[ARC5] PBY Radios

[Kenneth G. Gordon]

On 19 May 2017 at 11:51, Raymond F Chase wrote:

> I was just researching the Midway Naval battle and found that somehow they
> fitted PBY's with torpedoes and one sunk a Jap tanker with its torpedo.
> Surprisingly the torpedo worked, at this stage of the war our torpedoes
> often failed to function.
> Ray

No "somehow" about it: they were commonly fitted to carry either two torpedos, or at least 2 
depth charges. As I remember it, there was a mechanism in place to crank depth charges out 
to their drop-points from inside the fuselage.

You're right about our torpedos early in the war: they were terrible, unreliable, downright 
dangerous to the users, etc. The story of all that is downright depressing. 

But they were finally modified to work correctly...after in at least one case one of our own 
submarines was sunk by its own torpedo circling back to where it had been fired from. There 
were also at least one case of a "near miss" due to the same thing. 

The Japanese "long lance" torpedo was superb...although dangerous to its crews.

Ken W7EKB

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