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The Sorry Saga of the Brewster Buffalo (part 2)

Vic Bargh was one of the New Zealand lads who left their pretty farms to defend the British fortress at the southern tip of Malaya. "When we got to Singapore," Bargh told me on the telephone last year, "we thought we'd see all sorts of modern aeroplanes." Instead, they were given creaky Vildebeest torpedo planes. So Bargh was delighted when Buffaloes arrived: "They were beautiful aeroplanes. We all thought they were good, you know. We didn't know they were out of date."

That fall, Vic Bargh and his mates were sent to Burma, anchoring the supply line to Singapore. By December there were five Buffalo squadrons in Southeast Asia, each with British commanders, a few junior officers from Australia or New Zealand, and a dozen sergeant-pilots like Bargh. As with the Ascot races, so with the RAF in 1941: you needed a good accent to get into the clubhouse.

Below Singapore lay the oil-rich islands of Sumatra and Java, where the Dutch had a colonial air force. They bought Brewsters, too, and some of these were also delivered with second-hand engines.

Far to the northwest, the B-239s had reached combat squadrons. The Finns judged the plane to be simply constructed and easily repaired. (Their state aircraft factory was close to the front, and their mechanics were inventive. Finding that oil didn't circulate freely through the engine, for example, they inverted a cylinder ring and solved a problem that plagued the Brewster wherever it served. It probably also helped that Finland was colder than Malaya or even Britain.) To bring the B-239s up to snuff, they added armor plate and modern gun sights. "The more we played with it," recalled Joppe Karhunen in 1982, "the more we liked it."

For a recognition mark, the Finns used a blue hakaristi, a bent-leg cross that signified good luck in Nordic lands. Thus it happened that a warplane supplied by the United States came to carry an insignia resembling the Nazi swastika.

It also fought on the German side. In June 1941, with his troops occupying most of western Europe, Hitler turned east against the Soviet Union. To Finland, this was the "Continuation War." The B-239s were flown by Lentolaivue 24, combat-hardened men who were fighting to regain the land they'd lost in the Winter War. Within six months, they were credited with destroying 135 Russian planes at the cost of two Brewsters.

Overclaiming? Oh, yes. Most fighter pilots overclaim, for a variety of good reasons. But the Finns certainly exacted a terrible vengeance for their losses in the Winter War, using the fighter Britain had exiled to Southeast Asia.

To be sure, the combat wasn't entirely a David-Goliath match. Joseph Stalin had purged his officer corps in the 1930s, eliminating anyone who showed signs of independent thought. In the case of the Red Air Force, the result was formations that doggedly held their course while the enemy cut them to pieces, and pilots who stormed into combat without "checking six" (looking to the rear). Gunsights often consisted of a circle hand-painted on the windscreen, and the planes were obsolescent. This was especially true on the Finnish front, where a future ace named Hasse Wind claimed his first victory against a Polikarpov I-15 biplane, older than the Vildebeests at Singapore.

In the United States, the Navy finally got enough Brewsters to equip VF-2 on Lexington. Like the Australians and New Zealanders in Southeast Asia, the pilots of "Fighting Two" were mostly enlisted men. Gordon Firebaugh was one of them. In a 1983 interview with aviation historian Jim Maas, Firebaugh praised his F2A-2 as "the most fabulous thing to step into." (To be sure, he'd stepped out of an old Grumman biplane, slower by nearly 100 mph.)

Like the Royal Air Force, the Navy wanted more fuel, more armor, and more ammunition. The result was the F2A-3--the sports car transformed to a slug. In Firebaugh's recollection, it was this model that suffered the most landing-gear failures: its weight, and the consequent increase in landing speed, caused the wheel strut to bend out of alignment. Mechanics filed off a bit of metal so the wheel could retract, and after a few such fixes it broke.

The Navy solved the problem, as it often did with unsatisfactory equipment, by giving the F2A-3 to the Marines. By November 1941, the "First Team" of carrier fighter pilots was almost entirely equipped with Grumman Wildcats.

On December 7/8, the Navy and the Marines had 36 Brewster fighters in the Pacific. The Dutch had 70, and the British had 150. Against Japan, this wasn't the puny force it would have been in Europe. The Mitsubishi company was building just one of its "Type Zero" navy fighters per day--a rate that even Brewster Aeronautical could match. Only 400 Zeros were in combat squadrons when the war began, and the Nakajima company had shipped just 50 of its equivalent Type One army fighter, popularly called Hayabusa (Falcon). Most land-based units were still equipped with the puny, fixed-gear Type 97 fighter. (The planes were identified by year of adoption, using a calendar based on the legendary founding of the Japanese empire. In western terms, the Type 97 went into service in 1937, the Zero in 1940, the Hayabusa in 1941.)

The Japanese fighters had a semi-bubble cockpit canopy, such as Dayton Brown had given the Buffalo. And the Zero and Hayabusa were powered by the 14-cylinder Nakajima Sakae engine, a virtual clone of the Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp. So they combined the best features of the Buffalo and the Wildcat, while being nimble enough to fly rings around either.

In an advertisement published that December, Brewster boasted that its fighters were "carrier-based off Diamond Head," defending Hawaii. But no U.S. aircraft carrier was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese arrived, so the U.S. Brewsters were spared the carnage of December 7.

In Malaya, where the date was December 8, the RAF sent unescorted Blenheim and Hudson bombers, and even Vildebeests, to attack the invasion fleet. The Buffaloes were used for strafing and reconnaissance--if they managed to get off the ground. Often their pilots were denied permission to scramble even when Japanese bombs were bursting upon their airfields; those who did get into the air tried mostly to survive. Typical of the war's first days was an encounter on December 9, when an Australian pilot aimed through an oil-smeared windshield and fired at his own wingman, fortunately missing him.

Not until December 22 did the Commonwealth pilots meet the Japanese on nearly equal terms: 12 Buffaloes against 18 Hayabusas. The Japanese lost one plane, the Australians six. That settled the question of who owned the air over Malaya, and the Royal Air Force retreated to Singapore island.

Over Rangoon the following day , Vic Bargh saw his first hinomaru--the rising sun painted on Japanese warplanes. The American "Flying Tigers" got most of the credit for defending Burma, but RAF 67 Squadron was the vanguard that noon. It wasn't a happy experience: "We met 35 or 37 [fighters] and a big mob of bombers," Bargh recalled. "I had a fighter about two feet behind me all the time. . . . I had no armor plating, so I could see him easily. He was in a fixed undercarriage, what we called a Type 97 fighter. One [bullet] got by my ear. At that point I realized I couldn't turn with him any longer. I spiraled down and I came up again . . . and there was another mob of bombers." Bargh was credited with shooting down a twin-engined Mitsubishi bomber, meanwhile performing a stunt unique in the annals of aerial combat: he took off his boot, slid back the canopy, reached around, and cleaned the windshield with his sock. "The oil . . . would just get too hot and overflow," he explained. "As soon as the engine was at full throttle, this would happen. . . . But you had to use full throttle. The Japanese fighters were very good."

The New Zealanders survived that encounter, but on Christmas Day met the same Hayabusas that had savaged the Australians over Malaya. Four pilots were killed and 13 Buffaloes destroyed.

"You had to be above them," Bargh explained. "And when you saw them coming, you pulled up steeply and rolled over on your back. . . . We were quite used to flying the aeroplane; it didn't matter a damn whether we were upside down or right way up. You just curled over at the top [and] twisted around so you came in from behind. Straight in behind. You can do it if you tipped upside down and you watched them coming along. I've done it, I've done it. I did it twice, and I lived."

Flight Sergeant Bargh was 21 years old that Christmas.

The Buffalo pilots claimed a few victories in 1942, but left most of the fighting to the Flying Tigers and to Hurricane squadrons rushed from North Africa. "They were a different lot to us," Bargh said of the Hurricane pilots, "and we were just left on the ground, gazing at them." Singapore fell in February, and Indonesia in March, and that was the end of the Buffalo in Southeast Asia.

Brewster Aeronautical was meanwhile going through another transformation. Jimmy Work and the Miranda brothers--free after five months in Lewisburg--got rid of George Chapline, the navy's man, and installed a president more to their liking. Then the company was sued for $10 million by stockholders who alleged close dealing and inflated commissions.

That was it for the U.S. Navy. In April 1942, the government seized Brewster Aeronautical and put the former head of the Naval Aircraft Factory in charge of it. The ostensible reason was the Miranda brothers with their prison records, but historian Jim Maas suspects that the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics was punishing Brewster for chasing export business while the Navy cooled its heels, waiting for fighters. "BuAer got ticked," Maas speculated in an e-mail message last winter, "and they had long memories."

The Navy wanted no more Buffaloes. It meant to use the expropriated company to build a new dive bomber (SB2A Buccaneer) and the redoubtable, gull-winged Corsair fighter (F4U when it came from Chance Vought, F3A from Brewster). One reason for America's astonishing output during World War II was the government's policy of having one company build the planes of another. The Wildcat, for example, was given to General Motors, while Grumman concentrated on its F6F Hellcat.

In the Pacific, the Navy had eliminated the Buffalo from its aircraft carriers. However, VMF-221 on Midway atoll still had 20 in service, plus 6 Wildcats. Like the colonial pilots in Malaya, Burma, and Indonesia, the Marines had never seen combat, which probably had something to do with their fate in the Battle of Midway.

Their ordeal got underway at 6:12 a.m. on June 4, when Capt. John Carey cried into his microphone: "Tally ho! Hawks at Angels Twelve!" Midway was supposed to defend itself with anti-aircraft guns, while its aircraft attacked the enemy fleet. VMF-221 would have been better off following that plan. In one of those breathtaking gambles that marked the Japanese advance, only 18 Zeros stayed with the task force. With no American fighters to trouble them, they made an easy meal of the bombers and torpedo planes from Midway.

Meanwhile, VMF-221 dove upon two squadrons of single-engine Nakajima bombers--the hawks at 12,000 feet--and the escorting Zeros fell upon the Marines. The Americans were stunned by the ferocity and maneuverability of the Japanese fighter. Charles Hughes, forced by a balky engine to return to Midway, saw two friends assailed by Zeros, with one shot down and the other saved only by flak from the atoll's guns. "Both looked like they were tied to a string while the Zeros made passes at them," Hughes wrote in his combat report.

When the slaughter was done, six Buffaloes and four Wildcats returned to Midway. The Japanese claimed 41 "Wildcats" in the 45-minute brawl, for the loss of two fighters and four bombers. In the end, though, the boastful Zero pilots had to swim for it. U.S. Navy dive bombers sank their carriers, a blow from which the Japanese navy never recovered. But VMF-221 didn't fight again until the Guadalcanal campaign in August, and the Marines ever after knew the Buffalo as the "Flying Coffin," a plane not merely disliked but actively hated. As in Malaya, the Brewster was blamed for a disaster that might better have been attributed to faulty tactics, inexperienced pilots, and poor command decisions.

In truth, the Buffalo wasn't all bad, especially in its early variants. Gordon Firebaugh, promoted to lieutenant j.g. and flying a Grumman Wildcat, was shot down at Guadalcanal. "I've often thought that . . . I'd [have] been better off in a Brewster," he said. "I think it would have matched the Zero. The [Wildcat] was heavier and didn't have the turning radius."

And in Finland the B-239 went from victory to victory: 500 Russian planes destroyed at the cost of 28 Brewsters. Clearly, Dayton Brown's fighter could not have been as bad as it has been painted. The Finns knew it as the Taivaan Helmi (Sky Pearl) and copied it as the Humu (Distant Storm). Their home-built variant had wooden wing panels and a captured 1,000-horsepower Russian engine, a virtual clone of the Cyclone that was also used to re-engine some B-239s.

In 1944 the Soviet Union forced another armistice upon the Finns, requiring them to turn against their former ally. So it happened that the Brewster's final victory was a Ju-87 Stuka, shot down on October 3, 1944.

Postwar, Finland was allowed an air force of 60 planes. Among them were at least two Brewsters, used as advanced combat trainers until 1948. Even today, the Humu prototype remains on display at a museum in Tikkakoski, the only known example of Brewster's hapless Buffalo series.

[That last sentence was true at the time, but since then BW-372 and other Buffalo ghosts have surfaced. -- Dan Ford]