Grumman TBF Avenger
The Grumman TBF Avenger was the U.S. Navy's standard carrier-based torpedo bomber of the Second World War, designed to replace the outclassed Douglas Devastator and first flown in 1941. It fought from the Battle of Midway onward, most of the more than 9,830 built were produced by General Motors' Eastern Aircraft Division as the TBM, and after the war it served other navies and flew as a firefighting aircraft; survivors are preserved in museums and still flown today.
Why It Mattered
By 1939 the U.S. Navy's torpedo squadrons still flew the Douglas Devastator, an aircraft whose lack of speed and range no further development could overcome, and the Bureau of Aeronautics issued a specification for a new carrier-based torpedo bomber. Grumman and Vought both submitted designs; Grumman's won, and the Avenger became the Navy's standard torpedo-bomber for the rest of the Second World War. Production totaled more than 9,830 aircraft, nearly three-quarters of them built by General Motors' Eastern Aircraft Division as the TBM. Size, range and adaptability made the type far more than a torpedo bomber: it could fly as far as its escorting fighters, and it spent much of the war as a bomber and submarine hunter.
Design Notes
The Avenger was a large single-engine aircraft flown by a crew of three: a pilot, a turret gunner and a radioman. Its wings folded rearward, the same arrangement Grumman used on the Wildcat fighter, so that even this large aircraft could be packed tightly on deck, fit on carrier elevators and operate from small escort carriers. Grumman designed its own turret for the gunner behind the pilot, powered by electric motors it found fast and reliable, and armed with a single .50-caliber gun. Weapons rode inside the fuselage, in a large bomb bay that could hold a torpedo or bombs instead. Forward firepower was weak at first; in 1943 the single cowling gun was dropped, and each wing received its own .50-caliber gun, producing the TBF/TBM-1C. The most numerous variant, the TBM-3, answered the type's persistent shortage of power with a more powerful engine.
Operational History
The prototype XTBF-1 made the type's first flight on 7 August 1941. The Navy gave the aircraft the name Avenger in October 1941, and on December 23, 1941, two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Grumman received an order for 286 TBFs. Its combat debut, at the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942, was costly: six Avengers attacked the Japanese fleet from Midway Island, and only one returned to the island. Torpedo attacks proved dangerous and American torpedoes unreliable, so the Avenger was more often equipped as a bomber. Grumman, busy with the Wildcat and Hellcat, handed production to General Motors' Eastern Aircraft Division, whose aircraft were designated TBM; Grumman built its last TBF in December 1943, and Eastern had built three-quarters of all Avengers by the war's end. Later variants took on new work as night fighters, radar-equipped submarine hunters and electronic countermeasures aircraft, and the type was also adapted — the first aircraft so converted — to ferry passengers and freight to and from its carrier. Britain was the first to receive the type under Lend-Lease, and called it the Tarpon until 1944.
Afterlife
After the war the Avenger served on with New Zealand, Canada, France and the Netherlands, and Japan, the country it had helped defeat, used the aircraft until the early 1960s. Surplus Avengers went to work as aerial firefighting aircraft, and many were still doing that work three decades after the war. The type's most famous loss came just after the war: a flight of five American Avengers, known as Flight 19, disappeared on 5 December 1945, a loss later added to the Bermuda Triangle legend. Survivors remain in museums and in the air: the National Air and Space Museum holds a former Royal Navy Tarpon, now in storage, and Planes of Fame's TBM-3E, restored to flight in 1976, still flies.