Not the prettiest thing but it got the job done. Just about any job you could think of.
In military aviation there are the "glamor girls" like the P-51, Spitfire and B-17 that get all the attention. Then there are their less glamorous cousins like the Hurricane, P-47 and B-24. The ones that do the dirty work but don't get the credit. B-24s were actually more numerous than B-17s but when have you ever seen one in a movie?
These are the workhorses. The ones you never hear about. The ones that do the heavy lifting but never seen to get the attention of their glamorous cousins. One of the least glamorous but most important planes of WWII was the PBY Catalina.
Not the prettiest thing but if you needed to be plucked out of the ocean there was no prettier sight than one of these.
I don't normally write about navy planes (buncha rust-pickin' squids) or flying boats or WWII for that matter, but I've had more than one request for a PBY diary so here goes.
First off, what's a PBY? In Navy lingo PB stood for "Patrol Bomber". The last letter represented the aircraft's manufacturer. So a PBM was built by Martin and a PBY was built by Consolidated.
Consolidated later merged with Vultee to become CONVAIR (CONsolidated Vultee AIRcraft). Today we know them as General Dynamics.
A PBY Catalina or PBY-5 thus was a patrol bomber, built by Consolidated, and named after Catalina Island.
The design of the PBY-5 goes back to the early 1930s. Even then it was thought that we might have to fight a war in the Pacific against Japan. The Navy wanted a long range flying boat that could patrol vast areas of the ocean and bomb enemy ships. Hence the PB or "Patrol Bomber" designation. The advantage of a flying boat in the 1930s was that it could be built sufficiently large without needing a long runway. Long runways were few and far between in the days before WWII. A flying boat could operate from any relatively calm body of water like a lagoon or even a calm ocean.
The difference between a flying boat and a floatplane is that a flying boat has an actual hull, like a boat, built into the fuselage. From the top it looks like an airplane and from the bottom it looks like a boat. A floatplane on the other hand usually started out as a land-based airplane and had its landing gear replaced with floats.
PBY-5A with floats retracted. The retracted floats became an extension of the wing.
It gets even more confusing because later models of the PBY-5 were actually amphibians. They had retractable landing gear and could operate from runways
or water. You will sometimes see earlier models with what looks like landing gear but it's actually "beaching gear". Wheels that were attached temporarily so it could be brought up onto shore. Kind of like the little wheeled dolly I use to launch my kayak.
The Catalina was actually a bigger plane than I imagined. It actually had a larger wingspan than a B-17 (104 feet). It wasn't as heavy as a B-17 but it could weigh in at 35,000 pounds. It had what's called a "parasol wing", meaning that the wing is actually suspended above the fuselage on a pylon.
Model posing as a 1940s pinup adds some glamor to a workhorse of an airplane. This picture does show how the "parasol" wing was suspended above the fuselage.
It was powered by two Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp radial engines putting out 1,200 horsepower a piece. One unique feature was the retractable floats on each wingtip. The idea originated with the British Saunders-Roe company and was licensed by Consolidated. This gave it an impressive 2,500 mile range. Good thing too because the Pacific is a big place.
Standard crew was usually: two pilots, flight engineer, navigator, radio operator plus four gunners.
Catalina cockpit circa WWII. I would guess that the horizontal bar moves back and forth with the yokes attached to it.
Defensive armament was normally a .50 caliber machine gun in each waist blister plus two .30 calibers in the nose turret and another .30 caliber in the dorsal (top rear) hatch.
Offensive load could be up to 4000 pounds of bombs, depth charges or torpedoes. I was a bit dubious about the torpedoes but apparently PBYs did make night torpedo attacks on Japanese convoys.
Now to the good parts. Who flew these? Everybody! What did it do? Everything!
The list of countries that operated these is much too long to print here. When I said everybody flew these I wasn't exaggerating. The US Navy of course as well as the Royal Air Force and Australia to name a few. Canada and the Soviet Union actually built their own under license. Pretty much everyone else from Iceland to Israel had these at one time or another. Even the Army Air Corps and later the US Air Force operated them as the OA-10.
Don't know if this is for real but I like it.
The Catalina performed anti-submarine warfare, search and rescue, transport, mine sweeping, reconnaissance and of course bombing.
When doing my research on the Catalina, what most impressed me was how versatile this thing was.
Patrol was of course its primary mission. The PBY's great range and excellent visibility made it well suited for this role. I never realized that the first sighting in the search for the battleship Bismark was by a US Catalina. Of course the PBY is most famous for spotting the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway.
It excelled in anti-submarine warfare. Catalinas from various countries sank 40 U-boats during WWII. Several were lost during these attacks as U-boats had pretty decent anti aircraft guns.
U-boat U-662 under attack by a PBY.
U-662 after being hit by depth charges from the PBY.
US Catalinas served in the search and rescue role well into the 1950s. Some other countries used them as late as the 1960s.
It's most notable for rescuing survivors from the torpedoed USS Indianapolis. They managed to put 56 survivors on the plane, tying some to the wings. It couldn't fly like that but it served as a lifeboat until they could be rescued by ship.
I think this is a cool picture. Both PBYs and blimps were used for search and rescue.
In another episode a Catalina flown by Lieutenant Nathan Gordon set down under heavy fire five times and a total rescued sixteen men. Somehow his badly overloaded (and bullet holed) Catalina made it back into the air. Maybe the bullet holes made it light enough to fly. He was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Now the really good part. The "bomber" part of "patrol bomber".
There's a saying that armchair generals talk tactics, real generals talk logistics. For Japan the logistics of keeping their troops supplied while scattered across the Pacific was a big problem.
To protect their supply ships from US forces they operated at night. So how do you attack something that only comes out at night? You need something nocturnal.
Something like a.........cat.
Commander of a Black Cat squadron with mascot.
Thus the "Black Cats" were born. Catalinas were painted flat black, even the insignia, to make them almost invisible at night. The "cat's eyes" were radar and radar altimeters.
In the daytime a PBY was fairly vulnerable to Japanese fighters. They were big, slow and had only moderate defensive armament. At night it was a whole different animal.
Skimming the wave tops with its radar altimeter, a black PBY was almost invisible. Even if a Japanese fighter was lucky enough to spot one, attacking it was almost suicidal. A black plane skimming across black waves on a dark night didn't offer much depth perception.
PBY waist gun position.
The preferred method of attacking a ship was in a shallow dive down the length from the bow or stern. Normally four bombs would be released from a height of 200 feet (sometimes lower). The bombs would be released at roughly 75 foot intervals to increase the chances of at least one hitting. Remember this was WWII and bombing was an imprecise business. The bombs were fused for a 5 second delay so as not to destroy the aircraft. They frequently pressed their attacks so close that the standard bomb sight was discarded as useless. It was replaced by a TLAR unit (That Looks About Right).
Big planes dropping bombs at night from low level? I guess I can relate to that after all.
The fate of many Japanese ships after an encounter with a PBY.
Later on some of the Black Cats had their bow turrets removed and replaced with four fixed .50 caliber guns. While not much use against warships these proved effective for strafing barges and cargo ships.
PBY-5A in Black Cat colors. The retractable landing gear makes this an amphibean rather than a true flying boat.
Sometimes, as previously mentioned, they made torpedo attacks on Japanese ships but bombing was generally more effective. A torpedo attack meant a fairly straight and level run in at around 100 feet off the water. This made a fairly easy target for anti-aircraft gunners. Plus our torpedoes generally didn't work. The Japanese torpedoes of course worked as well as everything else they make.
Loading what looks like a torpedo onto a Black Cat. Note the temporary beaching gear.
Conditions for the Black Cat personnel were pretty awful. Probably better than being an infantryman but not by much. Operational and living facilities on the islands were fairly primitive. Tropical diseases, especially malaria, were a constant problem. Maintenance crews had to work all day in the tropical heat to keep the planes flying at night.
Mechanics work on a PBY in the tropical heat. Facilities on the islands were rather primitive.
It's hard to say just how great a contribution the Black Cats made to defeating the Japanese. The amount of Japanese shipping they sent to the bottom would be measured in the hundreds of thousands of
tons. I can safely say that their contribution was relatively huge for such a small force. Not bad for a plane that was arguably outclassed even at the beginning of the war.
We had our very own Catalina on Diego Garcia. Called "Katie" by its pilot, it was wrecked when a typhoon tossed it onto the beach in 1944. She rests there to this day.
Katie still sits on Diego Garcia.
By 1945 the war weary Catalinas were getting to be long in the tooth. The patrol bombing mission was taken over by larger, more capable aircraft like the PBM Mariner and the PB4Y-1, basically a Navy version of the B-24 Liberator.
By 1945 Catalinas were being replaced by larger aircraft like this PB4Y-2 Privateer. This is a single-tail derivative of a B-24.
The Martin PBM-5 was a larger replacement for the Catalina.
Another oddball mission for the Catalina was the "Double Sunrise" flights operated by Quantas during the war. After Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1943, the only air link between Australia and England was across the Indian Ocean by way of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Modified Catalinas made the 3,500 nautical mile flight nonstop from Perth in 28 to 32 hours. Ouch.
Certificate given to passengers who endured the "Double Sunrise" flights from Perth to Sri Lanka.
After the war the PBY served the US military as a search-and-rescue aircraft into the late 1950s. They saw service with other countries well into the 1960s. An impressive record for a plane that first flew in 1935.
In the 1940s and 1950s surplus Catalinas were pretty common on the civilian market. Several were converted to luxurious "flying yachts".
Here's a link to a 1950 LIFE magazine article about the converted PBYs. The photographer seemed to be rather enamored with the girl in the polka-dot bikini.
Now this is more my style. A flying yacht with a stocked bar.
Jacques Cousteau used to have one. Sadly his son was killed while flying it.
PBY cockpit with modern instrumentation. I guess the engine controls are mounted like that because that's the shortest distance to run the cables. Looks awkward to me.
Today there are roughly two dozen PBYs still flying. Some are in museums but several are actively used as fire fighters. Eighty years old and it's still working. Can't really say much more than that.
It may be old but it still kicks butt. A PBY water bomber fighting a fire.