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The RAF had a tradition of fierce alliteratives: Hawker Hurricane, Gloster Gladiator, Vickers Vildebeest, Supermarine Spitfire. It therefore christened the B-339 “Buffalo,” a name so apt that it was soon applied to all models of the Brewster fighter. (Though not by the Finns, who continued to call their fighters by the company designation of B-239.) Thanks to the modifications demanded by the RAF, the British variant weighed 900 pounds more than the equivalent U.S. Navy F2A-2. Its speed dropped accordingly, along with its climb rate, its service ceiling, and – most crucial for a fighter plane – its maneuverability. To make matters worse, Brewster shipped some of the B-339s with Cyclone engines refurbished from the Trans World Airways passenger fleet. These second hand engines almost certainly contributed to the dismal record of the Brewster Buffalo in British service. The Royal Air Force followed a triage system for allocating warplanes, reserving the Spitfire for home defense, sending the Hurricane and the Lend-Lease Curtiss Tomahawk (P-40, in U.S. Army service) to North Africa, and exiling the Brewster Buffalo to Southeast Asia. This was probably not the best place for it, to judge by the comments of British test pilot Eric Brown. “Delightful maneuverability,” he wrote of the Brewster fighter. “Above 10,000 ft. labors badly. Oil and cylinder head temperatures high in temperate climates.” (Italics added.) If an engine overheated in Britain, how would it fare in the tropics?
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The Yanks put the B-339 through its paces at Church Fenton in Yorkshire. Squadron Leader Walter Churchill (a Dutch-born Englishman with four German planes to his credit in the May 1940 Battle of France, and no kin to the wartime prime minister) complained that the fighter had no armor plate and not enough guns. Worse yet, its fuel tanks were built into the wings, and the wings into the fuselage, so that a single bullet hole could require a major rebuild. The tail wheel wobbled. The clock had no built-in timer, so the pilot couldn’t tell when to switch fuel tanks. “On no account,” Churchill concluded, “should this type be considered as a fighter without considerable modification.” However, it would make a dandy trainer, he thought. “It behaves with the ease of a Gladiator [biplane] and is just as simple to aerobat,” Churchill wrote. “So far we have found no vices.” So 71 Squadron used the Belgian B-339s as trainers. A few were also supplied to the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm in the Mediterranean, to serve with 805 Squadron on the beleaguered island of Crete. “A delight to fly – very maneuverable,” Squadron Leader Alan Black said of the Brewster, in a wonderfully understated critique. “It would have been an excellent fighter but the guns could not be fired.” (Italics added.) The problem, Black thought, lay in frayed electrical wires in the mechanism that synchronized the nose guns with the propeller. Only one of the B-339s ever set out on a combat mission, flown by a former Member of Parliament named Rupert Brabner. He turned back when the engine sounded rough, lost power before reaching the runway, and flipped the Brewster onto its back. Dayton Brown’s roll bar did its job, and the former MP survived to fly again. The plane did not: with the rest of 805 Squadron’s Brewsters, it was captured when German paratroopers seized Crete in May 1941.
From THE SORRY SAGA OF THE BREWSTER BUFFALO first published July 1996 by Air & Space / Smithsonian magazine