Interesting photos for the US military challenged

I have spotted this concrete pad with the attached markings at an old WW2 USN flying boat base. it has been dated 1943
Any comments? Any information?
It is all our history here.

If the markings are incised, they would be from the crew that poured the concrete. The others are more than likely "Kilroy was here" type things from Navy personnel passing thru.

:flower: 

Jon

Such a nice chunk of history. Thanks for sharing that Kurt

The markings are incised, they obviously were put there by the crews, including the "boat crew"
other markings are an anchor and a stylised "wings", the year 1943 is also prominent with a couple of the names. It looks like there could have been 2 or 3 pours. My guess is they were put there in a dump of leftover concrete.
This is on private property and is usually kept covered over by grass so it doesn't get vandalised.
I reckon its a direct timeline monument, inscribed on the day. Who knows where these warriors or their ground(water) crew ended up. They worked on S&R and spying on the Japs. There are a number of old Catalina sites around OZ.
The Yanks worked with the Aussies and apparently a couple crashed nearby limping back and short on fuel. The Aussies used unarmed and overloaded Black Cats to ferry high ranking military and politicians to and from Ceylon. They had to fly these things for 7 hours to burn enough fuel so that they could land. Story goes one Catalina crew got a double load and all aboard thought they were going to crash as the plane didn't want to lift out of the water. It was reputedly the longest take off run recorded on the Swan River, and up into the Canning River. The Japs never found out or knew about the night time Black Cat Colombo Runs.
After the war a whole lot of the Cats were scuttled in a deep canyon just off the coast near Rottnest Island. What would they be worth today?
There was also the large US Indian Ocean Submarine base at Garden Island, just off the coast off Fremantle.

For quite a few years until the Ketchikan, AK airport opened in 1973 the main air link between KTN and SEA, ANC and JNU was provided by PBY Catalina aircraft between the old Army Air Corps airport on Annette Island to Ketchikan. It was always funny on those flights to watch the tourists taking the seats in the two waist gunner bubbles. Those things leaked like a sieve on take off and landing. On a choppy day you could get pretty wet sitting there. Besides a Catalina there were also a couple Grumman Goose aircraft on the short run. It's hard to imagine what it would have been like on a long range patrol in the PBY. They carried over 12 hours of fuel and cruised around 100kts. I know they were slower than my C172. Great old airplanes though, sounded great, they had a fuel range of around 24 hours or nearly 2400 miles in military configuration.

Side question, off topic, to Kurt,

Why is Australia referred to as OZ ???????

The same reasons the English call the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the UK and the Yanks call the United States of America USA, it is simply to shorten it, it comes from the term aussie (pronounced ozzy and sometimes spelled) so rather than Australia just say Oz or Aus (pronounced the same as oz)

What Exavid said and cos its a magical kingdom Dicko. Full of wonderment and a lot of things that want to eat, bite or sting you to death.

Actually Oz Idiom is to shorten words to their minimum understandable value. This is so you can keep the mouth shut to keep the flies out. Ideal Oz speak is to actually not move the lips which is why a bushy will always sound like a ventriloquists dummy. We also tend to diminutise pronouns too
Dicko, to me means your name is obviously Dixon? yes? Probably not, as it could refer to Dick with a surname starting with O.

NB for formal matters it can also be referred to as "Straya"



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