It is an article of faith that the worst fighter plane of WWII was the Brewster F2A Buffalo.  It's pretty difficult to contest this assertion: in the single true fight it was in, the Battle of Midway, it was essentially massacred by the Imperial Japanese Navy's A6M2 Zero, much the same way a high school team would be by the Chicago Bears.  "It is my belief that any commander that orders pilots out for combat in a F2A-3 Brewster Buffalo should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground" reads one Marine after-action report.  After Midway, the barrel-shaped plane was relegated to trainer status, then to mechanic training.  Its passing was unmourned, its memory one of ridicule and scorn.  The British and Dutch, who also received versions of the Buffalo, felt similarly.

It fell to the Finnish Air Force to give the Buffalo its taste of glory.


The "Winter War" between Finland and the Soviet Union had ended with something of an unlikely outcome.  The Finns had managed to punch Ivan in the snoot despite being horribly outnumbered... the Soviets had three times as many men, thirty times as many planes, and practically "DIV/0" in tanks.  Stalin's purge had disposed of his best commanders, demoralized the army, and left inexperienced politicos in charge.  The weather was ridiculously cold, and while the Finns were prepared, the Red Army was not at all.  The Finns held off the Red Army for 105 days, and while the peace treaty gave the Soviets captured territory, the Finns had dealt out disproportionate losses.  They suffered around 70000 wounded or killed, while the Soviets took nearly 325000 lost or injured.  Both sides knew nothing had been settled.

The Finns immediately set out to fix their shortage of modern planes.  They managed to pry free some 40 Brewster F2As from the United States, and that's where the redemption begins.  To start with, the Finns were sent not Buffaloes, but the B239.  "B239" was Brewster's in-house model number for the original F2A-1, and was a substantially different plane than the one delivered to the US Navy.

The plane the US Navy wanted had pilot armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, and had been modified for naval use: tailhooks, built-in life raft, and a strengthened body to take the stress of carrier landings.  As the Finnish Air Force didn't have an aircraft carrier, it didn't need all that stuff.  The B239 was more like a Japanese Zero than the Grumman F4F Wildcat it resembled: lightweight and very, very nimble.  It also had a better gunsight than the one in the American version, a reflector sight as opposed to the tube sight in the Buffalo.  The Finns got to practice with the B239 for nearly a year before the Finns went back to war with the Soviet Union.  This time, they were ready.

They worked out tactics very similar to the ones worked out by the US Navy to fight while outnumbered, including a variant of the Thach Weave.  When the Germans began Operation Barbarossa, their ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union, the Finns joined in as allies.  Thus began the "Continuation War," the push to recover territory lost in the Winter War.  The B239 equipped a single squadron of 37 planes at this time, and immediately began to rack up eye-popping numbers.  By the end of the war in 1945, the B239 victory / loss ratio was a stunning 26:1, 477 to 19.  While the vast majority of these were scored against Soviet biplanes and monoplanes from the Spanish Civil War era, more advanced planes fell to the tubby fighter's guns as well.  It wasn't until late 1944 that the Soviet Air Force began to field fighters that eclipsed the B239.

The B239's pilots weren't the only people who loved the easy-flying fighter (the highest scoring Finnish ace, Ilmari Juutilainen, called it "a gentleman's traveling plane").  Finnish mechanics were able to perform miracles with the B239, keeping them flying despite a total lack of spare parts.  In some cases, this led to a Frankenstein's Monster version of the plane, called the "Humu".

The various Humus, one of which is seen above in a Finnish museum, at first scavenged parts from dead B239s to get one or more working.  Then the wings were replaced by plywood copies, then fuselage and engine were replaced as well; the engine was a Soviet knockoff of a Wright Cyclone.  Some records suggest upwards of six Humus were actually built, with another 90 planned.

In the end, five B239s survived the war, having been replaced in frontline service by German Me-109s.  They were finally withdrawn from use in 1953, when they were scrapped.  The plane considered the "worst fighter of WWII" was better known to the Finns as the "Sky Pearl," and it shows what the Buffalo could have been.

Instead of what it was.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 07:54 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
Post contains 813 words, total size 6 kb.