Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

got into the sonar business before the United States was in the
war by getting a contract from the Canadian Navy to build what
was called a "sound range recorder" which ia a device that
recorded the echoes that came back to the sonar equipmen and
plotted them against time, and you could measure the ran 4 e and
the rate of change of range, and this gave a good indicatqon of
when the depth charges should have been dropped. Well, thqt was
a big help to the escort vessels and then Sangamo later goti into
the manufacture of echo ranging equipment and they made the first
PPI, Planned Plot Indicator, sonar equipment, which, in essence,
ensonified the ocean in all directions at the same time, and then
looked directionally for the echo, and this equipment could be,
or this information could be displayed on a PPI screen so you
could look at the echo and see where it was with respect to your
ship. There was a lot of intensive work done on that, and
towards the end of the war, they finally got these. This, the
Sangamo Sonar equipment, onto some of these ships. And there was
at least one submarine attack made by this equipment off of the
east coast, I think, up near Boston, and they did sink a
submarine with it.
At any rate, that was the business I went into when I went
into the Navy. That was the anti-submarine warfare
business. And that was what I did for the escort vessels, that I
rode on these convoy trips, and although, I never saw a
submarine, other ships did, and I helped the other ships that I
was on, to get their equipment operating properly and get their
depth charge teana trained so that they could get their depth
charges fired promptly when it was require. An I suspect that I
did some good, but after VE Day, that was after we licked the
Germans in Europe, the whole focus of the anti-submarine warfare
was switched to the Pacific but it wasn't really the same
challenge there, cause the Japanese didn't have too many
submarines. But we kept the research work going, and at Key
West, there was a lot of research done, and I already alluded to
some of the work that was done with the T5 torpedo, We did other
work which, I guess, some of it is still classified. And there
was still work being done up in Boston at the Charlestown Navy
Yard and at Harvard. And, instead of being sent to the Pacific,
I was sent after VE Day, down to Key West and to Port Everglades
where we had another Anti-submarine warfare experimental station.
Port Everglades, as I said, is the, was the port for Fort
Lauderdale. And there was a Coast Guard Station there, and w e
took over the Coast Guard Station, or rather we operated out of
it, and the Coast Guard enlisted personnel who kept up the base
and did some of the services for us and the Coast Guard pars",
which were the women in the Coast Guard. They kept up the
quarters and ran the mess, made all the meals and served all the
meals to the people,and they were a bunch of good kids that we
had at Port Everglades. We had, at one time, an Italian captured
submarine that we used to do some experimental work and we had
the entire Italian crew with it. And the enlisted Italiam crew
stayed in the enlisted quarters of the base and the Officers