The Wayward Navigator, Part III

Into the Wind and Stretching the Gas

So we're going back, and that tail wind is now a head wind.  Everybody is upset about that, and one of the gunners comes up to me and says, "Lieutenant, what are we gonna do with this navigator?  If we have to ditch this aircraft, it'll be the 3rd one for me."

If we run out of fuel, which seems likely, ditching the aircraft is what we'll have to do--in the Pacific.

I tell the crew:  Disconnect the empty bomb bay tanks and salvo 'em--drop 'em out of the aircraft.  They're heavy.  Throw all the machine guns and all the ammunition overboard.  Take all the radio frequency boxes, and there were a whole bunch of them--all the radios we had were low frequency--and throw them  all overboard except the one we'd need when we got back home.

So we did all that, to lighten the aircraft to stretch the distance we could fly with the fuel we had left.  Then we get to where we should see land--but there's no land.

Now what do we do?

The navigator has a procedure for this circumstance:  You make either a left turn or a right turn, and the navigator tell you which way because he figures that if his figures aren't quite correct, then land should be in that direction.  Then you figure out how much fuel you have left and how far you can fly in that direction before you see land, and still go the other way.  If you don't see land, you fly back and fly in the opposite direction.  If you don't see land then, you prepare to ditch the aircraft. 

Well, we made that left turn and flew about 15 minutes, and somebody said, "There's land!"  That's the big word.  What land it was, we didn't care--there was land!  If you're over land, you can bail out instead of ditching your aircraft.  It happened to be where we left from, so we called--broke radio silence, because when you're on a mission you don't use your radio at all because the Japanese are listening for it.

So I broke radio silence and gave my number, and said, Here I am,  we're coming in, straight in.   Of course they knew, our base, that something was wrong, because we should have been back by then.

Landing

When the aircraft is flying, we call that "straight and level."  When you land, you pull the nose up and the aircraft sinks.  And you pull the power back, and the aircraft sinks down to the runway, and the wheels hit the runway along with the tail, and you've landed.

So I did that, and we landed.  We're going down the runway and one engine quits, and a few seconds later, another engine quit.  So we had not much fuel left--not a surprise.  And they would have cleared any traffic out of our way, because they knew I was about to run out of gas.