I wonder what happened to all the P-5Ms the Navy retired back in the 70’s. They were a smaller, two engined version of the Mars that might be able to work in areas too small for this monster. If sea planes make good water bombers because they can reload from any standing body of water then I’d think the Mariners would make good candidates.
I think thats the Martin Mariner. The last one is parked out here at the Pima Air Museum.
I worked at Texas Instruments in Dallas back in the P5M days when we built APS-80 ASW radars for them. One of the ASW engineering group tried to arrange to have one of the P5Ms brought to Mountain Creek Lake by Dallas NAS, but they would not do it, because they said the boats leaked so much that they would probably sink in a day or two. They were expected to be pulled up on the beach any place they landed, amd the beaching facilities at Dallas NAS had been decommisioned, if there were any. I recall seeing big flying boats passing over on the east-west airway through Dallas during WW2 though.