The Black Cats: Charles Sternburg

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Charles Sternburg. Sternburg served in the Navy in World War II, and was a member of the Black Cats. The Black Cats were a group of bombers that flew stealth missions in the Pacific, tasked often with destroying enemy submarines or flying reconnaissance. They flew seaplanes called PBY Catalinas which were nearly invisible during the night, but were incredibly vulnerable to enemy munitions.

Sternburg flew as a co-pilot and bombardier with the Black Cats.

Charles Sternburg:

The Black Cats’ squadron job was to go out at night and destroy enemy shipping that was resupplying the Japanese that were still in the area, and to keep the submarines from surfacing to recharge their batteries during the night.

I got in as a replacement pilot when they were sending the veterans back home after too much action. I was just out of flight school at Pensacola in 1944, February, and I had a one month course in celestial navigation for long range patrol planes. And then they sent us to Milne Bay New Guinea for replacements in the seaplane squadrons.

Well, we could carry a 2000-pound payload, four 500-pound bombs, or two torpedoes each a thousand pounds each, or four depth charges, which were 500 pounds each. We had a 50-caliber gun on each side, and what they call a clamshell blister that could be opened up so the gun could be fired, and 230 calibers in the nose.

And the plane was originally designed just for reconnaissance, so then they put bomb racks under the wings right outside in the open to carry the bombs and the torpedoes, and the depth charges.

A typical Black Cat mission would be we would take off at sunset just before dark, and we would fly an 800-mile segment, would then go 200 miles crossways, and then come back 800. And there'd be five of us out fanning out from our base covering that whole area 800 miles out.

And we would look for shipping and signs of submarines. Our radar would pick up a submarine and as we'd close in on … as we got about 60 miles from it, they'd usually submerge.

The radar was a very primitive kind, wasn't a scope type. It had a line that went up and down, and sideways for degrees. And the radar man had to determine how far away and what he was looking at, and he could tell whether it was an island or a submarine or another airplane by the movement.

As soon as he told us where it was, we would hone in on it. He would tell us 20 degrees to the right or left (of course, that's port and starboard in Navy talk) and how far away it was, and how fast we were closing on it.

And then the patrol plane commander would determine what to do, whether to get ready to make an attack on it. Most of the time, the submarines would submerge before we could get to them. And at that point, we didn't have any way to tell which way they went. Those type of devices came out later.

The Japanese ship, we would make a bombing run on them. We had the four bombs and with an intervalometer, we could let one at a time go or all at once or one, and then two, and then one. And that was the usual pattern.

We'd set it up for one, two, and one, and try to hit the two of them right on the ship. And if you missed a little bit, one of the sequences would get to the ship and make it so it would sink or disable it.

They were transports that were moving supplies, and once in a while, we'd get combat with a destroyer escort or ship of that type.

Well, our method of attack was to sneak up on them. We were painted black, we had no lights, and we had flare dampers on the exhaust so that as we were departing from the attack, it was difficult to spot us in that respect.

The idea was to see a ship, drop down to sea level 50 feet, because we had a radar altimeter that kept us from going too low, and make a run on the ship, let our bombs go, zoom over the ship, and back down to 50 feet, and keep going so they couldn't shoot at us, get to shoot us down.

The skin was 040 aluminum, that's 40,000 thick. And it was structurally good for the airplane, but no good for any armament. Our main protection was that we flew at night where they couldn't see us, they couldn't hear us coming, and after we left the scene, they couldn't see us leaving.

You feel a little boost in the air from the explosion. The idea is that there's a slight delay on the bombs. They get armed when they leave the airplane, there's a wire that's pulled out and a propeller on the bomb rotates until it arms them, and then the bombs go off on contact, and the depth charges for submarines were set to go off 25 feet below the surface.

We had a gunner on each gun. There was one on each side of the plane, and they would be mostly for strafing. There was no interrupter on them, so they had to be careful they didn't shoot our wing or tail.

You could see at night, we had red lights on the instruments, so we'd have night vision. If you just turn a flashlight on for one second, your night vision is destroyed for about 30 minutes. So, we were very careful not to do that. Our flashlights had a little red lens on them, and a lot of nights were moonlit and very bright.

Interviewer:

So, it was easy to sneak up on the Japanese?

Charles Sternburg:

Yes. They have what you call luminous wake at night. If they're traveling, the fluorescent in the water makes a nice feathery wake, so you can see that. And after finding the luminous wake, the ship of course, would be right in front of it and it could determine what kind it was. Didn't want to sink any of our own ships, of course.

We would go after ground targets if we could make a safe run to get in there and out of there. We wouldn't attack any place with known anti-aircraft guns because we were too vulnerable. We were only flying just under 95 knots, but it's about 110 miles an hour.

Yes, the Black Cats did a lot of enemy shipping trouble and keeping the submarines from surfacing to charge their batteries. The squadron 52 that I was in had sunk over 200,000 tons of enemy shipping before I got into the squadron, and they got the unit citation for that.

The Japanese submarines had to recharge the batteries at night so they could stay underwater all day. And by making them submerge, we caused them not to be able to operate all day long under sea. They would have to surface to recharge their batteries, and at that time, the Air Corps people were out on their daylight patrols could find them and try to sink them.

Because of our slow speed and low altitude, we would come up over the horizon before they were aware of us. And when we dropped down to 50 feet, we were in what they called a sea return of radar. So, if they had radar, they couldn't pick us up. A sea return on radar is just a bunch of hashy stuff that would hide us.

I was the co-pilot and the bombardier. And then we always carried three pilots, one guy navigating, two guys flying. We would take turns at that. So, I was also a long-range navigator. The patrol plane commander would take charge of any runs to drop the bombs, and he would tell the copilot when to trigger the bombs to release them.

I had gone through the Pan-American School of Navigation in Hollywood, Florida to learn celestial navigation and dead reckoning. We used dead reckoning because we weren't allowed to have any radio contact except through our CW Morse code. Everything was encoded to send out. We could not talk on the radio.

We would be briefed on what was out there, and we would send back reports on what we saw. And the central control people would have all this information, and if they thought something was out there that we could find, they would let us know. And the radio man would get these encoded messages, and every four hours, we had a new code, we had to decode them, and turn them into English so we could understand them.

There was five squadrons of us out there. We had 15 planes in each squadron, and we would take turns with different missions. We'd have six weeks of anti-sub, six weeks of night bombing, six weeks of torpedoes, and then six weeks of just daylight patrol and night patrol. And then they would send us to a rest camp in Australia for a couple of weeks.

In the Philippines, we would fly down over Borneo and attack shipping there. We'd fly out towards the China coast. We were restricted from going within 60 miles, which was a line of sight at 800 feet at that time. And just in general, keep an eye on what was going on at night out there so that they couldn't be sending in submarines and shipping that we were unaware of.

Another part of our missions was to give weather reports. Every hour, we looked out at the weather and sent in a report so that the weather people would have an idea of what's going on as far as the weather was.

You need good weather to do your missions, and many times, we would fly through a storm front, drop down to 300 feet or less to get underneath the turbulence, and it would take us 15 minutes of real rough weather, and take two people on the controls to control the airplane, even with the automatic pilot on.

And we'd be in rain and heavy gusts of wind, and finally break through into the clear. And sometimes at night, we'd go through two of those: one on the way out and same one on the way back in.

As far as carrying two torpedoes, each one was a thousand pounds, we never made any torpedo runs on enemy shipping. One of the reasons was we were too vulnerable. If we thought we could make one without being detected, we would. But usually, a ship would know we were coming in and they would swing their guns our way and shoot us down. So, the torpedo runs were very scarce. Well, you did go out with them, but I never made a torpedo run, just practice runs. And when you coming in on a ship and you see all the gun turrets swinging around, pointing at you, and you're still a minute away, there's not much chance of surviving that.

Our missions were controlled by the command center and if it was an anti-sub mission, we would carry four depth charges. If it was a night patrol where enemy shipping was probable, we would carry four 500-pound bombs. Before each mission, we would be told what type of mission it was, and that the armament would be for that purpose.

New Guinea was basically a jungle, a rainforest type of island. And we were not allowed to fly over more than half a mile inland because if we were shot down over the rainforest, there would be no way to get out. The vegetation was too thick. If you were in one mile, you'd never make it. So, because we were seaplane, we stayed at shorelines and out to sea. There was one part of New Guinea, we would fly through what they call Geelvink Bay on our way to the Indies, and there was a Japanese airfield with 12 Japanese fighters. We'd fly through there in the daytime at 50 feet above the water hoping they didn't see us on our way to a rescue mission type of thing.

Most of the reconnaissance missions were just endless hours of flying and looking out over the ocean, and looking for anything that would be interesting to send back to the command. On one patrol, we weren't aware of it at the time, but we were out over the sea before the Philippines and we started seeing ships over the horizon, and pretty soon, as we got alongside of them, we stayed about 60 miles out. You could look back and forward, and it was ships for 120 miles, and this was the invasion fleet of the Philippines, and they hadn't told us about it. And as we would get closer, certain ships would head our way. Obviously, they were checking us out to see if we were friend or foe. And a PBY is very distinctive and should be easy to spot as friendly, but there had been occasions where they were shot down or shot at by our own people. So, we were instructed to never fly near or over any of our own ships.Trigger happy gunner might mistake you and shoot at you.

When we were at Manus in the Admiralties, there was a lone bomber would come over about 10 o'clock every night and would drop some bombs on whatever targets they were after. And in the Philippines, when we were out in the Bay Leyte Gulf, there was some B-25s on the field just near where we were.

And a lone jet bomber came by and hit one airplane on the end of the field, and that would explode, and then the next one would explode. Meanwhile, they were taking off the other ones that hadn't been damaged and we were on the ship, of course, watching all this, all the fireworks.

We would be watching movies on the ship outside, and they would shut down the movie and we'd be sitting there out there in the dark, all the lights out hoping they wouldn't bomb our ship. Not every night, but frequently.

When the Japanese bomber would go overhead, they'd apparently be about 8 or 10,000 feet altitude and you could hear them coming because they didn't have their engines synchronized. Twin engine airplane, you have to have both the engines going at the same speed to get one sound. And if they're not, one's going a little faster than the other, you get a drumming sound, it's very distinctive.

Well, flying a seaplane is a whole different experience. We live on board a seaplane tender where we have our meals and sleep. And to get to the seaplane, which is anchored out in a bay on a buoy, you have to take a personnel carrying boat and go out to the plane and climb in it, get up in the cockpit, and get everything ready. And then you have to start the engines one at a time, and as soon as you start one, you have to cut loose from the buoy. One of the crew will do that. And you have to start the other engine immediately, otherwise you're going around in a circle with no controlled and danger of running into some of the other airplanes. The engine was started by what they call the guy in the tower, which would be a flight engineer these days. Mechanic would have the controls to actually start the engine. The pilot just had a little switch on the control column to tell him what to do.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Charles Sternburg.

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