Hello again, WIXers,
People who work on warbirds know what I'm talking about when I say that the Hot Stuff crew does more than just keep an old airplane in the air. A lot of what we're about, and why we come out week after week for round after round of generally thankless toil, is because Keeping History Alive is something that drives us.
Once in a while, we get to come face-to-face with that history. This latest time was the long-awaited visit of some of the suviving members of Patrol Bombing Squadron 148 (VPB-148), a South Pacific PV-2 squadron. It was a great time, meeting with those fellows, and hearing their stories. We meet WW2 vets often enough, and PV flyers and mechs, too; but seldom do we have them coming out in squadron strength! We did our level best to let 'em know they were appreciated.
There's a look at some of the midday festivities. The local FBO put on a luncheon for the fellows, and we towed Hot Stuff over to serve as a centerpiece. The old boys and their families swarmed her, too.
To make the more the merrier, we had a few local vets out to hobnob with the PVators. One of them, left-most in the pic above, is Uncle Bud. Bud was a tunnel gunner on PVs, but lost his flight status due to medical reasons. He ended up running the R-2800 test stand on Guadalcanal for a good portion of his career. Next to him is Repair Depot George, who ran the post-production modification depot in Burbank. As PV's came off the line, George did the final mods required by the Navy before acceptance into service. He's given us some interesting tech data that can't be found anywhere else, documenting installations like our plane's upper tunnel-position windows.
On the right is Don Hayes, a pilot from VPB-148. Don was a quiet fellow, and just took it all in for a while, only coming out with the stories later on. But he had some hair-raisers! More on that later.
There's Earl Richards, the organizer of the reunion, a job he's undertaken ever since 1995, which was the first time these guys got back together in 50 years. They've made it an annual event ever since. Behind him, facing away, is Bill De Favero, a gunner/mechanic.
Probably the highlight of the visit was when we pulled the Harpoon out and fired her up. We were bound and determined that if the boys wanted to get up in the air in a PV once again, we'd make it happen for them.
There we are, both fans turning, preparing to taxi out for the hop. Although not a terribly lengthy hop--about forty minutes, all told--it was a fine success. Nothing but smiles all round when we came back.
The squadron then adjourned for further activities around town. We got back together with them, at their invitation, the next evening for their final-evening banquet. It was a pretty fine time, with laughs and stories galore.
And from this point on, I think I'm going to stop trying to tell the story on my own, and instead I'm going to repeat some of the stories I heard from these guys. I doubt if I can do them justice, really.
There's Don Hayes again; he and I shared a table at the banquet with his son Don, and with Pete Reid and his highly personable wife.
I stood listening to Don and our left-seater, Steve Rider, trade Harpoon flying tips and tales. One of Don's stories in particular stuck with me:
They were out at the far end of a long-range patrol in the central Pacific when they spotted evidence of a possible sub contact. They went into a search pattern, and worked the area good for as long as they could, but no joy.
By the time they were ready to give up, it was getting dark, and a front was moving through. In the central Pac, the weather can be changeable and nasty all right, and there were CB's everywhere, cloud-to-cloud lightning, and visibility wasn't the best. And their nav radios, being old-time stuff, were doing a great job of pointing at the nearest thunderstorm, but a very poor job of directing them towards home.
Don had the long trailing-wire liaison radio antenna streamed, but that wasn't giving very good reception either. Before they lost contact with home base altogether, they heard Base say that they'd put up a searchlight beam for them, straight up into the sky. But there was a mighty long way to go before the crew would have any hope of seeing it.
Don put the plane on the best heading he could, and flew that track until they'd surely flown long enough to be back at Midway, but no island in sight. Just dark, and blinding flashes of lightning, and turbulence, and gas gauges bouncing on "E".
Starting to run out of hope as well as gas, they were, and lightning to the left, then lightning to the right, robbed them of most of their night vision, and then a final flash blinded them altogether ... but wait! That wasn't lightning--that was the searchlight! They'd flown right through the beam!
A tight spiraling descent, then, and they broke out right over the island, expecting to be engine-out at any moment. One approach was all they could hope for, and they came screaming down, landing hot (around 140: a good 40-50 knots fast), and barely got stopped before they ran out of island. But they were down, all in one piece, in the nick of time. Turning around to back-taxi, first one engine quit, then the other.
Don's gunner was first out of the plane, and he face-planted on the ground and kissed that runway like it was an old girlfriend. Don opines that they all felt that way. It wasn't always the Japanese one had to worry about in that line of work!
Another story:
We had a door prize for each member of the squadron in attendance, and there you see Pete Reid accepting his item from PJ--it's an R-2800 piston that's been made into a bookend.
Pete was a radarman. The radar position is back in the rear of the cabin, across from the door. Ahead and to his left was the navigator's station. Preparing to take off for a patrol one day, Pete looked over at the nav table, on which was a stack of chest-pack parachutes, and noticed to his horror that a wisp of smoke was curling up from the stack. Just that quickly, the wisp of smoke turned into a blaze of flames. Fire! called Pete over the intercom, we've got a fire in the cabin!
Engines shut down faster than it takes to type the words, and pilot, co-pilot, and radioman disappear out the escape hatch, and the turret gunner flew out the door. Pete and the navigator attacked the flames--which, being on the navigator's table, are inches above 115 gallons of high-octane fuel--with the extinguisher, and luckily got it put out without anything going "boom," although choking acrid smoke filled the plane. Pete and the navigator staggered outside after the rest.
A maintenance guy had left a cigarette burning on--must have perched it on the ARC-5 rack just forward of the table, and forgot about it. Vibration from the engines sent it falling onto the stack of chutes.
This story confirms for us that we're right to get hostile with people who take it into their heads that they're going to smoke around our airplane ... which is to say, you're asking for a knuckle sandwich, if you're caught smoking under our wing.
There you see ol' Earl, doing one of the several skits he put on, a bit that was reminiscent of an old Jonathan Winters routine. When he wasn't acting the part of ribald old "Granny," Earl had a few stories of his own.
VPB-148 had two confirmed air-to-air kills, both of them Betty bombers. One of them was by a buddy of Earl's. Their formation, launched from the northern Solomons was on its way to a strike, flying over a broken cloud layer. One of the gunners, looking down through the tunnel glass, suddenly saw a Japanese bomber down below, visible through a break in the clouds.
Earl's buddy peeled on down and proceeded to play fighter pilot for a while, plastering the Betty with his five nose .50's until the plane finally went down after a 20-minute running battle.
Only then did he notice that he'd been at war emergency power the whole time. You're not supposed to spend 20 solid minutes with firewalled throttles in a Harpoon; it's not healthy for the poor engines.
Our man limped back to base, fretting about his engines the whole way. Luckily for him, he got the kill, or his plane captain (crew chief to you Air Force types) might have become hostile with him. As it was, recounts Earl, the plane captain was still a bit ...
snippy.
As it was, they pulled both those engines and shipped them down to Guadalcanal for overhaul ... where no doubt, ol' Uncle Bud did their post-maintenance runs on his test stand. What a small world.
One final story:
Standing just to the right of President Rich (foreground left, there, in the blue shirt) is Bill De Favero, a mechanic and tunnel gunner. Bill flew mostly on PV-1's, but had some PV-2 time as well. I was talking to him earlier, and he was telling me about field mods they did back in the day. My favorite: these planes had camera windows aft of the cabin door, but usually only one plane per formation would be detailed to take strike photos. If there wasn't a camera installed, they'd rig up a machine gun to the camera mount, and blaze away from there.
"I was a waist gunner," said Bill to me almost immediately upon first meeting, and I'm sure glad I didn't open my big mouth to say "aw, whaddya mean, there weren't no waist gunners in these planes," and let him finish instead!
So, there you go, WIXers. It was a pretty fine time, hobnobbing with these gents. When they left, they seemed to have a pretty good opinion of our gang, and we all sure thought they were the bee's knees, for that matter.
There are fewer and fewer of these old boys with every passing year. I was glad we were able to have this visit with them.
That's it for this time. See you next time,
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