How a WWII Pilot Destroyed TWO Enemy Aircraft Carriers - The Story of Richard Halsey Best 

This is great 👍

I trying to figure out where I heard the last name Best from until the last 4 minutes of the video. Best was depicted in one of *My* 5 best WW2 related movies called *Midway* can't remember the name of the actor who portrayed him tho. He was all about never say never, he gave no fu*ks about his safety he made sure his mission is completed.

That was the Mogami class heavy cruiser Mikuma. Dusty hit Kaga, Hiryu and Mikuma. Dick Best hit Akagi and Hiryu. He was in sickbay for the flight against Mogami and Mikuma. Dick Best's main contribution was the hit on Akagi.

RIP Dusty Kleiss

These naval pilots saved the US from Japanese expansion in the Pacific. This was the "Stalingrad" of the Pacific War.

Okay...how the hell did Best and Kleiss not get the Medal of Honor? All the pilots that achieved direct hits on the 4 Japanese carriers should have received a Medal of Honor!!!!

@@nogoodnameleft That's true!!! They deserved that!!!

For what I researched (Although I lost the source), Weber's missed bomb did disable the turbine (Or something similar, I ain't familiar with ships)

@@joeyakathug5215 It jammed Akagi's rudder

@@panzerivausfg4062 Thanks for clarification

@@joeyakathug5215 If you see the scene from Midway (2019), Kroger's bomb smashed in the water next to the ship but Weber's bomb hit the sea right behind the Akagi and the blast and the underwater shock wave probably did the damage to the rudder.

Midway (2019) was a bit of a travesty in terms of historical accuracy. They got a few things right but missed a lot. It transformed Dick Best from a real-life hero into a Marvel Cartoon superhero. The totally made-up, highly risky landing near the movie's beginning would have got him court-martialand took me out of the movie. It is something no pilot would have done and made the rest of the movie was a cartoon. Overall the movie got a few things right and a lot wrong as it turned Dick Best into a cartoon. Dick Best made one of the singular greatest decisions in WW2 to pull out of his dive on the first carrier when he realized that the lead planes following McClusky had dived on the wrong (according to doctrine) carrier and Best the presents of mind, bravery, and skill to take out the second carrier. It might have been a different outcome if there had ended up being 2 Japanese left after the first attack. It is hard to fault McClusky since he was the one that figured out how to find the carriers in the first place and had not been a dive bomber pilot for very long. As many others have mentioned, Dusky Kleiss also hit two carriers that day, also a great accomplishment. Taking nothing away from what Kleiss did, Best's presence of mind may have changed the outcome of the whole battle of Midway. That could also be said of McClusky's finding of the carriers while risking everything to keep searching, or Best would not have been in a position to sink the carrier.

He should've got the Medal of Honor,w/making that obsolete equipment work like he did

@@curtiskretzer8898 The SBD was not obsolete in 1942. The TBD is another story.

@@MW-eb1qh the Dauntless was obsolete.The Devastator that replaced it was questionable

@@curtiskretzer8898 do you even have a clue?

@@bombsquig original statement & follow up replies stand on their own. Best made the moving target dive bomber work way past capability

This travesty can be & should be fixed! I hope there us family that pursues this!

@@Mister8224 that window has long since closed

If you give it to Best, then you need to give it to Dusty Kleiss as well. They both hit carriers at Midway. BTW Kleiss would tell us that he was a trained dive bomber pilot and was just doing what he was trained to do.

@@johnemerson1363 Sounds reasonable John. I think what they both did was far above expectations & in addition changed the trajectory of the war. It's hard to argue they both deserve the button.

@@Mister8224 Dusty Kleiss's book, "Don't Call Me A Hero" would argue the point. They both did their jobs magnificently.

Two Aircraft Carriers in a single AFTERNOON!

Jack “Dusty” Kleiss, who hit Kaga and Hiryu on June 4 and the cruiser Mikuma two days later.

Bomber pilots are not "aces" unless they do what fighter pilots do to earn the designation; shoot down five enemy aircraft. I don't know of any who have done that.

He actually shared that feat with Dusty Kleiss who hit Kaga and Hiryu, then came back the next day to hit the Cruiser Mikuma. Best gets remember a little more because he was the only one to score a direct and fatal hit on Akagi. Although I think Kleiss's hit on Kaga was the one that wiped out the bridge and all the command officers.

@@ToddSauve There actually were a small number of "Dauntless Aces". Owing to the fact that once a Dauntless dropped it's bombs it was a shockingly effective fighter. And a number of Zero's discovered that the Twin .30's in the back were a nasty surprise. Most Dauntless Ace's came out of Guadalcanal and the Solomon's. There were also some number of Avenger Air to Air kills late in the war, when they started using radar equipped Avengers as nightime fleet defense against Kamikaze's. They first tried it with an Avenger guiding 2 Hellcat's at night. I think they later just sent up the Avenger discovering that it could do the job with less aerial confusion.

He took out Akagi with a single direct hit on her and at same time saved hundreds of American lives...

He insured that battle was a win for the U.S. and not a draw for both sides. That lifted America at a time when the Japanese were undefeated and considered the best navy in the world. He should never be forgotten.

Fuck Hiryu all my homies hate Hiryu

My grandfather flew with Torpedo 8. May they all rest in peace. You gave all so that others could secure victory.

If I remember correctly, a total of 41 TBD-1 Devastator torpedo bombers attacked the Japanese carriers. 35 were shot down, including all aircraft of the Hornet's VT-8. This is correct; the attention given to the torpedo planes allowed the dive bombers to approach and attack almost unnoticed and unopposed.

Armed with torpedoes that malfunctioned, the Navy should have executed a couple of Admirals,,and definitely got rid of King.

There is something that happens when an explosion happens underwater called the water hammer effect....water not being compressible, it has a devastating effect in a ships side when the explosion is close enough and slams all that water against the ships plates and rivets and welds and can buckle those plates.. ..when the bomb exploded near the stern of the ship it jammed the rudder and the upsplash from the bomb going off bent up part of the back of the flight deck!

For further information on the concept, look up the bombs designed by Barnes Wallace in WW2. Bouncing bombs to destroy dams, all the way up to the grand slam bombs.

Dangerous, certainly, but not "just as deadly". No carriers in this battle were sunk by near misses. Five were sunk by direct hits.

If it jammed the rudder then it basically made the ship unmaneuverable and pretty much a sitting duck.

@@skibum6422 A jammed rudder is bad for any warship, but most can still maneuver to a certain extent, if they have two indepenent engines and driveshafts. And they don't lose much of their speed, either. But for a carrier it's worse. They NEED to be able to turn up against the wind in order to safely launch and retrieve aircraft. (Modern carriers with steam catapults can mostly get away with not doing this during launches, but retrieval... No. ) Turning against the wind is very difficult without a working rudder, even if you have multiple propellers. It's not just that planes don't like crosswinds when taking off or landing, but a carrier doing 20Knots into a moderate breeze(13Knots), that's 33Knots of airspeed that the aircraft doesn't have to generate before achieving lift, or how much less speed they have relative to the flight deck when attempting to land. Taking off with a fully loaded fighter or bomber, you NEED every extra knot of speed that can be provided because the runway is so short. That jammed rudder alone would probably have put it out of comission for the battle, even if Best had missed with his bomb.

I read about Dusty Kleiss, Never call me hero, years ago. Never heard of Best till I saw Midway, both are amazing men, thank God for those naval aviators. Go Navy.

Agree 100% and want to add recognition to the SBDs, barely current tech, yet, in the hands of aggressive and well-trained pilots served as long as they had to until all the problems caused by the politicians/commanders involved in the Helldiver program were cleared up. Unfortunately for the Helldiver by the time a decent version came out, the idea of individual models of planes for each role dive bombing, torpedo attack, and fighters was coming to an end with fighters powerful enough to carry equivalent bomb load although not as far but had the benefit of not needing escorts and the idea of the single seat attack plane, Skyraider-types.

@@robertsmith2227---Agreed

What happen to him?

@@farhanazzahra5---As it turned out he inhaled something that badly damaged his lungs. Which the movie showed. And the navy wouldn't allow him to fly after that. He stayed on the ground the rest of his life. Or well that's what I assume happened to him after he was grounded.

a fair number of officers had a over developed sense of worth, combined with aggressive self promotion. Cmdr Dick Best wasn't one of them.

@@brokenbridge6316 He lived to 91, which would not have happened if he had kept flying. Not a shame, but a reward.

that might be correct when trying to call them heros but most ww2 memoirs I've read said they wanted their actions to be recognized

Agreed, hands down

Yes. The 1976 version is something I’ve seen many times, because it used to be on (pre-streaming) TV all of the time. When I started to research the battle myself, I wondered why they felt the need to invent Charlton Heston’s character. And don’t even get me started on the romance thing w/ his Son. The Actor and Actress they chose for those roles were painful.

@@mmp64. He should have received the congressional Medal of Honor, instead he got the distinguished flying cross and the Navy Cross. Imagine dive bombing on two aircraft carriers and living to tell the story.

@@larrybenoit1274 I know. I can't even do it in a video game. I cannot fathom how they did what they did.

I agree. Ever since I saw the 2019 movie, it's been hard for me to watch the 1976 movie. Apart from some of the score John Williams wrote for the older movie, I would say that the 1976 movie did a better job of explaining Yorktown's role in the battle, but only marginally.

Stalingrad. How can u say that. It was the begin of the end for the f nazi's. A whole div and the 6 army gruppe where gone. 1 fieldmarshal and 34 generals out to the gulags. U can not compare that to the 4 carriers of midway. Compare it whit Iwo Jima or Okinawa. Than i can go in your statement. No way. Midway.

@@hansmaquine they were the turning points in their respective theater

Battle of Britain too, the Germans first defeat.

@@hansmaquine Iwo Jima & Okinawa were a much different situation. Japan had zero chance of winning the war by that point. Strategically speaking, Stalingrad & Midway are exceedingly similar. Axis forces dramatically overplayed their hand, and Allied forces scored decisive victories that permanently crippled the the Axis war efforts. Both completely changed their theatre, largely ending the Axis offensives.

Actually, the battle of Khalkin Gal started a chain of events that would lead to the defeat of both Japan and Germany. The Soviet victory caused Japan, along with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, to abandon its North Wind Cloudy Plan (attacking the Soviet Far East Territories) and institute East Wind Rain. When Richard Sorge’s spy network in Japan confirmed Japan’s intentions and informed Soviet intelligence, which Stalin this time believed after his disastrous disbelief just 5 months earlier in June, 1941, the Soviets were able to release tens of thousands of troops, along with tanks and planes, to stop the Germans at Moscow, which was the real turning point as it destroyed the myth of Wehrmacht invincibility and allowed the Soviets to regroup. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a fatal victory as it did not sink the USA carriers nor do any real lasting damage to the Pearl Harbor Naval Station. With the airfields, fuel farm and dry docks intact, the US Navy was able to continue full operations at Pearl instead of San Diego. After the US Navy effectively knocked out two Japanese carriers at Coral Sea (they were rendered unable to participate at Midway as planned), replace the Lexington almost immediately and repaired the Hornet in record time at Pearl instead of San Diego because Japan never carried out its last wave in its attack on Pearl, making it available in time to participate at Midway. Also, the US Navy had found out about what had been a secret Japanese reconnaissance base on an island halfway between Hawaii and Midway and destroyed it, preventing Japan from knowing about the trap they were sailing into. Also, it was at Kursk that Germany’s fate was finally sealed. In other words, nothing happens in a vacuum.

The oxygen rebreather of Best's SBD had become heated during the unusually long search on the morning mission on June 4. The material used in the rebreather to remove exhaled carbon dioxide was sodium hydroxide. If the device containing this material were abnormally heated, it could release caustic soda fumes through the pilot's oxygen mask; consequently, Best had inhaled caustic fumes. Sometime in the past, Best had contracted latent tuberculosis, which remained in his lungs in an inactive state for years. The inhaled caustic fumes caused a chemical pneumonitis and eroded away a tuberculosis granuloma, transforming the inactive form of the organism into an active form, resulting in the progression from latent TB infection to TB disease.

yeah it's in the video

He is on my list!

@@TJ3 Good to know.

Why "Swede"?

@@kaewakoyangi8071 It was his nickname.

@@jackthedragon612 Thank you, Captain Obvious. But "Vejtasa" is not a Swedish name, it's Hungarian. Or Czech. In Hungarian it actually means something: "his brother-in-Law".

Thanks!

I have a video on him as well if you want to go watch it. It's pretty good!

Rudel Was A "FEARLESS ACE" To...

I have, as a matter of fact. There is a book (which title escapes me at the moment) which talks about the last 100 days of WW 2 on the European front. As I recall, Hans Ulrich Rudel was mentioned several times, including the mission in which he was severely wounded and burned when his aircraft either crashed or was shot down. I knew about his tank-killing prowess. I did not know about the other things. Thank you for the additional information!

Rear Gunner sees the tracers going past him also! Just can see them coming. Not sure which is worse.

I believe the protocol during a dive was to have the gunner swivel his seat to face forward, and he was responsible for calling out the altitude to help the pilot time the release and recover the plane before hitting the water. I wasn't there, but I think I read this somewhere...

Well stated. Those guys were special.

Do keep in mind that AA wasn’t the biggest threat a pilot faced when attacking an enemy ship. Enemy fighter patrols were.

​@@bkjeong4302... that's what destroyed Torpedo 6 & 8...fighters and Ensign George W Gay had a ringside seat. Saw his obituary in Time in 87?

That's because he is DICK BEST !!!!

I don't know about then, but now, at least, military medical retirement is based on a percentage of your ability to perform your job. Since his lung condition no longer allowed him to serve, he was "fully disabled". Troops returning from the Middle East today with prosthetic limbs are 100%, and can go on to live full lives.

My dad lost his legs in Vietnam and gets disability so no it’s not about a shorter life .

See Robert Heinlein

Glad you enjoyed it

@@TJ3 Outstanding as always.

That was the Marshall Raid when they were returning from the Battle of Coral Sea.

@@andysnyder4506 I was just wondering about this again last night. Thx!

Thanks!

Yes

Thank you

Drawing a blank on the name, and it was US Army Air Force, but a sargent was awarded the Medal of Honor early in the second great debate. He put out a fire with the only liquid available to him...he pissed on it

It helped a little that there was a fully fueled strike in the hanger where the bomb exploded, also there was ordinance all over the place, not to mention that the IJN did not have the best damage control in the world.

@@frednone you must have read “Shattered Sword” too!

I'll check it out!

Thsts why Best was the best pilot...He single handedly erased McCludky's error and made sure Akagi did not escape ... McCluskys decision to stay out instead of returning to fuel up was a huge part in this battle however...Do he deserves plenty of credit for his actions on this day...

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for watching!

AMEN!

There has never been anything like the American citizen soldier

I agree with everything you said up to the last sentence. Most immigrants came and come because of those accomplishments and our values. This from one whose ancestors fought under Washington, but all Americans came from immigrant ancestors, only the first ones walked here. TJ... excellent as always.

Dusty was incredible as well.... Dick was a little more spectacular in the manor he scored those 2 direct hits... Peeling out of dive after realizing both squadrons all dove on Kaga and then sinking Akagi almost single handedly is off the charts bro....

@@17donhol Strictly speaking, while the SBDs all reduced the 4 carriers to flaming wrecks, they all retained the structural integrity of their hulls. They could not be saved, so the Japanese scuttled them with torpedos from their destroyers. Otherwise, the 4 could have stayed afloat and drifted indefinitely. Some say the IJN was concerned the USN may have tried to tow Akagi back to Pearl if she was not scuttled, to use for propaganda purposes. The IJN did not tell the Japanese people what happened at Midway till late in the war. If the USN had captured Akagi and towed her to Pearl, certainly Japan's citizens would have found out the truth.

An air group at the time was all planes on the ship Hence the title CAG, commander air group

I remembered growing up in the air of freedom in the '50s n '60s due to the conquest of the evil powers of Japan n Germany in WW2. Now we got losers in power n they brought in the stench of oppression that fills the air.

Thanks!

I was wondering what the "GC" stood for. Thank you for explaining!

Excellent point, many aircraft unrecoverable.

Thanks!

Thanks!

@@TJ3 As a Boomer who had parents that lived through the depression and WW2 it's refreshing to see younger generations to discover the amazing history of those times. I would recommend you also research the German-Russian theater of the war. Reality is stranger than fiction!

This will blow your mind! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6CerdjvePsg.html

They did...it's called VICTORY AT SEA... and can be found here on RU-vid . The musical score is epic

Working on it! Haha