Скачать или смотреть Japan Never Expected Black-Cat Radar To Stalk Convoys All Night

Japan Never Expected Black-Cat Radar To Stalk Convoys All Night
Solomon Islands, November 13, 1942, zero two hundred hours, and Lieutenant Commander Takeshi Yamada stood on the bridge of destroyer Naganami, watching his lookouts scan the darkness of the Slot as they shepherded four transport barges loaded with rice and ammunition toward Guadalcanal, completely unaware that fifteen miles away a matte-black painted American PBY-5A Catalina was tracking every movement of his convoy on its ASV Mark II radar screen, the phosphorescent green blips marking his ships for death in waters the Japanese had ruled since August. The radar operator aboard the Catalina, painted so black it seemed to absorb the moonlight itself, watched the returns from his Yagi antennae mounted under the wings, the 1.7-meter wavelength pulses at 214 megahertz painting a perfect picture of the Japanese formation at a range the enemy couldn't even imagine, while Yamada's lookouts strained their eyes into darkness that revealed nothing, trusting in the night that had protected the Tokyo Express for months. The Americans called these converted patrol bombers Black Cats, a name officially adopted on October 30, 1942, though the Japanese wouldn't learn the designation until captured documents revealed it months later, by which time hundreds of their supply barges and dozens of destroyers had already gone to the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound, victims of an electronic eye they couldn't detect, couldn't counter, and couldn't escape.
The Catalina's pilot, Lieutenant William Mason of VP-11, reduced his twin Pratt and Whitney engines to near-idle, the technique Black Cat crews had perfected to mask their approach, while his radar operator called out course corrections that would bring them directly over the Japanese convoy, and in the nose compartment, the bombardier prepared his load of four five-hundred-pound bombs, knowing that Yamada's ships below had no radar, no warning receivers, nothing but human eyes and ears to detect the hundred-foot wingspan of death gliding toward them at two thousand feet. The Japanese had dismissed radar technology when their German allies had offered to share it in 1941, with naval planners in Tokyo believing their superior night vision training and binoculars would always triumph over electronic gadgets, a decision that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto would later privately curse as he read report after report of supply convoys simply vanishing in the night, their last radio transmissions cut off mid-sentence as American bombs found them in absolute darkness. Radio Tokyo had begun inventing explanations for the mounting losses by December 1942, broadcasting claims of new American superplanes that surpassed anything known in speed and maneuverability, desperate propaganda to explain why their convoys were being devastated by what were actually the slowest, most ungainly aircraft in the American inventory, lumbering flying boats that cruised at barely one hundred twenty-fi