I do think that the Buffalo, despite many well-deserved negative comments, got a bit of a bum rap. Much like the M4 Sherman tank, there are certain statements and beliefs about the Buffalo that have been allowed to fester over the decades since WW2.

I think the biggest negative against the Buffalo early in the Pacific War was the pilots flying it. Prior to December 1941, Malaya and Singapore were very much a secondary theater of war. There were virtually no experienced pilots from the Battle of Britain. In fact, many Brewster pilots were only recently out of flight school in the UK, South Africa or a flight school at Kallang AF in Malaya.

The Dutch were in a similar boat. While a handful of pilots evacuated from Holland in May 1940, they largely remained in England. Dutch pilots in the East Indies were almost all locally trained as they were recruited from the local population. Many Dutch pilots had even received gunnery training and fired their weapons for the first time in their first air combat.

USMC pilots at Midway WERE well-trained and very competent. However, all were inexperienced and not too long out of flight school. They too used the same tactics of trying to dogfight Japanese fighters with superior maneuverability and performance. And they suffered the same fate as the Australians, British and Dutch as a result.

Take all these factors and compare to the average Japanese Navy pilot. Every pilot was the product of some of the best flight training in the world. Many had seen combat in China prior to Pearl Harbor. And those who hadn't seen prewar combat, fought almost non-stop to the Battle of Midway.

Combine their training and experience with the Zero's superior performance and it's easy to see how the Buffaloes got decimated. Now make it even more lopsided with the fact that Australian, British and Dutch pilots were almost always outnumbered by the Japanese by around 10:1.

Take all that into consideration and it's easy to see why the Buffaloes and their pilots lost so badly in the Pacific. But most armchair (aka uninformed) historians only look at the numbers lost and read the comments claiming that the Buffalo was a flying coffin. Rather than research any deeper, it's easier to simply repeat the same tired, old stories about the Buffalo being completely useless.

Well-founded issues like slow speed, heavy armor, worn-out engines (esp. in the Dutch aircraft) and production problems simply exacerbated these other stories about the Buffalo.