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Show WES ORDGREN BR R 23,2 BEC: I was curious about the PBMs that you flew. rve seen a picture of tho e but what was their purpose? What were you training to do? If you had gone into combat, what would you have done? WES: Well, we used to practice, actually drill you might say, with submarines, the American submarines. They'd go out to a certain part out to sea, not too far from San Diego, and we had to-hopefully we'd try and fly above the clouds, and then as soon as we'd pick them up on our radar (because they'd be on the surface, that was the deal, they had to be on the surface) we'd pick them up. As soon as we did then we'd start flying towards them in a dive, get as much speed up as possible. At that time a lot of speed was over 300 miles an hour, but we'd start coming down and as soon as they spotted us coming at them, through their periscope or whatever, someone out on the conning tower, and see us coming, then they had to try to crash dive. If they got down and actually below the surface for more than thirty seconds before we got over them, they'd been safe. We'd drop these big 600 pound ash cans, they called them-big depth charges-and so we'd try to get over them in that time. Then we could have probably sunk them. If we didn't make it, it was too late. And they'd tow targets, also, behind the submarines and we'd come down and drop small bombs on them, on the tow targets. Or we'd shoot, also give our gunners some practice shooting our machine guns, which happened to be .50 caliber, pretty large, and give them a chance to shoot at targets being towed by other airplanes. That's the way we'd practice. Then navigation flights. We'd go out for twelve hours at a time sometimes, navigating and pick up different parts of the coastline. Ended up down in Mexico one time, flying up the coast. We'd lost our radio compass, gone out on us, so 14 |
