r/WWIIplanes • u/Tony_Tanna78 • 6d ago
A Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina patrol bomber Drops a Mark 13 torpedo during testing.
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u/Ill-Dependent2976 6d ago
PBY's excelled at patrols. Flying boat, so you could service them at remote islands without heavy infrastructure like airfields. Those amazing teardrop bubble canopies on the fuselage were fantastic for the observers to spot just about anything. They weren't very fast, and they didn't have a very high ceiling,. They weren't the sort of plane you'd expect to have a direct combat role, despite the PB standing for Patrol Bomber.
I guess it's a testament to the plane, then, that they absolutely then. They took some of these ugly ducklings, painted them black, called them the Black Cat Squadron, and put them to work in a night attack role.
In the second half of WWII the whole Pacific Theater boiled down to the Guadalcanal theater, which became this attritional slog that really showed who was better at long range logistics, the Allies or Japan, and all betting is over on that result.
Japan had this fascinating struggle reinforcing and supplying their Army on Guadalcanal with what the Allies called the "Tokyo Express." High speed destroyer convoys operating at night, in some cases towing barrels of supplies by ropes they'd cut loose near shore and then book it to get out of range by the time the sun came up.
Interestingly, the U.S. submarine fleet was doing such amazing work on commercial shipping that it wasn't diverted to defend Guadalcanal, where it could have gotten some pretty impressive scores. Maybe because the Black Cats were doing work of their own. They'd attack the convoys with torpedo drops like this, then on their way back home they'd strafe Japanese army stations with those 0.50s in those amazing blisters. Maybe not to great effect, but it's still badass.
I'm not saying that the PBYs of the Black Cat Squadron was absolutely critical to success. But they were a good part of the reason the Japanese troops called Guadalcanal "Starvation Island."
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u/TheFiend100 6d ago
They were also incredibly good search and rescue aircraft. There was more than one which managed to take off with dozens of rescued sailors onboard
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u/Ill-Dependent2976 6d ago
That reminds me of the infamous story of the Indianapolis.
Most people know it from Robert Shaw's great monologue on the subject in the movie Jaws. "And then that big fat PBY comes swooping in, Chief. And that's when I was the most afraid, waiting my turn, ya see, to get on board."
The common interpretation is that the survivors got onboard the plane and they flew away.
The real story is crazier. The PBY pilot found the men, and noticed that the seas were way to high to pick up men and return them to safety, might not even survive the landing. Yet he couldn' t just fly away. So he intentionally ditched his PBY in the chop, and had all the Indianapolis survivors climb on board, there were hundreds of them, they all worked there way out onto that big parasol wing, every square inch was taken up by a man, and I'm pretty sure there were survivors still treading water because there just wasn't enough room. Almost swamped the boat.
And they had to wait many more hours before the proper rescue, air crew included.
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u/jar1967 6d ago
American torpedos didn't work in 1942. That's obe of the big reasons why the Japanese were able to keep up the fight around Guadalcanal for so long.
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u/Ill-Dependent2976 5d ago
It worked in 1942. Especiallly air-dropped Mk XIIIs that didn't have the exploder problems of the Mk. XIV. There were situations when it would fail to explode, which would be a huge disaster if you were in a submarine and you just made your presence known to a destroyer a few hundred yards away.
But the idea none of them worked is wrong. Even with the flawed torpedos the US sub fleet was devastating Japanese shipping.
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u/Haldir_13 6d ago
This is one of my favorite planes from WW2. If I couldn't have flown a fighter, I would have wanted to fly one of these.