When it comes to candidates for the worst fighter of World War II, one airplane usually leads the list. There are two books entitled The World's Worst Aircraft, and the Brewster Buffalo is the only fighter from any era to rate a chapter in both.
The RAF had a tradition of fierce alliterative:
Hawker Hurricane, Gloster Gladiator, Vickers Vildebeest. It christened the Model 339 "Buffalo," a name so apt that it was soon applied to all models of the Brewster fighter. Thanks to the modifications the RAF demanded, it weighed 900 pounds more than the equivalent F2A-2. Speed dropped, along with climb rate, service ceiling, and maneuverability. To make matters worse, Brewster shipped some of the British 339s with second-hand Wright Cyclones cannibalized from the TWA passenger fleet.
The British had a triage system for allocating warplanes, reserving the Spitfire for home defense, sending the Hurricane and the Curtiss Tomahawk (the P-40 in U.S. Army service) to North Africa, and exiling the Buffalo to Southeast Asia. This was not the best place for it, to judge by the comments of test pilot Eric Brown: "Delightful maneuverability. Above 10,000 ft. labors badly. Oil and cylinder head temperatures high in temperate climates." If the Cyclone overheated in Britain, how would it fare in the tropics?
No matter! "Buffaloes are quite enough for Malaya," said Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham in Singapore, five days before Japan proved him wrong. It was an article of faith in the West that the Japanese could neither build decent warplanes nor fly them effectively.
Vic Bargh was one of the New Zealand lads who left their pretty farms to defend the British fortress at the southern tip of Malaya. "When we got to Singapore," Bargh says, "we thought we'd see all sorts of modern aeroplanes." Instead, they were given creaky Vildebeest torpedo planes. So Bargh was delighted when Buffaloes arrived: "They were beautiful aeroplanes. We all thought they were good, you know. We didn't know they were out of date." When they flew the Buffalo against the nimble fighters of Japan, they often didn't come back.
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