Chapter 31
NAS Ile, New Caledonia
We
were transferred from the USS COPAHEE to our new base on Ile Nou on the 5th
of October, 1942. The base was still not
ready for occupancy. The tin shed that
would be our shops were incomplete and the small square plywood huts for living
quarters were still being erected. The
small wooden screened building that were mess hall and administration were
complete and in business. In the
meantime, a tent city had been set up for us around the hill form the base and
adjacent to the old French prison.
We
found that the huge stone prison building was still in use. It was peopled by all sorts of
convicts—thieves and murderers mostly.
The interesting thing about it was that the prison hates were not locked
in the daytime. The prisoners were free
to come and go in the daylight as long as they did not leave Ile Nou. Some of the New Caledonia natives even had
their families living in the prison with them.
A
day or two after our arrival, with no facilities or duties as yet, we were
invited by the French warden of the prison to have a tour. The prison was built in a hollow square with
a large open courtyard in the center. In
the center of the courtyard there was a large guillotine that we were informed
was still in use. The large sharp steel
blade and the brown stains on the cobblestones beneath the haollowed neck rest
certainly looked as if it were. We were
told that the guillotine was the same one that had beheaded Marie Antoinette in
Paris 149 years before.
From
the tent city by the prison there was a narrow path that led around the hill to
our new base. We walked it three times a
day to reach the mess hall. On our
second or third day there, Troy and I were walking along the path on our way to
the mess hall. Halfway along we suddenly
halted. Coming the other way was a
fearsome apparition. It was a New
Caledonia native that must have stood seven feet tall and was about four feet
across the shoulders. He had a mean and
ugly face topped with a shock of orange-colored hair. (In later years his hairdo would have been called
an Afro.) He was carrying a mean looking
machete.
Anderson
poked me and muttered, “What’ll we do –run for it?”
I
shook my head, “No—keep walking as if we own the place.”
It
was a good guess. The big native backed
off the narrow path and favored us with a sort of salute and a big grin that
showed blackened snaggle teeth. We
smiled in return and went on our way feeling very relieved. (We
were to learn later that the native was a trustee at the prison. He was serving a long term for murdering a
man he had caught in bed with his wife.
He was actually a big amiable man who did odd jobs for us later. For a pack of Luckies a week, he did our
laundry for us in the stone trough at the prison for as long as we for
there. He spoke some French, but very little
English. We soon learned to communicate
in the local “pidgin’. We never could
pronounce his name so called him “Sam”.
That seem to please hi and he answered to it readily.)
We
lived in tent city beside the prison for nearly a month while the base was
being completed. The tin shop buildings
were completed first to get the base operational as soon as possible. Living quarters cold wait because the war was
going on and airplanes were needing overhaul.
In the first old photograph of the base at Ile Nou that I will include,
our engine assembly building is the one on the far left.
Once
the shop was complete our problem became to equip it with the tools we needed
to accomplish assembly of new engines to install on the airplanes that came in
from the combat zone to the north.
The
chief petty officer in charge of the engine shop, CPO Barnes, and I sat down in
our new office (a walled off corner of the tin building) and drew up list of
our needs, then we made out requisition after requisition for the items we
needed—chain falls to remove the new engines from their crates (when and if we
received any), work stands, and tools.
With
the massive quantities of war materials then being moved south, most of our
requisitions were filled quite promptly from the huge supply dump that had been
set up near Noumea. Before long we had
most of the larger items needed to set up our assembly line. We built up our own little library of
overhaul manuals.
The
two items that continued to be in short supply were new engines and the hand
tools our crew needed. Japanese
submarines were all too successful with their “torpedo junction” off the Fiji
Islands. Many supply ships were being
torpedoed and sunk. Most of our
requisitions for engines and hand tools came back marked “NA—not
available”. Many of the food resupply
ships were also sunk and for a long time we lived on a diet mostly of beans and
Spam.
Dark-haired
and clever little Amuchustagi, a third class aviation mech on my crew, turned
out to be a good scrounger without peer.
One afternoon he came to me in the shop.
He had ridden the mail boat to Noumea and had found an old buddy of his
on duty at the Naval Supply Depot.
“Mooch” had made a little tour of the supply dump and found a bunch of
crates of hand tools in a far corner of the barbed wire compound. He proposed that we “draw some midnight small
stores”.
We
planned an operation that would have been a credit to the old TV program
“Mission Impossible”. By making some
discreet contacts and handing out some bottles of scarce Australian “Old
Soldier” 150-proof rum, we arranged for a boat one night. The supply dump near Noumea was close to the
beach. Amuchustagi found out what night
his old buddy could arrange to have the perimeter watch on the back side of the
supply compound and about midnight that night, clad in dungarees and dark
jerseys, four of us hit the beach like commandos.
We
had brought wire cutters. When Pete’s
buddy had gone by, we cut the bottom strand of the barbed wire and slithered
into the compound. Using a masked
flashlight Pete quickly found the crates of tools that our requisitions had
failed to produce. In less than an hour
we shoved our boat off the beach with most of the tools that our hop needed.
The
next morning after muster the shop Chief, Barnes, saw the crew sorting the hand
tools. He came into the shop office
where I had coffee going in a battered pot heated by a blowtorch. After pouring himself a cup of the strong
black java he said, “Looks like one of our requisitions finally produced some
tools.
“Ye’—came
in late last night.”
“Reckon
I had better not ask to see a copy of the requisition.”
“Seem
to have misplaced it, Chief,” I said with a faint smile. “Let you know when I find it.”
“Sure,
Frieze,--you do that.”
By
the first week in November our repair base was in full operation and weary,
battered PBYs from the combat area in the Solomons began to arrive. In addition to our engine shop, Ile Nou
included metalsmiths, instrument shop, ordnance shop, and radio/radar
repair. While the flight crews were sent
on to Auckland or Brisbane for a week of R&R, we could completely overhaul
a war-weary PBY and return it to combat.
Bullet
and shrapnel holes to be patched attested to the fact that our P
BYs
were not limited to passive patrol actions.
From the flight crews, we got word of our shipmates (and occasionally of
brother Dick) who were flying from aircraft tenders scattered around the
Solomon Islands and at Esprito Santos.
Before
the war began, the Time Between Overhauls (TBO) of the R-1830-92 engines hd
been set by Pratt & Whitney at 400 hours.
Immediately after December 7th, 1941, the TBO was raised to
800 hours and, subsequently to 1,200 hours.
Some of the big fourteen cylinder radials that came into Ile Nou had
been flown longer than in the field. It
is a tribute to Pratt & Whitney that they remained the most reliable
engines in the history of aviation.
When
we finally began receiving some new engines we still faced problems. We found to our dismay that the shipments
included new carburetors but we were slow in receiving new starters,
alternators, propeller governors, and the other accessories.
The
starters were the worst problem. The
flywheel of a Jack & Heinz aircraft inertial starter spins up to 12,000 rpm
when the starter is energized. That
resulted in wear on the ends of the starter bearings. We had no overhaul manual for the starters so
one weekend Chief Barnes and I sat down in the shop with one fairly new starter
and disassembled it, carefully measuring clearances with a micrometer. I then went out to the repair ship ANTARES,
anchored in Noumea Harbor, and had the machine shop make up a batch of brass
shims of the proper diameter and of different thicknesses. After that the chief and I overhauled the old
starters and returned them to service.
That was but one example of the ingenuity required in those early black
days of the war in the Pacific.
