[ARC5] PBY Radios

[Phillip Carpenter]

Dad's PBY-5A carried depth charges and coordinated with the PT boats to ensure the sinking of Jap shipping and submarines. If the PBY dropped depth charges didn't sink the sub they would continue to follow it with a watchful eye until the PT boat took over sinking her.

Phillip W4RTX 

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 19, 2017, at 12:03 PM, Kenneth G. Gordon <kgordon2006 at frontier.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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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