Finding Survivors
 

I was south of Guadalcanal spotted some U.S survivors on my map. But I can't find them. They appear on my map and are never there. I also see pink smoke and try to follow that but never get close. Need help

Airplanes just arbitrarily crash during the game, and the "Survivor" mark on your chart may be rather old. They're sort of like a lifeboat when you sink a ship. There's a certain percentage of "survivors". When you see one, click on the icon with your mouse, and it'll give you a time of when the "report" came in. They will usually drift at one to two knots, in whichever direction the game decides they're going to travel. Now, if you have a mission where picking-up survivors is part of the patrol, then you can pick them up, as per some of the help threads for that (I can't find one right off). However, I've never been able to pick one up that wasn't part of a mission, so I don't know if that isn't part of the regular part of the game, or what. Someone else would have to answer that. But as far as finding them, they do drift. btw, you can accidentally run over them with your boat... jessayin'...

You nailed it, if your mission is to pick up a downed pilot you get within range of THE downed pilot (it has to be the specific one in the mission, random downed pilots are out of luck) and a menu pops up for the rescue. Assuming you're on the surface, if you're submerged and in range you won't get the rescue popup until you surface. If your mission does not include rescuing a downed pilot you can cruise through a sea of the poor beggars with no option to interact in any way.

I seem to remember that you have to identify the specific survivor in your task by finding them in the binoculars and hitting the space bar to mark them. However, I may have that confused with who knows what.

In the stock game space bar fires whichever secondary weapon (deck gun or AA) you're manning, L key locks on a target. The point is random survivors are nothing more than scenery, to pick up a survivor (1) you must have a mission to pick up a survivor, and (2) you can only pick up the survivor specific to that mission. It's similar to a photo mission, you can't lock onto any ship in the area and take a picture, the camera icon won't even activate unless you have one of the targets specific to the mission locked on. Tactical programming for this game is a bit simplified.