OAK HARBOR – Adolph Meisch talks about being aboard a U.S. Navy flying patrol boat in the mid-1940s trying to reach Adak Island from the community of Kodiak in the northern reaches of Alaska.
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
There was a 110-mile-per-hour headwind in the area, as he tells it, and the plane had been aloft for an hour but was making little progress. So the frustrated pilot landed where they had started.
“I had the honor of being stationed at Adak and also Kodiak,” Meisch recalls. “It’s the worst place in the world to fly.”
Meisch went on to spend more than 20 years in the Navy before retiring and working as a mechanic for Kenmore Air. Now he’s one of a growing group of people attempting to perpetuate the memory of the long-retired airplane in which he used to fly, a seaplane base here and the brave men who flew the planes and worked in Oak Harbor during World War II.
The airplane is the PBY Catalina, an amphibious flying patrol boat with a boatlike hull.
In Navy jargon, the PB stands for patrol boat. The Y designates the manufacturer, Consolidated Aircraft Co.
A 30-minute documentary video depicting the Whidbey Island Naval Seaplane Base and the people whose lives changed when the Navy arrived here at the start of the war will debut on Sunday.
The documentary, “In Defense of Their Nation,” was produced at the behest of the PBY Memorial Foundation. It will be shown at 2 p.m. in the Elks lodge, 155 NE Ernst St. in Oak Harbor. Admission is free.
Member Wes Westlund spearheaded a drive to raise $12,000 and get some equipment to have the documentary produced. Meisch is vice president of the association and an aircraft buff who has taken up the cause of the PBY.
“We want to preserve naval aviation history, beginning with the PBY,” said Win Stites, association president. “We think there is a big segment of history not in the history books today.”
Part of that history, in his estimation, is an almost forgotten part of World War II and the seaplane’s role in battling the Japanese in the Aleutian Islands.
The association’s dream is to establish a museum, possibly on the old seaplane base site, which now is used mainly for military storage and housing supporting Ault Field and Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.
The association’s headquarters is in an old gas station on Pioneer Way with a view of the seaplane base.
Meisch, 78, was kept out of the Aleutian combat by a broken wrist, but he flew there after the Japanese had withdrawn. It seemed to be always foggy or windy, or both, “so it was very interesting flying. There were more people killed by weather on both sides than combat.”
The PBY was a bomber; it dropped torpedoes and was equipped with a cannon. It also participated in search-and-rescue operations for downed airmen and survivors of stricken vessels.
The first PBY arrived at the seaplane base in fall 1942. The base was hastily constructed at the war’s outset, transforming a sleepy Whidbey Island town of about 650 people into a busy wartime facility.
Oak Harbor resident Eileen Brown, who used to work for the naval station’s newspaper, helped start the association when she put a request in the publication for old pictures of the PBY.
The foundation office now is festooned with photos, scrapbooks, model airplanes and a model of the museum Stites and the others hope to establish, hopefully with a restored PBY.
Standard equipment on the flying boats was a handful of sharpened pencils, Brown said. The plane was as likely as not to pop a hull rivet when the ship landed hard in rough seas. Crewmen would simply shove a pencil into the hole to stop the leak.
“PBY 101 was carry sharpened pencils,” Stites said.
Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or haley@heraldnet.com.
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