Your Sunday Morning Historical Prop Noise

A Douglas SBD:

I recently took a trip to visit my mother on her birthday. The return trip had me changing planes at Midway Airport. When I change flights there, if I don't have to rush to my next one, I like to go to the Battle of Midway exhibit and look at the SBD on display.

Those guys were all peacetime volunteers. It's probably a good bet that a fair number of the Americans at the battle, both junior officers and enlisted, had joined the Navy for a steady job and "three hots and a cot" during the Great Depression. War came calling, they stepped up and did their jobs.

The Battle of Midway was a turning point in the war, the high-water mark of Japanese expansion. Thing is about turning points, they're just of interest to historians. Most of the time, they're not apparent to those doing the fighting. It's just another day in the trenches/cockpit/engineering plant.

While I was sitting there for a bit, some dude told his girlfriend that the metal pipes under the airplane were used for launching it from a carrier:

They weren't. That's a bomb-trapeze. Its function is to swing the bomb out clear of the propeller's arc before releasing the bomb. SBDs dove at an angle of up to 80 degrees, their speed limited by perforated dive brakes. The bomb, of course, would free-fall upon release and, if not swung out clear of the propellor, would smash it.

And no, I didn't correct the dude at the airport. Though every fiber of me wanted to.