From the beginning of World War II, when flattops emerged as the Navy's capital ships, the SBD Dauntless proved essential as the principal striking arm of the the carrier's air group in the first two years of war, a testament to its versatility as scout and bomber, and to its particular potency against enemy warships.

"The naval dive-bomber was to prove the hammerhead of the naval war. The steeper the dive made in the attack, and the closer to the point of bomb release to the target, the less is the hazard of missing. Such an operation required a specially designed plane, with wing flaps rugged enough to serve as 'brakes' in a steep dive, and an airframe and wings stout enough to take the stresses of multi-G pullouts after the drop. The SBD was such an airplane." That admiring sentiment was penned by Professor E.B. Potter, historian and long-time senior faculty member at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The Douglas Dauntless was flown by all three military services in nearly every theater of warfare. The Army Air Force's version, the A-24 Banshee, flew in Java and New Guinea, and later in the Gilbert Islands in support of Army amphibious landings. Marine SBDs flew in the opening phase of the Battle of Midway and were indispensable in the push up the Solomons, and in Luzon and Mindanao in the Philippines where they defined close air support for Army and Marine units on the ground. For the U.S. Navy, the Dauntless comprised half of the aircraft on every aircraft carrier for the first year of the war and flew in all five of the major carrier-versus-carrier battles in the Pacific, sinking six flattops, and over 300,000 tons of enemy shipping. This is the history of the Dauntless, from its popular, record-setting Gamma forebear that debuted in in the mid-1930s, to its extraordinary performance at the Battle of Midway and beyond.