said Sir Robert Brooke-Popham in Singapore, five days before Japan proved him wrong. It was an article of faith in the west that the Japanese could neither build decent warplanes nor fly them effectively.