The Wayward Navigator, Part I

Those 800 mile search missions. . .

The Japanese navy  fleet was the number 1 priority of our armed forces in the Pacific.  Why?  Because we had Pearl Harbor to remember, when the Japanese fleet sunk a great part of our navy.  We maintained submarines that located the Japanese fleet--aircraft carrier, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, all moving as a unit--and would keep their eye on it.

The Japanese had good weather information because they controlled so many of the weather stations--in all of China, Manchuria, Korea, the islands.  When a big front was moving in, they would notify the Japanese navy.  And when that front was coming in, the commander of the navy would go right into the middle of it, and he'd stay right in the middle of that front as long as he felt he needed to, and then he would exit at some point.  Of course there was no way our submarines that were shadowing them could follow them in this severe weather.

So where's the Japanese navy?  Don't know. So what do you do about that?  You fly a search mission.  Our job was to drop bombs, but a search mission had higher priority over dropping bombs.

So they would set up a section--think of a piece of pie:  One side of that piece of pie is 800 nautical miles long; the top of the slice is 60 nautical miles, and the other side of the pie, coming back to the point where we took off from, is another 800 nautical miles.  This took more gas than we could carry, so instead of having bombs in the aircraft, we had bomb bay tanks--tanks full of gasoline to fly the airplane.  We would use the gas in those tanks first, and when they were empty, we'd use the gas that normally comes in the wings of the aircraft.

We're briefed about where our ships are, and any other other things that are going on, the weather, and one question is always:  Will we see land?  And for the mission I'm about to tell you about, the answer was: 
No, you won't see any land. At the end of your leg, there are some islands but they're another 50 or 60 or 70 miles further, so you won't see them.

This is a story Dad told when I interviewed him at the Grand Central StoryCorp booth,
May 5, 2004.  

 --Kathryn Paulsen

http://storycorps.org/