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A careful read of Lundstrom would give a very accurate tally for 1942. IIRC, he was only able to confirm one Zero front gun kill claim in 1942.In other words, how many Japanese aircraft were downed by SBD (both by pilot and the rear gunner), vs. how many were lost to the Japanese A/C?
As the Japanese found, a pair or SBD's could usually hold their own against a fighter attack using a variation on the Thatch Weave.
A frontal attack was hard, they had a pair of .50's that could happily chew you up and the A6M didn't have much of a performance advantage.
A stern or beam attack meant duking it out with the mutual defensive fire of the tail gunners while gaining relatively slowly.
Do you know the actual, verified score of SBD vs. A6M?
I have to wince at this one.As the Japanese found, a pair or SBD's could usually hold their own against a fighter attack using a variation on the Thatch Weave.
A frontal attack was hard, they had a pair of .50's that could happily chew you up and the A6M didn't have much of a performance advantage.
A stern or beam attack meant duking it out with the mutual defensive fire of the tail gunners while gaining relatively slowly.
From the same Osprey book, the final numbers differ a bit from R Leonard's above, it says 63 SBDs shot down by fighters, of which 39 CV based in 1941-1942, the other 24 being either at Guadalcanal, or at the Marianas battle in 1944. Compare this with the maximum of 9 A6Ms lost to SBDs in 1942.
Perhaps there might have been a few more SBDs lost in the Solomons in 1943 or at Rabaul to get closer to the numbers above. Conversely, a few more A6Ms might have been lost in 1943 or at the Marianas. Whichever way, i think it's reasonable to assume a roughly 6 to 1 ratio of kills for the A6M vs the SBDs.
A-24 was the USAAF's land-based version of the SBD (non-navalized).A-24s?