12/6/41 1906 hours – 325 miles north of Pearl

Captain Dale Maler and his crew had been in the air for over five hours in a Catalina and had seen nothing but empty ocean. They were now over five hundred miles from base, just to the east of the center of the search pattern and had seen nothing but water for most of the flight. The sun was on the western horizon, just off to his left as he looked for the three hundredth time at the fuel gage and the clock. In about a half hour he must turn toward base, at that time he would have enough fuel to return and still have a comfortable safety margin. The longer he looked, the more sure he was that the Japanese fleet was not in his area. Possibly one of the other planes would find the Jap fleet. Or maybe this was another false alarm, maybe there was no Japanese fleet. There had been at least ten false alarms in the last month, all had resulted in the Catlaina’s burning a lot of fuel, crews getting tired and nothing being spotted. For something to do to bide the time he mentally calculated how much fuel he had burned looking for Jap fleets that were not there. He smiled, on the good side the government was paying for him to get flight time that would be good when he looked for a job after leaving the Military. His train of thought was broken by his co-pilot George White, who was looking toward the east through the binoculars whistled, “Look at that.”

Dale strained but couldn’t see anything so he picked up his binoculars. Before he focused them he knew George was right, something was out there. He turned the focus wheel slightly. Off on the eastern horizon was a fleet. They turned toward it to get a better look. They had their backs to the sun, and thus had the advantage of being able to see but couldn’t easily be seen. After a few minutes of flight they were able to identify several of the ships as Japanese carriers and were able to get a rough heading. They dropped low over the water and turned southwest to avoid detection. About fifteen minutes later they made a report. Their orders had been to avoid making any radio transmissions while close to the fleet to make detection more difficult.

Within the hour the location of the Japanese fleet was signaled to the American fleet at sea. All other PBY’s were notified to avoid the area so that the surprise would be maintained. The PBY’s primary purpose now was to be sure that Mahler had actually found the fleet by a negative search of the remainder of the area. The base would be placed on alert at 0500 the next morning. Another PBY would skirt the area about two hours later to verify the location and course of the Japanese Fleet.

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World War II – a Novel Chapter One

World War II 7

World War II 9