Presentation Date: May 28, 1998
Art Perry
Commanded PBY Catalinas for US Coast Guard During WWII Flew PBY and PBM flying boats for the U.S. Coast Guard, rescuing aircrews in World II and Korea. He tells of one harrowing rescue of a P-2V crew off the coast of China.
"Of Amphibs, Seaplanes and Rescues"
"I was an anchor clanker in World War Two. And I would joke "We had to go out and win the war before they'd let me go to flight training." With those words, Commander Art Perry, U.S. Coast Guard shared his career experiences of seaplanes and rescues at the May meeting of the Golden Gate Wing.
According to Perry the origins of Coast Guard aviation involved Ten Pound Island in Boston Harbor, with a canvas tent hangar borrowed from the Army and a Navy WWI seaplane. During Prohibition, there were many a call for seaplane operations to stop rum runners who had faster boats than the Coast Guard cutters of the times.
Art Perry's career didn't begin in the air, though. Fresh out of Coast Guard Academy, Perry was a boat pilot at one of the notorious beach landings in the Pacific War - - Tarawa. He performed similar duties at Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Guam, Saipan, the Philippines and a final landing at Iwo Jima. From there, Perry went back to the States for flight training.
In 1945 he was at NAS Dallas in the Yellow Birds (N3Ns), then Corpus Christy, and finishing in PBYs in Pensacola, Florida. There he also flew the SNJ-5C, equipped with an arrestor hook for carrier landings. Perry made five landings on the U.S.S. Wright before he was sent to Coast Guard school at Port Angeles, Washington where he flew the PBY and PBM, Grumman Goose and Widgeon.
PBY Catalinas made for some interesting experiences. Crews took them down the ramp in the morning, removing the beaching gear and flying them until just before noon. The Catalina would be landed near the shore and taxied parallel until a wingtip float was over the beach. A crewman would walk the top of the wing to the beach and "anchor" it and then crews would swap places, walking up and down the wing to and from the shore. The afternoon crew would then fly until it was time to bring the plane up on the beaching gear and onto the ramp for the night.
Landing flying boats was quite a challenge, and Art saw his fair share of mishaps while flying them.
On one notable flight, Perry says he was flying the right seat when the pilot of his PBM made a traumatic landing. At about 50 feet above the water, the pilot chopped the throttle. "She dropped like a rock, and hit hard. The impact was so hard the engines nearly sheared off their mounts."
When it came to flying long missions over water, Perry especially liked the four engines of PB4Y Privateers. "It really spoils you. As far as I'm concerned, all single engined flights are emergencies."
Perry stressed how communications remains critical to Coast Guard rescue operations, linking merchant ships and Navy vessels with aircraft in quickly finding rescue victims and coordinating efforts.
One Sunday afternoon during the Korean War, (January, 1953) Perry got a special call to fly a PBM. Perry told the caller "What are you callin' me for, I don't have the duty." As he found out, the first PBM had already flown up the coast to China to rescue a Navy P2V crew off the coast of China. The P2V had been photographing sites along Formosa, when it was shot up and forced to ditch. With darkness falling and no surface vessels in the area, the PBM landed to rescue five of the P2V crew. But on takeoff, one of the PBM's engines quit after the JATO (Jet Assisted Takeoff) bottles had already been fired. It was believed the pounding of the waves as the flying boat rose onto its step had knocked the flexible fuel line off. The PBM crashed into the water and rolled over, losing half its crew and a couple P2V survivors.
Perry and his crew put a big load of one-million candle-power flares on the PBM. The Navy destroyer Halsey Powell had arrived on the coastal crash site and put out a radio beacon for Perry's PBM to home -in on. The PBM settled into a racetrack pattern, dropping three dozen flares while the destroyer negotiated the rocky waters to pick up eight survivors. Eleven hours after the PBM had flown off to assist, Perry and his crew landed in darkness at Sangley Point, ending one of the toughest missions he'd flown.
Perry says "I was sure that when we started dropping those million candle-power flares over the Chinese coast, that we'd get shot right out of the sky. But I guess they didn't know what were were doing either, so it was pretty good."
Later in his career, Perry was flying PB4Y-2 Privateers out of San Francisco, when a Naval Reserve P2V lost an engine. He flew out and began following them in. He says the P2V pilot asked "Should I go over the Golden Gate bridge or under it? We don't have much fuel, we dumped a lot, maybe too much."
Perry told them Half Moon Bay was a good alternate - - even though it didn't show up in the military charts. As the P2V dumped its guns and everything else, staggering along at 500 feet, Perry's PB4Y led the way to Half Moon Bay's runway, where the P2V safely landed.