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At the Battle of Midway, forty-one TBD Devastators were launched between 7 and 9 a.m. By 11 o'clock, 35 had been shot down. After the battle, all other Devastators were withdrawn from non-training units and they never again flew in combat.

The Devastator was so bad that the Navy destroyed all remaining planes by the end of 1944. So there are now no museum exhibits anywhere of what was at one time the U.S. Navy's frontline torpedo bomber.

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They were terrible outdated planes that should have never been flown into battle, but they did at least serve one important role at Midway by diverting the Japanese fighters at just the right moment so that the US Navy's dive bombers could approach almost undetected.

And the torpedo they dropped barely worked.

Later in tests the US Navy found there was a 2/3 chance the torpedo would break up, not start or simply sink when it hit the water.

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