Blog #3: 1/11/23: The Brewster Buffalo - The US Navy’s Worst Embarrassment
Welcome back to another exciting historical adventure in the field of military aviation!
I'm Brooke from Brooke In The Air, and I'm here to share with you the fascination and passion of flight, as much as I can anyway.
Today's episode, as hinted in the last article, the infamous Brewster Aeronautical Corporation's F2A Buffalo!
"Huh?" I hear a lot of you asking. Well, exactly. The F2A was a horrific disaster of a plane, surpassing that of the bomber equivalent, the B-18 Bolo.
Combat production Brewster F2A-3 Buffalo
Grumman F4F Wildcat, mainstay of the US Navy and successor to the Brewster F2A which the F2A had initially beat out in testing trials.
The story starts in 1939 when the Buffalo won a competition, ironically, against it's successor: the Grumman F4F Wildcat to become the US Navy's first carrier-capable all-metal mono-wing fighter. It was also the first all-weather monoplane to have a permanent arrestor hook for carrier landings.
The F2A Buffalo was short, stubby, had thick, straight wings, a poor fuel consumption rate, even poorer armament, overall bad combat radius and operational range, it was overweight, unstable, and was a beyond-sad match against the advanced enemy strategic fighters of the early 1940s. It's primary opponent, the Mitsubishi A6M Raisen, more commonly known as the "Zero" was faster, had a sharper turn rate, was much better armed and more agile at all altitudes, plus it could travel farther, and early in, generally, the imperial Japanese pilots were better trained.
Brewster F2A Buffalo piloted by Lieutenant J. Thach, tipping on a carrier. This aircraft was written off and replaced. Thach would “tip” his Buffalo fighter at least two times. It wasn’t technically his fault as the Buffalo was overly top-heavy and clunked on the carrier hard-deck.
Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” or Reisen - Replica Aircraft flown by the Commemorative Air Force (T6 Texan)
Now, the F4F Wildcat built by Grumman wasn't much better, after all the Buffalo had beaten it in a fly-off competition, and the Buffalo was certainly better than the Grumman F3F biplane it replaced, and in fairness, the Mitsubishi A6M was undoubtedly, until late 1942, the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world for that short time.
Lt. Thach’s second tipping incident with the F2A Buffalo, this time aboard the carrier USS Saratoga
BW-233, the Finnish Air Force version of the F2A Buffalo, this aircraft in particular was nicknamed “Noka” after Nokia, yes that same Nokia.
And, while outsourced to various nations, including Finland, France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the Finns of the Finnish Air Force, put their B-239s - de-navalised F2A-1 Buffalos to good use against early Soviet fighters such as the Yak-1 and were arguably the best in the use of the outdated and outmatched planes, shooting down 32 Soviet fighters for every Finnish Buffalo shot down, producing 36 Buffalo aces by the war's end.
The British did attempt to improve the performance of their Buffalos by cutting in half the amount of fuel and ammunition carried, plus installing lighter guns. But ultimately it made little difference, they still had inadequate aircraft especially compared to the high performance Messerschmitt BF-109. The lighter armament, usually .30 caliber guns, were consistently ineffective against the superior and much more well-armored German fighters. The British soon returned to using upgraded Hawker Hurricanes after discarding the Buffalo in disgust. The Buffalo in action became a replay of events in the Pacific Theater, when the Japanese ate up the early American fighters.
In December, 1941, the air forces of the British Commonwealth and the Dutch, suffered severe losses in Southeast Asia to the Japanese Army Air Force's Ki-43 "Oscar" land-based fighter in addition to the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. The F2A-3 variant saw service with the US Marine Corps over the battle of Midway and earned the derisive nickname "the flying coffin" from pilots who hated the plane. The F2A-3 variant was markedly inferior to the former to the F2A-2 despite its notable improvements. It still lacked self-sealing fuel tanks and cockpit armor with the only quality feature being that the Buffalo was entirely made from aluminum. May of 1942 marked the last time the Buffalo would see note-worthy combat.
Only powered by a 950-horsepower radial engine, later upgraded to a 1,250 horsepower engine, and initially armed with a single Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun and one .30 caliber machine gun, both mounted in the nose. This was considered inadequate by the Navy but additional armament, and the added fuel in the “wet wings” (which are essentially just sealed wings that have been converted to serve as fuel tanks) weighed the plane down to unbearable levels. As a result, the Buffalo was extremely slow for a fighter, an element that enemy planes happily exploited. It wasn't long before the Brewster Buffalo had lost all confidence of the pilots it had tried to win over. It has a respectable top speed of 323 mph at an altitude of 16,500 feet, the improvements of the F2A-2 which also includes an improved propeller, but was still weighed down with "necessary" aircraft weight.
The last run of F2A Buffalos, notably the F2A-3 variant, a total of 108 ordered by the US Navy, was simply a means of keeping production lines running. The F2A was subsequently replaced by the aircraft it had beaten in a fly-off competition in 1939, the Grumman F4F Wildcat. Grumman also became the primary aircraft supplier of the US Navy, while Brewster Aeronautical Corporation would become a subcontractor for Vought, producing F4U Corsairs for the US Marine Corps. In an early mock dogfight exercise orchestrated by General Claire Chennault pitted his P-40 Warhawks against the Royal Air Force's F2A Buffalos and the P-40 Warhawks won handily. Chennault's pilots summarily retracted their request to gain the F2A Buffalos in exchange for their existing P-40 Warhawks.
The existing F2A Buffalos we're immediately transferred to training squadrons in the United States, as they weren't seen as useful for anything more than advanced fighter trainers and they really weren't.
The Brewster F2A Buffalo went down in history for historical significance, for sure. But for all the wrong reasons. It was a beloved airplane by some, yet much maligned by pilots the world-over. It was under-armed, outmatched by numerous opponents, and was yet again an example of the US being unfit for full-scale war, at the time, for war production. By 1943, Grumman had taken center stage in aircraft production, and had begun producing the F6F Hellcat which was arguably the best fighter in the Pacific Theater.
Grumman F6F Hellcats in formation, 1943 in the South Pacific on Combat Air Patrol
