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00:00It certainly wasn't the fastest or the best looking aircraft
00:29that fought in World War II.
00:31It wasn't the easiest plane to fly, but the PBY Catalina flying boat
00:36became one of the most reliable and most admired aircraft ever built.
00:43It was a good airplane. Low altitude, rough weather.
00:47She was a tough little beast.
00:49In action, this simple, rugged and versatile aircraft
00:53proved to be the ideal workhorse around the globe.
00:56Able to operate on land and sea,
01:00the Catalina delivered supplies, flew long-range patrols
01:03and saved the lives of countless shipwrecked sailors and airmen.
01:09That airplane did everything it was asked to do and more.
01:14But it also had a darker and more menacing side to its character.
01:18In the Atlantic Ocean, Catalinas bombed and sank dozens of German submarines.
01:27In the Pacific, black-painted cats flying at night
01:31pounced on unsuspecting Japanese ships.
01:33Using archive film and colour re-enactments,
01:39battle stations joins the crew of a long-range Catalina
01:43as they patrol the dark waters of the ocean and hunt down the enemy.
01:48In 1907, a young motorcycle manufacturer from Hammonsport, New York,
02:00became fascinated with the adventure of flight.
02:05His name was Glenn H. Curtis,
02:07and he would become immortalised as the creator of a very special kind of aircraft.
02:12Curtis was a born inventor.
02:15After numerous experiments,
02:17he designed an aircraft that could take off and land on water,
02:21the flying boat.
02:27Soon, the military began to take an interest.
02:30During World War I,
02:31flying boats were widely used as spotter planes,
02:34mostly searching for submarines.
02:36It was the birth of a new era in naval warfare.
02:42In the First World War,
02:45the U.S. Navy really didn't have a land plane capability,
02:48so the backbone of U.S. Navy operations was the flying boat.
02:53And during World War I,
02:54they developed the NC flying boat,
02:56which was designed to be a long-range aircraft
02:59capable of flying great distances across the Atlantic,
03:01which, in fact, one of them did in May of 1919.
03:08After the war,
03:09hundreds of surplus warplanes were sold off at bargain prices,
03:12helping to fuel the passion for aviation that now gripped America.
03:20The flying boat's ability to operate from any stretch of calm water
03:24gave it an almost unlimited freedom,
03:26opening up new frontiers to aviation.
03:28When Pan American introduced its luxury clipper services to Central and South America,
03:40the golden age of the flying boat had arrived.
03:43Like the great ocean liners,
03:47the Pan Am clippers of the 1930s allowed the rich to travel in style to exotic destinations.
03:59But the Navy also saw a tactical role for large long-range aircraft,
04:03patrolling the world's oceans to give early warning of any threat to American interests.
04:08Soon, the flying boat became a key part of the nation's defense planning.
04:14The main advantages of the flying boat over a wheeled aircraft,
04:17certainly in the early stages before the advent of the aircraft carrier,
04:20was the great range that they had.
04:22Plus, they could land almost anywhere.
04:24So they could set down in any number of forward bases.
04:28And so that's what made the flying boat a real advantageous platform for Navy operations,
04:32particularly in the Pacific,
04:33where the Navy was definitely looking towards fighting the next war.
04:38In 1933, the Navy invited bids for a new long-range patrol aircraft.
04:43The Consolidated Aircraft Corporation had already designed flying boats for the Navy
04:48and was determined to secure this important contract.
04:53Their chief designer was a talented engineer called Isaac Macklin Ladin,
04:58known to all as Mack.
05:00In the early 1930s, most aircraft were still biplanes,
05:05with fabric-covered wings braced by a maze of steel wires.
05:09In a bold move, Mack Ladin created a metal monoplane.
05:16Its huge wing was supported on a single pylon above the fuselage,
05:20braced to the hull by only four struts, two on each side.
05:24All flying boats needed outrigger floats for stability on water,
05:31but in the air they became a liability, increasing drag and reducing performance.
05:36Mack Ladin hit on the brilliant solution of designing floats that folded up in flight
05:41to form the wingtips, reducing the drag while adding lift.
05:46The Navy was suitably impressed, and in June 1935, Consolidated won a contract for 60 aircraft,
06:00the biggest military order since World War I.
06:03The plane that now came off the production line would become a classic.
06:10It was known by its code letters, PBY.
06:15P for patrol, B for bomber, and Y the prefix for consolidated.
06:21The PBY was a big aircraft, and it certainly looked impressive.
06:28And here were all those greatly beautiful PBYs.
06:31It was love at first sight.
06:33And I said, well, I've got to fly those.
06:36Along came a PBY.
06:38And it was gracefully soaring above us.
06:42And it was so beautiful.
06:44In my mind, it was like a soaring eagle.
06:47It just soared and made slow turns.
06:51And later on, I found out what a devil it could be in combat.
06:57PBY, the Navy called her.
07:00Back in 1935, the first PBYs took to the water and the air.
07:06Commonplace today, but then a milestone in the history of aviation.
07:11But the PBY would be best known as the Catalina, or simply the Cat.
07:17With a cruising speed of little more than 130 miles per hour,
07:21the big, twin-engine Catalina was not exactly fast.
07:24But it had tremendous endurance, with a range of well over 3,000 miles.
07:29And it could stay in the air for over 15 hours.
07:36Although it was always vulnerable to attack, its main armament was substantial.
07:41It consisted of two heavy-caliber machine guns mounted in blisters on each side of the rear fuselage.
07:50Although it had originally been designed as a patrol aircraft,
07:53the PBY could carry four 1,000-pound bombs, or two torpedoes,
07:58which greatly increased its tactical value to the Navy.
08:02The PBY did everything it was asked to do, and more.
08:07It covered a lot of ground, and it could remain a law for a great deal of time.
08:11Basically, though, it was designed to spot the enemy fleet.
08:14The radar was just in its infancy then,
08:17and nothing could beat a pair of two human eyes in spotting the fleet,
08:21and reporting it back to the home base.
08:23By the late 1930s, the world was becoming a dangerous place.
08:29In the Pacific, Japan was steadily becoming more powerful and more aggressive.
08:38In Europe, Hitler's Germany was openly rearming for war,
08:43and building a navy which threatened to dominate the Atlantic.
08:46Britain and America watched and waited as tensions steadily mounted.
08:54Both nations realized that airborne early warning would play a vital role in future conflicts.
09:01Most admirals still put their faith in big gun warships,
09:05but a few believed that if war should come, it would be decided by air power.
09:11They would soon discover just how right they were.
09:16September 1939, Europe is plunged into war.
09:27Britain's first line of defense was the Royal Navy.
09:32Many of its warships carried seaplanes,
09:35which could be launched by catapult to scout beyond the horizon.
09:39The problem was getting them back.
09:41The open sea is a dangerous place to land an aircraft.
09:51Multi-engine, long-range patrol planes were a much safer bet,
09:55but Britain's hard-pressed RAF simply didn't have enough of them.
09:58In 1940, they ordered a fleet of PBYs to help patrol the Atlantic.
10:08It was the RAF pilots who coined the name Catalina.
10:10They liked the aircraft and soon discovered that the B in PBY really did mean bomber.
10:23They began using their Catalinas to attack German U-boats.
10:31Since the start of the war, the Nazi wolfpacks had roamed across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean,
10:37sending scores of British ships to the bottom.
10:39The Catalina became a key weapon in the battle against the U-boats,
10:52locating and sinking them in increasing numbers.
10:54But Germany's powerful fleet of surface warships remained a potent threat.
11:13In May 1941, the CAT helped to secure a major British victory at sea.
11:18The Royal Navy was in hot pursuit of the German battleship, the Bismarck.
11:26At 42,000 tons, she was the pride of the Nazi battle fleet and Hitler's favorite warship.
11:33In an engagement west of Iceland, the Bismarck had sunk the British battleship, HMS Hood, with a direct hit.
11:41Only three of her crew survived.
11:43The Bismarck then escaped into the fog and vanished.
11:51Somewhere under that mystery of fog, the Bismarck was steaming under forced draft for a safe haven.
11:57Then a rift in the clouds, a tell-tale wake.
12:02A Catalina flashed the word, quarry sighted.
12:04It was a Catalina patrol plane of the RAF's coastal command, which finally hunted down the Bismarck.
12:14A position was reported, and Britain's Royal Navy closed in for the kill.
12:18The Bismarck went down with only 115 out of the 2,400 men on board survived.
12:37Britain had maintained her supremacy in the North Atlantic with the help of a plane designed to maintain United States supremacy in the Pacific.
12:45The attack on the Bismarck clearly demonstrated the value of a long-range patrol aircraft in combat.
12:53The US was quick to learn the lessons.
12:58The long-range Catalina was the ideal aircraft for patrolling the ocean.
13:04But getting it in and out of the water meant fitting cumbersome beaching gear.
13:08It was a slow and tedious process.
13:14To solve the problem, the PBY-5A was introduced.
13:19A standing for amphibian.
13:21With a retractable undercarriage, this version of the CAT was equally at home on land or at sea.
13:27Catalinas were soon stationed in US bases across the Pacific, from Midway to the Philippines and from Wake Island to Pearl Harbor.
13:43As Japan became increasingly hostile, the Navy stepped up its daily reconnaissance flights.
13:48On a peaceful Sunday morning in December 1941, the Japanese finally launched their attack on the Pacific battle fleet moored at Pearl Harbor.
14:01So I see them coming around one by one. They strafe and bomb, and then they make a circle and come around again.
14:16They must have made about three or four passes on each attack.
14:20You couldn't believe it, and you didn't think it was happening.
14:23The whole sky was black with smoke.
14:34Everything was on fire, and there was dead people on the dock.
14:39And there was three feet thick on the water, and people were going around.
14:45It was utter confusion.
14:46The Japanese had not only crippled the American Pacific Fleet, they had almost wiped out the Airborne Patrol Force.
14:57Sixty-seven Catalinas were badly damaged or completely destroyed.
15:04They picked a beautiful time.
15:07Everybody was saluting the flag, and they weren't saluting their guns.
15:16Pearl Harbor was a bitter lesson for the Americans.
15:20Despite all their long-range patrols, U.S. forces had failed to detect the approach of the Japanese Armada.
15:33As America recovered from the shock of the Japanese attack, recruiting offices across the nation were besieged by young volunteers eager to get into the fight.
15:42I was very highly agitated at what happened out at Pearl Harbor.
15:50We weren't told too much about what happened other than it was a big blow to the fleet.
15:55And I joined the Navy the next day, thinking that I gotta go.
16:01December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor.
16:05My father was going to be the big stopper in my mind.
16:12When I came home that afternoon, and he said, how was school?
16:16I gave him the papers that I needed to get his signature on.
16:20And he thought for a long time.
16:23And he said, well, I'm too old to go, and we're going to be at war.
16:27And he said, you go.
16:28And he signed, with tears in his eyes.
16:30The smoke from the blazing wrecks at Pearl Harbor hung in the air for days.
16:43But America was now at war.
16:46And the Catalina crews, struggling to recover from this devastating blow, would be right in the front line.
16:51The feel at that time was, we've got to do something, and we've got to do it fast.
17:08Early in 1942, new Catalinas begin coming off the production lines to replace the losses of Pearl Harbor.
17:14As fresh orders pour into the consolidated factory, the call goes out for more and more workers in the race to speed up production.
17:23I'd put on my application that I'd worked with some radios.
17:29And, of course, the interviewer had a drawer that he opened up, and he said, what's that?
17:35I said, it's a soldering iron.
17:37What's that? That's a wire cutter.
17:38You're an electrician.
17:39So I became an electrician, and that was when the company was building from very few people, just hiring all the time.
17:46And there, it consolidated, we were working 11 hours a day and seven days a week.
17:51The CAT soon won the respect and admiration of its crews.
17:56The standard PBY crew consisted of eight men.
17:59A bombardier who doubled as the bow gunner, a pilot and co-pilot, a navigator, a radio operator, a flight engineer, and two waste gallons.
18:13Bulkheads divided the plane into seven watertight sections.
18:19For crew comfort on long-haul patrol flights, the central compartment contained bunks and a galley.
18:31It took a lot of training to master the highly specialized art of flying a boat.
18:35Well, if you ever saw a, what I call a PBY driver, he had thick wrists and big muscles.
18:48The controls, the biggest barn doors, it took a little bit of muscle to move them.
18:54It was unstable.
18:55She'd fall off on one wing or the course would wander unless you, you had to fly it every minute of the time.
19:06It had the smallest stabilizing tabs, which you had to constantly readjust.
19:13Every time somebody moved or the load shifted just a little bit, you had to readjust it.
19:20You couldn't relax very long in that airplane, not if you were flying it.
19:25The real trick on a seaplane landing at any time is to make sure you keep your wings level.
19:34You do not want to get afloat into the water at high speed, because it'll turn you around so fast it'll be a wreck.
19:41When you come in to land, well, it's a high angle, then, kaboom, down you come and it really hits hard.
19:48You know, you haven't got no control all of a sudden.
19:50Well, you put it into just about a stall just when you about to get to the water,
19:53to splat, you come down pretty hard.
19:56It landed with a great big splash.
19:59Not a touchdown, it was a beautiful landing.
20:02But if you didn't keep coming back all the time until you got that big fat duck plowing through the water,
20:09then she'd go off the water.
20:12Because there weren't any flaps, anything to kill the speed.
20:14That's the one thing about that thing that I consider pretty vicious.
20:23The PBY certainly had its faults, but it also had great strengths.
20:28And as the crews learned to handle it, they developed a growing respect for this rugged workhorse.
20:33It was a good airplane, very good. Low altitude, rough weather, rain squalls, and she was a tough little beast.
20:47Like some great sea bird, the Catalina soared above the ocean on its long and lonely patrols.
21:05Its crew spent many hours out of sight of land, scanning the ocean for the tiny speck that could be a submarine periscope or a downed pilot drifting in a life raft.
21:21Keeping the engines running hour after hour was the job of the flight engineer.
21:25From his cramped compartment inside the wing support, he communicated with the pilot using a series of indicator lights.
21:37The only thing the pilot has regarding the engines in the cockpit are the throttles.
21:43Everything else is back there in a tower. He relies on his engineer.
21:47It was the navigator's job to plot their course and guide the ship home safely.
21:58It's nice to know where you are.
22:01Every once in a while a crew member that wasn't doing anything would come up and look over your shoulder and say,
22:05where are we? Well, you put your finger, you know, right there.
22:08But they did trust you, no doubt about it.
22:12But sometime, you're going to be lost.
22:16You won't know where you are.
22:18So what do you do?
22:20You turn around and go back and you don't know where to go back to?
22:23Do you think, well, my sense tells me that land is over there and water is over here.
22:28What do you do?
22:30In bad weather, it could be an almost impossible task.
22:34Many lone Catalinas vanished without trace in the vast expanse of the Pacific.
22:38The radio operator was the only link to the outside world.
22:45His signals, tapped out in Morse code, would relay the vital early warning of enemy activity back to base.
22:57Soon the Catalina crews would play a key role in the epic sea battle that would change the entire course of the war in the Pacific.
23:05Midway.
23:06Midway Island.
23:09Not much land, right enough.
23:11But it's our outpost.
23:15A Navy patrol plane.
23:17Routine patrol.
23:19Only behind every cloud may be an enemy.
23:27Following the disaster of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese continued to drive back American forces in the Pacific.
23:33In June 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy sent a huge task force to capture the American-held Midway Island, 1,100 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor.
23:50The first objective was to lure the remaining ships of the U.S. Pacific fleet into battle and sink them.
23:59But the Japanese codes had been broken, and the defenders knew an attack was coming.
24:09What they didn't know was the exact position of the task force.
24:12Up until the Battle of Midway, the U.S. Navy, quite frankly, was not having a good war.
24:20They had only been able to score some hit-and-run raids against Japanese islands.
24:23So the Battle of Midway was very much a showdown in which the U.S. Navy was going to put it all on the line to stop the Japanese fleet.
24:32On the morning of June the 3rd, a Catalina patrol aircraft spotted the leading ships of the Japanese task force.
24:42At dawn the following morning, another Catalina finally spotted the remaining ships, including the aircraft carriers.
24:49A large force of American carrier planes took off to strike the Japanese battle fleet.
25:01But the waves of dive bombers were met by superior Japanese fighters and suffered appalling losses.
25:10Then, in ten short minutes, the tide turned completely.
25:14American dive bombers caught three Japanese aircraft carriers whilst their decks were packed with aircraft, rearming and refueling.
25:25With no air cover, the big carriers were sitting ducks, and all three quickly fell victim to American attacks.
25:31Later that day, a fourth Japanese aircraft carrier was lost.
25:38Midway was a devastating defeat for the Japanese, and marked the turning point in the Pacific War at sea.
25:44At last, U.S. forces had won a decisive victory, as the Japanese found themselves on the defensive for the first time.
25:54In the Battle of Midway, there were some elements that played a great role, and certainly that was finding where the Japanese fleet was.
26:00And code-breaking played a role in that, but it still required an aircraft to spot the ships.
26:05And it was here that the PBY played a pivotal role in the battle, because it was PBYs that spotted not only the invasion force destined for Midway, but more importantly, spotted the carrier force.
26:15The Catalina had proved its ability beyond any doubt, but even before Pearl Harbor, in an ongoing quest for bigger and better, the Navy had already ordered its intended replacement.
26:28The battleship of the air, the Coronado, the mightiest seaborne aircraft now in service.
26:35The four-engine Coronado was a far bigger and more modern aircraft, but it cost three times as much as the Catalina to build, and was a very complex machine.
26:48By contrast, the CAT was easy to produce in large numbers, and so remained the standard workhorse of the Navy.
27:01Like Henry Ford's Model T, it was slow but sure, and it got the job done.
27:07But every Catalina crewman knew that even with its armament, the slow-moving CAT stood very little chance of surviving a Japanese fighter attack.
27:16Those long and lonely ocean patrols would be some of the most dangerous missions of the whole Pacific War.
27:30The Catalina has been called the cruiser of the air. Her wings spread is 105 feet. Her length from nose to tail is 65 feet.
27:38She can carry a load of many tons. Her range, fully loaded, is over 4,000 miles, and the PBYs, new and old, have stood up to all the tasks imposed by modern war.
27:50But sometimes the odds against it were just too great. On his first combat patrol in August 1942, Bob Dimit's Catalina was attacked out of the blue by three Japanese fighters.
28:03They were real showoffs. They were real showoffs. They would corkscrew in and roll. I watched one of them coming in on our tail there, and he was just lazily doing rolls and shooting at us.
28:18I guess they figured that this was a big duck and it was going. Our raiding man was killed. He was sitting right behind me.
28:34But the mechanic was shot through the chest and those were the two big casualties that we had. The rest of us all had small shrapnel in us.
28:51Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the Japanese Zeros vanished. One man was dead, one seriously wounded, and the cat was badly damaged.
29:00And when we got away from there, our port engine was starting to burn. But that sucker flew, and we noticed some dots on the horizon. Never saw such pretty pieces of palm trees in our life.
29:21Somehow they managed to crash land the damaged Catalina in shallow water and skidded to a halt on the beach.
29:27When we stopped, then we started getting kind of worried because we really didn't know at that time where we were and whether it was friendly or enemy.
29:40So we climbed out of the airplane and stood there with our big .45s in our hands and waited.
29:51After a week marooned on their tropical island, Bob Dimit and his crew were beginning to wonder how long they could survive before help came or the Japanese arrived.
30:04All of a sudden we see this dot just off the water underneath this black cloud heading right for us, and it looked like a seaplane.
30:15Well, at that time we didn't know whether it was a Japanese seaplane or whether it was an American seaplane, so we didn't do anything.
30:23And we waited and waited and waited until the last minute, and we could finally make out that it was a Catalina.
30:32And we were jumping up and down and yelling at him, but Santa Claus has nothing on that airplane.
30:39The relief that you feel when you have a friend that just flies by like that there is, well, you can't describe it.
30:49We know then that we're home free.
30:53All but one of Bob's crew survived their ordeal.
30:59Thanks to the Catalina.
31:03Such narrow escapes had a profound effect.
31:06Hey, I got news for you.
31:08They were all brothers under the skin boy after that one there, and there was no doubt about that.
31:15We stayed close for a long time.
31:16Usually bonding shows up after an incident or an accident.
31:23If the pilot manages to evade and get the plane back without being shot down,
31:31he is the biggest thing in the world to that crew.
31:35So now they've bonded to the pilot, and the crew has bonded together as one.
31:40You could see it happen, and when I was on the islands in the South Pacific and the PBYs would come back from their patrol,
31:48you could tell that there's a changeover.
31:51All of a sudden they're like brothers.
31:53You can't come between them.
31:58Not surprisingly, every American GI in the Pacific learned to love the cat.
32:03Its familiar and friendly outline in the sky was always a welcome sight.
32:10For the troops isolated on remote coral islands, it meant news from home in the mail.
32:17For the wounded, it meant vital medical supplies and a trip to the safety of a base hospital.
32:25For survivors, drifting for days in the empty ocean, it meant life itself.
32:31And for the men who flew it, the cat became one of the family.
32:35Oh, yes. Every hop we came back on, the airplane was our baby.
32:43We loved it. We put it to bed at night, wake it up in the morning,
32:48and if we had any long flights, it never occurred to us that anything was going to go wrong.
32:53The cats operated in the most primitive conditions, and their crews learned to become almost entirely self-sufficient.
33:04You had to be self-sufficient.
33:06Those planes were on their own.
33:09They'd be at some out of the way island in a cove,
33:12and there'd be some 55-gallon drums of fuel and some oil.
33:18You lived in the plane, and you ate, cooked, and lived in the plane.
33:26On land or on water, the big cats were most vulnerable to Japanese air attacks between missions.
33:32But many of their forward bases were hacked out of the jungle and not easily spotted from the air.
33:41Their long-haul missions across the Pacific put a huge strain on the aircraft,
33:45and on the dedicated ground crews who kept them flying with only the most basic equipment.
33:50Preventative maintenance is the secret to the whole thing.
33:56The old saying goes, you can't pull off the road and call for a wrecker.
34:01If you have a problem and you lose an engine, you're going to have to return to base.
34:06You have a full crew, full ammo, full gas load.
34:10Perish the thought that you lose an engine on take-off.
34:14The remote jungle bases had no workshop facilities,
34:17but this didn't stop the Catalina.
34:21It carried its own set of folding work platforms, which could be hung on the engines.
34:28There you were. You were on the platform.
34:29You could work on the whole accessory section.
34:32After a set number of hours in the air, each engine had to be thoroughly inspected.
34:37Each check would be more intense.
34:40And you had to see them coming because that meant that it was going to be work.
34:43Not just flying, it was going to be work. You had to get yourself 30.
34:47And then you would have the 30, 60, 90, and 120-hour check.
34:52Right now, 120-hour takes quite a long time.
34:55That's 120 hours in the air.
34:57Now the airplane's going to be down for a couple of days.
34:59In wartime, that's not really well thought of, but it has to happen.
35:04So you can imagine that there's a lot of fellas, a lot of mechanics, really running all over that airplane to get it back in the air.
35:12That's one thing a pilot doesn't want is to have his airplane on the deck.
35:17It's not what it's built for.
35:18A close bond developed between the pilot and his chief engineer.
35:28Lives depended on both their skills.
35:31Before each mission, they would thoroughly check out the aircraft together.
35:36It's the rapport that you develop with the pilot.
35:39And if you're the chief aboard, or if you're the senior man aboard, or if you're the flight engineer, you're a little bit closer to the pilot than the rest of the crew.
35:50He'll come to you first.
35:52But he's still in charge.
35:55I realized I was the man behind the wrench. I wasn't the man up front driving.
36:00The pilot drives it. I fix it.
36:02It's an airplane that you could fix with duct tape or something like that.
36:08If it hadn't been too complicated, it wouldn't have been able to do the job.
36:12But this faithful servant could also show another, much more aggressive side to its nature.
36:21When darkness fell, the docile cat would transform into a deadly hunter.
36:32Guadalcanal is the most hotly contested strip of land in the South Pacific.
36:39For five months, the Japs have tried to win back this vital outpost.
36:43But their transports, bombed and beached, lie wrecked on the sands of the Solomon Islands.
36:52Midway had marked the turning point at sea.
36:55But it was Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, which finally halted the Japanese advance on land.
37:02It was a critical situation, as the Japanese poured men and supplies into battle,
37:07in a desperate bid to drive American forces back into the sea.
37:13The entire Japanese operation depended on regular supply runs by a fleet of transport ships,
37:19operating at night, and supported by destroyers and light cruisers, known as the Tokyo Express.
37:24The only hope of an American victory, lay in cutting off this lifeline of supplies.
37:33It was finally achieved, with the help of a most unlikely weapon.
37:37Anything familiar? That torso with a middle-aged sag?
37:44Her speed less than some cars can do.
37:47Got her? Right. The old cat.
37:51Navy Catalina patrol boat. PBY in a black nightgown for night camouflage.
37:56A black cat.
37:57It was called the black cat, because they flew at night, and the plane was painted perfectly black.
38:05Despite its age, the Catalina was pioneering a new kind of clandestine operation,
38:11which would become an increasingly important part of modern warfare.
38:14During the day, to launch a PBY on any sort of attack mission would have been suicide,
38:19because it was a slow and lumbering aircraft.
38:21But those attributes made it really particularly suited to night combat,
38:25where it could loiter over targets and search for them really at will.
38:30For every pound of bombs dropped last month, one ton of enemy shipping was sunk or damaged.
38:36Records like that mean plenty in any language, dollars or yen.
38:40The formula was very simple, but very effective.
38:47Take a regular PBY Catalina patrol plane, paint it matte black from nose to tail,
38:53hide its glowing exhaust pipes above the wings, and turn off all navigation lights.
39:01Then hang 4,000 pounds of bombs under its wings, and you have a very potent weapon.
39:07The black cat, the original stealth bomber.
39:19Another night, another mission, another prowl into the dark.
39:23A cat needs its nine lives on these jobs.
39:29Back at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese surprise attack had decimated the Catalina force.
39:33Now, under cover of darkness, the cats took their revenge.
39:38This time, it would be the Japanese who were caught napping.
39:43These long-haul missions were always tense and exhausting for the Catalina crews.
39:48Skipper always had us doing things.
39:52And he'd say, you guys in the blisters, I want you to keep an eye out.
39:56And if he ever saw anything, and we didn't see it first, we was in bad trouble.
40:00We reported seeing something before he did.
40:04Or he'd said, all right, what's going on back there?
40:06You guys sound asleep?
40:07Without radar, the Japanese forces were unable to locate the cats in the darkness.
40:13Even powerful searchlights usually failed to reveal the cats' presence.
40:18And the defenders could only fire blindly into the night sky in hope of hitting something.
40:22The searchlight would be right on us.
40:27And nobody shot at us.
40:29The searchlight would come right on, and everything gets all light up in the plane.
40:36He said, uh-oh. We just kept right on going, and the light went off somewhere else.
40:40So they never did see us. Never would see us.
40:43The attack had to be made on the first pass, to gain the advantage of surprise.
40:52But the slow-flying cat had plenty of time to line up on the target.
40:59You know, we dropped bombs. We dropped everything we had.
41:03And I don't know, because we never did, nobody ever went down to see what had happened,
41:07because that was Japanese territory.
41:09One more flight completed.
41:12One less convoy flying the rising sun.
41:15Another loss in losses adding up to billions of dollars in equipment.
41:19That didn't get there.
41:22In one month alone, a single squadron claimed 43 Japanese ships,
41:27as the Black Cats stalked the night skies.
41:30Most of their victims never knew what hit them.
41:32Starved of their vital supplies, the Japanese lost their grip on the Solomon's chain,
41:41and began the long and bloody retreat, back across the Pacific, to the home islands.
41:46At a critical moment in history, the Black Cats squadrons, hunting and bombing by night,
41:58had helped to turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.
42:00A job done by planes that can't maneuver, but do, that can't dive, that can't rev up speed,
42:10to wiggle out of a run, but go in anyway for a second try, a third.
42:14And every less ship gives the men who are landing a better break.
42:18That's what keeps the cats flying.
42:24When production ended, nearly 4,000 Catalinas had been built,
42:31making it by far the most numerous flying boat ever designed.
42:35In a variety of services, with a variety of nations,
42:39the PBY did everything in almost every theater of war.
42:42It dropped bombs, it dropped torpedoes, it depth-charged U-boats, it fired retro rockets.
42:46It was the Dumbo for downed flyers, the salvation and savior for them
42:51when they were floating in the open ocean, with little chance of rescue without the PBY.
42:55So, in short, the PBY performed all missions that it was called upon to do,
42:59and performed them with great mobility.
43:03After the war, most military aircraft were scrapped, but the cats soldiered on.
43:08They were simply too useful to throw away.
43:10Wherever there was water, the Catalina still had a peacetime job to do.
43:18Coast Guard patrols, firefighting, cargo carrying, passenger carrying, exploration, surveying, and a score of other roles.
43:26The coming of the jet age hastened the death of most remaining flying boats, but not the cats.
43:37As the new millennium dawns, the consolidated PBY Catalina is still flying.
43:43One of the longest lived and best loved aircraft of all time.
43:51That airplane, I fell in love with it.
43:55All I could say was, Mr. Consolidated, you did a hell of a job.
43:59You did a hell of a job.
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