Chapter Headings:
A New Mission
Ready to Go
A Navy Career
Aleutian Posting
Aircrew
Aleutian Patrols
Engine Fire
Ashore
Rescue

A New Mission

It was early morning, before daylight, in March 1943 at Adak Island, the site of the Westernmost U.S. naval base in the Aleutian Islands. Adak is one of the islands that stretches westward, like a string of pearls, over 1000 miles from Alaska.

A rough shaking had just roused me from deep sleep. The lights were on in our Quonset hut when I opened my eyes, and I saw the other members of our flight crew swinging their legs out of their cots. The sleep-fogged questions forming in my mind were partially answered when a voice shouted, "Get ready to fly, men, we've got work to do!" That didn't answer another question, though. "Why us? This is our day off, and we don't fly today."

In the mess hut a few minutes later, a pair of sleepy looking cooks hurriedly whipped up a batch of powdered eggs, potatoes and toast for us, while we poured ourselves mugs of strong, black coffee. Our entire nine-man crew was now seated at a long table, and while waiting to eat our senior pilot and Patrol Plane Commander Lt. J.H. Tetley walked to the head of the table to explain the situation. He informed us that Japanese warships had been detected between Kiska and Attu islands, near the western end of the Aleutians. Kiska and Attu were the only U.S. territories that had been invaded and occupied by the Japanese.

Our squadron, Patrol Squadron VP-41 of Fleet Air Wing Four, had been ordered to attack them with bombs and torpedoes. Lt. Tetley concluded his briefing by saying with prophetic insight, "Bring your sleeping bags men. We don't know where we'll be staying tonight." At first I wondered why the other crews of our squadron were not with us getting ready for the strike. Then I remembered that they and their planes had been dispersed to other locations to enlarge the squadron's area of patrol coverage.

It took several moments for the full implications of Mr. Tetley's announcement to sink in. When it did, I nervously began assessing our chances of surviving the attack, which I ultimately concluded was slim. My gloomy assessment rested on the attributes of our aircraft compared with those of the enemy force we'd be attacking. Our squadron was equipped with Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina seaplanes. Not that Catalinas weren't good craft: they were among the best - for their designed duty! PBY's, classified as patrol bombers, were supremely suited for flying long reconnaissance sweeps over open water and dropping depth charges on submarines. But they were slow and stodgy. Their top speed was roughly 155 knots which, however, could only be maintained for about seven minutes without wrecking the engines. Their normal flying speed was around 105 knots, which was about half that of the Japanese Mitsubishi "Zekes" and Nakajima "Rufes" we would undoubtedly encounter over the target. The firepower of the Japanese ships, whose gunners were notoriously good, was another consideration. Then the flying weather had to be factored in. As one 'old hand' PBY sailor put it when speaking of Aleutian weather, "The winds are like none others on earth. You can be leaning into a 50-knot headwind, and in a second it will change direction and hit you in the back. The incessant fog makes you wonder if the sun will ever shine again. There's rain. There's snow. There's sleet. Sometimes they come one at a time. Sometimes they come at the same time."

Despite these obstacles, though, I believed our PBY could still put up a good fight. First of all, they were rugged and reliable aircraft that could tolerate abuse that most others could not. And they were tolerably well armed, in addition to the depth charges, bombs and torpedoes they could carry. PBY's fairly bristled with guns; a manned 30- cal machine gun in a nose well; two manned 50 cal machine-guns in waist blisters, one on each side; and a manned 30-cal machine gun that poked down out of the aft tunnel section hatch. These thoughts brightened my day somewhat.

Ready to Go

Following a hurried breakfast we started out for the flight-line. As we trudged over to our plane in the darkness, our flight boots crunching loudly in the snow, a Marine sentry stepped into the beams of our flashlights and somberly scrutinized us as we passed.

The plane was ready to go when we reached it. Gas tanks had been topped off and ammo canisters were full. Two fat 500 lb bombs hung from racks under one wing, while an aerial torpedo was fastened to racks under the other wing. Being an amphibian, with retractable wheels and wing tip floats, our craft was capable of taking off from either water or land. This morning we used Adak's perforated-metal Marsten mat runway. With our bomb load, full tanks and entire crew aboard it took a long roll to get us airborne. Stygian blackness enveloped us the moment we lifted off.

At the time my rating was Aviation Radioman Third Class, and I was number-two radioman and junior member of our flight crew. Number-one radioman, K.J Holden, manned the Catalina's radio and radar, while I went aft to one of the two blister lookout positions in the waist section. With over 300 miles and roughly three hours of flight time to our target area, I had nothing to do but wait and think. Enveloped in total darkness, lulled by the muffled roar of our engines and the warmth of my fleece-lined flight suit, my thoughts began drifting back over the events that led up to the situation I now found myself in.

A Navy Career

I remember wanting to join the navy in 1939, before the war started, while still attending high school in Los Angeles. I wanted this so badly I regularly dreamed about it. My best friend had received parental permission to enlist, and I wanted to go with him. However, my parents would have none of this. My father's emphatic response to my plea was, "You aren't joining anything until you graduate from high school," and my mother backed him up. So my buddy went off to enlist in the Navy without me.

I was disappointed, but I later recognized that my parent's wise decision probably saved me from an early watery death. That's because at that time friends who enlisted together were permitted to serve together on the same ship. After boot camp my friend reported aboard the destroyer USS Jarvis, where I probably would have been had I enlisted with him. I learned later that Japanese torpedo bombers had sunk the Jarvis following the Battle of the Coral Sea, and all hands went down with the ship. In the meantime, the Japanese bombed our fleet at Pearl Harbor shortly after I received my High School Diploma, and the U.S. declared war. This gave me unarguable justification for immediately enlisting in the Navy.

In January 1942 I reported to the Naval Recruit Depot at San Diego as a boot recruit. For some reason I didn't remember much about boot camp, other than it was a blur of muster, indoctrination classes, PE, KP and nighttime sentry duty. On our final day we expectantly lined up to receive our service assignments. I learned that I was to attend Fleet Radio School at North Island Naval Air Station, San Diego, to train for flight duty as an aviation radioman. My flying assignment figured, because in boot camp I had requested submarine duty. One radio school event still stands out in my mind. Our class was lined up at work benches along the outside wall of a hangar building to practice wire-splicing techniques. Suddenly a staccato burst of machine gun fire erupted inside the hanger. A sailor standing next to me collapsed to the ground; he had been drilled through the thigh and was bleeding profusely. It seems that a student gunner working on the other side of the wall had accidentally squeezed off a few rounds.

Aleutian Posting

My radio school class ended in July 1942, and I received orders to report to Patrol Squadron VP-41 flying somewhere in the Aleutian Islands. I was very excited about my new assignment, but I would have been downright worried had I known that the Aleutians had some of the world's worst flying weather. I hitched rides on Navy aircraft from San Diego to Naval Air Station, Kodiak, Alaska, where I spent a few days awaiting transportation to my squadron. Off base, I found Kodiak town to consist of wooden store buildings, unpaved deep-mud streets and board sidewalks. I recalled its green, awful-tasting Alt Heidelberg beer, its 20+ hours of daylight, and the huge taxidermied Kodiak bear rearing up on hind legs standing in front of the local trading post. The bears head was the size of a bushel basket and its outstretched arms resembled tree stumps.

At Kodiak I learned that VP-41 was currently operating from Dutch Harbor Naval Base on Unalaska Island, a long way out on the Aleutian Island chain. A PBY going there gave me a lift from Kodiak, and I remembered flying past the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a place covered with steaming volcanic fumaroles. After arriving at Dutch, I learned that the squadron had since moved to Cold Bay, a Navy base about 175 miles east of Dutch Harbor, at the tip of the Alaska Peninsula. After a few days I moved on to that rainy, foggy 'mud hole' and found a new surprise awaiting me. I had been assigned to Cold Bay's base radio section instead of a flight crew. This duty quickly turned out to be tiring and monotonous; four hours on radio watch, eight hours off, day after day. Existence became a blurred continuum of radio watches interspersed with meals and sleeping.

Cold Bay's communication center was situated in a cave-like underground bunker entered by a wide, two-way-traffic wooden ladder made slippery by mud tracked in. Radio gear - transmitters, receivers, power amplifiers, wires and cables - filled the radio shack, along with a nauseating admixture of cigar, cigarette, pipe smoke and oil-burning heater fumes. Getting around at Cold Bay was unforgettable too. The ground - perma frozen treeless tundra, undulated in large furrows and mounds that appeared to be the eroded work of giant farm plows.

I recalled one humorous incident that occurred during a night watch. Bill Gantz, a fellow radioman, began reading his mail during a lull in Morse CW radio traffic. He suddenly laughed and began reading aloud part of his letter. It sounded familiar - the words, syntax and grammar, the whole bit - like something I myself had read a few times before. I asked Bill who wrote the letter and he named a girlfriend of his in L.A.. I almost fell out of my chair, for I also had been regularly seeing this same girl during my stint at radio school and had received almost identical letters from her. What coincidence! Bill and I cracked up over this, wondering how we managed to see this gal so often without running into each other.

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