42 AH JULY 2018
“Starve before doing business with the damned
Navy,” Johnson said. “They don’t know what the
hell they want and will drive you up a wall before
they break either your heart or a more exposed
part of your anatomy.” So it’s not surprising that
Johnson had no hand in the design of the Nep tune,
instead busying himself with the P-80 Shooting
Star and the Constellation. The Neptune was the
work of John Wassall, chief engineer of the Vega
subsidiary, with the substantial help of engineers
R.A. Bailey and Lou Height.
The P2V was a success straight out of the box.In 1946 the U.S. Army Air Forces was setting
records routinely with B-29s, raising the bar by
simply ferrying them nonstop from the Pacific
back to the States. This annoyed Admiral Chester
Nimitz, who knew the AAF was campaigning for
the big budget bucks by claiming that long-range
nuclear raiding was its bailiwick alone.
Nimitz suggested upstaging the Army by setting
a record with the Navy’s brand-new Neptune.
P2V-1 production aircraft number three was fit-
ted with extra fuel tanks that increased its capacity
to almost 9,000 gallons. The airplane was sent to
Perth, Australia, with the goal of flying east non-
stop and unrefueled all the way to Washington,
D.C., maybe even on to Bermuda. Headwinds and
bad weather dashed those hopes, but The Turtle
made it as far as Naval Air Station Columbus,
Ohio, setting a record of 11,236 miles that stood
for 16 years, until an Air Force B-52H flew about
1,300 miles farther.
A Navy spokesman decided that The Turtle
wasn’t a jazzy enough name for a record-setting
bomber, so in a press release he bumped it up to
The Truculent Turtle. Call it what you will, the air-
plane today sits in the National Naval Aviation
Museum, in Pensacola, Fla.
The P2V went through a considerable range
of variants, from P2V-1 to -7, with endless subva-
riants along the way. There was a P2V-8 on the
drawing board, but it was canceled with the arrival
of the P-3 Orion, the Neptune’s direct successor.MARITIME MISSIONS
A Neptune patrols off
southern California
circa 1959-60 (top).
Radioman Richard
Boslow of VP-21 said
his most memorable
mission was when his
P2V-7 came across
a Soviet “Whiskey
boat” in the Medi-
terranean (above).