I
waited eagerly for Chief Byron to post the new permanent flight crew
assignments the next morning and let out a whoop of joy. I was once more assigned to 11-P-11 with “Dopey”
Clark’s crew. Not only that, Foret had
made CPO and Ernie Davenport was the plane captain. I had been moved up to second mech and a new
man, Paul Herrin, was our third mech.
Clark, our PPC, had been promoted to lieutenant junior grade and Ens. “Whiskey”
Willis was still the co-pilot. I forget
his name, but we had an experienced ARM1c for first radio man. It was a good crew.
Davenport
had been on a ferry crew and he lost no time getting us familiar with the
changes in the PBYs. The engines had
late model Stromberg pressure injection carburetors that had automatic
temperature controls. No longer would we
have to sit in the tower endlessly and manually keeping the temperatures
right. In the galley compartment beneath
the mechanic’s tower seat there was a new type of auxiliary power unit (we called
it a “putt-putt”) that was designed to run on aviation fuel instead of white
gasoline from its own little fuel tank. The
putt-putt was plumbed directly into the main fuel tanks (a fact that would
become important to us at a later date.).
Back
in the roomy waist gun blisters, the big black fifty-caliber machine guns were
mounted on pivots so that it was not necessary to swing them up into position. To fire, the gunner simply opened the side of
the blister and swung the gun out, all the while well shielded from the slipstream. Forward in the nose, behind the bomb sight
window, the PBY-5s were equipped with the latest (and still secret) Norden bombsights.
Being classified, it was necessary for the bombardier to carry the bombsight to
the airplane in a black bag just before flight and return it to the ordnance vault
immediately after the flight. [Since my father writing his memoires the Norden bombsight
has been replaced by a radar based bomb sight.]
By
the middle of November all of us were fully aware of the deteriorating of U.S.-Japanese
relations. We knew from scuttlebutt that
the entry of the U.S. into the war in Europe was more and more imminent and we
were fully aware of the “Axis” that had been formed by Germany, Italy, and
Japan. Tojo and his minions became our
very potential enemy in the Pacific and a serious and grim air crept into our
training flights.
We
had read the accounts and seen the newsreels of the debacle at a coastal town
in Europe called Dunkirk. We knew that
President Roosevelt had armed our merchant ships participating in convoys to
England. We knew that Navy destroyers
had been sunk guarding those convoys. We
knew, too, that Roosevelt was still faced with a very divided United States
with the pacifists and German bundists still making themselves heard. We had had absolutely no idea and no hint
that we might be in immediate danger in Hawaii, however, and went about our
training with a blithe attitude, still observing those relaxed tropical working
hours and long weekends.
