MAD Cats

This collection of stories from the members of VP-63, who lived and slept with the "MAD Cat" through almost three years of World War II, is not a gory tale, for VP-63 personnel normally did not see that kind of war, with its agony of injury and death on the ground and in trenches. Theirs was a relatively clean war usually over the beautiful sea. When tragedy struck, the consequences were instant and final. Many of these stories are humorous, with tragedy mostly in the background. The special lives they forged are what it is all about.



Through it all, the sailors of VP-63 gave birth to a major technology that came out of the war; something that became a mainstay of the anti-submarine effort to this day. It was their work that gave birth to the Magnetic Anomaly Detector (MAD) that today, is carried by almost every ASW aircraft throughout the world. The 'stinger' sticking out of the back of every P-3 and P-8A is instantly recognizable to every sailor in the MAD Cats…