care of me, always have.”
“Betsy?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Be ready to tell us again.”
“Now!” She added, “That’s a bullfrog G, three octaves down.”
“This note?”
“That’s right.”
“Get that on the grid and tell the General to get his ships up! That cuts it
to a square ten miles on a side! Now, Betsy-we know almost where you are. We are
going to focus still closer. Want to go inside and cool off?”
“I’m not too hot. Just sweaty.”
Forty minutes later the General’s voice rang out:
“They’ve spotted the ship! They see her waving!”
AFTERWORD
In 1931 I was serving in LEXINGTON (CV-2). In March the Fleet held a war
game off the coast of Peru and Ecuador; for this exercise I was assigned as radio
compass officer. My principal duty was to keep in touch with the plane guards,
amphibians (OL8-A), guarding squadrons we had in the air-i.e., the squadrons were
carrierbased land planes; if one was forced to ditch, an amphibian was to land on
the water and rescue the pilot.
No radar in those days and primitive radio-the pilots of the plane guards
were the only ones I could talk to via the radio compass. The fighters had dot-dash
gear; the radio compass did not. To get a feeling for the limitations of those days,
only 28 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, see my “The Man Who Was Too
Lazy to Fail” in Time Enough For Love, PutnamlBerkleylNEL.
A radio compass depends on the directional qualities of a loop antenna. To
talk you rotate the antenna for maximum signal; turn it 90° and you get a minimum
signal that marks the direction of the other radio-or 180° from it but you are
assumed to know whether your beacon is ahead or behind you-and you do in almost
every case where it matters, such as going up a channel in a fog. That minimum will
tell you direction within a degree or two if the other radio is close enough, loud
enough.
If it’s too far away, the signal can fade to zero before you reach the
bearing you need to read, and stay zero until well past it. No use turning it back
90° to try to locate it by the maximum signal; that curve is much too flat.
Late afternoon the second day of the exercise we were in trouble; the other
squadrons were landing but VF-2 squadron was lost-all too easy with one-man fighter
planes before the days of radar. The captain of the squadron, a lieutenant
commander, held one opinion; the pilot of the amphib held another-but his opinion
did not count; he was a j.g. and not part of the squadron. The
Page 188
juniors in the squadron hardly had opinions; they were young, green, and depending
on their .~kipper-~znd probably had fouled up their dead reckoning early in the
flight.
The squadron captain vectored for rendezvous with the carrier, by his
reckoning. No carrier. Just lots and lots of ocean. (I was in the air once, off
Hawaii, when this happened. It’s a lonely feeling.)
No sign of the U.S. Fleet. No SARATOGA (CV-3), no battleships, no cruisers.
Not even a destroyer scouting a flank. Just water.
At this point I found myself in exactly the situation described in
SEARCHLIGHT; I could talk to the plane guard pilot quite easily-but swing the loop
90° and zero signal was spread through such a wide arc that it meant nothing. . .
and, worse, the foulup in navigation was such that there was no rational choice
between the two lobes 180° apart.
And I had a personal interest not as strong as that of Betsy Barnes’ father
but strong. First, it was my duty and my responsibility to give that squadron a
homing vector-and I couldn’t do it; the equipment wasn’t up to it. Had I kept track
of vectors on that squadron all day- But that was impossible; Not only had I had
four squadrons in the air all day and only one loop but also (and damning) there was
war-game radio silence until the squadron commander in trouble was forced to break
it.
But, second, the pilot of the plane guard was my closest friend in that