Getting PBYs Back into the War, Thanksgiving, and a Chance Meeting with Admiral Halsey

"One such emergency we had was one afternoon when one of the new PBY-5As (the amphibious version with retractable landing gear) arriving from Hawaii on the way to Esprito flipped over on landing. "

Airplanes for overhaul came with enough frequency that it became necessary to augment our crews and work two shifts, first shift from 0800 to 1600 hours and a second shift from 1600 to midnight.  As the leading petty officer, I continued to receive flight pay since each PBY was test flown after overhaul before it was turned back to the combat flight crew.  I was the test crew plan captain.  I was also the final inspector of the engine build-up and installation and the fact that I would be flying in the airplane made me more than me more than meticulous.  I was known to blow my stack at the unfortunate mechanic that failed to safety wire a propeller governor or had improperly installed an oil strainer!

In extreme emergencies we would turn out all hands regardless of shift and work all night if necessary.  One such emergency we had was one afternoon when one of the new PBY-5As (the amphibious version with retractable landing gear) arriving from Hawaii on the way to Esprito flipped over on landing.  Fortunately, none of the crew were seriously injured.

Apparently what happened was that the 5A made a water landing to come to the ramp at Ile Nou.  When the hull contacted the surface, the uplock on the big main wheels failed and the main landing gear fell out of the wheel wells in the side of the fuselage.  The wheels tripped the airplane over on its nose, the nose landing gear doors failed, and the nose wheel blew a spout of water upward between the pilots that peeled back the cockpit canopy like an opened sardine tin.

Barnes and I considered it an extreme emergency because we wanted to salvage the precious engines that were submerged beneath the upside-down 5A in salt water.  The ordnance people wanted to salvage the guns.  Every shop needed spare parts and this had been a brand new airplane.

The accident happened in the late afternoon at the end of first shift.  In less than an hour a crane on a barge had righted the PBY-5A and it was brought up the ramp at Ile Nou.  I had both port and starboard crews standing by.  We wanted to get the engines off, stripped down to the crankshaft, flushed down, and pickled in oil before the saltwater corrosion ruined them.

No one stopped for evening chow.  It was a race between the two engine crews to get the engines off and disassembled.  It could have been some sort of record as both engines were completely disassembled and the parts in an oil bath before 0200.

We wound up with a lot of spare parts but not with two usable engines.  We saved every major part except for the supercharger sections of the engine crankcases.  They were the only parts of an R-1830-92 made of magnesium and salt water corrosion had already set in on the metal when we got the cases off after 0130.   The insides of the blower section were already chalky with corrosion and were beyond use.

We had another “extreme emergency” shortly before Thanksgiving.  The Navy was making every effort to provide us with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner and some break to the monotony.  They wound up flying in turkeys in some BPY-2s—the big four-engined version of the PBY that was called a “Coronado”.  In the meantime, it was decreed that every man should have two cans of beer (there was no beer garden at Ile Nou and none was available in Noumea) for the holiday.  The beer shipment made it through “Torpedo Junction” off the Fijis and a consignment for Ile Nou was barged to our small dock.

The emergency came when the beer barge came in late and was left moored to the pier, still loaded with our beer, overnight.  The barge had a leak and, come morning, the beer consignment was on the bottom in fifteen or twenty feet of water!  The word went out and there was no lack of volunteer divers to recover the beer.  We managed to salvage enough that everyone who wanted beer got at least a can and most of us two.

The salvage operation was a tribute to loyalty to the shipmates.  To my knowledge, not one can of beer was smuggled away from the dock or consumed during the salvage operation.  The beer was put into a waiting truck and on Thanksgiving Day was dispensed at the mess hall during an afternoon “happy hour”.

The Thanksgiving turkey dinner turned out to be too rich for most of us.  After weeks of becoming accustomed to a bland and monotonous diet, we scoffed up great quantities of turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, and all the trimmings.  Our stomach rebelled and there were more people lined up at the community privy that evening than there were sitting in poker games!

The infrequent beer was not the only source of alcohol available to us at Ile Nou.  We found a source of “Old Soldier” 150-proof Australian rum in Noumea and the base mail orderly made considerable money smuggling in bottles of rum in the mail sacks.  We could also occasionally buy a bottle of good whiskey from flight crews just arrived from Hawaii or back from R&R stints in Brisbane or Auckland—at quite inflated prices that did not deter us because we were not spending much money on liberty in Noumea.

There was also other black market alcohol to be had.  It was primarily medical alcohol filched from supply shipments.  It was straight grain alcohol and required a mixer.  When it was available (which was not often) we would bum a half-gallon of grapefruit juice from the galley and a mixture of one-half grapefruit juice and one-half alcohol became known as an “Ile Nou Cocktail”.  We would have preferred orange juice but none was to be had.

One evening we had just started a crap game in hut C-4 when a sailor knocked on the door and offered to sell us a quart jar of medical alcohol.  After Pappy Berridge had sampled it and pronounced it good alcohol and, being ahead in the game at the time, I bought a quart.  We sent Amuchustagi to the galley to scrounge the grapefruit juice and went on with the game.

A half hour later there was another knock on our door.  I was the shooter at the time and backed p to the door with the dice in one hand and a wad of greenback in the other.  When I pushed the door open, there stood the JOOD (Junior Officer of the Day) and the PO of the watch.  Oh boy, I thought, he’s got me dead to rights. Shooting craps (all gambling aboard was against Navy Regulations) and the rest of the bottle of medical alcohol was in plain sight on the deck under my bunk!

Apparently the young ensign was just going through the motions to follow orders.  He ignored the dice and the money both in my hand and on the blanket-covered table and said, “Sailor—there are five gallons of medical alcohol missing from sick bay and we are informed that someone is out selling it.  Haw anyone been around offering to sell you some?”

I edged slightly sidewise hoping to be between the ensign and the bottle under my bunk and answered with a straight face, “No, sir, nobody like that been by—but,” and I grinned at him, “I hope I see him before you do, sir!”

The JOOD smiled slightly, still trying to keep his eyes away from the dice and the money.  “Well,” he said solemnly, “just remember it is your duty to report it if you become aware of anything against regulations.”

He and the grinning petty officer of the watch turned away and headed for the next hut as I said, “Yes, Sir, we’ll sure enough remember that!”

We waited until the JOOD would be out of earshot before we poured another drink and went back to the game.

There were many regulations “honored in the breach” down there in the backwaters of the war where leave and liberty were almost non-existent and entertainment was limited to movies, most of which we had seen before.  Our officers not only looked the other way, they participated in the same activities.

One had to do with shaving.  Some men grew full beards (our young squadron photographer, Kofoed, who had a cherubic face grew a magnificent full blond bear) and others grew mustaches.  I was one of the latter.  I had always admired my Grandpa Stanley’s handlebar mustache and resolved to grow one.

A handlebar mustache requires no trimming and it became a nuisance when it got long enough to curl over my lip. But was not yet long enough to brush to the side and curl the ends.  It got in the way when I was eating especially if we had soup when it became downright messy.  I stayed with it, however, and by the time I got back to San Francisco early in March of 1943 it had a span of over five inches with beautifully curled ends.  I used beeswax to control it since I could not find mustache wax in Noumea.

Admiral Halsey while in New Caledonia

In either December or January, I had occasion to meet Admiral Halsey and had arrived at Ile Nou in his personal plane, one of the PB2Y Coronados and remained on the base for two or three days.  On the second morning of his visit I had gone to the shop early and had a pot of coffee going in our blowtorch-heated pot when Chief Barnes stuck his head in and announced that Halsey was going to inspect the base right after muster.

Normally, preparation for an admiral’s inspection required a couple of days and we had, at the most, an hour’s time.  All we could do was scramble around and clean up our work spaces and I sent those with the most disgraceful dungarees to their huts to change and get clean white hats.  We made it with bare minutes to spare while the admiral and his party inspected the adjacent shop.

When we fell into ranks outside the shop door as the inspection party approached, the chief poked me in the ribs and whispered, “Frieze, did you turn off the coffee pot?”

I was chagrined—the blowtorch was still going on the desk in the office and I could smell the coffee outside the door.  I turned but it was too late.  Admiral Halsey was standing in front of me.  He looked us over then, as he started to enter the shop, he halted and turned back.  “Sailor,” he said, “is that Navy coffee I smell?”

I gulped and cold feel my face turning red, “Yes, Admiral,” I managed weakly, “I am afraid it is, Sir.  I forgot to turn off the blowtorch we make it with when we got word of the inspection!”

Admiral Halsey grinned and said, “Well, sailor, how about a cup?”

“Yes, Sir!”  I darted into the office corner, got the cleanest mug in sight, and poured a cup of the strong black coffee.  Halsey carried it and sipped at it while he strolled around the shop and listened to the chief’s description of our procedures.  When he returned to the door, Halsey handed me the mug with a “Thank you, son—pretty damn good coffee” and went on his way.

A Promotion and the Pig Incident

"Later I had no recollection of unbuttoning the flap of my holster, drawing the 45, or charging..."

On the 24^th of November 1942 I was advised that, effective as of 1 November, I had been promoted to Aviation Machinist Mate First Class.  Not long afterward Barnes announced that I was the leading petty officer of the engine shop.  It was a bit mind-boggling to me because I had still been in the Navy for only two years and four months but it was gratifying to feel that I was successfully doing my small part in the war.

New Caledonia is not a part of the tropical south Pacific.  It is too far south and there was nary a palm tree to be seen.  The main island is heavily forested and, according to the New Zealanders from whom we took over the base in Ile Nou, at the time was populated in the hills by natives who were cannibals.  The Kiwis told us some hair-raising tales about savages that would come down from the hills and paddle out to Ile Nou in canoes.  They (the Anzacs) solemnly assured us that more than one of their sentries had been clubbed to death or knifed in the middle of the night.  We were sure that such tales were pure malarkey but they did contribute to a memorable night when I was base petty officer of the watch and fired the one deadly shot of my wartime career.

Our little base on Ile Nou was not fenced but there was a perimeter road around it that ran along the brow of the low hills on either side.  There was a total of nine or ten sentry posts along the perimeter road that were manned during the hours of darkness.  It was the duty of the leading petty officer of the watch to make hourly checks of the sentries that walked the posts carrying rifles.

One warm night in December (it was summer “down under”) I was posted as leading petty officer of the midnight to 0400 watch.  At 0200 I set out, armed with a Colt 45 automatic in a holster on my hip, to check my sentry posts.  I went up the hill to the north toward the leper colony moving very quietly as a result of all those hours I had spent in the Ozark woods stalking squirrels and practicing moving noiselessly through the darkness.

There were two sentry posts along the perimeter road along the brow of the hill.  There was no moon but the starlight was sufficient that I could see that the road was empty.  Neither of the sentries (not members of my engine crew) were anywhere to be seen and did not answer when I softly called out.

I moved along the road and, to my dismay, found both watch standers sitting on a low embankment sound asleep.  Apparently they had sat down to chat a minute or share a smoke and both had fallen asleep.  It came to me with a shiver along my spine that sleeping on watch in wartime is a court-martial offense punishable in the extreme by execution. 

It was agonizing.  I knew that my responsibility by Navy Regulations was to arrest the two and report them to the OOD.  They would certainly be court-martialed and it did occur to me that the death penalty was unlikely since we were not actually in a combat zone.

I stood over the sleeping men for two or three minutes then came to a decision.  Their weapons were held loosely between their knees.  I reached down and took both rifles in the course of which both men woke with a start.  They leaped to their feet and came to attention, both obviously terrified.  I was pointing the rifles directly at their belt buckles.

Neither man was a personal acquaintance of mine but I knew that both were fairly recent recruits and were still seamen first class.  One of them reminded me of my y9unger brother Rex.  I also recalled the nights that I had stood the mid-watch by our airplanes on the ramp at Kaneohe and, on one occasion, had come so close to falling asleep leaning against an airplane that I nearly dropped my rifle.

It was simply beyond me to put the two frightened young men on report.  Instead, in a low voice as cold as I could make it, I ripped them up one side and down the other.  I do not recall my words but they were harsh as I reminded them of the possible consequences of sleeping on watch.  They stood ramrod straight and shivered as they took it.

Finally I grounded the butts of the rifles then handed them back to the chastened two and said, “Look, it wouldn’t be any satisfaction to me to turn you in and I’m going to make you a deal.  My butt would really be in a sling for not putting you on report if word of this got out and so would yours so you are not to breathe a word to anyone!

“From now on every time I have a watch I am going to make sure you are on it.  Whenever I check your posts—and you never know I’m coming—I want to find you on your feet, your weapon on your shoulder, walking your post.  Furthermore, I want to hear you challenge me and make me advance to be recognized just like it says in the book!  Now, shoulder arms and get with it!”

The men moved off marching their posts and I turned and took a shortcut down the hillside toward the watch shack to make my report to the OOD that all was well at 0200 hours.  Just down from the road I stepped up on a small boulder.  In the starlight I could see something that looked like a log lying beneath the boulder so I stepped down on it, forgetting that there are no long sized trees on Ile Nou.

When my weight hit the “log” three was a sudden “OOF!” as if the breath were going out of someone.  The thing rolled and I went sprawling.  As I fell, a thought of the Kiwis’ tales about the savages flashed through my mind.  I rolled in midair and hit the ground on my back.  There against the skyline I could see what appeared to be a man getting to his hands and knees.  My flashlight had gone flying out of my hand.

Later I had no recollection of unbuttoning the flap of my holster, drawing the 45, or charging it but I must have done that in midair as it was in my hand.  As the shape moved without challenge or hesitation I fired.  In the quiet of the early morning hours, the boom of that 45 sounded like a 16-inch naval rifle!  There was a sort of squeal and the dark form went down.

Lights came on all over the base.  Still holding the gun on the inert form, I found my flashlight.  I heard the duty officer’s jeep come to life so I signaled it with the light then shined it on the “man” I had shot.  When the duty officer skidded to a halt beside me he found me staring down at a very large and very dead pig.  My shot had hit it just below one eye and had blown a sizeable chunk out of the other side of the head—and I never could have hit the broadside of a barn with a handgun on the target range!

Men, including my two sentries from up the hill, came running from all directions—many of them in their skivvies.  I explained what had happened to the OOD.  He laughed ruefully and said, “Oh hell, go call out the duty cook to butcher this thing.  We’ll have some fresh pork for breakfast—which will be a nice change from those beans and Spam!”

That, of course, was not the end of it.  I took an unmerciful ribbing from my shipmates although tempered by admiration that I was apparently a dead shot with a forty-five.  (I chose not to mention my scores on the target range with a pistol!)

The next afternoon a very mad French farmer from the leper colony was in the commanding officer’s office raising Cain about our shooting his “best and finest sow” as well as the interpreter could understand his voluble sputtering.  I never did find out what the Navy paid him but he finally went away somewhat mollified.

The Black Cats

"The Black Cat would take off at dusk and prowl the enemy shipping lanes in the darkness.  "

“The Black Cats”

It was, I believe, in December of 1942 that our PBYs came into their own as weapons of war.  Being slow and downright clumsy to maneuver, the PBY “Catalina” was a sitting duck in the daylight for enemy fighters or anti-aircraft fire.  Consequently, they were relegated to scouting and anti-submarine patrol missions.  Not for long, however.  The ingenuity require that I mentioned earlier manifested itself in many ways during those early days of the war and before long “the Black Cats” became deadly to enemy shipping.  Captain Richard Knott said it best in his book The Black Cat Raiders--"Not since David and his slingshot has there been a more unlikely instrument of war.”

The PBY was the only airplane of that time with the endurance to fly—“prowl” if you will—all night and radar had been installed to give it the eyes of a cat.  When it was realized that in the darkness a PBY could literally sneak up on enemy shipping and arrive overhead undetected, that capability was put to use.

The airplanes were painted dull black (see the photography of the Ile Nou base) and flame dampeners were installed on the exhaust stacks of the engines.  The Norden bombsights, of little use in darkness and at low altitude, were replaced with simple aiming devices that were literally made from coat hanger wire and scraps of metal.  The airplanes were then armed with four bombs under the broad wing—a 1,000 lb bomb inboard on each wing and a 500 lb bomb outboard.  The alternative was a 21-inch torpedo on each wing.

The Black Cat would take off at dusk and prowl the enemy shipping lanes in the darkness.  When a target was picked up on the radar—freighter, tanker, supply barge, and sometimes even warships—the “Cat” would come in at low altitude.  Before the enemy could figure out the significance of the sound of airplane engines in the darkness, the PBY would be overhead, release its deadly load, and be off into the darkness before searchlights and anti-aircraft weapons could be brought to bear.  Our VP-11 squadron alone sank more than 100,000 tons of enemy shipping during that first deployment to the South Pacific and was subsequently awarded a Presidential Unit Citation.  I longed to be back on a combat flight crew but consoled myself with the thought that someone had to keep those Cats ready to prowl.ne noteworthy black cat episode occurred on October 22, 1942.  It was a long distance raid on Tonelei Harbor on Bougainville Island 900 miles northwest of the base at Esprito Santos where some of our VP-11 airplanes were operating.

Three airplanes took part—one piloted by my old friend Jack Coley, one by George Poulos, and one by my old co-pilot “Whiskey Willis”.  They were each armed with a torpedo beneath the port wing and two 500 pound bombs on the starboard wing.

They took off at dusk, Jack Coley in the lead, and flew the 900 miles over enemy-held territory to arrive off Tonelei at 0200 in the morning darkness.  Not a shot was fired by the Japanese until the three black cats started dropping torpedoes and bombs at the many ships moored in the harbor.

All three pilots believe they scored heavily—Coley with a torpedo into an armed transport, Willis with a torpedo hit on a cruiser and bomb hits that sand a destroyer, and Poulos with both torpedo and bomb hits on a heavy cruiser.  (In deference to my old shipmates I probably should not repeat the rumor I heard soon after the raid that one of them dropped a torpedo at what, in the darkness, he believed was an aircraft carrier but that turned out to be a dock!  It was only a rumor.)

The PBYs had no time to stay to observe results.  To quote Whiskey Willis, “Then all hell broke loose.  It was like the Fourth of July!”  Searchlights came on and anti-aircraft fire lit up the night.

The airplanes stayed low on the water as they left with the waist gunners shooting out searchlights as they went.  All three made it safely back to Esprito after a refueling stop at Tulagi Island in spite of numerous bullet holes in the airplanes including a hit on Coley’s starboard fuel tank that nearly caused him to run out of gas short of Tulagi.  He landed at Tulagi with barely ten gallons left in the port tank.

(Such sea stories were commonplace as we went about our business in the heat, dust, and sometimes torrential rains of New Caledonia.  Since this is intended to be my story and not a history of the war in the Pacific, I will confine myself to personal incidences at Ile Nou and will include a bibliography at the end of my story with some books that will give a better insight to World War II in the Pacific and the role that my beloved PBYs played in that long ago war.)

NAS Ile, New Caledonia

Chapter 31

NAS Ile, New Caledonia

We were transferred from the USS COPAHEE to our new base on Ile Nou on the 5^th 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 7^th, 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.

Getting Launched

On the 28^th of September COPAHEE sailed into the harbor at Noumea, New Caledonia.  Just off the entrance we passed the out-bound USS WASP, our newest carrier.  We would not see WASP again because the big aircraft carrier was sunk a few days later.

We lay at anchor that afternoon while a contingent of four dozen Marine pilots came aboard to fly off the airplanes we had brought.  They would fly off the little carrier to a field on New Caledonia for final fueling and arming and would then head for the battle on Guadalcanal.

The pilot assigned to my F4F came to the airplane in the evening for his cockpit checkout.  He was a young lieutenant probably no more than a couple of years older than my twenty.  He was a bit nervous because he had made but one catapult takeoff during flight training and it would be a catapult takeoff the next morning.

I gave the young lieutenant a thorough cockpit checkout.  He had a chart of New Caledonia with him so I showed him the map case and the plotting board that pulls out from beneath the instrument panel.  He remained in the cockpit going over everything after I climbed down off the wing and I did not see what he did with the long blueprint strip chart of New Caledonia.

The next morning, we weighed anchor and moved outside the Noumea Harbor to launch the airplanes.  It would be the first flight operations from the 440-foot long COPAHEE deck.  We warmed up the engines, the pilots manned their planes, the steam catapult was made ready, and the ship was brought around into the wind to get the maximum wind speed across the deck.

The first three F4Fs went off without incident, then my airplane was rolled onto the catapult.  We connected the hydraulic tail hook, connected the belly cable from the catapult, and I check the wing downlocks to make sure they were engaged.  The young marine  nervously checked that his canopy was locked open, and ran the engine up to maximum RPM.  It sounded good.  I slid off the flight deck onto the catwalk.

When the launching officer, kneeling out ahead of the starboard wing, was satisfied with the sound of the engine he brought his upraised hand down, pointing down the deck and the catapult fired.  As the little airplane sped down the sixty-foot length of the catapult I almost had a cardiac arrest—chunks of something came swirling aft in the slipstream.  Migawd, I thought, the flaps let go!  I dived onto the flight deck for a piece of the flying material.

Meanwhile, the F4F went off the end of the deck and dropped sickeningly out of sight toward the water.  I cringed, waiting for the geyser that would erupt when he hit the water.

It did not happen.  Just as I snatched a piece of the loose material and discovered to my relief that it was part of the New Caledonia strip map, the airplane came up into view.  It was weaving erratically for a minute, then it steadied down and climbed away after the others.

(I saw that pilot six weeks later when he passed through Noumea on his way for some R&R in Australia and asked him about that takeoff.  It seems that he had not put the strip map in the map pocket alongside that seat but had slipped it into the slot above the plotting board under the instrument panel.  The jar of the catapult shot had fired it back into his lap.  There the slipstream from the open canopy had caught it, unfolded it, and some of it wrapped around his head.  He had been fliying blind when he left the flight deck and had ripped the paper away just in time to pull up the nose and stagger into the air.

I also asked the young marine how he did with the F4F on Guadalcanal.  With a big grin he told me that he had shot down four Japanese planes, two Zeros and two of the Nakajima bombers, before he had been hit and bailed out of the burning F4F.  He was not quite an ace (five victories) but we figured that four for one was a pretty good trade seeing as how he had parachuted and survived.)

The rest of the launches went relatively well until we got to the last F4F in front of the dozen SBDs at the stern.  Something caused the hydraulic tail hook to release prematurely when the F4F pilot, a tall lanky marine, released his brakes just as the launching officer dropped his arm.  The belly cable from the catapult head dropped free and the airplane, engine at full power, simply lurched forward and taxied off the flight deck without flying speed and went nose down into the water.  Meanwhile, without the drag of the airplane, the catapult head slammed forward and the hook buried itself eighteen inches into the half-inch steel stopper plate.  The catapult was out of commission.

We paid no attention to the catapult but scrambled forward along the catwalk to see what happened to the pilot.  He was one lucky man.  The impact did not knock him unconscious  and the airplane was floating for a few seconds held up by the buoyancy of the wing and fuselage that slowly filled with water.

The F4Fs life raft had popped out of the camelback behind the cockpit.  The marine pilot flipped his seat belt loose, stood up in the seat, and stepped out into the little rubber raft without even getting his feet wet.  The DE, acting as plane guard for the launches, took him aboard.  He later re-boarded COPAHEE and flew another airplane off successfully.

With the catapult out of commission, we had to fy the rest of the airplanes, a dozen SBDs and the rest of the F4Fs, from the angar deck, off the short flight deck with running takeoffs.  It had never been done before but the senior marine officer present said they would do it and that he would fly the first SBD off.

We started the colonel from as far aft as the other airplanes would permit.  He had something less than four hundred feet of flight deck in front of him.  To run the Wright engine up to full power, we tied down the tail with white line to help the brakes hold the airplane.  When the launching officer gave the ‘go” signal, a sailor cut the line and the colonel released the brakes.  The SBD seemed to start very slowly and we all held our breath when he went off the deck.

The SBD, like my F4F, dropped out of sight toward the water and we waited for the splash.  Again, it did not happen.  After several seconds, the SBD climbed into sight.  There was water trailing from the tail wheel—he had come that close to going into the drink and had bounced the tail off the top of a wave!

With the precedent set, we got the other airplanes off with only one more casualty.  It was an SBD and was carrying a gunner in the rear seat.  It went fine down the deck but just as the airplane got airborne the engine torched, sputtered, and the SBC nosed into the water out ahead of the ship.

The tail of the airplane was sticking out of the water as the momentum of COPAHEE carried the ship past and we could see the gunner out of his seat on the wing trying desperately to get the pilot’s cockpit canopy open.  The force of the impact had slammed it shut and the pilot had hit his head on the gunsight and was unconscious.  The gunner went under water still tyring to get the canopy open.  He did not make it but came to the surface alone after a couple of minutes.  The pilot went to the bottom still strapped into the SBD.

(Something useful often stems from tragedy.  As a result of that incident, and others during the battle of Midway that were similar when pilots of SBDs were knocked unconscious during ditching by hitting their heads on that optical gunsight located atop the instrument pane., shoulder harnesses soon became standard in all airplanes.  Up until then, we had only a seat belt in the cockpits.)

When the COPAHEE again dropped anchor in Noumea Harbor, it was time for we passengers to be transferred to our assignments.  Mine was to be with the engine change shop of Patrol Wing One Headquarters Squadron based there at Noumea.

We found that our headquarters PBY repair base would be on a small island that forms part of the northeast side of Noumea Harbor.  It is called “Ile Hou” and is a narrow island about a mile long.  There were two hills on the island separating it roughly into thirds.  On the end nearest the city of Noumea there was an old French prison that we learned was known as “the Devil’s Island of the Pacific”.  On the far end was a leper colony.  The little island was almost barren and covered with brown grasses, boulders, and some scrub brush.

Our base was located in the valley in the center of the island half way between the prison and the leper colony farm.  From the COPAHEE we could see that a concrete launching ramp and paved parking area were in place, however, buildings for the little base were still under construction.  They were not yet ready for us so we remained aboard COPAHEE for a few days.

That gave us an opportunity for our first liberty in a foreign port (New Caledonia was a French possession).  Troy Anderson and I got liberty one day and went ashore.  Wartime Noumea had very little to offer.  The “city” was a conglomeration of low tropical buildings with little in the way of amusements other than a few small bars that had little to offer besides wine or absinthe.  It was not the South Pacific that we had seen in the Sidney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre or Bing Crosby/Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour movies.

We did find the most notorious cathouse in the South Pacific, “The Pink House”.  It was a large rambling house with peeling pink paint on the outskirts of Noumea.  It was not an inviting prospect and the women we saw on the wide verandas that circled the building were not our idea of appealing womanhood.  We did not go inside but surveyed it form a distance then gave up and went back to the ship.  Liberty cold wait.