The "Black Cats of the Navy" flew Hell's perimeters. Silhouetted against billowing white clouds and brightest blue skies, they soared in and out of some of the bloodiest and most costly battles in the Pacific. Here, for the first time, the PBY Catalina pilots, and air crewmen of U.S. Navy Patrol Squadron 23 tell their epic World War II story.
Obsolete from the beginning of World War II, the PBYs of U.S. Navy Patrol Bombing Squadron 23 nevertheless sighted and tracked the Japanese fleet, supplied coast watchers, carried out bombing raids, ferried wounded, hunted submarines, and performed air-sea rescue for island carrier strikes and the B-29s operating over Japan.
On Hell’s Perimeters takes you . . . from Pearl Harbor to the sighting of the enemy fleet at the Battle of Midway . . . from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima . . . from rescue of survivors of the ill-fated USS Indianapolis in the final days of the war, to the flying of surrender documents from the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Author Bio
Don Klotz, born in Chicago, Illinois, enlisted in the Navy at age seventeen in 1943 and joined U.S. Navy Patrol Bombing Squadron 23 as a radioman-gunner, for its third tour of duty in the Pacific. After the war, Don attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Northwestern University before beginning his career in advertising.
It was not until some fifty years later, after raising five children and nearing retirement, that he began a search for Navy comrades and undertook a compilation of the squadron’s history.
