The distances involved were enormous. Buka on the northern tip of Bougainville was about 400 nautical miles away, Rabaul on the eastern tip of New Britain, about 450. This was the first time I would be flying the ocean without my plotting board, which felt strange. No way around it though — Catalinas carried a navigator, who was supposed to get you there and back. Modahl apparently thought Pottinger could handle it — and I guess he had so far.
Standing on the tender’s deck, I surveyed the sky. The usual noon shower had dissipated, and now there was only the late-afternoon cumulus building over the ocean.
Behind me I could hear the crew whispering — of course they weren’t thrilled at having a copilot without experience, but I wasn’t either. I would have given anything right then to be manning a Dauntless on the deck of Enterprise rather than climbing into this heaving, stinking, ugly flying boat moored in the mouth of this jungle river.
The Sea Witch! Gimme a break!
The evening was hot, humid, with only an occasional puff of wind. The tender had so little freshwater it came out of the tap in a trickle, hardly enough to wet a wash-rag. I had taken a sponge bath, which was a wasted effort. I was already sodden. At least in the plane we would be free of the bugs that swarmed over us in the muggy air.
I was wearing khakis; Modahl was togged out in a pair of Aussie shorts and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up — the only reason he wore that shirt instead of a tee shirt was to have a pocket for pens and cigarettes. Both of us wore pistols on web belts around our waists.
As I went down the net I overheard the word “crazy.” That steamed me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
If they wanted to think I was nuts, let ‘em. As long as they did their jobs it really didn’t matter what they thought. Even if it did piss me off.
I got strapped into the right seat without help, but I was of little use to Modahl. I shouldn’t have worried. The copilot was merely there to flip switches the pilot couldn’t reach, provide extra muscle on the unboosted controls, and talk to the pilot to keep him awake in the middle of the night. I didn’t figure Modahl would leave the plane to me and the autopilot on this first flight. Tonight, the bunks where members of the crew normally took turns napping were covered with a dozen flares and a dozen hundred-pound bombs, to be dumped out the tunnel hole aft.
The mechanic helped start the engines, Pratt & Whitney 1830s of twelve hundred horsepower each. That sounded like a lot, but the Cat was a huge plane, carrying four five-hundred-pound bombs on the racks, the hundred-pounders on the bunks, several hundred pounds of flares, God knows how much machine gun ammo, and fifteen hundred gallons of gasoline, which weighed nine thousand pounds. The plane could have carried more gas, but this load was plenty, enough to keep us airborne for over twenty hours.
I had no idea what the Cat weighed with all this stuff, and I suspect Modahl didn’t either. I said something to the mechanic, Dutch Amme, as we stood on the float waiting our turn to board, and he said the weight didn’t matter. “As long as the thing’ll float, it’ll fly.”
With Amme ready to start the engines, Modahl yelled to Hoffman to release the bowlines. Hoffman was standing on the chine on the left side of the bow. He flipped the line off the cleat, crawled across the nose to the other chine, got rid of that line, then climbed into the nose turret through the open hatch.
A dozen or so of the tender sailors pushed us away from the float. As soon as the bow began to swing, Amme began cranking the engine closest to the tender. It caught and blew a cloud of white smoke, and kept the nose swinging. Modahl pushed the rudder full over and pulled the yoke back into his lap as Amme cranked the second engine.
In less time than it takes to tell, we were taxiing away from the tender.
“You guys did that well,” I remarked.
“Practice,” Modahl said.
Everyone checked in on the intercom, and there was a lot of chatter as they checked systems, all while we were taxiing toward the river’s mouth.
Finally, Modahl used the rudder and starboard engine to initiate a turn to kill time while the engines came up to temperature. The mechanic talked about the engines — temps and so on; Modahl listened and said little.
After two complete turns, the pilot closed the window on his side and told me to do the same. He flipped the signal light to tell Amme to set the mixtures to Auto Rich. While I was trying to get my window to latch, he straightened the rudder and matched the throttles. Props full forward, he pulled the yoke back into his lap and began adding power.
The engines began to sing.
The Witch accelerated slowly as Modahl steadily advanced the throttles while the flight engineer called out the manifold pressures and RPMs. He had the throttles full forward when the nose of the big Cat rose, and she began planing the smooth water in the lee of the point. Modahl centered the yoke with both hands to keep us on the step.
I glanced at the airspeed from time to time. We were so heavy I began to wonder if we could ever get off. We passed fifty miles per hour still planing, worked slowly to fifty-five, then sixty, the engines howling at full power.
It took almost a minute to get to sixty-five with that heavy load, but when we did Modahl pulled the yoke back into his lap and the Cat broke free of the water. He eased the yoke forward, held her just a few feet over the water in ground effect as our airspeed increased. When we had eighty on the dial Modahl inched the yoke back slightly, and the Witch swam upward in the warm air.
“When the water is a little rougher or there is a breeze, she’ll come off easier,” he told me. He flipped the switch to tell Amme to raise the wingtip floats.
He climbed all the way to a thousand feet before he lowered the nose and pulled the throttles back to cruise manifold pressure, then the props back to cruise RPM. Of course, he had to readjust the throttles and sync the props. Finally he got the props perfectly in snyc, and the engine noise became a smooth, loud hum.
After Modahl trimmed he hand-flew the Witch awhile. We went out past the point, where he turned and set a course for the tip of the island that lay to the northeast.
“Landing this thing is a piece of cake. It’s a power-on landing into smooth water: Just set up the attitude and a bit of a sink rate and ease her down and on. In the open sea we full-stall her in. After you watch me do a few I’ll let you try it. Maybe tomorrow evening if we aren’t going out again.”
“Yeah,” I said. The fact that Modahl was making plans for tomorrow was comforting somehow, as I’m sure it was to the rest of the crew, who were listening on the intercom. As if we were a road repair gang on the way to fill a pothole.
When we got to the island northeast of Samarai, we flew along the water’s edge for twenty minutes, looking for people or a crashed airplane or a signal — anything — hoping our lost Catalina crew had made it this far.
We had been in the air over an hour when Modahl turned northeast for Bougainville. He engaged the autopilot and sat for a while watching it fly the plane. We were indicating 115 miles per hour, about a hundred knots. The wind was out of the west. Pottinger, the navigator, was watching the surface of the sea to establish our drift before sunset.
“Keep your eyes peeled, gang, for Joe Snyder and his guys. Sing out if you see anything.”
The land was out of sight behind and the sun was sinking into the sea haze when Modahl finally put his feet up on the instrument panel and lit a cigarette. The sun on our left stern quarter illuminated the clouds, which covered about half the sky. The cloud bases were at least a thousand feet above us, the tops several thousand feet above that. The visibility was about twenty miles, I thought, as I studied the sun-dappled surface of the sea with binoculars.