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Title: The Mosquito Fleet

Author: Bern Keating

Release date: June 7, 2021 [eBook #65550]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOSQUITO FLEET ***

                           THE MOSQUITO FLEET


                              BERN KEATING

                      SBS SCHOLASTIC BOOK SERVICES
                New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney


_To Lieut. Commander Brinkley Bass and Lieut. Commander Clyde Hopkins
McCroskey, Jr., who gallantly gave their lives during World War II. They
were brave seamen and good friends._


Photographs used on the cover are courtesy of the U.S. Navy. This book
is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, or
otherwise circulated in any binding or cover other than that in which it
is published—unless prior written permission has been obtained from the
publisher—and without a similar condition, including this condition,
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Copyright © 1963 by Bern Keating. This edition is published by
Scholastic Book Services, a division of Scholastic Magazines, Inc., by
arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 4th printing January 1969
                                                   Printed in the U.S.A.




                                CONTENTS


  1. The First PTs: Facts and Fictions                                 1
  2. Attrition at Guadalcanal                                         13
  3. Battering Down the Gate: the Western Hinge                       51
  4. Battering Down the Gate: the Eastern Hinge                       71
  5. Along the Turkey’s Back                                          92
  6. The War in Europe: Mediterranean                                125
  7. The War in Europe: English Channel                              170
  8. The War in Europe: Azure Coast                                  181
  9. I Shall Return—Round Trip by PT                                 201
  Appendix 1. Specifications, Armament, and Crew                     249
  Appendix 2. Losses Suffered by PT Squadrons                        250
  Appendix 3. Decorations Won by PT Sailors                          251


  Historical material in this book comes from action reports, squadron
histories, and other naval records on file at the historical records
section in Arlington, Va. Most valuable was the comprehensive history of
PT actions written by Commodore Robert Bulkley for the Navy. The Bulkley
history was in manuscript form at the time I did research for this book.
The broad outline of naval history comes mostly from the _History of U.
S. Naval Operations in World War II_ of Samuel Eliot Morison. I am
grateful to several PT veterans for their generous contribution of
diaries, letters, anecdotes, etc., which have been drawn on for human
interest material. Among these kind correspondents are: James Cunningham
of Shreveport, La., Roger Jones of Nassau, Bahama Islands, Lieut.
Commander R. W. Brown of Scituate, Mass., Capt. Stanley Barnes of the
War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa., James Newberry of Memphis, Tenn.,
and Arthur Murray Preston, of Washington, D. C. The officers of Peter
Tare Inc., a PT veterans organization, have been helpful.




                                   1.
                   The First PTs: Facts and Fictions


In March 17, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur arrived safely in Australia
after a flight from his doomed army in the Philippine Islands. The
people of America, staggering from three months of unrelieved disaster,
felt a tremendous lift of spirits.

America needed a lift of spirits.

Three months before, without the formality of declaring war, Japan had
sneaked a fleet of planes from a carrier force into the main American
naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and in one Sunday morning’s work
the planes had smashed America’s Pacific battle line under a shower of
bombs and torpedoes. Without a fighting fleet, America had been helpless
to stop the swift spread of the Japanese around the far shores and
islands of the Pacific basin.

Guam and Wake Island had been overrun; Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, the
East Indies, had been gobbled up. Our fighting sailors, until the
disaster of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, had been boasting around
the navy clubs that the American fleet could sail up one side of the
Japanese homeland and down the other side, shooting holes in the islands
and watching them sink from sight. Now they ground their teeth in
humiliation and rage, unable to get at the Japanese because the Pacific
Fleet battle line lay in the ooze on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. His
Imperial Japanese Majesty’s navy was steaming, virtually unopposed,
wherever its infuriatingly cocky admirals willed.

When a combined Dutch-American flotilla had tried to block the Japanese
landings on Java, the Allied navies had promptly lost 13 of their
pitifully few remaining destroyers and cruisers—and the tragic sacrifice
had not even held up the Japanese advance for more than a few hours.

The naval officers of the Allies had had to make a painful change in
their opinion of the Japanese sailor’s ability; he had turned out to be
a formidable fighting man.

On land, the Japanese army was even more spectacularly competent. Years
of secret training in island-hopping and jungle warfare had paid off for
the Japanese. With frightening ease, they had brushed aside opposition
everywhere—everywhere, that is, except in the Philippine Islands, where
General MacArthur’s outnumbered and underequipped Filipino and American
fighters had improvised a savage resistance; had patched together a kind
of Hooligan’s Army, fleshing out the thin ranks of the defenders with
headquarters clerks and ship’s cooks, with electrician’s mates and
chaplain’s assistants, with boatless boatswain’s mates and planeless
pilots.

MacArthur’s patchwork army had harried the Japanese advance and had
stubbornly fought a long retreat down the Island of Luzon. It was
bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula and on the island fortress of
Corregidor in Manila Bay, and it was already doomed, everybody knew
that. The flight of its commanding general only emphasized that it had
been written off, but the tremendous fight it was putting up had salved
every American’s wounded national pride. Besides, the very fact that
MacArthur had been ordered out of the islands clearly meant that America
was going back, once the nation had caught its breath and recovered from
Pearl Harbor.

General MacArthur, with a talent for flamboyant leadership that amounted
to genius of a sort, emitted the sonorous phrase: “I shall return.”

A few sour critics, immune to the MacArthur charm, deplored his use of
the first person singular when the first person plural would have been
more graceful—and more accurate—but the phrase caught on in the free
world.

“I shall return.” The phrase promised brave times ahead, when the
galling need to retreat would end and America would begin the journey
back to Bataan.

A stirring prospect, but what a long journey it was going to be. The
most ignorant could look at a map and see that MacArthur’s return trip
was going to take years. And yet his trip out had taken only days. A few
of the curious wondered how his escape had been engineered. News stories
said that MacArthur had flown into Australia. But where had he found a
plane? For days America had been told that on the shrinking Luzon
beachhead no airstrips remained in American hands. Where had MacArthur
gone to find a friendly airfield, and how had he gone there through the
swarming patrols of the Japanese naval blockade?

The full story of MacArthur’s escape, when it was told, became one of
the top adventure stories of World War II.

First came the bare announcement that it was on a motor torpedo boat—a
PT boat in Navy parlance, and a mosquito boat in journalese—that the
general had made the first leg of his flight across enemy-infested seas.
Then a crack journalist named William L. White interviewed the officers
of the PT rescue squadron and wrote a book about the escape and about
the days when the entire American naval striking force in the
Philippines had shrunk to six, then four, then three, then one of the
barnacle-encrusted plywood motorboats hardly bigger than a stockbroker’s
cabin cruiser.

The book was called _They Were Expendable_, and it became a runaway
best-seller. It was condensed for _Reader’s Digest_ and featured in
_Life_ Magazine, and it made the PT sailor the glamour boy of America’s
surface fleet. _They Were Expendable_ makes exciting reading today, but
the book’s success spawned a swarm of magazine and newspaper articles
about the PT navy, and some of them were distressingly irresponsible.
Quite innocently, William White himself added to the PT’s exaggerated
reputation for being able to lick all comers, regardless of size. He
wrote his book in wartime and so had no way of checking the squadron’s
claims of torpedo successes. Naturally, as any generous reporter would
have done, he gave full credit to its claims of an amazing bag—two light
cruisers, two transports and an oil tanker, besides enemy barges,
landing craft and planes.

Postwar study of Japanese naval archives shows no evidence that any
Japanese ships were torpedoed at the times and places the Squadron Three
sailors claim to have hit them. Of course, airplane and PT pilots are
notoriously overoptimistic—they have to be optimistic by nature even to
get into the cockpits of their frail craft and set out for combat. And
yet any realistic person who has worked in government archives hesitates
to give full weight to a damage assessment by an office research clerk
as opposed to the evidence of combat eyewitnesses.

Postwar evaluation specialists would not confirm the sinking of a
5,000-ton armed merchant vessel at Binanga on January 19, 1942, but Army
observers on Mount Mariveles watched through 20-power glasses as a ship
sank, and they reported even the number and caliber of the guns in its
armament.

On February 2, 1942, Army lookouts reported that a badly crippled
cruiser was run aground (and later cut up for scrap) at the right time
and place to be the cruiser claimed by PT 32. Evaluation clerks could
not find a record of this ship sinking either, so the PT claim is
denied.

Unfortunately, the most elaborately detailed claim of all, the sinking
of a _Kuma_ class cruiser off Cebu Island by PTs 34 and 41, most
certainly is not valid, because the cruiser itself sent a full report of
the battle to Japanese Navy headquarters and admitted being struck by
one dud torpedo (so much at least of the PT claim is true), but the
cruiser, which happened to be the _Kuma_ itself, was undamaged and
survived to be sunk by a British submarine late in the war.

The undeniable triumph of Squadron Three was the flight of MacArthur. On
March 11, 1942, at Corregidor, the four surviving boats of the squadron
picked up the general, his staff and selected officers and technicians,
the general’s wife and son and—most astonishingly—a Chinese nurse for
the four-year-old boy. In a series of night dashes from island to island
through Japanese-infested seas, the little flotilla carried the escaping
brass to the island of Mindanao, where the generals and admirals caught
a B 17 Flying Fortress bomber flight for Australia.

The fantastic and undeniably exaggerated claims of sinkings are
regrettable, but in no way detract from the bravery of the sailors of
Squadron Three. They were merely the victims of the nation’s desperate
need for victories.

William White’s contribution to the false giant-killer image of the PTs
is understandable, but other correspondents were less responsible. One,
famous and highly respected, said that all PTs were armed with
three-inch cannon. Putting such a massive weapon on the fragile plywood
deck of a PT boat was a bit like arming a four-year-old boy with a
big-league baseball bat—it’s just too much weapon for such a little
fellow to carry. The same reckless writer said that PT boats cruised at
70 knots. Another said that a PT could pace a new car—which amounts to
another claim for a 70-knot speed. Almost all of the reporters, some of
whom surely knew better, wrote about the PTs’ armament as though the
little boats could slug it out with ships of the line.

In the fantasies spun by the nation’s press, the PTs literally ran rings
around enemy destroyers and socked so many torpedoes into Japanese
warships that you almost felt sorry for the outclassed and floundering
enemy.

PT sailors read these romances and gritted their teeth. They knew too
painfully well that the stories were not true.

What was the truth about the PT?

Early in World War II, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pulled
the United States into the war then raging in Europe against Germany and
Italy and in China against Japan, the American Navy had been tinkering
around with various designs of fast small boats armed with torpedoes.
British coastal forces had been making good use of small, fast torpedo
boats, and the American Navy borrowed much from British designs.

On July 24, 1941—four and a half months before America entered the
war—the Navy held the Plywood Derby, a test speed run of experimental
PTs in the open Atlantic off Long Island. The course ran around the east
end of Block Island, around the Fire Island lightship to a finish line
at Montauk Point Whistling Buoy. Two PTs of the Elco design finished
with best average speeds—39.72 and 37.01 knots—but boats of other
designs had smaller turning circles. Over a measured mile the Elcos did
45.3 knots with a light load and 44.1 knots with a heavy load.

On a second Plywood Derby, the Elcos raced against the destroyer
_Wilkes_. Seas were running eight feet high—in one stretch the destroyer
skipper reported 15-foot waves—and the little cockleshells took a
terrible beating. Most of the time they were out of sight in the trough
of the seas or hidden by flying spray. The destroyer won the race, but
the Navy board had been impressed by the seaworthiness of the tough
little boats, and the Navy decided to go ahead with a torpedo-boat
program. The board standardized on the 80-foot Elco and the 78-foot
Higgins designs, and the boatyards fell to work.

The boats were built of layers of plywood. Draft to the tips of the
propellers was held to a shallow five feet six inches, so that the PT
could sneak close to an enemy beach on occasion as a kind of seagoing
cavalry, to do dirty work literally at the crossroads.

Three Packard V-12 engines gave a 4,500-shaft horsepower and drove the
boats, under ideal conditions, as fast as 45 knots—but conditions were
seldom ideal. A PT in the battle zone was almost never in top racing
form. In action the PT was usually overloaded, was often running on
jury-rig repairs and spare parts held together with adhesive tape and
ingenuity. In tropic waters the hull was soon sporting a long, green
beard of water plants that could cut the PT’s speed in half. Many of the
PTs that fought the bloody battles that follow in these pages were doing
well to hit 29 or even 27 knots.

The American Navy had learned the hard way that any enemy destroyer
could make 35 knots, and many of them could do considerably
better—plenty fast enough to run down a PT boat, especially after a few
months of action had cut the PT’s speed.

The normal boat crew was three officers and 14 men, though the
complement varied widely under combat conditions. The boat carried
enough provisions for about five days.

As for that bristling armament the correspondents talked about, a PT
boat originally carried four torpedoes and tubes, and two 50-caliber
twin machine-gun mounts. In combat PT skippers improvised installation
of additional weapons, and by the war’s end all boats had added some
combination of 40-mm. autocannon, 37-mm. cannon, 20-mm. antiaircraft
autocannon, rocket launchers, and 60-mm. mortars. In some zones they
even discarded the torpedoes and added still more automatic weapons, to
give themselves heavier broadsides for duels with armed enemy small
craft.

Pound for pound, the PT boat was by far the most heavily armed vessel
afloat, but that does not mean that a PT flyweight, no matter how tough
for its size, was a match for an enemy heavyweight. PT sailors never
hesitated to tackle an enemy destroyer, but they knew that a torpedo
boat could stand up to an all-out brawl with an alert and aroused
destroyer the way a spunky rat terrier can stand up to a hungry wolf.
After all, the full and proper name of a destroyer is _torpedo-boat_
destroyer.

The PT’s main tactic was not the hell-roaring dash of the
correspondents’ romances, but a sneaky, quiet approach in darkness or
fog. The PT was designed to slip slowly and quietly into an enemy
formation in bad visibility, to fire torpedoes at the handiest target,
and to escape behind a smoke screen with whatever speed the condition of
the boat permitted. With luck, the screening destroyers would lose the
PT in the smoke, the confusion, and the darkness. Without luck—well, in
warfare everybody has to take some chances.

What most annoyed the PT sailors about their lurid press was that the
truth made an even better story. After all, they argued, it takes guts
to ease along at night in an agonizingly slow approach to an enemy
warship that will chew you to bloody splinters if the lookouts ever spot
you. And it takes real courage to bore on into slingshot range when you
know that the enemy can easily run you down if your torpedoes miss or
fail to explode, as they did all too often. Compared to this reality,
one of those imaginary 70-knot blitzes would be a breeze.

One disgusted PT sailor wrote: “Publicity has reached the point where
glorified stories are not genuinely flattering. Most PT men resent the
wild, fanciful tales that tend to belittle their real experience....
There is actually little glamour for a PT. The excitement of battle is
tempered by many dull days of inactivity, long nights of fruitless
patrol, and dreary hours of foul weather at sea in a small boat.”

He griped that the PT sailor would prefer the tribute of “They were
dependable” to “They were expendable.”

Maybe so, but the public just would not have it that way. The dash and
audacity of the sailors of those little boats had appealed to the
American mind. It was the story of David and Goliath again, and the
sailors in the slingshot navy, no matter how they balked, joined the
other wild and woolly heroes of legend who go joyously into battle
against giants.

This is the story of what the mosquito fleet really did.




                                   2.
                        Attrition at Guadalcanal


In August 7, 1942, exactly eight months after Pearl Harbor, American
Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands, as the
first step on the long road to Tokyo. The Japanese reacted violently.
They elected to have it out right there—to stop the Allied recovery
right at the start and at all costs.

Down from their mighty base at Rabaul, they sent reinforcements and
supplies through a sea lane flanked by two parallel rows of islands in
the Solomons archipelago. The sea lane quickly became known as The Slot,
and the supply ships, usually fast destroyers, became known as the Tokyo
Express.

The night runs of the Tokyo Express were wearing down the Marines. As
they became more and more dirty and tired they became more and more
irritated to find that the Japanese they killed were dressed in spruce
new uniforms—sure sign that they were newcomers to the island.

Even worse was the sleep-robbing uproar of the night naval bombardments
that pounded planes and installations at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal,
the only American base where friendly fighters and bombers could find a
home. The American hold on the island was in danger from sheer physical
fatigue.

The American and Japanese fleets clashed in the waters around the
Guadalcanal landing beaches in a series of bloody surface battles that
devoured ships and men on both sides in a hideous contest of attrition.
Whichever side could hang on fifteen seconds longer than the
other—whichever side could stand to lose one more ship and one more
sailor—was going to win.

At the very moment of one of the big cruiser-destroyer clashes (October
11-12, 1942)—officially called the Battle of Cape Esperance—American
naval reinforcements of a sort arrived in the area. Forty miles east of
the battle, four fresh, unbloodied fighting ships were sailing into
Tulagi Harbor at Florida Island, just across a narrow strait from
Guadalcanal.

It was half of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, four PT boats, the
first American torpedo boats to arrive in combat waters since the last
boat of Lieut. John Bulkeley’s disbanded Squadron Three had been burned
in the Philippines seven months before.

                    [Illustration: SOLOMON ISLANDS]

The PT sailors came topside as they entered the harbor to watch the
flash of cannonading in the sky to the west where American and Japanese
sailors were blowing each other to bloody bits. For them, training time
was over, the shooting time was now, and the PT navy was once again on
the firing line.

All day on October 13, the PT sailors scurried about, getting the little
warships ready for a fight. Their preparations made only a ripple in the
maelstrom of activity around the islands.

Coast watchers—friendly observers who hid on islands behind the Japanese
lines and reported by radio on ship and plane movements—reported a new
menace to Guadalcanal. They had spotted a Japanese naval force coming
down The Slot, but they said it was made up only of destroyers.

When Lieut. Commander Alan R. Montgomery, the PT squadron commander at
Tulagi, heard that only destroyers were coming, he begged off from the
fight—on the extraordinary grounds that he preferred waiting for bigger
game.

Montgomery’s decision is not as cocky as it first sounds. The Japanese
presumably did not know about the arrival of the PTs on the scene, and
if ever a PT was going to shoot a torpedo into a big one—a cruiser or a
battleship—it was going to be by surprise. No use tipping off the enemy
until the big chance came.

The big chance was really on the way. The coast watchers had
underestimated the size of the Japanese force. It was actually built
around a pair of battleships, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, all
bent on pounding Henderson Field and its pesky planes out of existence.

The Japanese command obviously expected no American naval resistance,
because ammunition hoists of the Japanese fleet were loaded with a new
kind of thin-skinned shell especially designed for blowing into jagged
fragments that would slice planes and people to useless shreds. The
bombardment shells would not be much use against armor. The Japanese
ammunition load would have been a disaster for the task force if it had
run into armored opposition—cruisers or battleships of the American
Navy—but the Japanese knew as well as we did that there was little
likelihood our badly mauled fleet, manned by exhausted sailors, would be
anywhere near the scene. The Japanese sailed down The Slot with one hand
voluntarily tied behind them, in a sense, supremely confident that they
could pound Henderson Field Without interference.

Shortly after midnight on October 14th, two Japanese battleships opened
up on Henderson Field with gigantic 14-inch rifles shooting the special
fragmentation and incendiary shells. The two battleships were
accompanied by a cruiser and either eight or nine destroyers. A Japanese
scouting plane dropped flares to make the shooting easier. An American
searchlight at Lunga Point, on Guadalcanal, probed over the water,
looking for the Japanese, but American 5-inch guns—the largest American
guns ashore—were too short of range to reach the battleships and
cruisers even if the searchlight had found them. The big ships hove to
and poured in a merciless cascade of explosive.

For almost an hour and a half, Marines, soldiers and Seabees lay in
foxholes and suffered while the Cyclopean 14-inchers tore holes in the
field, riddled planes with shell fragments, started fires and filled the
air with shards from exploding shell casings—shards that could slice a
man in two without even changing the pitch of his screams.

At the PT base in Tulagi, Lieut. Commander Montgomery was awakened by
the din across the way. He knew that no destroyer force could make that
kind of uproar. The earth-shaking cannonading meant that the big boys
were shooting up Guadalcanal, blithely assuming that the U. S. Navy was
not present.

But it was. Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three was on the scene and
waiting for just such a target.

Montgomery called in his four young skippers—Lieuts. (jg) Henry S.
(Stilly) Taylor of PT 46, Robert C. Wark of PT 48, John M. Searles of PT
60, and his brother Robert Searles of PT 38.

At two o’clock in the morning of October 14th, Commander Montgomery
ordered: “Prepare for action. All boats under way immediately.”

It was the first combat order given to PT boats since the debacle in the
Philippines.

The PTs left the harbor together but scattered quickly. They had all
spotted the Japanese bombardment fleet by the orange flashes of its
guns, and they lost each other in the darkness as they deployed to
attack.

Somebody on a Japanese cruiser must have been at least mildly nervous,
for a searchlight came on, swept the water toward Tulagi, zipped right
across Bob Searles in 38, and then went black. Searles stretched his
luck; he cut his speed to 10 knots and began a slow stalk of the cruiser
that had muffed its chance to sound the alarm.

So cocky were the Japanese that the cruiser was almost dead in the
water; even at 10 knots, the 38 closed the range from behind.

Bob Searles greased the 38 along the still waters of the sound, holding
his breath and dreading to see the glare of that searchlight again. He
could see the target clearly silhouetted in the gun flashes, and it was
a brute—a light cruiser, Bob thought, judging from its shape, its size,
and the roar of its guns. Searles figured that he would probably be the
first and only PT skipper to enjoy the carefully preserved surprise that
the PT sailors hoped would bag them a big one—so he had to make his
first shot good or waste the chance they had all been hoarding.

A torpedo, like any other weapon that has to be aimed, is more likely to
hit the closer you get to your target before you shoot. So Bob went in
to 400 yards in stealthy silence. Four hundred yards in a naval battle
is the equivalent of arm’s length in an infantry fire fight. At 400
yards, a spread of torpedoes will usually score, but the machine guns
and autocannon of a cruiser’s secondary battery, guided by a
searchlight, will almost certainly tear up a torpedo boat. Searles, just
to be sure of a hit, was doing the same thing as a commando would do if,
armed with a high-powered rifle, he crept to within five feet of a
sentry armed with a sawed-off shotgun. At any range that rifle is a
deadly weapon—like a torpedo—but at close range the shotgun is just as
deadly and ten times surer of hitting with the first shot.

At 400 yards Bob fired two fish. He chased along behind them to 200-yard
range—almost rock-throwing range—and fired his last two torpedoes. The
instant he felt the boat jump from those shots, he poured on the coal
and roared past the cruiser, 100 yards astern. As they went by, all
hands topside on the PT felt the scorching blast of a double explosion
forward of the cruiser’s bridge.

The surprise was over. From here on the whole Japanese task force would
be alarmed and shooting back—but that big boy the PT sailors had been
after was in the bag. The 38’s crew was sure of it. Searles had the good
sense not to hang around the hornet’s nest he had stirred up. His
torpedoes were gone anyhow, so he lit out for home, convinced that he
had scored the first PT victory of the comeback trail.

The other PTs had scattered, looking for other targets in the dark.
There were plenty of targets, for they had penetrated the destroyer
screen, without either side knowing it, and were in the heart of the
Japanese formation. After the blast from the 38’s torpedo attack on the
cruiser, the PTs themselves were as much targets as they were hunters.

Lieut. Commander Montgomery, riding with John Searles on the 60, was
stalking a big ship—possibly the same cruiser Bob Searles had already
attacked—but the escorting destroyers were roiled up and rallying
around.

A searchlight poked about the water, looking for the 60 which had
probably been dimly spotted by a lookout. The searchlight never found
the 60, but it did silhouette the PT for another destroyer. Japanese
shells from the second destroyer screamed over the PT, but Montgomery
held steadily to his attack course on the cruiser—or whatever it
was—until two of the 60’s fish were off and running.

John Searles spun the rudder over hard left and shoved the throttles up
to the stops. Smoke poured from the generator on the stern, to cover
their escape, and so the crew of the 60 didn’t see the end of the
torpedo run, but it claimed a hit, anyhow, from the sound of a massive
explosion.

If it was a torpedo hit and if the hit was on the same cruiser Bob
Searles said he hit, that cruiser was in sad shape. Not so the
destroyers. They were full of fight and boring in on the 60.

Smoke makes a fine screen for covering escape, but only for a time.
After the initial escape is successful, a continuing smoke cloud only
marks the course of the fleeing PT boat, just as a tracer’s
phosphorescent trail tracks a bullet through the night. So Montgomery
shut off the smoke when he thought they were free, but he had waited a
moment too long.

Just as the smoke-screen generator hissed to a halt, a destroyer pinned
the 60 down in the blue glare of a searchlight and a salvo of Japanese
shells, landing 20 feet astern, almost lifted the 60 out of the water.

The Japanese destroyer captain did not know it, probably still doesn’t
know it if he is even alive, but when he turned his light on the 60, he
simultaneously lost the chance to sink one PT boat by ramming and just
possibly saved his own ship from being sunk by still another PT.

Robert Wark’s 48 was sneaking up on the destroyer in a torpedo attack on
one side; Henry Taylor’s 46 was roaring across the water, looking for
targets on the other side, quite unaware that the destroyer was in its
path. When the searchlight glare hit the 60, Taylor saw the Japanese
ship dead ahead and put the rudder of the 46 over hard. He barely missed
a collision with the can, a collision that would have reduced his little
warship to a floating carpet of matchsticks. But, in skimming by the
destroyer, Taylor almost rammed Wark’s 48 and spoiled its torpedo
attack. Wark lost contact with the destroyer in the wild careering
around the sound that followed the double near-collision, and he didn’t
get off his torpedoes.

The whole time the Japanese captain was so intent on sinking the 60,
pinned down by his searchlight, he apparently missed the near-collisions
right under his nose. His shells were creeping up the wake of the
fleeting 60 and he doggedly plowed into the stream of 50-caliber bullets
from the PT antiaircraft machine-gun battery, willing to take the
punishment in exchange for a chance to run the torpedo boat down.

Lieut. Commander Montgomery turned on the smoke generator again and had
the inspiration to drop two depth charges into his wake. The charges
exploded just ahead of the Japanese destroyer, and the Japanese skipper
shied away from the chase, fearful that the closer he got to the PT
boat, the more likely he was to be blown in two by a depth charge right
under the bridge. The 60 escaped in the smoke, lay close to the beach
for the rest of that night, and drifted aground on a coral reef near
morning.

Wark, who had picked up his original target again, was still trying to
shoot a fish into the destroyer that had abandoned the chase of the 60.
Wark did not know it, but he was himself being stalked. From 200 yards
away, a Japanese destroyer caught the 48 in a searchlight beam and fired
all the guns that would bear.

A searchlight beam is a two-edged tool. It helps the aim of the gunners
on the destroyer; at the same time it makes a beautiful mark for the
PT’s machine guns. C. E. Todd, the ship’s cook, pumped 50-caliber
bullets into the destroyer’s bridge and superstructure until the light
was shattered. The destroyer disappeared and nobody knows what damage it
suffered, but it is highly improbable that it could be raked by
50-caliber fire from 200 yards away without serious damage and
casualties.

The 48’s skipper could say: “He never laid a glove on me.”


Aboard the Japanese flagship, the admiral, apparently alarmed by
unexpected naval resistance no matter how puny, ordered a cease fire and
a withdrawal. Eighty minutes of shellfire had left Henderson Field in a
shambles anyhow. Forever after, Guadalcanal veterans of the night
between October 13 and 14, 1942, talked about The Bombardment—not the
bombardment of this date or the bombardment of that date. Simply The
Bombardment. Everybody knew which one they meant.

What had the PTs accomplished on their first sortie? Bob and John
Searles claimed solid hits on a cruiser. Postwar assessment of claims
says that there is “no conclusive evidence that any major Japanese ship
was sunk” on that night. But the next day a coast watcher reported that
natives had seen a large warship sink off the New Georgia coast, to the
north on the withdrawal route. Radio Tokyo itself acknowledged the loss
of a cruiser that night under the attack of “nineteen torpedo boats of
which we destroyed fourteen.”

That last bit—public admission by the Japanese of the loss of a cruiser
to a PT—is the most convincing. The Japanese played down their own
losses ridiculously. Sometimes they even believed their own propaganda,
so much so that they deployed for battle forces which had been destroyed
but whose loss they had never admitted, even to themselves.

A curious incident during the almost nightly naval bombardments of
Henderson Field shows the Japanese sailor’s fatal desire to believe his
own propaganda. Eight Japanese destroyers and a light cruiser bombarded
the field the night of October 25, 1942. They sank two small ships, but
they called off the shore bombardment after only a feeble effort.

The reason?

A Japanese officer ashore had sent a message: BANZAI. OCCUPIED AIRFIELD
AT 2300.

He had done no such thing. Indeed, the very planes spared by that
spurious message sank the cruiser the next morning.

Perhaps a more important result of the first PT foray than the hit on a
cruiser was the shock to the Japanese nervous system. The Japanese navy
had an inordinate horror of torpedo boats—possibly because the Japanese
themselves were so diabolically good at surface torpedo attack. The
knowledge that American torpedo boats were back on the scene must have
been a jolt to their sensitivities.

Nobody can prove that the Japanese admiral called off the bombardment
because of the torpedo attacks—after all, he had already shot up
Henderson Field for eighty minutes and had expended almost all his
special bombardment ammunition—but it is a remarkable coincidence that
the shooting stopped almost immediately after the PTs arrived, and the
withdrawal followed soon after the torpedoes started swimming around.

Half an hour after their sortie from Tulagi, the PTs saw a vast armada
of Japanese ships turn tail and leave the field to them.

The Marines didn’t quibble. They crawled out of their foxholes, those
who could, and thanked God for whoever had run off the 14-inchers.
Henderson Field had survived, but barely, and the Marines were willing
to give anybody credit for running off the battleships, if whoever it
was would just keep them off. The PTs were willing to try.

The night between October 14th and 15th was the low point of the Navy’s
contribution to the Guadalcanal campaign. Two Japanese cruisers
insolently pounded Henderson Field with 752 eight-inch shells, and the
Navy could not lift a finger to stop them. The only Navy fighting ships
in the area were the four PTs of Squadron Three, but the 60 was still
aground on a reef, the 38 had left all of its torpedoes inside a
Japanese cruiser the night before, and the other two PTs were escorting
two little supply ships across the channel between Tulagi and
Guadalcanal. The cruisers had a field day.

The next night two Japanese cruisers fired 1,500 punishing eight-inch
shells at Henderson Field.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, in Washington, after studying the
battle report, could say only: “Everybody _hopes_ we can hang on.”

Admiral Chester Nimitz was even more grim. “It now appears that we are
unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of
the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is
not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.”

Perhaps the PTs had arrived too late to do any good. Certainly a navy
that consisted of three torpedo boats afloat and one on a reef was not
going to win the battle for Guadalcanal.

The Japanese, beginning on November 2nd, spent a week running destroyer
and cruiser deckloads of soldiers down The Slot—65 destroyer deckloads
and two cruiser loads in all.

On November 8th, PTs hit the destroyer _Mochizuki_ but did not sink it.

This kind of reinforcement by dribbles was not fast enough to satisfy
the Japanese brass, so they planned to stop sending a boy to do a man’s
job. At Truk, they organized a mighty task force of two light carriers,
four battleships, 11 cruisers and 36 destroyers to escort 11 fast
transports to Guadalcanal on November 14th.

Before risking the transports, jammed with soldiers to be landed at
Tassafaronga, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson Field for two
straight nights to eliminate once and for all the dangerous Marine
airplanes based there.

The climactic sea struggle for Guadalcanal began on the night of
November 12, 1942.

American scouting planes and Allied coast watchers sent word that a
frighteningly powerful bombardment force was on its way down The Slot,
and the most optimistic defenders of Guadalcanal wondered if this was
going to be the end. Two Japanese battleships, the _Hiei_ and the
_Kirishima_, a cruiser, and fourteen destroyers were in the Japanese
fleet. (The Japanese had learned to fear the PT boats of Tulagi; the
fleet commander had posted two destroyers on one advanced flank and
three destroyers on the other, as a torpedo-boat screen. In addition, he
had assigned three other destroyers, not counted among the 14 under his
direct command, to rove ahead on an anti-PT patrol.)

In a swirling, half-hour action on Friday, November 13th—the opening of
the three-day naval Battle of Guadalcanal—the United States Navy lost
the cruiser _Atlanta_, the destroyers _Barton_, _Cushing_, _Laffey_, and
_Monssen_, and suffered severe damage to the cruisers _Portland_, _San
Francisco_, _Helena_, _Juneau_, and to three destroyers. Admiral Daniel
J. Callaghan was killed.

Limping home after the battle, the cruiser _Juneau_ was torpedoed by the
submarine I-26 (whose skipper admits that he was aiming at another ship
entirely). The _Juneau_ disappeared in a blast of smoke and flame. In
one of the most tragic and inexplicable misadventures of the war, the
survivors of the _Juneau_, floating within easy reach of the PTs at
Tulagi, were abandoned, and no attempt was made to rescue them until all
but a handful had died of exposure.

It is possible that the PTs—excellent rescue craft manned by sailors
eager to help stricken shipmates—were so new to the theatre that the top
brass didn’t even know of their presence, or at least weren’t in the
habit of thinking about them. At any rate, the PTs were tied up at
Tulagi while American sailors drowned almost within sight of the harbor.

On the night between November 13th and 14th, two Japanese heavy
cruisers, screened by a light cruiser and four destroyers, steamed
toward Guadalcanal with another load of bombardment shells.

The situation on Guadalcanal was grave. The base was crammed with the
sick and weary survivors of the naval battle. The veteran defenders knew
another punishing flotilla was on its way with possibly the final, fatal
load of fragmentation shells aboard—and there were no big American ships
near enough to say them nay.

The United States Navy had almost shot its bolt, at least temporarily.
Almost but not quite.

Two PTs were still in the fight.

One, commanded by Stilly Taylor, and another, commanded by John Searles,
had been screening the heavy cruiser _Portland_, which had been badly
damaged in the previous night’s battle and was being towed to Tulagi.

Stilly Taylor tells what happened in one of the most momentously
important torpedo-boat adventures of the Pacific War:

“The Japs began to shell Henderson Field, first putting a very bright
flare in the vicinity of the field, and so naturally both of us [the two
PTs] started in on them independently....

“As soon as the Japs opened fire it was obvious to us that there was at
least one fairly heavy ship. We thought it was probably a battleship....
We could tell it was definitely a heavy ship because of the long orange
flash from its gunfire rather than the short white flash which we knew
from experience was the smaller fire of the destroyers....

“Due to the light put up by the Nip flares, I was able to use my
director for the first time. I set the target’s speed at about 20 knots,
and I think he was doing slightly more than this. I kept him in the
director for approximately seven of his salvos and really had a
beautiful line on him. [PT boats usually were forced, by bad visibility
at night and in bad weather, to shoot from the hip. A chance to use a
director for visually aimed fire was an unaccustomed luxury well worth
gloating over in an action report.]

“After closing to about 1,000 yards, I decided that if we went in any
farther we would get tangled up in the destroyer screen which I knew
would be surrounding him at about 500 to 700 yards.

“I therefore fired three fish. The fourth misfired and never left the
tube. The three fish landed beautifully and made no flash as we fired
them.

“We immediately turned around and started back for the base, but we had
the torpedoes running hot and straight toward the target.

“I am positive that at least one of them found its mark.

“_Certainly the Nips ceased fire immediately and apparently turned right
around and limped home._”

Nobody knows what damage these two PTs did that night. Planes the next
day found a badly damaged cruiser leaving the scene, and that could well
have been Taylor’s victim. At any rate, the material damage inflicted by
these two brave seamen and their crews is comparatively unimportant.

What is important is the almost incredible but quite possible fact that
the two cockleshells ran off a horribly dangerous Japanese surface fleet
prepared to give Henderson Field what might well have been its death
blow. As soon as the torpedo boats attacked, the Japanese stopped
shooting and ran.

It is not hard to understand why. The American fleet had been badly
battered during the previous night’s battle, but so had the Japanese
fleet, and Japanese nerves were probably raw and jumpy.

The two PTs achieved complete surprise, and a surprise attack in
restricted waters is always unsettling to naval officers, even the most
cocksure and well rested. The Japanese could not be sure exactly who was
attacking and in what force. They could have had only a dim idea of what
damage they had done to the American Navy the night before, and, for all
they knew, the torpedo tracks they saw came from a dangerous destroyer
flotilla, backed up by who knows how many mighty ships of the line.

With their nerves shaken by the suddenness of the torpedo attack and
with no knowledge of what was prowling around out there in the dark, it
apparently seemed best to the Japanese commanders to abandon the
bombardment quickly and save their ships for another day.

The two glorified cabin cruisers had driven off the Japanese task force
when only three planes had been destroyed and 17 damaged (all the
damaged planes were in the air before the end of the next day), and
Henderson Field was still in action. The next day, November 14th, a
smoothly functioning Henderson Field was host not only to the Marine
planes permanently based there but also to Navy planes from the carrier
_Enterprise_ which landed at Henderson for refueling during shuttle
trips to attack 11 fast Japanese transports coming down The Slot.

All-day attacks on November 14th, by the Marine, Navy, and Army planes,
saved from destruction by the two PT boats, sank seven of the transports
and worked a hideous massacre among the Japanese soldiers on their decks
and in their holds. Four of the transports and 11 destroyers survived
and at sunset were sailing for the Japanese beach-head of Tassafaronga
Point. The destroyers carried deckloads of survivors from the sunken
transports.

The destroyer commander was Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, perhaps the most
brilliant combat officer of the Japanese navy. He repeatedly showed a
fantastic devotion to duty that enabled him to carry out his missions in
spite of seemingly impossible difficulties. Tanaka _was_ the Tokyo
Express.

To give Tanaka a little help with the disembarkation of the troops at
Guadalcanal, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson during the
landings as a diversion—and just possibly as a _coup de grâce_ to
further American air resistance. They sent a battleship, two heavy
cruisers, two light cruisers and nine destroyers to do the job. This
time the light cruisers and destroyers were deployed in a formidable
anti-torpedo-boat screen to prevent a recurrence of the previous night’s
spooking from a measly two-boat PT raid.

The Japanese had lost their chance, however, for much more American
naval power than a brace of torpedo boats stood between the Japanese and
Henderson Field. Admiral W. A. Lee, on the battleship _Washington_, had
arrived from the south, accompanied by the battleship _South Dakota_ and
four destroyers. He sailed north to meet the Japanese across Iron Bottom
Bay (so called because the bottom was littered with the hulks of
Japanese and American ships sunk in earlier battles. There were so many
hulls on the ocean’s floor that quartermasters reported to their
skippers that magnetic compasses were deflected by the scrap iron).

The American admiral—known to his intimates as “Ching” Lee—had a bad
moment when he overheard two PTs gossiping about his battleships over
the voice radio.

“There go two big ones, but I don’t know whose they are,” said one PT
skipper.

Admiral Lee grabbed the microphone and quickly identified himself to
shore headquarters before the PTs could get off a nervous shot.

“Refer your big boss about Ching Lee; Chinese, catchee? Call off your
boys.”

The PT skippers answered, with good humor, that they were well
acquainted with old “Ching” and promised not to go after him.

The PT crews watched Admiral Lee sail into the decisive last action of
the three-day Battle of Guadalcanal. That night his ships sank the
Japanese battleship and routed the Japanese bombardment fleet. But the
mixed transport and destroyer reinforcement flotilla was taken,
nevertheless, by the stubborn and wily Admiral Tanaka, around the action
and to the beach at Tassafaronga where he carried out his reinforcement
mission almost literally “come hell or high water.”

The Japanese had made a mighty effort, but American fliers, sailors, and
PT boatmen had spoiled the assault. The only profit to the Japanese from
the bloody three days was the landing of 2,000 badly shaken soldiers,
260 cases of ammunition, and 1,500 bags of rice.

But the Japanese were not totally discouraged. They had the redoubtable
Tanaka on their side, and so they went back to supply by the Tokyo
Express. The idea was for Tanaka’s fast destroyers to run down The Slot
by night to Tassafaronga Point, where sailors would push overboard drums
of supplies. Troops ashore would then round up the floating drums in
small boats. In that way, Tanaka’s fast destroyers would not have to
stop moving and would make a less tempting target for the Tulagi PTs
than a transport at anchor.


On November 30, 1942, Admiral Tanaka shoved off from Bougainville Island
with eight destroyers loaded with 1,100 drums of supplies. At the same
moment an American task force of five cruisers and six destroyers—a most
formidable task force indeed, especially for a night action—left the
American base at Espiritu Santo to break up just the kind of supply run
Tanaka was undertaking.

The two forces converged on Tassafaronga Point from opposite directions.
The American force enormously outgunned Tanaka’s destroyers and also had
the tremendous advantage of being, to some extent, equipped with radar,
then a brand-new and little-understood gadget. Thus the American force
could expect to enjoy an additional superiority of surprise.

And that is just the way it worked out. At 11:06 P.M., American radar
picked up Tanaka’s ships. Admiral Tanaka’s comparatively feeble flotilla
was blindly sailing into a trap.

American destroyers fired twenty torpedoes at the still unsuspecting
Japanese, who did not wake up to their danger until the cruisers opened
fire with main battery guns at five-mile range.

The Japanese lashed back with a reflex almost as automatic for Tanaka’s
well-drilled destroyer sailors as jerking a finger back from a red-hot
stove. They instantly filled the water with torpedoes.

No American torpedoes scored. Six Japanese torpedoes hit four American
cruisers, sinking _Northampton_, and damaging _Pensacola_,
_Minneapolis_, and _New Orleans_ so seriously that they were unfit for
action for almost a year. Cruiser gunfire sank one Japanese destroyer,
but the rest of Admiral Tanaka’s ships, besides giving the vastly
superior American force a stunning defeat, even managed to push
overboard many of the drums they had been sent down to deliver.

Tanaka had once more carried out his mission and had won a great naval
victory, almost as a sideline to the main business.


On the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1942, Admiral
Tanaka came down again with eleven destroyers.

This time it was not a mighty cruiser-destroyer force waiting for him,
but only eight PTs from Tulagi. They were manned, however, by some of
the most aggressive officers and men in the American Navy. The boats
were deployed around Cape Esperance and Savo Island, on the approaches
to Tassafaronga.

Two patrolling torpedo boats spotted Tanaka’s destroyers and attacked,
but one broke down and the other came to his rescue, so no shots were
fired. Nevertheless, the Admiral was spooked by the abortive attack of
two diminutive PTs, and retreated. He recovered his courage in a few
minutes and tried again.

This time four PTs jumped him and fired twelve torpedoes. When their
tubes were empty, the PTs roared by the destroyers, strafing with their
machine guns—and being strafed. Jack Searles, in 59, passed down the
_Oyashio’s_ side less than a hundred yards away, raking the destroyer’s
superstructure and gun crews with 50-caliber fire. The 59 itself was
also riddled, of course, but stayed afloat.

Admiral Tanaka, who had run around the blazing duel of battlewagons at
the Battle of Guadalcanal to deliver his reinforcements, who had bored
through massive day-long air attacks, who had gutted a mighty cruiser
force to deliver his cargo to Tassafaronga, turned back before the
threat of four PTs, abandoned the mission, and fled back to
Bougainville.

The PT navy at Tulagi (and the Marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal) had
good cause to celebrate a clear-cut victory on this first anniversary of
Pearl Harbor.


Times were too hard for the PTs to get any rest. Jack Searles patched up
his bullet-torn 59, and, with another boat, put out two nights later, on
December 9th, to machine-gun a Japanese landing barge sighted near Cape
Esperance. During the barge-PT duel, one of Searles’ lookouts spotted a
submarine on the surface, oozing along at about two knots. Jack whipped
off two quick shots and blew a 2,000-ton blockade-running submarine
(I-3) into very small pieces. There is no way to deny the submarine to
Jack Searles’ bag, because a Japanese naval officer, the sole survivor,
swam ashore and told the story of the I-3’s last moments.


On the night of December 11th Admiral Tanaka began another run of the
Tokyo Express with ten destroyers. Dive bombers attacked during
daylight, but made no hits. The job of stopping Tanaka’s Tokyo Express
was passed to the PTs. They zipped out of the harbor at Tulagi and
deployed along the beach between Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance.

The night was bright and clear, and shortly after midnight three PTs,
commanded by Lieut. (jg) Lester H. Gamble, saw the destroyer column and
attacked. The other two boats were skippered by Stilly Taylor and Lieut.
(jg) William E. Kreiner III.

The Japanese destroyers turned on searchlights and let go with main
batteries and machine guns, but the three torpedo boats got off their
torpedoes and popped two solid hits into the destroyer _Teruzuki_. The
Japanese ship blazed up, and for the second time Tanaka had had enough
of torpedo boats. He went home.

The PTs had not yet had enough of Tanaka, however, for Lieut. Frank
Freeland’s 44 heard the combat talk of his squadron mates on the voice
radio, and came running. He roared past the burning _Teruzuki_, chasing
the retreating destroyers. Two things were working against him; Lieut.
Freeland did not know it, but one of the destroyers had stayed behind
with the _Teruzuki_, and the flames from the burning ship were lighting
the PT boat beautifully for the hidden Japanese gunners.

Aboard the 44 was Lieut. (jg) Charles M. Melhorn, who reports his
version of what happened:

“We were throwing up quite a wake, and with the burning cargo ship [he
probably mistook the burning _Teruzuki_ for a cargo ship] lighting up
the whole area I thought we would soon be easy pickings and I told the
skipper so. Before he could reply, Crowe, the quartermaster who was at
the wheel, pointed and yelled out ‘Destroyer on the starboard bow.
There’s your target, Captain.’

“Through the glasses I could make out a destroyer two points on our
starboard bow, distant about 8,000 yards, course south-southwest. We
came right and started our run. We had no sooner steadied on our new
course than I picked up two more destroyers through my glasses. They
were in column thirty degrees on our port bow, target course 270, coming
up fast.

“The skipper and I both saw at once that continuing our present course
would pin us against the beach and lay us wide open to broadsides from
at least three Jap cans. The Skipper shifted targets to the two
destroyers, still about 4,000 yards off, and we started in again.

“By this time we were directly between the blazing ship and the two
destroyers. As we started the run I kept looking for the can that had
fired.... I picked him up behind and to the left of our targets. He was
swinging, apparently to form up in column astern of the other two. The
trap was sprung, and as I pointed out this fourth destroyer the lead
ship in the column opened fire.”

The 44 escaped from the destroyer ambush behind a smoke screen, but once
clear, turned about for a second attack. The burning _Teruzuki_
illuminated the 44, and _Teruzuki’s_ guardian destroyer, lurking in the
dark, drew a bead on the ambushed PT.

“We had just come out of our turn when we were fired on.... I saw the
blast, yelled ‘That’s for us.’ and jumped down on the portside by the
cockpit. We were hit aft in the engine room.

“I don’t remember much. For a few seconds nothing registered at all. I
looked back and saw a gaping hole in what was once the engine-room
canopy. The perimeter of the hole was ringed by little tongues of flame.
I looked down into the water and saw we had lost way.

“Someone on the bow said ‘Shall we abandon ship?’ Freeland gave the
order to go ahead and abandon ship.

“I stayed at the cockpit ... glancing over where the shell came from. He
let go again.

“I dove ... I dove deep and was still under when the salvo struck. The
concussion jarred me badly, but I kept swimming underwater. There was a
tremendous explosion, paralyzing me from the waist down. The water
around me went red.

“The life jacket took control and pulled me to the surface. I came up in
a sea of fire, the flaming embers of the boat cascading all about me. I
tried to get free of the life jacket but couldn’t. I started swimming
feebly. I thought the game was up, but the water which had shot sky high
in the explosion rained down and put out the fires around me....

“I took a few strokes away from the gasoline fire, which was raging
about fifteen yards behind me, and as I turned back I saw two heads, one
still helmeted, between me and the flames. I called to the two men and
told them that I expected the Japs to be over in short order to
machine-gun us, and to get their life jackets ready to slip. I told them
to get clear of the reflection of the fire as quickly as possible, and
proceeded to do so myself.

“I struck out for Savo, whose skyline ridge I could see dimly, and
gradually made headway toward shore. Every two or three minutes I
stopped to look back for other survivors or an approaching destroyer,
but saw nothing save the boat which was burning steadily, and beyond it
the [_Teruzuki_] which burned and exploded all night long.

“Sometime shortly before dawn a PT boat cruised up and down off Savo and
passed about twenty-five yards ahead of me. I was all set to hail him
when I looked over my shoulder and saw a Jap can bearing down on his
starboard quarter.

“I didn’t know whether the PT was maneuvering to get a shot at him or
not, so I kept my mouth shut. I let him go by, slipped my life jacket,
and waited for the fireworks.

“The Jap can lay motionless for some minutes, and I finally made it out
as nothing more than a destroyer-shaped shadow formed by the fires and
smoke.

“I judge that I finally got ashore on Savo about 0730 or 0800.
Lieutenant Stilly Taylor picked me up off the beach about an hour
later.”

Lieut. Melhorn was in the water between five and six hours. Only one
other sailor survived the explosion of the 44’s gas tank. Two officers
and seven enlisted men died.

Flames on the _Teruzuki_—the same flames that lit the way to its fiery
death for the 44—finally ate their way into the depth-charge magazine,
and just before dawn the Japanese destroyer went up with a jarring
crash.

More important to the fighters on Guadalcanal than the sinking of the
_Teruzuki_ was the astonishing and gratifying fact that Admiral Tanaka,
the destroyer tiger, had been turned back one more time by a handful of
wooden cockleshells, without landing his supplies. The big brass of the
cruiser fleet that had been unable to stop Tanaka at the Battle of
Tassafaronga must have been bewildered.


After the clash between Tanaka and the torpedo boats on December 11th,
no runs of the Tokyo Express were attempted for three weeks. The long
lull meant dull duty for the PTs, but was a proof of their effectiveness
in derailing the Tokyo Express. Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal were
down to eating roots and leaves—and sometimes even other Japanese,
according to persistent reports among the Japanese themselves—before
their navy worked up enough nerve to try another run of the Tokyo
Express.

On January 2nd, ten destroyers came down The Slot. One was damaged by a
dive bomber’s near miss, and another was detached to escort the cripple,
but the other eight sailed on.

That night, eleven PTs attacked Tanaka’s destroyers with eighteen
torpedoes, but had no luck. Tanaka unloaded his drums and was gone
before dawn.

No matter. As soon as the sun came up, the PTs puttered about Iron
Bottom Bay, enjoying a bit of target practice on the drums pushed off
the destroyers’ decks. One way or the other, the torpedo boats of Tulagi
snatched food from the mouths of the starving Japanese garrison.

A week later a coast watcher up the line called in word that Tanaka was
running eight destroyers down The Slot. Rouse out the PTs again!


Just after midnight on January 13th, Lieut. Rollin Westholm, in PT 112,
saw four destroyers and called for a coordinated attack with Lieut. (jg)
Charles E. Tilden’s 43.

“Make ’em good,” Lieut. Westholm said, so Lieut. Tilden took his 43 into
400-yard range before firing two. Both missed. To add to his disastrous
bad luck, the port tube flashed a bright red light, a blazing giveaway
of the 43’s position.

The destroyer hit the 43 with the second salvo, and all hands went over
the side, diving deep to escape machine-gun strafing. The destroyer
passed close enough so that the swimming sailors could hear the Japanese
chattering on the deck.

Lieut. Clark W. Faulkner, in 40, drew a bead on the second destroyer in
column and fired four. His heart was made glad by what he thought was a
juicy hit, so he took his empty tubes back home.

Lieut. Westholm, in 112, took on the third destroyer and was equally
certain he had put one into his target, but two of the destroyers had
zeroed in during his approach run, and two shells blew his boat open at
the waterline. Lieut. Westholm and his eleven shipmates watched the rest
of the battle from a life raft. The other PTs fired twelve fish, but
didn’t even claim any hits.

Either Lieut. Westholm or Lieut. Faulkner had scored, however, for the
_Hatsukaze_ had caught a torpedo under the wardroom. The Japanese
skipper at first despaired of saving his ship, but damage-control
parties plugged the hole well enough so that he was able to escape
before daylight.

When the sun rose, the PTs still afloat picked up survivors of the two
lost torpedo boats and then went through the morning routine of sinking
the 250 floating drums of supplies the destroyers had jettisoned. The
starving Japanese watching from the beach must have wished all torpedo
boats in hell that morning.

The Japanese did come out to tow in the wreckage of the PT 43, but a New
Zealand warship stepped in with a few well-placed broadsides and reduced
the already splintered torpedo boat to a mess of matchwood before the
Japanese could study it.


Nobody but the Japanese High Command knew it at this point, but the
plane and PT blockade of the Tokyo Express had won; the island garrison
had been starved out.

During the night between February 1st and 2nd, coast watchers reported
20 Japanese destroyers coming down The Slot. The American Navy had no
way of knowing it, but the Tokyo Express was running in reverse. The
decks of those destroyers were clear—they were being kept clear to make
room for a deckload of the starved-out Japanese on Guadalcanal. Japan
was finally calling it quits and pulling out of the island.

Whatever the mission of the Japanese ships, the mission of the American
Navy was clear—to keep the Japanese from doing whatever it was they were
doing and to sink some ships in the process.

Three American mine-layers sprinkled 300 mines north of Guadalcanal,
near Savo Island, in the waters where the destroyers might be expected
to pass. Eleven PTs waiting in ambush attacked the destroyers as they
steamed by the minefield. The PTs rejoiced at a good, solid hit on a
destroyer by somebody—nobody was sure whom—and the destroyer _Makigumo_
admittedly acquired an enormous hole in the hull at that very moment,
but the Japanese skipper said that he hit a mine. He said he never saw
any PTs attacking him.

Postwar assessment officers say that he probably hit a mine while
maneuvering to avoid a PT torpedo. Avoid a torpedo attack he never even
saw? Someone is confused. Some of the PT sailors who were sure of hits
on the _Makigumo_ have a tendency to get sulky when this minefield
business is mentioned, and nobody can blame them. The _Makigumo_, at any
rate, had to be scuttled.

Regardless of what damage they did to the Japanese, the PTs themselves
suffered terribly in this battle.

Lieut. (jg) J. H. Claggett’s 111 was hit by a shell and set afire. The
crew swam until morning, fighting off sharks and holding up the wounded.
Two torpedo boatmen were killed.

Ensign James J. Kelly’s 37 caught a shell on the gas tank and
disappeared in a puff of orange flame. One badly wounded man survived.

Ensign Ralph L. Richards’ 123 had stalked to within 500 yards of a
destroyer target when a Japanese glide bomber slid in from nowhere,
dropped a single bomb, and made possibly the most fantastically lucky
hit of the war. The bomb landed square on the tiny fantail of the racing
PT boat. The boat went up in a blur of flames and splinters. Four men
were killed.

In spite of the fierce attacks of the PT flotilla, Tanaka’s sailors
managed to take the destroyers in to the beach, load a shipment of
evacuees, and slip out again for the quick run home.


This was the last and by far the bloodiest action of the PTs in the
Guadalcanal campaign. The PTs had lost three boats and seventeen men in
the battle and had not scored themselves—unless you count the destroyer
_Makigumo_, which PT sailors stubbornly insist is theirs.

An over-all summary of their contribution to the campaign for
Guadalcanal, however, gives them a whopping score:

  A submarine and a destroyer sunk [not counting _Makigumo_]

  Two destroyers badly damaged

  Tons of Japanese supply drums riddled and sunk

  Dozens of disaster victims pulled from the water

  Two massive bombardments just possibly scared off

  And—by far the most important credit—the Tokyo Express of Rear Admiral
  Raizo Tanaka ambushed and definitely turned back twice after a
  powerful cruiser force had failed at the job.

Even after the postwar assessment teams cut down PT sinking credits to a
fraction of PT claims, there is still plenty of credit left for a force
ten times the size of the Tulagi fleet.




                                   3.
                        Battering Down the Gate:
                           the Western Hinge


Toward the end of 1942, as the Japanese defense of Guadalcanal was
crumbling, American forces began to inch forward elsewhere in the
Pacific, most notably on the island of New Guinea, almost 600 miles to
the west of Guadalcanal.

New Guinea is the second largest island in the world (only Greenland is
larger). Dropped over the United States, the island would reach from New
York City to Houston, Texas; it is big enough to cover all of New
England, plus New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio,
Kentucky, and all of Tennessee, except for Memphis and its suburbs. Even
today, vast inland areas are unexplored and possibly some tribes in the
mountains have never even heard about the white man—or about the
Japanese either, for that matter. The island is shaped like a turkey,
with its head and wattles pointed east.

                   [Illustration: PHILIPPINE ISLANDS]

  Mindanao
  Palau Is.
  Celebes
  Timor
  Arafura Sea
  Guam
  Caroline Islands
  Micronesia
  New Guinea
  Hansa Bay
  Nassau Bay

Early in the war, right after the fall of the Philippines and of the
East Indies, the Japanese had landed on the turkey’s back. The
Australians held the turkey’s belly. The Japanese had tried to cross the
grim Owen Stanley Mountains, to get at the turkey’s underside, but tough
Australian troops had slugged it out with them and pushed them back. The
fight in the mountains was so miserable for both sides that everybody
had tacitly agreed that the battle for New Guinea would be decided along
the beaches.

Splitting the very tip of the turkey’s tail is Milne Bay, a magnificent
anchorage. Whoever held Milne Bay could prevent the other side from
spreading farther along the coast. Australians and Americans, under the
command of General MacArthur, moved first, seized Milne Bay in June of
1942, and successfully fought off a Japanese landing force.

A curious example of the misery the homefolks can deal out to front-line
fighters is the mix-up caused by the code name for Milne Bay. For some
obscure reason, the Gili Gili base, at Milne Bay, was called “Fall
River.” Naturally, according to the inexorable workings of Murphy’s Law
(if anything _can_ go wrong, it _will_) many of the supplies for Milne
Bay were delivered to bewildered supply officers at Fall River,
Massachusetts.

Despite this foul-up, by the end of October, 1942, Milne Bay was safely
in the hands of the Allies and ready to support an advance along the
bird’s back. All movement had to be by sea, for there were no roads
through New Guinea’s jungles, and the waters around the turkey’s tail
were the most poorly charted in the world. Navigators of deep-draft
ships were horrified to have to sail through reef- and rock-filled
waters, depending on charts with disquieting notes like “Reef possibly
seen here by Entrecasteaux in 1791.” No naval commander in his right
mind would commit deep-draft ships to such uncharted and dangerous
waters for nighttime duty. Which means that the times and the coastal
waters of eastern New Guinea were made for PT boats, or vice versa.

On December 17, 1942, less than a week after the PTs of Tulagi had
fought the last big battle with the _incoming_ Tokyo Express, the PT
tender _Hilo_ towed two torpedo boats into Milne Bay and set up for
business. Other PTs followed. For seven more months motor torpedo boats
were to be the entire surface striking force of the U. S. Navy in the
Solomon Sea around the tail of the New Guinea turkey.

By the time the _Hilo_ had arrived at Milne Bay, the fight for the
turkey’s back had moved 200 miles up the coast to a trio of villages
called Buna, Gona, and Sanananda. Two hundred miles is too long a haul
for PT boats, so the _Hilo_ stayed at Milne Bay as a kind of rear base,
the main striking force of PTs moving closer to the fighting. They set
up camp at Tufi, in the jungles around Oro Bay, almost within sight of
the Buna battlefield, and began the nightly coastal patrols that were to
stretch on for almost two weary years before all of New Guinea was back
in Allied hands.

First blood was drawn on Christmas Eve. Ensign Robert F. Lynch
celebrated the holiday by taking out the PT 122 for a routine patrol,
looking for small Japanese coasters or submarines running supplies and
reinforcements into Buna. The night was dark and rainy, and the PT
chugged along without much hope of finding any action. PTs had no radar
in those days, and a visual lookout was not very effective in a New
Guinea downpour.

Even in New Guinea, however, the rain cannot go on forever. When the
rain clouds parted, a bright moon lit up the sea and a lookout snapped
to attention.

“Submarine,” he hissed. “Dead ahead, a submarine.”

Hove to on the surface was a Japanese I-boat, probably waiting for
Japanese small craft to come from the beach for supplies, or else
recharging its batteries, or probably both. Ensign Lynch began his
silent stalk and closed to 1,000 yards without alarming the submarine’s
crew. He fired two torpedoes and kept on closing the range to 500 yards,
where he fired two more. The submarine went up in a geyser of water,
scrap iron, and flame.

Ensign Lynch thought he saw a dim shape beyond his victim and was alert
when another surfaced I-boat shot four torpedoes at him. He slipped
between the torpedo tracks, but could do nothing about retaliating,
because he had emptied his tubes. He had to let the second I-boat go.
Postwar assessment gives Ensign Lynch a definite kill on this submarine.

The same Christmas Eve, two other PTs from the Oro Bay base sank two
barges full of troops.

Ensign Lynch’s torpedoing of the submarine—the first combat victory of
the PT fleet in New Guinea waters—was a spectacular triumph, but the
sinking of two barges was much more typical of the action to come.

The terrible attrition of ships in the Guadalcanal fight had left the
Japanese short of sea transport. Besides, Allied airmen made the sea
approaches to New Guinea a dangerous place for surface craft in
daylight. Nevertheless, the Japanese had to find some way to supply
their New Guinea beachheads by sea or give them up, so they began a
crash program of barge construction.

The barges were of many types, but the most formidable was the
_daihatsu_, a steel or wooden barge, diesel powered, armored, heavily
armed with machine guns or even with automatic light cannon. They could
not be torpedoed, because their draft was so shallow that a torpedo
would pass harmlessly under their hulls. They could soak up enormous
amounts of machine-gun fire and could strike back with their own
automatic weapons and the weapons of soldier passengers. A single
_daihatsu_ could be a dangerous target for a PT. A fleet of _daihatsus_,
giving each other mutual fire support, could well be too much to handle
even for a brace of coordinated PTs.

The naval war around New Guinea became a nightly brawl between
_daihatsu_ and PT, and the torpedo function of the PT shriveled.
Eventually many of the boats abandoned their torpedo tubes entirely and
placed them with 37-mm. and 40-mm. cannon and extra 50-caliber machine
guns, fine weapons for punching through a _daihatsu’s_ armor. The PT in
New Guinea gradually changed its main armament from the torpedo—a
sledge-hammer type of weapon for battering heavy warships—to the
multiple autocannon—a buzz-saw type of weapon for slicing up small
craft.


At the Buna-Gona-Sanananda battlefield, the Japanese were dying of
starvation. It was the story of Guadalcanal again—with supply from the
sea cut off by aggressive American patrols, the emperor’s infantry—no
matter how desperately brave—could not stand up to a long campaign.

The night between January 17th and 18th, the _Roaring Twenty_ (PT 120)
caught three barges trying to slip out of Sanananda. The PT recklessly
took on all three in a machine-gun duel, sank two of them, and set the
third afire. PT sailors were the first to know that the end had come for
the Japanese ashore, because the barges were loaded with Japanese
officers trying to slip away from their doomed men. Next day Sanananda
fell to the Australians.


When both the base at Sanananda, on the turkey’s tail, and Guadalcanal
fell to the Allies in the first months of 1943, the Japanese tried to
slam an impenetrable gate across the path of the Allied advance. The
eastern hinge of the gate was to be the mighty naval base and airfield
complex at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain. The western hinge was
planned for the place where the turkey’s tail joins the turkey’s back,
an indentation of the New Guinea coastline called Huon Gulf.

To build up the western hinge of the gate, the Japanese landed at the
ports of Lae, Salamaua, and Finschhafen, on the Huon Gulf. The Japanese
wanted Huon Gulf so badly that they even dared send a fleet of surface
transports to ferry 6,900 reinforcements across the Bismarck Sea to New
Guinea. The convoy run was daring, because it would be within reach of
land-based Allied bombers almost the whole way.

Escorting the eight transports were eight destroyers, veterans of the
Tokyo Express. Tanaka, however, was no longer with them. He had been
relieved of his command for telling the high navy brass in Tokyo some
unpleasant truths. He spent the rest of the war on the beach as a
penalty for speaking up about mistakes made at Guadalcanal.

The Japanese convoy sailed from Rabaul, at the eastern hinge of the
gate, on March 1st, under cover of a terrible storm which the ships’
captains hoped would ground Allied bombers. On March 3rd the storm
lifted unexpectedly. The seasick soldiers felt slightly less miserable.

In Japan March 3rd is Doll’s Day, a sentimental family holiday when
little Japanese girls dress up their dolls and parade them about the
streets under the fond eyes of admiring fathers. Many of the soldiers
were depressed at being on such a martial mission on Doll’s Day, so
their officers passed out candy as a little touch of holiday. The
officers did not tell the soldiers that the lifting of the storm had
been a disaster, that an Allied snooper had already spotted the convoy,
and that Allied bombers were almost surely on the way.

Worse was on the way than ordinary bombers.

Back in Australia, the American bomber force had been working on a new
dirty trick, and bomber pilots were eager to try it on the transports
crowded with candy-munching soldiers.

Mechanics had torn out all the bombardier equipment from the nose of B
25 attack bombers and had mounted eight 50-caliber machine guns. Under
each B 25 they had slung two 500-pound bombs armed with five-second
delay fuses. The idea was to make a low-level bombing run, so as to skip
the bombs across the water like flat stones. The delayed-action fuses
were to keep the bombs from detonating until they had slammed into the
ships’ sides. When the snooper reported the convoy, it sounded to Allied
bomber pilots like the perfect target for testing the new weapon.

While fighters and high-level bombers kept the Japanese convoy occupied,
the converted B 25s came at the Japanese so low that the blast of their
propellers churned the sea. The Japanese skippers thought they were
torpedo bombers—which they were, in a sense—and turned into the attack,
to present the narrowest possible target, a wise maneuver ordinarily,
but this also made the ships the best possible targets for the long,
thin pattern of the machine-gun ripsaws mounted in the bombers’ noses.
The ships were ripped from stem to gudgeon by the strafing runs. Then,
when the pilots were sure the antiaircraft gun crews had been sawed to
shreds, the low-flying B 25s charged at the ships broadside and released
the skip bombs, which caved in hull plates at the waterlines and let in
fatal doses of sea water. It was almost impossible to miss with a skip
bomb. By nightfall the Bismarck Sea was dotted with rafts, lifeboats,
and swimmers clinging to the debris of sunken ships. Only darkness
stopped the slaughter from the air.

After that sunset, however, the slaughter from the sea became more
grisly than ever. Eight PTs from New Guinea, under Lieut. Commander
Barry K. Atkins, fought their way to the battle zone through the heavy
seas in the wake of the storm which had so treacherously deserted the
Japanese convoy.

Just before midnight they spotted the burning transport _Oigawa Maru_.
PT 143 and PT 150 each fired a torpedo and blew the transport out of the
water. The PT sailors searched all night but could find no other
targets—largely because almost all of them were already on the floor of
the Bismarck Sea.

When the sun came up they had targets enough, but of a most distasteful
kind. The sea was swarming with Japanese survivors, and it was the
unhappy duty of the PTs to try to kill them to the last man, so that
they could not get ashore on nearby New Guinea.

On March 5th the same two PTs that had sunk the _Oigawa Maru_ jumped a
Japanese submarine picking up survivors from three boats. The PTs
charged, firing torpedoes, but they missed the crash-diving submarine.
Then they were presented with the hideous problem of what to do with the
100 helpless soldiers who watched fearfully from the three boats. The
Japanese would not surrender, and they could not be allowed to escape.

The two PTs turned on the machine guns and set about the grim butchery
of the unhappy Japanese. When the execution was over, they sank the
three blood-drenched boats with a shallow pattern of depth charges.

Scout planes conned other PTs to lifeboats and rafts crammed with
Japanese. More than 3,000 soldiers died, but so thick were the survivors
that several hundred managed to swim ashore despite the best vigilance
of the small-craft navy. The natives of New Guinea, who had long chafed
against the Australian law forbidding head-hunting, were unleashed by
the authorities and had a field day tracking down the few Japanese who
made it to the beach.

Eighteen Japanese made an astonishing 400-mile voyage through
PT-patrolled waters to a tiny island in the Trobriand group. They were
captured by the crew of PT 114 in a pioneer landing party operation of
the PT fleet.

The skip bombers of the American Air Force had sunk four destroyers and
eight transports, killed 3,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors, and shot
down 30 planes. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was a smashing blow to
the Japanese, and they never again risked a surface transport near
eastern New Guinea (except for a one-night run of four destroyers in a
feeble and abortive attempt to set up a spurline of the Tokyo Express.)


The American Navy had an official torpedo-boat doctrine, of course, and
PT officers were well drilled in the proper manner of delivering
torpedoes in combat before they left the States, but this night-prowling
business against torpedo-proof barges called for new torpedo-boat
tactics.

Lieuts. (jg) Skipper Dean in PT 114, and Francis H. McAdoo, Jr., in PT
129, tried the still-hunt methods of Mississippi, where sportsmen hide
themselves beside a known game trail and let the stag walk right up to
his death. On the night between March 15th and 16th, the two PTs set up
an ambush in a known barge rendezvous. They slipped into Mai-Ama Bay, a
tiny inlet on the Huon Gulf shoreline, which they suspected was a
Japanese barge terminal, and there they cut their engines and waited. As
usual, it was raining and visibility was virtually zero.

The current persisted in setting the boats toward the gulf, so the 114
dropped anchor. Lieut. McAdoo found that he was too restless for a still
hunt, so he oozed the 129 back into the gulf on one engine, to see if
any barges were unloading south of the entrance to the bay.

The PT sailors didn’t know it, but six Japanese barges had arrived
before them and were unloading all around in the darkness. Two of the
drifting barges, already unloaded and idling about the bay until time to
form up for the return trip, bumped into the side of the 114. To the PT
sailors it was as though a clammy hand had touched them in a haunted
house. They were galvanized.

Silence and stealth were second nature to them, however, so they moved
quietly to battle stations. The Japanese on the barges, happily assuming
that the PT was another Japanese ship, chattered amiably among
themselves.

Machine-gunners on the PT strained to depress their 50-caliber mounts,
but the barges were too close. Sailors quietly cocked submachine guns
instead.

At the skipper’s signal, with blazing Tommy guns, the crew hosed down
the decks of the two _daihatsus_ that were holding the PT in their
embarrassingly close embrace. The PT anchor was snagged to the bottom,
so a sailor parted the line with an ax, and the PT tried to put a little
distance between itself and the Japanese.

The aft 50 calibers sank one barge, but the other caught under the bow
of the PT and plugged its escape route. Skipper Dean solved the problem
by shoving the throttles up to the stops and riding over the barge,
which swamped and sank under the PT’s weight.

The 114, once free from the two _daihatsus_, turned back into the inlet
with guns roaring. The 129 came running, and the two PTs mopped up the
rest of the six-barge convoy.


The Australian army had taken on the job of throwing the Japanese out of
the three Huon Gulf villages that formed the western hinge of the
Japanese gate. They were doing as well as could be expected with the
nasty job of fighting in the filthy jungles of New Guinea, but they were
having supply problems almost as serious as those of the blockaded
Japanese. The Allies had no beachhead near the Australians, and
supplies, in miserly quantities, had to be flown to a jungle airstrip
and packed to the troops by native bearers.

The PT fleet in New Guinea had become so sophisticated by this time that
it had acquired a formal organization and an over-all commander, a
former submarine skipper named Morton Mumma. Aboard one of his PTs,
Commander Mumma had gone poking about the little-known shoreline around
the Huon Gulf (Mort Bay was named for him, because he first explored
it), and he had found a fine landing beach at Nassau Bay. The beach was
right under the nose of the Japanese garrison at Salamaua, it’s true,
but it was also temptingly handy to the Australian lines.

On the last day of June, 1943, three PTs packed a company of riflemen on
their deck. With 36 small Army landing boats, the PTs sortied into a
foul sea, lashed by high winds and rain. Total naval escort for the
amphibious armada was PT 168, which presumably was in better fighting
trim than the others, because it carried no seasick passengers. PT 168
promptly lost its convoy in the storm.

_The Flying Shamrock_ (PT 142) missed the landing beach at Nassau Bay
and did a countermarch. In the rain and darkness, the _Shamrock_ beat
the astronomical odds against such an accident by ramming the tiny PT
143, to the alarm of the miserable foot soldiers on both boats.

The Army landing craft scattered in the storm, and the two PTs had to
round them up and guide them to the beach, where several broached in the
high surf and were abandoned. Short of landing craft to put their own
sea-weary passengers ashore, the PTs had to carry them back to the
staging area.

Despite the less than 100 per cent efficiency of the operation, the few
American soldiers who had reached the beach threw the Japanese garrison
into a panic. A lucky bomb hit had killed their able commander, and
without his support the 300 Japanese assigned to guard Nassau Bay broke
and fled before the insignificant Allied invasion force.

Puny as they were, the landings at Nassau Bay threw the Japanese high
command into a flap. They saw clearly, possibly even more clearly than
the Allies, that the Nassau Bay beachhead was going to unhinge the whole
Japanese gate across the Allied path. The landings also paid an
unexpected bonus far to the east, where American soldiers were landing
on Rendova Island, as part of the island-hopping advance up the central
Solomons toward the eastern hinge of the Japanese gate. The Japanese at
Rabaul were so alarmed by the minuscule PT operation at Nassau Bay that
they jammed their own radio circuits with alarms and outcries. The
Japanese at Rendova couldn’t get anybody to listen to their anguished
cries for help, and the American troops went ashore with almost no air
opposition.

Ashore on Huon Gulf, the Australians still had the uncomfortable job of
convincing the stubborn Japanese foot soldiers that they were doomed,
and previously the only way to convince them had been to kill them by
bullets or starvation. The PTs tightened the blockade by night.

Just before the end at Finschhafen, when the Japanese were getting ready
to give up the Huon Gulf, barge traffic increased. It was the same story
as the earlier abandonment of Buna, Gona, and Sanananda. The Japanese
were slipping out by night.

On the night between August 28th and 29th, two PTs patrolled off
Finschhafen. Ensign Herbert P. Knight was skipper of the 152; Lieut.
(jg) John L. Carey was skipper of _The Flying Shamrock_ (PT 142). Riding
the _Shamrock_, in command of the operation, was a most distinguished PT
sailor, Lieut. John Bulkeley, rescuer of MacArthur, back from his tour
in the United States as the number one naval hero of the Philippines
campaign.

Lookouts spotted three barges, and one went down under the first attack
by the two PT boats, but the other two were still afloat after the third
firing run. Ensign Knight dropped depth charges alongside, but the
barges rode out the blast and were still afloat when the geysers of sea
water settled. Lieut. Carey made a depth-charge run and blew one of the
barges apart, but the other still survived.

Aboard the _Shamrock_, Bulkeley decided to finish the job in the
old-fashioned way—by hand.

For the first time in this century, with a cry of “Boarders away,” a U.
S. Navy boarding party, weapons in hand, swarmed aboard an enemy craft.
One Japanese made a move in the darkness, and Lieut. Bulkeley blew him
down with a 45 automatic. The other passengers, twelve fully equipped
soldiers, were already dead.

The boarders picked up what documents and equipment they thought would
be interesting to Intelligence, and reboarded their PT. The 152 pumped
37-mm shells into the barge until it slid under the water.

Ashore, Intelligence captured the diary of a Japanese officer named
Kobayashi. Under the date of August 29, 1943, was the entry:

  Last night with the utmost precaution we were without incident
  transported safely by barge between Sio and Finschhafen. _So far,
  there has not been a time during such trips when barges have not been
  attacked by enemy torpedo boats._ However, it was reported that the
  barge unit which transported us was attacked and sunk on the return
  trip last night and the barge commander and his men were all lost.

The PT blockade at sea and the Australian drive ashore pinched the
Japanese hard, and on September 16th Australian infantrymen walked into
a deserted Finschhafen. The western hinge of the gate had been broken.




                                   4.
                        Battering Down the Gate:
                           the Eastern Hinge


The western end of the Japanese gate was nailed to the great land mass
of New Guinea, and its unhinging was a natural job for the Army. The
eastern hinge was at Rabaul, in the tangle of islands and reef-strewn
sea channels that make up the Solomon and Bismarck archipelagos.
Reduction of Rabaul was naturally a Navy job, to be carried on
simultaneously with the Army effort in New Guinea.

After the fall of Guadalcanal in February, 1943, the master plan in the
South Pacific, under Admiral William Halsey, was to hop from island to
island through the central Solomons, reducing one by one the Japanese
bases arranged like steppingstones between Guadalcanal and Rabaul.

PTs were moved up as fast as new bases were established, because they
were short of range and useless if they fell too far behind the front.

The night the Army went ashore at Rendova (June 30, 1943), three PTs
sailed up Blanche Channel, on the approaches to the Rendova landing
beach. Coming down the same channel was the American landing flotilla,
transports, supply ships, and escorting destroyers. The destroyer
_McCawley_, damaged by one of the few Japanese air attacks that opposed
the Rendova landings, was being towed to Tulagi, but was riding lower
and lower in the water and its survival was doubtful. Rear Admiral
Richmond K. Turner (riding _McCawley_ as flagship of the Rendova
invasion force) was debating whether or not to give the stricken ship
euthanasia by friendly torpedo when his mind was made up for him by two
mysterious fish which came out of the night and blew _McCawley_ out of
the water.

The deadly PTs had struck again! But, alas, under the illusion that they
were hitting an enemy transport. Explanation of the snafu? The usual
lack of communications between PTs and other commands. The PTs had been
told there would be no friendlies in Blanche Channel that night—and the
only friendlies they encountered just happened to be the entire Rendova
landing fleet.


American soldiers quickly captured Rendova Island, and the PT navy set
up a base there. Across Blanche Channel, on New Georgia Island, Marines
and soldiers were fighting a heartbreaking jungle action to capture the
Japanese airfield at Munda, but they had taken over enough of New
Georgia for another PT base on The Slot side of the island.

Business was slow at first for the PTs. The big-ship admirals, who were
fighting repeated destroyer-cruiser night actions in those waters—and
who were possibly nervous about the PTs since the _McCawley_
incident—ordered the PTs to stay in when the big ships went out.

Concern of the admirals over poor communications between PTs and other
units was justified. Early on the morning of July 20th, three torpedo
boats were returning to Rendova Base through Fergusson Passage. Three B
25s—the same kind of aircraft that had performed such terrible execution
of the Japanese in the Bismarck Sea—spotted the patrol craft and came
down to the deck for a strafing run.

Aboard PT 168, Lieut. Edward Macauley III held his gunners in tight
check while they suffered under the murderous fire of the friendly
planes. Repeatedly the gunners of the 168 held their breath as the B 25s
raked them with bullets—but they held their own fire in a superb display
of discipline. Not so the other two boats. Gunners were unable to stand
being shot at without shooting back, and the first PT burst of
counterfire brought down a bomber in flames.

Somehow the other bombers came to their senses and the strafing runs
stopped, but all the boats had already been riddled and two were
burning. The 166 was past saving. Sound crew members helped the wounded
over the side into life rafts and paddled frantically away from the
burning craft. They made it out of danger just as the gas tanks went up
in a blast of searing orange flame.

Lieut. Macauley and his brave crew—the only group to come out of the
ghastly affair with unblemished credit—took their still burning 168
alongside the stricken bomber to rescue survivors before the plane went
down. Three of the bomber crew were dead; the three survivors were
wounded. One bomber and one PT were lost in the sad affair. One officer
and ten men of the torpedo-boat patrol were wounded.

Reason for the tragic mistake? Same as for the _McCawley_ sinking. The
bomber pilots had been told that there would be no friendly vessels in
those waters at that time.


PTs were harassed, during the night patrols, by Japanese seaplanes
escorting the Japanese barge convoys, so one PT skipper and a night
fighter plane rigged an ambush. An American night fighter was to perch
aloft, the PT was to charge about, throwing up a glittering rooster’s
tail of a wake to attract a float plane, and the night fighter was to
jump on the float plane’s back.

The plan worked like a fifty-dollar clock. The noisy, rambunctious PT
lured down a float plane—OK so far—and the PT’s skipper conned the
escorting night fighter in to the counterattack.

The first word from the night fighter, however, was a disconcerting,
“I’m being attacked by the float plane.”

“Bring him down to two feet,” said the PT skipper, “and _we’ll_ get on
his tail.”

Nobody was hurt.


PTs fought some lively barge actions on July 23rd and 27th, but the big
battle—the naval battle which has earned what is surely the most
exaggerated fame of all time for its importance—the battle of the 109,
took place the night between August 1st and 2nd.

On the afternoon of August 1st, search planes saw four Japanese
destroyers coming down The Slot. They were loaded with 900 soldiers and
supplies for the embattled defenders of the Munda airfield. It was a
typical run of the Tokyo Express and a prime target for PTs.

During the afternoon, when the Japanese destroyers were still far from
Rendova, the Japanese showed their deep respect for motor torpedo boats
by socking the Rendova base with bombs from 25 planes.

Two PTs were sunk by a bomber which crashed into their nest. One of the
PTs destroyed was 164, which had survived the tragic strafing by B25s
just eleven days before.


At sunset 15 PTs—four of them equipped with the new-fangled gadget
called radar—sortied from the base under the command of Lieut. Henry I.
Brantingham aboard 159. Brantingham was another veteran of the MacArthur
rescue run in the Philippines. The PTs were deployed around the
approaches to the Japanese landing beach for resupplying Munda airfield.

Lieut. Brantingham, naturally, had chosen a radar-equipped boat for his
flagship, and so was the first to pick up the Tokyo Express, just after
midnight on August 2nd. Brantingham, for some reason, thought his radar
pips were from landing craft, and closed for a strafing run, but
4.7-inch shells from the destroyers persuaded him that his targets were
fair torpedo game. He and Lieut. (jg) William F. Liebnow, Jr., in 157,
fired six torpedoes. No hits. The two boats escaped behind puffs of
smoke.

Worse than the six misses was the lack of communication. The other PTs,
most of them without radar, didn’t even know the destroyers had arrived
on the scene, much less that they had been alerted by the torpedo runs
of 157 and 159.

Next to pick up the cans was the radar-equipped 171, carrying the
division commander, Lieut. Arthur H. Berndtson. The boat’s skipper,
Ensign William Cullen Battle, closed at a slinking ten knots to 1,500
yards, where Lieut. Berndtson fired a full salvo of fish. All four tubes
blazed up in a grease fire that was as helpful to the destroyer gunners
as a spotlighted bull’s-eye. Shellbursts splashed water aboard the 171
as the boat ripped out to sea.

Again the attacking PT which had missed its target failed to report by
radio to the other PT skippers, who were straining their eyes in the
darkness looking for ships they didn’t know were already on the scene.

A third radar boat, Lieut. George E. Cookman’s 107, picked up the cans
on the radar set and missed with four fish. Three other PTs, aroused by
the flash of destroyer gunfire, came running from the southeast. A
Japanese float plane strafed them, and destroyer salvos straddled the
boats, but they got off all their torpedoes—12 of them—and all 12
missed.

The Tokyo Express went through the strait and unloaded 900 soldiers and
supplies.

So bad were communications between the PTs that most of the 15 skippers
who had started the patrol still didn’t know that the destroyers had
arrived and been unsuccessfully attacked, much less that they had
already discharged their cargoes and were going home. And that meant the
destroyers were coming up on the PT lookouts from behind.

At the wheel of the 109 was Lieut. John F. Kennedy. The boat was idling
along on one engine to save fuel and to cruise as silently as
possible—good PT doctrine for night patrol.

A lookout on the destroyer _Amagiri_ saw the 109 at about the same
instant a lookout on the PT saw the destroyer. Making a split-second
decision, Japanese Commander Hanami ordered the helmsman to spin the
wheel to starboard and ram.

The _Amagiri_ crashed into the starboard side of the 109 and killed the
lookout on the spot. The boat was cut in two; the rear section sank;
burning gasoline covered the sea. The _Amagiri_ sailed on, but at a
reduced speed, because the 109, in its death agony, had bent vanes on
the _Amagiri’s_ starboard propeller, causing violent vibration at high
speeds.

PT 169 fired torpedoes at the _Amagiri_, but at too close a range for
them to arm and explode. PT 157 fired two that missed. Thirty torpedoes
were fired that night, and the only damage inflicted on the destroyers
was by the quite involuntary and fatal body block of the 109. It was not
the greatest night of the war for the PT navy.

Eleven survivors of the 109 searched surrounding waters for two missing
shipmates, but never found them. They spent the night and the next
morning on the still-floating bow section. By midafternoon they decided
that no rescue was on the way. Since they felt naked and exposed to
Japanese plane and ship patrols, they set out to swim three and a half
miles to a desert island, the skipper towing a badly burned shipmate for
four hours by a life-jacket tie-tie gripped between his teeth.

After harrowing nights spent on several desert islands—nights during
which the skipper showed most extraordinary stamina, resourcefulness,
and courage—the ship-wrecked sailors were found by native scouts. They
took the heroic skipper by canoe to a coast-watcher station, and there
he boarded a rescue PT and returned for his marooned companions.

The skipper of the 109 was, of course, the same John F. Kennedy who on
January 20, 1961, became the thirty-fifth President of the United
States.


After Munda fell and with it all of New Georgia, American strategists
studied the map and decided that island-by-island reduction of Japanese
strength was too tedious. They decided to start by-passing some of the
bases, cutting off the by-passed garrisons and starving them behind an
American sea blockade. More night work for the PTs.

Up the line a bit was the island of Vella Lavella, only lightly held by
the Japanese. American strategists chose a beach called Barakoma as a
possible landing spot and ordered a reconnaissance.

Four PTs, on the night between August 12th and 13th, carried a scouting
party of 45 men to the beach at Barakoma. A Japanese plane nagged the
boats with strafing and bombing runs for two hours. A near miss tore up
the planking on the 168 and wounded four sailors, so the 168 had to drop
out of the operation, but the other three boats put their passengers
ashore safely. Scouts reported that the only Japanese around that part
of the island were ship-wrecked survivors of an earlier sea battle, so
thirty-six hours later four more PTs landed reinforcements.

Japanese snooper planes spotted the PT passenger runs, but apparently
the Japanese high command couldn’t think of torpedo boats as invasion
craft, so the scout landings were made without interference.

The main force followed, and by October 1st all of Vella Lavella was in
American hands.


The Japanese began shrinking their Solomon Islands perimeter, falling
back to the islands on the near side of the new American base at Vella
Lavella. American destroyers, out to smash the evacuation bargeline, met
a Japanese destroyer screen for the _daihatsus_ on the night between
October 6th and 7th. As usual, Japanese torpedoes were deadly. One
American destroyer went down and two others were sorely damaged. More
important, the Japanese supply and evacuation train ran its errands
without molestation from the American cans.

The American destroyers did sink the Japanese _Yugumo_, and American PTs
were sent to pick up 78 survivors. Aboard the 163, an American sailor
offered a cup of coffee to one of the captive Japanese, who killed the
Good Samaritan (and of course died himself at the hands of the murdered
sailor’s shipmates). PT sailors felt less uneasy about the massacre of
the shipwrecked Japanese at the Bismarck Sea after the treacherous
murder of their comrade by a rescued Japanese.


Having successfully leapfrogged once, American strategists looked at the
map again. The whole point to the island-hopping campaign was to put
American fighter planes close enough to Rabaul so that they could screen
bombers over that base and keep the Japanese pinned down there under
constant bombardment. The best site for a fighter base was Bougainville
Island, so American planners put their fingers on the map and said:
“This is the place for the next one.”

Accordingly, Marines landed at Cape Torokina, on Bougainville, on
November 1st. Their mission was to capture enough of the island to build
and protect a fighter strip. The rest of the island could be left to the
15,000 Japanese soldiers who defended it. Nobody cared about them.
Rabaul was the real target.

The Japanese high command at Rabaul sent down a cruiser-destroyer force
with the mission of getting among the American transports in Empress
Augusta Bay, off Torokina, and tearing up the helpless train ships like
a pack of wolves in a herd of sheep.

An American cruiser-destroyer force met them just after midnight on
November 2nd, and sank one Japanese cruiser and a destroyer. More
important, the American flotilla ran off the Japanese marauders before
they reached the transports.

American reconnaissance planes, however, spotted a massive concentration
of heavy cruisers and destroyers building up in Rabaul Harbor, a
concentration too great for American naval forces then in the South
Pacific to handle, because most American capital ships of the Pacific
Fleet had been pulled back toward Hawaii to support an operation in the
Gilbert Islands.

Admiral Halsey scratched together a carrier task force, and even though
a carrier raid near a land-based airfield was then against doctrine, he
sent the carrier’s planes into the harbor. They damaged the cruisers
badly enough to relieve the immediate threat to the Torokina landings.
The carrier raids stirred up a hornet’s nest around Rabaul.

Eighteen Japanese torpedo bombers took off to smash the brazen carrier
task force. Just before total dark they found American ships and
attacked. Radio Tokyo broadcast, with jubilation, that the score in this
“First Air Battle of Bougainville” was “one large carrier blown up and
sunk, one medium carrier set ablaze and later sunk, and two heavy
cruisers and one cruiser and destroyer sunk.” Rabaul’s torpedo bombers
won a group commendation.

An American staff officer, hearing the account of this First Air Battle
of Bougainville as reported by Japanese pilots, could only hold his head
in his hands and hope his own pilots were not feeding him the same kind
of foolishness.

Here is what really happened in the First Air Battle of Bougainville.

A landing craft, the LCI 70, and the PT 167, were lumbering back from a
landing party on the Torokina beachhead. Just after sunset the Japanese
bombers struck in low-level torpedo runs. The PT brought down the leader
by the novel method of snagging him with its mast. The plane’s torpedo
punched clean through the PT’s nose, leaving its tail assembly,
appropriately enough, in the crew’s head.

The torpedo boat’s 20-mm. cannon shot down a second torpedo bomber so
close to the ship that the sailors on the fantail were soaked.

Four torpedo bombers launched their fish at the LCI, but since the
torpedoes were set for attack on a deep-draft carrier, they passed
harmlessly under the landing craft’s shallow hull—except for one which
porpoised and jumped through the LCI’s thin skin, unfortunately killing
one sailor. The unexploded warhead came to rest on a starchy bed in the
bread locker. The torpedo was still smoking, so the LCI’s skipper,
Lieut. (jg) H. W. Frey, ordered “Abandon ship!”

Time passed. No explosion. A damage-control party reboarded the LCI and
rigged her for a tow back to Torokina. PT 167 raced ahead with the
wounded.

Rear Admiral T. S. Wilkinson radioed congratulations to Ensign Theodore
Berlin, skipper of the PT, for knocking down a plane with his mast.
“Fireplug sprinkles dog,” is the way the admiral put it.

So ended the First Air Battle of Bougainville.


PTs quickly set up a base on Puruata Island, just off the Torokina
beachhead, even though the Marine foothold was still feeble. Sea patrols
of the torpedo boats were still vexed by poor communications. The night
of November 8th, for instance, the destroyers _Hudson_ and _Anthony_
came up to Torokina, sure that there were no friendly PTs in the bay,
because higher-ups on the beach had told them so. Naturally, when radar
picked up the pips of patrolling PTs 163, 169 and 170, they let fly with
everything.

The PTs, equally misinformed about what friendlies to expect, took the
destroyer broadsides to be a most unfriendly action and maneuvered for a
torpedo run. The skipper of the 170 tried to decoy the two American
destroyers into a trap. He called the 163 by radio, to warn him that he
was leading “three Nip cans” into their torpedo range. PT 163 got off a
long shot at the “three” cans, which fortunately missed.

There has been much fruitless speculation about that third mysterious
can reported by 170. Aboard the 170, the radar screen showed a big
target—not one of the two American destroyers—10,000 yards dead ahead. A
salvo of shells that “looked like ashcans” passed overhead, coming from
the same direction as the radar target. To this day nobody knows who was
the assailant with guns big enough to fire ashcan-sized projectiles.

The running duel lit up the bay for forty-five minutes. The torpedo
boats were just coming around for a new torpedo run when _Anthony_
figured out what was going on.

“Humblest apologies,” the _Anthony_ said by radio in a handsome bid to
accept all the blame. “We are friendly vessels.”


Farther west near Arawe, on New Britain, on Christmas Day 1943, Lieut.
Ed Farley’s 190, with Lieut. Commander H. M. S. Swift aboard, and Ensign
Rumsey Ewing’s 191 were returning to the Dregar Harbor base in New
Guinea, after a dull patrol.

Between 30 and 38 Japanese dive bombers and fighters came down from the
north and bombed and strafed the boats in groups of three and four. The
two little PTs were in a jam, for the force attacking them was large
enough to take on a carrier task force, screen destroyers and all. The
boats separated, went to top speed, and zigzagged toward a bank of low
clouds twelve miles away.

Japanese planes often made one pass at PTs and then dropped the job if
they did not score, but this overwhelming big flight of planes returned
for repeated attacks. PT skippers clamored for fighter cover from the
beach.

Aboard the 191, the skipper was hit in the lungs and Ensign Fred Calhoun
took command. A machine-gun bullet pierced his thigh, but he hung on to
the wheel to play a deadly game of tag with the attackers. He held a
steady course, his eye fixed to the bomb racks of the attacking plane,
until the bomb was away and committed to its course. Then he whipped
over the wheel to put the boat where the bomb wasn’t when it landed.

Nevertheless, fragments from a near miss knocked out a 20-mm. gun and
severely wounded the gunner, Chief Motor Machinist Mate Thomas Dean, and
the loader, Motor Machinist Mate Second Class August Sciutto. Another
near miss punched an 18-inch hole in the portside and peppered the
superstructure with steel splinters.

Japanese strafers hit the port and starboard engines and punctured the
water jackets, which spurted jets of boiling water into the engine room.
Engineer of the Watch Victor Bloom waded into the streams of scalding
water to tape and stuff leaks so that the engines would not overheat and
fuse into a solid mass.

Fearing that the gas fumes from punctured lines might explode, he closed
off the fuel-tank compartment and pulled a release valve to smother it
with carbon dioxide. When he had tidied up his engine room, Bloom gave
first aid to the wounded. (Not surprisingly, Victor Bloom won a Navy
Cross for this action.)

By this time the two PTs had knocked four planes into the sea near the
boats.

“Toward the end of the attack,” said Lieut. Farley, “the enemy became
more and more inaccurate and less willing to close us. It is possible
that we may have knocked down the squadron leader as the planes milled
about in considerable confusion, as if lacking leadership.”

Forty minutes after they were called, P 47 fighter planes from
Finschhafen arrived to drive off the shaken Japanese apparently startled
by the two floating buzz saws.

One of the P 47s was hit and made a belly landing about half a mile from
the 190. The pilot, though badly wounded in the head and arm, freed
himself and escaped from the cockpit before his plane went down. The 190
went to the rescue of its rescuer, and Lieut. Commander Swift and Seaman
First Class Joe Cope jumped overboard to tow the groggy pilot to the
undamaged PT.

Authorities were as astonished as the Japanese attackers had been by the
savage and effective response of the two PTs to the massive attack which
should have wiped them out, according to all the rules. Smaller and less
determined air attacks had sunk cruisers and destroyers in other waters.

Commander Mumma, with justifiable pride in his two boats, said of the
action: “It has shown that the automatic weapon armament is most
effective. It has demonstrated that ably handled PTs can, in daylight,
withstand heavy air attack.”


On the same Christmas Day 1943, the Bougainville bomber strip went into
business, and the fighter strips were so well established that American
forces could afford to settle down behind the barbed wire of The
Perimeter, content with what they already held. From here on out, they
could afford to ignore as much as possible the 15,000 Japanese still on
the island. From that day Rabaul was doomed to comparative impotence
under a merciless shower of bombs.

Not that Rabaul was a feeble outpost. One hundred thousand Japanese
soldiers, behind powerful fortifications and with immense supplies, made
Rabaul a formidable fortress—too tough for a direct frontal
assault—until the end of the war. Without air power, however, the
Japanese there could do nothing to hold back the Allied advance except
to glower at the task forces passing by just out of gun range on their
way to new island bases farther up the line.

The Japanese gate was unhinged at both ends and the Allies poured
through the gap.

American strategists decided to jump over Rabaul, leaving its defenders
to shrivel away behind a sea blockade. Some of the PTs leapfrogged with
the rest of the Allied forces and readied for more night patrol in the
waters farther along the sea lanes to Tokyo; some of them stayed behind
to make life as miserable as possible for the bypassed Japanese on
Bougainville and the other islands cut off from home.


PTs played a big part in the last jump that isolated Rabaul. The
landings in the Admiralty Islands were on Leap Year Day, February 29,
1944, by units of the First Cavalry Division. The Admiralty Islands are
a ring of long, thin islands enclosing a magnificent anchorage called
Seeadler Harbor. The fine anchorage and the airstrips planned for the
islands would give the Allies the last brick in the wall around Rabaul.

Faulty reconnaissance from the air had shown that the islands were free
of Japanese. Actually there were 4,000 Japanese in the islands, and
their commander was insulted that the Americans landed a force only a
fraction the size of his. He counterattacked violently. The only Navy
fire support available was from destroyers and small craft.

Among the small craft were MTB Squadron Twenty-One, commanded by
Lieutenant Paul Rennell, and Squadron Eighteen, commanded by the same
Lieut. Commander H. M. S. Swift who had surprised the Japanese air
command by the vicious antiaircraft fire of his two torpedo boats near
Arawe on Christmas Day.

The PTs went to work for the cavalry as a kind of sea cavalry, running
errands, carrying wounded, towing stranded boats off the beach, handling
the leadline to measure a poorly charted harbor bottom, and even
carrying cavalry generals on scouting missions.

From inside Seeadler Harbor they gave the cavalry close fire support
with machine guns and mortars. A keen-eyed sailor on 363 knocked a
sniper out of a tree with a short burst, for instance, and the crew of
the 323 demolished, with 50 calibers, a Japanese radio and observation
platform in another tree.

The island of Manus fell quickly, and Major General I. P. Swift,
commanding general of the First Cavalry Division, in a generous tribute
to a sister service, said: “The bald statement, ‘The naval forces
supported this action’ ... is indeed a masterpiece of understatement....
Without the Navy there would not have been any action.”




                                   5.
                        Along the Turkey’s Back


From the time that American planes stopped the Japanese onrush at the
Coral Sea and at Midway, it was a two-year job for the Allies to batter
down the Japanese gate at Rabaul and at the Huon Gulf. Once the gate was
down, it took MacArthur’s forces only four months to make the 1,200-mile
trip down the turkey’s back to a perch on the turkey’s head, just across
from the East Indies and the Philippines.

The swift trip was made possible, however, by a leap-frogging technique
that left behind a monumental job for the PT navy. General MacArthur
made almost all of his New Guinea landings where the Japanese weren’t,
by-passing tens of thousands of tough jungle fighters and leaving the
job of starving them out to the blockading navy. Except for the brief
loan of ships from the battle-line for special missions, the blockading
navy was the PT fleet.

The New Guinea PT force was beefed up for the blockade by many new boats
and officers. MacArthur had been deeply impressed by the torpedo boats
during his escape from Corregidor and used all his influence—which was
considerable in those days—to impress every PT possible into his force.

The PTs in New Guinea lost almost all use for their torpedoes, except
when they chanced to catch a blockade-running supply submarine on the
surface. The boat skippers wanted more guns, more auto-cannon and
machine guns for shooting up the Number One blockade-runner, the armored
_daihatsu_—and they got them.

Early in November 1943, Squadron Twenty-One arrived at Morobe base armed
with 40-mm. auto-cannon, a tremendously effective weapon for all-around
mischief. It was the first New Guinea squadron armed with the newer and
deadlier weapon.

More than the size of the new cannon, however, the size of the new
officers astonished the veteran PT sailors. Commander Selman S. Bowling,
who had replaced Commander Mumma as chief of PTs in the Southwest
Pacific, had voluntarily ridden on the Tulagi boats before his new
assignment, and he had decided then that PT officers should be tough and
athletic. When he went to the States to organize new squadrons, he had
recruited the biggest, toughest athletes he could find.

Among the newcomers were Ensign Ernest W. Pannell, All-American tackle
from Texas A. and M. and professional football player for the Green Bay
Packers; Ensign Alex Schibanoff of Franklin and Marshall College and the
Detroit Lions; Ensign Steven L. Levanitis of Boston College and the
Philadelphia Eagles; Ensign Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American from Notre
Dame; Lieut. (jg) Paul B. Lillis, captain of the Notre Dame team; Ensign
Louis E. Smith, University of California halfback; Ensign Kermit W.
Montz, Franklin and Marshall; Ensign John M. Eastham, Jr., Texas A. and
M.; Ensign Stuart A. Lewis, University of California; Ensign Cedric J.
Janien, Harvard; and Ensign William P. Hall, Wabash.

Also bulging with muscle were Ensign Joseph W. Burk, holding the world’s
record as single-sculls champion; Ensign Kenneth D. Molloy, All-American
lacrosse player from Syracuse University; Lieut. John B. Williams,
Olympic swimmer from Oregon State; and Ensign James F. Foran, swimmer
from Princeton.

Commander Bowling was right. PT crews had to be tough for the kind of
warfare they were waging. Shallow-draft _daihatsus_ clung to the shore,
and the PTs had to come in as close as 100 yards from the beach to find
their prey. For 1,200 miles the shoreline was lined with ten of
thousands of blockaded Japanese soldiers, every one of them itching to
get a crack at the patrol boats that were starving them to death. The
Japanese set up shore batteries and baited traps with helpless-looking
_daihatsus_ to lure the PT marauders within range. In this deadly
cat-and-mouse game, the PT did not always win.


About 2 A.M. on March 7th, PTs 337 and 338 slipped into Hansa Bay, a
powerfully garrisoned Japanese base by-passed early in the Allied
forward movement. The PTs poked about the enemy harbor and picked up a
radar target close to shore. From 400 yards away, the two skippers saw
that their radar pip came from two heavily camouflaged luggers moored
together, a prime bit of business for PTs. Before they could open fire,
however, they discovered that they had been baited into an ambush.

Machine guns opened up on the beach, and the PTs returned the fire, but
the best they could do was to strafe the bush at random, because the
Japanese gun positions were well concealed.

The machine guns at close range were bad enough, but the PT crews
“pulled 20 Gs” when a heavy battery began firing from the mouth of the
bay. The PTs, already deep inside the bay, would have to pass close to
the heavy guns to escape from the harbor. The worst was that the gunners
were obviously crack artillerymen, for the first shell hit so close to
the port bow of the 337 that water from the spout sluiced down the decks
and shrapnel whizzed overhead.

The sharpshooting gunners of the shore battery put a shell from the next
salvo into the tank compartment below the port turret. All engines went
dead and the boat burst into flame. The skipper, Ensign Henry W. Cutter,
pulled the CO₂ release valve but it was too late—the boat was doomed.

Francis C. Watson, Motor Machinist Mate, Third Class, who had been blown
from the port turret by the shell blast, got to his feet and started
forward, away from the searing flames, but he turned back into the fire
to help William Daley, Jr., who was crawling painfully out of the
burning engine room. Daley had been badly wounded in the neck and jaw.
Watson pulled Daley from the flames and with Morgan J. Canterbury,
Torpedomen’s Mate, Second Class, carried him forward. Ensign Cutter put
a life raft into the water on the side away from the big guns, and
Daley, dazed but obedient, tried to get into the raft, but slipped
overboard. The skipper and Ensign Robert W. Hyde jumped after him and
towed him to the raft.

The crew paddled and pushed the raft away from the burning boat and out
to sea, but a strong current worked against them and in two hours they
made only 700 yards. When their boat exploded, the concussion hurt.

Searchlights swept the bay and guns fired all night at the 338, which
had escaped behind smoke and was now trying to get back _into_ the
death-trap to find out what had happened to their comrades of the 337.
The crack gunners ashore were too good, however, and repeated brackets
from heavy salvos kept the 338 outside until the rising sun drove the
worried sailors home.

Daley died before sunrise, and—in the formal language of the Navy
report—“was committed to the sea.”

Survivors clinging to the three-by-seven-foot balsa oval were the
skipper and Ensign Hyde, Watson, Canterbury; Ensign Bruce S. Bales;
Allen B. Gregory, QM2c; Harry E. Barnett, RM2c; Henry S. Timmons, Y2c;
Edgar L. Schmidt, TM3c; Evo A. Fucili, MoMM3c; and James P. Mitchell,
SC3c.

The raft was not built for an 11-man load, so the sailors took turns
riding in the slat-bottom craft and swimming alongside. Currents nagged
them, and at dawn the raft was still less than a mile off the entrance
to the bay, within easy reach of Japanese patrol boats.

During the morning the currents set the boat toward Manam Island, six
miles away, and Ensign Cutter decided to make for the island, with the
idea that he and his crew would hide in the woods. Maybe they would find
food, water, shelter—who knows, just possibly a native canoe or
sailboat.

All afternoon the sailors paddled for the island, but the devilish
currents were not through with them. Every time they came close to the
beach a current would sweep them out to sea again.

Floating on the same currents were two logs which the sailors tied to
the raft. After dark the skipper, still hopeful of finding a boat on the
island, set out with Ensign Bales to swim to the beach, using the logs
as a crude substitute for water wings. For three hours the two young
officers swam, only to bump gently against their own raft again. The
currents had carried them in a giant circle, back to their starting
point.

Hyde and Gregory, tired of inaction, set out for the beach. They were
never seen again.

That night the sailors watched the flash of gunfire at Hansa Bay, where
their squadron mates shot up the beach in revenge for their loss. No PTs
came close enough for the shipwrecked sailors to hail.

By their very nature, PT sailors were men of action. Their solution to
any problem was, “Don’t just sit there, _do_ something.” The inactivity
of waiting passively for rescue was too much for some of them.

Just before dawn Mitchell set out for the island, and just after dawn
Ensign Bales, Fucili, Watson, and Schmidt followed. The others would
have gone, too, but they were too weak.

Watson returned to the raft in the middle of the morning. He had swum to
within 75 yards of the shore, he said, and he had seen Ensign Bales
walking around on dry land, but he had also seen Japanese workmen
building boats in a shipyard, so he came back to the raft. All hands
abandoned the idea of going to the island. After the war, captured
documents showed that the Japanese on Manam Island had captured one
officer and two enlisted men of the sailors who had swum ashore, but
these three luckless sailors were never heard of after this brief
mention.

That night, their third in the water, the sailors were exposed to a
nerve-racking and mysterious inspection. A small boat pulled out from
shore and circled the raft at 200 yards. Two Japanese trained a brace of
machine guns on the Americans, but held their fire. The shivering
sailors looked down the muzzles of those two machine guns until four
o’clock in the morning, when a squall with six-foot waves drove the
patrol craft back to the beach. After the squall passed, the PT sailors
were alone again—more alone than ever, for the delirious Canterbury had
swum away during the storm. Barnett, a first-rate swimmer, had chased
after Canterbury to bring him back, but had lost him in the heavy seas.

That morning the five surviving sailors spied an overturned Japanese
boat. It was fifteen feet long and a luxurious yacht compared to their
flimsy raft, so they righted the boat and bailed it out. A crab was
running about the bottom, and during the chase for this tasty tidbit the
sailors let their life raft drift away. Nobody really cared; they had no
fond memories of the balsa boat.

The sailors suffered horribly from thirst and they eagerly pulled in a
drifting coconut, but it was dry. They were badly sunburned and covered
with salt-water sores. Another chilly night and another blazing morning
passed without relief.

At noon on March 10th, three Army B 25s flew over. The planes circled
the frantically waving sailors, and Ensign Cutter sent a message by
semaphore, a dubious method of communication with Army pilots, but
better than nothing.

One bomber dropped a box which collapsed and sank. On his next pass, he
dropped two more boxes and a small package fixed to a life preserver.
They plunked into the sea not ten feet from the boat. The sailors
eagerly tore open the packages and found food, water, cigarettes, and
medicine. A marked chart showed them their position, and a message said
a Catalina flying boat was on its way to pick them up.

The Catalina took its time, however, for the sailors had one more trying
night to endure before the Cat, screened by two P 47s, landed on the
water and picked up the five exhausted survivors.


The old problem of bad communications between the different services
bothered the PTs worse than ever in New Guinea waters.

On the morning of March 27th, Lieut. Crowell C. Hall, on Ensign George
H. Guckert’s PT 353, accompanied by Ensign Richard B. Secrest’s 121,
went into Bangula Bay to investigate a reported enemy schooner.

That morning, at Australian fighter squadron headquarters on Kiriwina
Island, a careless clerk put the report of the PT patrol in the wrong
file basket, so fighter pilots flew over Bangula Bay, with the
information that no friendly PTs would be out. This was the same setup
that had already caused repeated tragedies and near-tragedies in other
waters.

At 7:45 in the morning, admittedly an unusual hour for the
night-prowling PTs to be abroad, four P 40s of the Australian squadron
flew over the boats. Lieut. Hall asked them, by radio, to investigate
the schooner, which was beyond a dangerous reef from the PT boats. The
plane pilots looked it over and told the PT skipper that it had already
been badly strafed and wasn’t worth attacking further.

The boats turned to go home. Four other P 40s and two Beaufighters of
the same squadron came down out of the sun in a strafing run on the PTs.
One of the Beaufighter pilots recognized the boats and frantically tried
to call his mates off the attack, but nobody listened. The gallant
Australian pilot even put his fighter between the strafing planes and
the boats, trying to block the attack with his own body. No luck.

The PT officers held their men under tight discipline for several
punishing runs, but the nerves of the gunners finally gave way, and each
boat fired a short burst from 37- and 40-mm. cannon and the 50-caliber
machine guns. The officers sharply ordered a cease-fire, and for the
rest of the attack the PT crews suffered helplessly while the planes
riddled their craft and killed their shipmates. Both boats exploded and
sank.

The first quartet of P 40s, the planes that had chatted with Lieut.
Hall, rushed back to the scene when they heard the radio traffic between
the attacking fighters and suspected what was happening. They dropped a
life raft to the swimming survivors and radioed headquarters the story
of the disaster. Two PTs were dispatched to the rescue.

Four officers and four enlisted men were killed, four officers and eight
enlisted men were wounded, two PT boats were lost to the deadly fire of
the friendly fighters—all because one slipshod clerk had put a piece of
paper in a wrong file basket.


Even worse was coming.

The combat zone in the Pacific was divided into the Southwest and the
South Pacific commands. Communication between the two commands at the
junior officer level was almost nonexistent. Everybody was supposed to
stay in his own backyard and not cross the dividing line.

On the night of April 28th, Lieut. (jg) Robert J. Williams’ 347 was
patrolling with Lieut. (jg) Stanley L. Manning’s 350. The 347 went hard
aground on a reef at Cape Pomas, only five miles from the dividing line
between the south and southwest zones. Lieut. Manning passed a line to
the stranded boat, and the two crews set about the all-too-familiar job
of freeing a PT from an uncharted rock.

At 7 A.M. two Marine Corps Corsairs from the South Pacific zone, through
faulty navigation, crossed the dividing line without knowing it.
Naturally they had no word of these PTs patrolling in their area,
because they weren’t in their area. They attacked.

The PTs did not recognize the Corsairs as friendly, and shot one of them
down. (This is an extraordinary mistake, also, for the gull-winged
Corsair was probably the easiest of all warplanes on both sides to
identify, especially from the head-on view presented during a strafing
run.)

Three men were killed in the first attack on the 350, and both boats
were badly damaged. The skippers called for help. The tender _Hilo_, at
Talasea, asked for air cover from Cape Gloucester (in the Southwest
Pacific zone and hence out of communications with the South Pacific base
of the Corsair pilots). The tender sent Lieut. (jg) James B. Burk to the
rescue in PT 346.

The pilot of the surviving Corsair reported to his base at Green Island,
in the South Pacific zone, that he had attacked two Japanese gunboats
125 feet long in Lassul Bay. (The PTs were slightly more than half that
long. Lassul Bay was actually 20 miles from Cape Pomas, the true scene
of the attack, and hence fifteen miles inside the South Pacific zone and
not in the Southwest Pacific zone.)

Green Island scrambled four Corsairs, six Avengers, four Hellcats, and
eight Dauntless dive bombers to finish off the stricken PTs. The
powerful striking force, enough air-power to take on a cruiser division,
found no boats in Lassul Bay, but they, too, wandered across the
dividing line and found the PTs at Cape Pomas.

By then the 346 had arrived. The skipper saw the approaching planes, but
recognized them as friendly types and thought they were the air cover
from Cape Gloucester, so the PT crews ignored the planes and continued
with the salvage and rescue work.

First hint that something had gone wrong was a shower of bombs that
burst among the PT boats. The PT officers frantically tried every trick
in the catalogue to identify themselves, and in despair finally turned
loose their gunners, who shot down one of the planes. The loss of one of
their mates angered the pilots and they pressed their attacks harder.
Two of the three PTs went down.

The plane flight commander called for a Catalina rescue boat to pick up
the downed pilot. The Cat never found the pilot, but instead picked up
thirteen survivors of the torpedo boats. Their arrival at Green Island
was the first word the horrified pilots there had that their targets had
been friendly.

Three PT officers and 11 men were killed, two plane pilots were lost,
four officers and nine men were wounded, two PTs and two planes were
destroyed, in this useless and tragic encounter.


Most PT patrols were not as disastrous, of course, but it was a rare
night that did not provide some adventure. Lieut. (jg) James Cunningham
kept a diary during 1944, and a few extracts from this journal show the
nature of a typical PT’s blockade duty:

  _March 12, 1944_: PTs 149 (_The Night Hawk_) and 194 patrol the north
  coast of New Britain. At 2300 we picked up a target on radar—closed in
  and saw a small Jap surface craft. We made a run on it and found out
  it was aground and apparently destroyed. We destroyed it some more.

  We moved to the other side of Garove Island, where we saw a craft
  under way heading across the mouth of the harbor. Over one part of the
  harbor were very high cliffs, an excellent spot for gun emplacements.
  We blindly chased the craft and closed in on it for a run. Just then
  the guns—six-inchers—opened up from the cliffs on us, and it seemed
  for a while that they would blow us out of the water. We left the
  decoy and headed out to sea, laying a smoke screen. The concussion of
  the exploding shells was terrific. I still believe the craft was a
  decoy to pull us into the harbor, and we readily took the bait. The
  thing that saved us was that the Japs were too eager. They fired too
  soon before we were really far into the harbor. On the way home, about
  10 miles offshore from New Britain, we picked up three large radar
  pips and figured they were enemy destroyers, because they were in
  enemy waters and we were authorized to destroy anything in this grid
  sector. We chased within one mile, tracking them with radar, and got
  set to make our run. We could see them by eye at that range and
  identified them as a destroyer and two large landing craft.

  We radioed for airplanes to help us with this valuable prize. Just as
  we started our torpedo run from about 500 yards away, the destroyer
  shot a recognition flare and identified themselves as friendly. It was
  a close call. We were within seconds of firing our fish. The task unit
  was off course and had wandered into a forbidden zone.

  _June 23, 1944_: PTs 144 (_The Southern Cross_) and 189 departed
  Aitape Base, New Guinea, for patrol to the west.

  We closed the beach at Sowam after noticing lots of lights moving.
  They appeared to be trucks, moving very slow. Muffled down, hidden by
  a black, moonless night, we sneaked to within 150 yards off the beach
  and waited for a truck to come around the bend and onto the short
  stretch of road that ran along the beach. Here came one, lights
  blazing. Both boats blasted away. The truck burst into flames and
  stopped, lights still burning. The last we saw of the truck (shore
  batteries fired on us immediately, so we got out) it was still
  standing there with headlights burning and flames leaping up in the
  New Guinea night. It has become quite a sport, by the way, shooting
  enemy trucks moving along the beach with lights on. The Japs never
  seem to learn. We fire at them night after night. They turn off the
  lights briefly, then they turn them back on again when they think we
  have gone. But we haven’t gone. We shoot them up some more, and they
  turn off the lights again. And so on all night long.

The Japanese apparently smarted under these truck-busting attacks, for
Lieut. Cunningham’s entry three nights later tells a different story:

  _June 26, 1944_: PTs 144 and 149 left Aitape Base, New Guinea, to
  patrol toward Sowam Village, where the road comes down to the beach.
  We were after trucks. We closed cautiously to three-quarters of a mile
  off the beach, then it seemed that everything opened up on us, 50 and
  30 calibers, 40 mms and three-inchers. At the time they fired on us we
  were dead in the water, with all three engines in neutral. To get the
  engines into gear, the drill is to signal the engine room where the
  motor mack of the watch puts the engine in gear by hand. There is no
  way to do it from the cockpit. Then, when the gears are engaged, the
  skipper can control the speed by three throttles.

  I was at the helm in the cockpit when the batteries opened fire, and I
  shoved all three throttles wide open, forgetting that the gears
  weren’t engaged. Of course, the boat almost shook apart from the
  wildly racing engines, but we didn’t move. The motor mack in the
  engine room below wrestled against me to push the throttles back. He
  was stronger than I was and finally got the engines slowed down enough
  to put them into gear. _Then_ we got moving fast. We made it out to
  sea OK without being hit, but I sure pulled a boo boo that time.

  _August 28, 1944_: PTs 188 and 144 west toward Hollandia, with a squad
  of Army radio-men aboard to contact a land patrol. This is enemy-held
  territory and the patrol was in hopes of taking a few prisoners.

  Just after sunrise we received a radio message to pick up Jap
  prisoners at Ulau Mission. We proceeded to the mission and I asked
  some P 39s that were strafing the beach to cover us while we made the
  landing.

  Lieut. (jg) Harry Suttenfield, skipper of the 188, and I launched a
  life raft and headed in to pick up prisoners from the Army patrol.

  We made it OK until we got into the surf, then the breakers swamped
  us. There were many dead Japs lying around, and the soldiers were
  burning the village. The natives took the prisoners out to the boats
  and then swam us through the surf, pushing the raft.

  We turned the prisoners over to the Army at Aitape.

More and more as the by-passed Japanese became progressively demoralized
by lack of food and rest, the PTs were pressed into service as Black
Marias, police vans for carrying Japanese captives from the front lines,
or even from behind the lines, to Army headquarters where Intelligence
officers interrogated the prisoners.

Most Japanese simply would not be captured, and killed themselves rather
than surrender. Many of them made dangerous prisoners, for they
surrendered only to get close enough to their captors to kill them with
concealed weapons.


On the night of July 7, 1944, Lieut. (jg) William P. Hall, on the 329,
dropped a fatal depth charge under a 130-foot lugger south of Cape
Oransbari. The crew snagged four prisoners, one of them a lieutenant
colonel, one of the highest ranking officers taken prisoner in New
Guinea.

One of the prisoners attacked Lieut. Hall, who flattened him with a
right to the mouth. Hall sprained his thumb and badly gashed his hand on
the prisoner’s teeth. He was awarded the Purple Heart for being wounded
“in the face of the enemy.”

Oddly enough, what few Japanese did let themselves be taken made docile,
even eagerly cooperative, prisoners. PT crewmen could never tell what
was coming on a Black Maria mission. Either the captives tried to kill
themselves or their guards—or they tried to help the guards kill their
former comrades.


On the night between March 16th and 17th, Lieut. H. M. S. Swift (the
Lieut. Swift of the great air battle at Aitape) was out with Lieut. (jg)
Eugene E. Klecan’s 367 and 325. Off Pak Island, the two boats caught
nine Japanese in a canoe. As the PTs approached, one Japanese killed
himself and three others with a grenade. Another was shot by PT sailors
when he resisted capture. The others came aboard willingly.

One of the captives asked for a pencil and wrote: “My name is Kamingaga.
After finished Ota High School, I worked in a Yokohama army factory as
an American spy. I set fire to Yokohama’s arsenal. Later, I was
conscripted into the Japanese army, unfortunately. I was very unhappy,
but now I am very happy because I was saved by American Army. To repay
your kindness I will work as a spy for your American Army.”

He was turned over to skeptical Army officers, who did not make a deal
with the traitorous captive.


Another Japanese canary, however, sang a most profitable song to his
captors.

On the night between April 28th and 29th, Ensign Francis L. Cappaert, in
370, and Ensign Louis A. Fanget, in 388, sank three barges in
Nightingale Bay, east of Wewak.

One of the barges had been loaded with two 75-mm. cannon and 45
soldiers. The PT crews tried to pull prisoners from the water, but all
but two deliberately drowned themselves.

One of the two captives said to Ensign Cappaert, “Me officer,” and
eagerly volunteered the advice that more barges were coming into
Nightingale Bay in a few minutes. The PT skippers didn’t know what kind
of trap their prisoner might be baiting for them, but they stayed around
anyhow. Three more barges came around the bend on schedule, however, and
the PT’s riddled them from ambush as “Me Officer” looked on.

The only surviving Japanese from the last three barges was a courier
with a consignment of secret documents. The first lesson drilled into
American sailors was that all secret documents, code books, maps, and
combat instruction, were to go to the bottom if capture was imminent.
The Japanese courier clung to his package, at some risk to himself, for
it would have been easier to swim without it. He willingly turned over
the secret papers to the PT officers.

At headquarters in Aitape, officers questioned the prisoners in their
own language, and to the astonishment of the Navy, the Japanese officer
dictated a barge movement timetable that helped PTs knock off fifteen
barges and a picket boat in the next five nights.

Commander Robert J. Bulkley, Jr., a PT veteran who later became the
official naval historian of the PT fleet (not to be confused with John
Bulkeley of the MacArthur rescue mission), said of the Japanese conduct
as prisoners:

“Most of them preferred death to capture, but once taken prisoner they
were usually docile and willing, almost eager, to give information. And
while their information might be limited, it was generally reliable.
They seldom attempted deception.

“The big job was to capture them, and PT crews became fairly adept at
it. One method was to crack a man over the head with a boathook and haul
him up on deck. Another technique, more certain, was to drop a cargo net
over the bow. Two men climbed down on the net. Other members of the crew
held them by lines around their waist so that their hands were free.

“They would blackjack the floating Japanese and put a line on him so
that he could be hauled aboard. Those were rough methods, but the gentle
ones didn’t work. The Japanese almost never took a line willingly, and
as long as they were conscious would fight to free themselves from a
boathook.”

As a nice contrast to this careless betrayal of secret information by
the Japanese, consider an American PT officer’s reaction to the loss of
a secret code book.

On the night of April 2nd, the 114 went aground 400 yards off Yarin, on
Kairiru Island. The crew jettisoned torpedoes and depth charges and the
boat was pulled off the rock by _The Southern Cross_ (144). The
propellers were so badly damaged, however, that the 114 was abandoned.
Confidential publications, including a code book, were put into a raft,
but the crew carelessly let it drift to the Japanese-held beach.

When the boats returned to the tender, the skipper reported the loss of
the codes to Lieut. Commander Robert Leeson, who jumped into 129,
commanded by his brother Ensign A. D. Leeson, and took off for Yarin.
Ensign Edmund F. Wakelin tagged along in 134.

The two PTs hove to off the beach at Yarin, and the officers studied the
situation. They could see the raft on the shore, but it was in full view
of a Japanese military hut, 600 yards away, and Yarin was the site of a
known powerful shore battery.

Commander Leeson wanted those books, though, and he wanted them badly,
so he jumped over the side and in full daylight swam the 400 yards
across the reef to the beach. While crews of the two boats watched the
beach with fingers crossed, dreading the sight of the first puff of
flame from the hidden shore battery, Commander Leeson pushed the raft
into the water and towed it back to the boat. The secret publications
were taken aboard intact.

The Japanese chose that moment—the moment just after their last
chance—to wake up and plunk a salvo of shells around the boats.

Commander Leeson, not satisfied with having saved the PT code in one of
the most daring exploits of the Pacific war, decided to hang around
until after nightfall. After all, the PTs had come all that long way
from the tender and had not yet worked any mischief.

After dark the boats slipped in close to the beach and sank two out of
three heavily loaded barges. The third barge blew a 14-inch hole in the
exhaust stack of the 196, knocked out the starboard engine, and started
a fire.

Clarence L. Nelson, MoMM2c, put out the fire, but he and A. F. Hall,
MoMM3c, passed out from the fumes. Ensign Richard Holt dropped his
battle duties long enough to give the two sailors artificial
respiration, and very probably saved Hall’s life. The 129’s engine was
definitely dead, however, and nothing would bring it back to life, so
Commander Leeson went on fighting with two-thirds power.

After airing out the 129’s engine room, the redoubtable Leeson, with his
crippled boat, led a limping charge straight into the mouth of the
Japanese cannon. The two boats launched a ripple of twenty-four rockets
at close range, and nothing more was heard from the beach.

When the sky turned light in the east, Commander Leeson took his sailors
home.


The spearhead of the Allied advance left New Guinea for Morotai Island
in September 1944. The landings there were supported by navy planes from
six escort carriers. On D-Day plus one, Ensign Harold Allen Thompson
took off from the deck of the carrier _Santee_ in his fighter plane to
strafe Japanese positions around Wasile Bay on nearby Halmahera. His
sortie touched off one of the most heroic adventures of the Pacific war.

According to the report of the carrier division commander: “Success of
the landings on Morotai depended upon keeping the Japanese continually
on the defensive ... thus making it impossible for them to launch
counteroffensives until American forces were established in strength on
the smaller island [Morotai].”

Ensign Thompson’s job was to beat up Japanese barges in Wasile Bay.
While he was in a steep dive on his fourth strafing run, the Japanese
made a direct hit with a heavy shell on Ensign Thompson’s plane.

The carrier division commander reports:

“The next thing he knows he was being blown _upward_ with such force
that his emergency gear was even blown out of his pockets. He pulled the
ripcord and on the way down he found himself literally looking down the
barrels of almost every gun in the Japanese positions about 300 yards
away.

“On hitting the water, he discovered that his left hand had been badly
torn, presumably by shrapnel. His life jacket had been torn in front and
would only half inflate. His main idea was to get away from the beach
and out into the bay, but progress was difficult.”

His comrades stayed with the downed pilot and strafed the beach until a
PBY patrol plane came, but the rescue Cat could not land. The pilot
dropped a life raft instead, and Ensign Thompson climbed aboard. He put
a tourniquet on his bleeding hand and then paddled to a pier to hide in
the shelter of a camouflaged lugger.

“These pilots heroically covered all the beach area with a devastating
attack so that little or no fire could be directed at the pilot in the
raft,” says the division report. “The attacks drove the Japanese gunners
to shelter, but after the attacks they returned to their guns.”

Ensign Thompson said it was a wonderful show to watch, but it was a
tragically expensive show. Ensign William P. Bannister was hit and
crashed 150 yards from Ensign Thompson, gallantly giving his life to
save his fellow pilot.

Ensign Paul W. Lindskog was also hit, but flew his wobbly plane safely
to a crash landing outside the Japanese lines. Almost all the planes
were holed, but they continued the strafing runs until Thompson had
worked his way behind the armored lugger.

When fuel ran low, another flight of fighters came up to strafe, and the
carrier set up a system of shuttle flights to keep the beach under
constant attack.

So far, so good. But how to get Ensign Thompson out of Wasile Bay if a
Catalina couldn’t land there? After all, the fighters couldn’t cover the
wounded pilot till the war was over. Somebody thought about the PT
fleet, and so the carrier division commander called the PT tender
_Oyster Bay_ and asked if there was anything the PTs could do.

Certainly there was something the PTs could do; they could rescue the
pilot.

Lieut. Arthur Murray Preston, commander of Squadron Thirty-Three, picked
two all-volunteer crews, and they put to sea in Lieut. Wilfred Tatro’s
489 and Lieut. (jg) Hershel F. Boyd’s 363.

The boat arrived off the mouth of Wasile Bay in the middle of the
afternoon. Lieut. Preston knew there was a minefield, backed up by a
light shore battery, at the eastern side of the entrance. A powerful and
hitherto unsuspected battery opened fire on the western shore, however,
and Preston chose the lesser danger of the minefield and the lighter
battery.

Shorefire from both beaches was so heavy that the PTs had to fall back.
The fighter pilots spotted their difficulty and made strafing runs on
the shore batteries. The Japanese guns still fired on the PTs, but at a
slower rate, and Lieut. Preston decided to risk a run through the narrow
straits.

“Strafing by the planes unquestionably reduced the rate of fire to make
a safe passage through the straits possible,” said Lieut. Preston.
“Safe” passage, indeed!

The inside was no improvement on the entrance, for the bay was small and
ringed with guns, all of which could reach the PTs. The shooting was
steadily improving also as Japanese gunners found the range.

Lieut. (jg) George O. Stouffer called from his torpedo bomber to ask
Lieut. Preston if he would like to have a little smoke between the PTs
and the shore gunners.

Would he like a little smoke? Just all there is. Stouffer flew between
the PTs and the beach, laying a dense curtain of smoke to blind the
gunners. He dropped one smoke pot squarely over a particularly dangerous
gun battery, blanking off its view in all directions. The plane also
dropped a smoke float to mark the location of the downed pilot’s raft.

During the approach of the two PTs to the armored lugger, they added
their guns to those of the planes lashing the beach, but lookouts kept a
nervous watch on the Japanese boat—nobody could be sure that the lugger
was not manned by enemy sailors waiting to shoot up the rescue craft at
the moment they were most occupied with the downed pilot. The closer the
boats came to the lugger, the more the planes concentrated their fire on
the nearby beach.

“This strafing was maintained at an almost unbelievable intensity during
the entire time the boats were in the vicinity of the downed pilot. This
was the ultimate factor in the success of the mission,” reads Lieut.
Preston’s report, which makes no mention of another factor—the
incredible tenaciousness of the two PT crews.

The first smoke screen was beginning to thin dangerously when the 363
hove to beyond the lugger and raked the beach with its guns.

The 489 went alongside the lugger.

“Immediately and on their own initiative, Lieut. D. F. Seaman and C. D.
Day, MoMM1c, dove overboard and towed the pilot in his boat to the stern
of 489. The pilot was in no condition to do this for himself and
appeared to be only partly conscious of his circumstances and
surroundings,” wrote Preston. The rescue took ten minutes.

The PTs were not through fighting yet. Lieut. Heston remembered that the
primary mission of PTs in those waters was destruction of Japanese
coastal shipping, so he ordered the two PTs to put a few holes in the
lugger and set it afire before leaving.

The fighter cover ran low on fuel, and there was a near-disastrous
breakdown in the shuttle timetable.

Preston reports what happened:

“While we were hove-to picking up Thompson there was a group of planes
giving us the closest possible cover and support. As we left the scene
the planes did not remain quite as close to us as they had
previously.... It was shortly after this that we learned that the
fighters were critically low on fuel and some of them out of ammunition.
Nevertheless, they were still answering our calls to quiet one gun or
another, sometimes having to dive on the gun positions without firing,
because their own magazines were empty.... They were magnificent.”

The PTs zigzagged across the minefield with heavy shells bursting within
ten yards on all sides. When they finally broke into the open sea and
roared away from the enemy beach, Ensign Thompson had been in the water
for seven hours, the PTs had been under continuous close-range fire from
weapons of all calibers for two and one-half hours. The boats were
peppered with shrapnel, but, miraculously, none of the PT sailors had
been scratched.

Dr. Eben Stoddard had a job, though, trying to save the pilot’s left
hand, which was so badly mangled by shrapnel that three fingers dangled
loosely.

The seven hours of protective strafing had blown up an ammunition dump,
destroyed a fuel dump, wrecked stores, silenced four heavy gun positions
at least temporarily, and certainly prevented the Japanese from getting
to the downed pilot.

Lieut. Preston was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for this
action, one of the two Congressional Medals of Honor awarded to PT
sailors. (The other was given to Lieut. John Bulkeley for his exploits
during the fall of the Philippines.) The two swimmers and the two
skippers won the Navy Cross. Every other member of the two crews won a
Silver Star.

Ironically, the day after incredible escape of all PT hands without
injury, Lieut. Tatro, skipper of the 489, while working on a 20-mm gun,
let a wrench slip and a trunnion spring threw the heavy tool into his
forehead, injuring him seriously.


By November 1944, there was no more work for the PTs in New Guinea, and
the last patrol was made just twenty-three months after the first one,
1,500 miles to the east. The PT navy in New Guinea had grown from one
small tender and six boats to eight tenders and 14 squadrons.

Almost nightly action had taken a terrible toll of the Japanese. The
shore was littered with the wreckage of _daihatsus_ and the jungle was
littered with the skeletons of thousands of Japanese soldiers who had
died for lack of supplies.

Major General F. H. Berryman, Commander of the Second Australian Corps,
wrote the PT commander:

  The following evidence emerging from the recent operations will
  illustrate the cumulative effect of the activities of your command:


  A. The small degree to which the enemy has used artillery indicates a
  shortage of ammunition.

  B. The enemy, in an endeavor to protect his barges, has been forced to
  dispose his normal field artillery over miles of coast when those guns
  might well have been used in the coastal sector against our land
  troops.

  C. Many Japanese diary entries describe the shortage of rations and
  the regular fatigues of foraging parties to collect native food, which
  is beginning to be increasingly difficult to obtain.

  D. A Japanese prisoner of war stated that three days’ rice, augmented
  by native food, now has to last nine days. This is supported by the
  absence of food and the presence of native roots on enemy dead.

  E. There is definite evidence that the enemy has slaughtered and eaten
  his pack-carrying animals.


  From the above you will see how effective has been the work of your
  squadrons and how it has contributed to the recent defeat of the
  enemy.

The war in New Guinea was over, but the Allies were still a long way
from Tokyo. Across the water were the Philippine Islands, garrisoned
with tens of thousands of Japanese. There was hard fighting ahead for
the PTs.




                                   6.
                           The War in Europe:
                             Mediterranean


While Americans and their Allies were fighting the Japanese in the
Pacific, on the other side of the world their comrades in arms grappled
in a Titanic struggle with the other two Axis powers. Half of the
European Axis partnership was halfhearted Italy, but the other half was
the martial and determined state of Germany, led by an insane genius at
the black arts of killing named Hitler.

The naval war in the coastal waters of Europe was eminently suitable to
torpedo-boat operations. The British had been making spectacular use of
motor torpedo boats for years—in fact, American PTs had been patterned
after British models. The Axis powers also used torpedo boats. German
E-boats prowled the English Channel and the Mediterranean. Even the
Italian MAS boats made Allied Mediterranean naval commanders nervous,
for the torpedo boat had been an Italian specialty since its invention
and the officers who manned Italian small craft were the most aggressive
and warlike in all the Italian Armed Forces.

American troops went ashore in Northwest Africa on November 8, 1942. (On
the other side of the world, the Japanese were just forming the massive
relief fleet that was smashed and dispersed definitively a week later in
the great three-day sea battle of Guadalcanal.) The United States Navy
rushed to put American torpedo boats into the Mediterranean to join the
British in harrying Axis shipping.

In New Orleans, in late 1942, Squadron Fifteen was organized. Its
commander was Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, destined to become
probably the most dashing of all American PT sailors, as the squadron
itself was to become the most spectacularly successful PT command in
either theatre.

On commissioning day the squadron members didn’t feel elated about their
future. Their first assignment was to patrol the warm blue waters off
Midway Island, far behind the fighting lines in the Pacific. While the
Tulagi PTs fought almost nightly battles with Tanaka’s Tokyo Express,
Squadron Fifteen was promised long, lazy afternoons of cribbage, 3,500
miles behind the combat zone. Its assignment gave its members slight
headaches every time they thought about it.

Lieut. Commander Barnes assured his squadron mates that somehow,
somewhere, he was going to find somebody for them to fight. But nobody
believed him—not even he, as he later confessed.

The squadron sailed for the Panama Canal and was well on the way to the
gentle duties of Midway when the radioman came running with a dispatch.

Orders to Midway were canceled! “Report to Commander in Chief, Atlantic
Fleet, in Norfolk,” the message read.

At the giant Virginia naval base, Barnes had his conference with the
upper echelons of brass and rushed back to his squadron mates with the
news that they were indeed going to find somebody somewhere to fight.
They were going to the Mediterranean as the first American torpedo-boat
squadron on the European scene.

The barman at the Navy Officers’ Club in Norfolk was famous in those
days—and may still be—for his Stingers, a most appropriate toast to duty
in the Mediterranean mosquito fleet.

The 201 and 204 crossed the Atlantic immediately as deck passengers on
the _S. S. Enoree_, and Lieut. Commander Barnes followed on the _S. S.
Housatonic_, with 205 and 208. The _Enoree_ arrived at Gibraltar first,
on April 13th. Boats were in the water the next day, and Lieut. Edwin A.
Dubose—also destined to make a name as a brilliant PT sailor—took them
to the British torpedo-boat dock, loaded a full cargo of torpedoes, and
set sail for Oran in North Africa. Skippers of the other boats followed
as fast as longshoremen could swing the PTs into the water.

Disappointment awaited the crews in Oran, where the high command sent
the boats to Cherchel, 300 miles from the nearest action, for an
indefinite period of training.

“I decided to take the bull by the horns and bum a ride to Algiers in an
Army truck to see Vice Admiral Henry K. Hewitt,” said Lieut. Commander
Barnes.

Admiral Hewitt was commander of all U. S. Naval forces in northwest
African waters, and Barnes hoped to persuade him that the PTs should be
based at Bône, 265 miles farther east and within easy reach of trouble
at the front.

“That trip took me several hours and by the time I got there I was
chagrined to find that orders had already been issued and Lieut. Richard
H. O’Brien, my next in command, had gotten the boats under way and was
in Algiers before me. The admiral himself brought me up to date with the
information that my boats were already there. Most embarrassing!”

The next day, April 27th, Lieut. Dubose took his boats to the forward
base at Bône, and that night they went out on their first patrol in
combat waters.


Bône was also the British forward base for motor torpedo boats and
gunboats. Like the American PTs, the British MTBs carried torpedoes, but
the British had already converted some patrol craft to gunboats, similar
to the heavily gunned PTs of New Guinea. The gunboats carried no
torpedoes.

The British had been fighting in the Mediterranean for months, so
American PTs made most of their early patrols with British officers
aboard to tip them off to local conditions.

The North African campaign was drawing to a close. General Erwin
Rommel’s crack Afrika Korps was bottled up in Tunisia, and torpedo boats
patrolled nightly to prevent escape of Rommel’s soldiers to Sicily, just
90 miles across the strait from Tunisia’s Cape Bon.

Lieut. Commander Barnes, in the 106, joined three British torpedo boats
under Lieut. Dennis Germaine, in a patrol down the east side of Cape
Bon. At Ras Idda Bay, Lieut. Germaine took one British MTB inside the
harbor to investigate a possible target.

Lieut. Commander Barnes continues the story:

  “Pretty soon Germaine came up on the radio with the startling
  statement that there are lots of ships in there, so I took the
  remaining British boats with me and started in. It was as black as the
  inside of your pocket, but sure enough, right there in front of me was
  a ship.

  “By the time we saw it against the dark background of the land we were
  inside the torpedo-aiming range and had to go all the way around the
  other side of it before getting a good shot.

  “Thinking there were other targets around, I lined up and fired only
  one torpedo—our first!

  “It ran hot and straight, and after what seemed like an interminable
  time made a beautiful hit forward. The whole ship blew up in our
  faces, scattering pieces of debris all around us and on deck. Just
  like the movies.

  “We immediately started to look for other ships but could find none.
  Neither could we find our British friend, who, it turned out, was
  temporarily aground, so we just eased around trying to rendezvous.
  Pretty soon he found us—and promptly fired two fish at us, one of
  which passed right under our bow and the other under the stern, much
  to our alarm and his subsequent embarrassment.

  “About half an hour later, bombers started working over the airfield a
  couple of miles away, and with the light of the flares we managed to
  join up with Germaine.

  “I personally think that ship was aground—the ship we
  torpedoed—although it certainly made a fine spectacle going up, and
  one of our officers who was along that night subsequently flew over
  the area in a plane and reported it sitting nicely on the bottom.

  “Actually, Germaine had not seen any ships and had mistaken some
  peculiar rock formations for a group of enemy vessels.”

That was not the last mistake of the British Navy. Unused to working
with their new Allies, the British boats took one more near-lethal crack
at American PTs.

Lieut. Dubose, in Lieut. (jg) Eugene S. Clifford’s 212, with Lieut.
Richard H. O’Brien in 205, left Bône on the night of May 10th to patrol
Cape Bon. On the way home after a dull night, the two boats cut deep
into the Gulf of Tunis to keep clear of a British destroyer area.

The Gulf of Tunis was supposed to belong to torpedo boats that night,
but two British destroyers came roaring out of the night on an opposite
course only 900 yards away. The destroyers opened up with machine guns
as they passed, so the PTs fired two emergency recognition starshells
and ran away behind a smoke screen.

Two German E-boats, lurking in the darkness for a crack at the two
destroyers, opened up on the PTs instead, and the British took _all_ the
torpedo boats under fire, distributing shells and bullets on American
and German boats with impartiality.

The two PT skippers were given the thorny tactical problem of dodging
friendly destroyer fire while simultaneously taking on the German boats.
Lieut. Clifford turned back through his own smoke, surprised the E-boats
at close range when he burst out of the screen, and raked the enemy with
his machine-gun batteries. He ran back into the smoke before they could
swing their mounts to bear on him, so he couldn’t report results of his
attack, but destroyer sailors saw one of the E-boats burst into flame.
The other ran from the fight.

Not so the destroyers. They chased the PTs for an hour, firing
starshells and salvos from their main battery. Fortunately their
shooting was poor, and the PTs got out of the battle with only a few
machine-gun holes.

Days later one of the destroyer skippers called to apologize. “We hadn’t
been able to find any action in our assigned patrol area,” he said, “so
we decided to have a bit of a look in the PT area.”

The destroyer skipper’s action was dashing and bold, but it was also a
fine way to catch a friendly torpedo in his own ship or to kill a dozen
or so of his Allies.

Three E-boats had attacked the destroyers at the precise instant that
the American PTs arrived on the scene, according to the British officer
who had heard a German radio discussion of a plan to attack the
destroyers. Naturally the alarmed British began blasting at any torpedo
boat in sight. Everybody saw Dubose’s recognition flares, but took them
for tracer fire, a common mistake.


A strange aftermath of the running gun battle was the naval occupation
of the great port of Bizerte by a lone PT.

The 205 lost the other boat in the night and put into Bizerte for
gasoline. The port had just been taken by Allied troops a few hours
earlier.

The shore batteries, now in friendly hands, nevertheless fired the
“customary few rounds” at the arriving PT boat, but the imperturbable
Lieut. O’Brien said: “The shots were wide, so I continued in and tied up
at the dock.”

Two hours later a newsreel photographer asked O’Brien to move his PT out
of the way so he could photograph some British landing ships just
arriving as “the first Allied craft to enter Bizerte.”

Lieut. O’Brien wondered what his own boat was if not an Allied craft,
and he had been in Bizerte long enough to be bored with the place, but
he patiently moved aside.

The brush-off from the newsreel man was only the beginning of the
stepchild treatment the PTs suffered at Bizerte.

Squadron Fifteen cleaned up a hangar and scrounged spare parts and
machinery from all over the city. When the big boys came into the
harbor, their skippers were delighted with the tidy PT base and
ruthlessly pushed the little boys out the door.

“We cleaned up half the buildings in Bizerte,” said one veteran of
Squadron Fifteen. “As fast as we made a place presentable, we were
kicked out. We ended up with only a fraction of our original space, and
we had to fight tooth and nail for that.”

Late in May the squadron was filled out to full strength and the newly
arrived boats were fitted with radar. The British boats did not have it,
so the two torpedo-boat fleets began to experiment with a system of
radio signals to vector British boats to American radar targets in
coordinated simultaneous attacks.


After the collapse of the Afrika Korps in Tunisia in mid-May 1943, all
of North Africa was in Allied hands and Allied attention turned toward
Europe, across the narrow sea.

To mislead the enemy about the spot chosen by the Allies for the next
landing, British secret agents of the Royal Navy elaborated a fantastic
hoax worthy of the cheapest dime novel. The amazing thing is that it
worked.

The British dressed the corpse of a man who had died of pneumonia in the
uniform of a major in the Royal Marines. They stuffed his pockets with
forged credentials as a Major William Martin, and they planted forged
letters on the body to make him look like a courier between the highest
Allied commands. The letters “revealed” that the Allies would next land
in Sardinia and Greece. The body was pushed overboard from a submarine
off the coast of Spain. It washed up on the beach as an apparent victim
of a plane crash and was frisked by an Axis agent, just as the British
had hoped.

Hitler was taken in by the hoax and gave priority to reinforcing
Sardinia and Greece, widely separated, not only from each other, but
also from Sicily, where the Allies were actually going to land.

To help along the confusion of Axis officers (most of whom were of a
less romantic nature than their _Fuehrer_ and were not taken in by the
Major William Martin fraud), the Allies mounted another hoax almost as
childishly imaginative as the planted cadaver trick.

On D-Day, July 10, 1943, Commander Hunter R. Robinson in PT 213 led a
flotilla of ten Air Force crash boats to Cape Granitola, at the far
western tip of Sicily, as far as it could get from the true landing
beaches around both sides of the southeastern horn of the triangular
island.

The crash boats and the PT were supposed to charge about offshore during
the early hours of D-Day, sending out phony radio messages, firing
rockets, playing phonograph records of rattling anchor chains and the
clanking and chuffing of landing-craft engines. The demonstration didn’t
seem to fool anybody ashore, but the little craft tried.

Most of Squadron Fifteen was busy elsewhere on the morning of D-Day and
narrowly missed being butchered in one of those ghastly attacks from
friendly forces that were so dangerous to PT boats.

One force of American soldiers was going ashore at Licata. Twenty-four
miles west, at Port Empedocle, was a flotilla of Italian torpedo boats
which so worried the high command that Empedocle had been ruled out as a
possible landing beach. To keep the Italian boats off the back of the
main naval force, a special screen was thrown between Port Empedocle and
the transport fleet, a screen of seventeen of Lieut. Commander Barnes’
PTs and the destroyer _Ordronaux_. After the war, historians discovered
that the much-feared Italian torpedo boats at Empedocle had accidentally
bumped into the invasion fleet the night before the landings, and had
fled in panic to a new base at Trapani at the farthest western tip of
the island.

Another one of those terrible blind battles between friendly forces was
prepared when nobody told the westernmost destroyers of the main landing
force that PTs would be operating nearby. The skippers of the destroyers
_Swanson_ and _Roe_, nervous anyway because of the Italian torpedo-boat
nest at Empedocle, charged into the PT patrol area when they saw radar
pips on their screens. Lieut. Commander Barnes flashed a recognition
signal, but the destroyer signal crews ignored it.

                     [Illustration: TYRRHENIAN SEA]

  TUNISIA
    PT 205 "CAPTURES" BIZERTE
  SICILY
    PT FAKE LANDINGS
    U.S. LANDING FORCS
    LANDING FORCES
    ITALIAN PATROL BASE
    PT BASE
    AELIAN ISLES CAPTURED BY PTS
    AXIS FERRY
  ITALY
    SWAY SHOOTS UP GEN. MARK CLARK IN PT 201
    ANZIO LANDINGS
  SARDINIA
    PT BASE

Just as the destroyer unit commander was about to open fire at 1,500
yards, Roe rammed Swanson at the forward stack. _Roe’s_ bow folded up
and both ships went dead in the water. The _Swanson’s_ forward fireroom
was partly flooded. Both ships had to be sent to the rear for repairs,
carrying with them, of course, their five-inch cannon which were sorely
missed by the assault troops of that morning’s landings.

Two nights later, on July 12th, Lieut. Commander Barnes split his PTs
into two forces to escort twelve crash boats for another fraudulent
demonstration of strength at Cape Granitola. The two forces ran parallel
to the beach behind smoke, and noisily imitated the din of a force a
thousand times their true size.

Searchlights blazed out from the shore, and the second salvo from shore
batteries landed so close to the boats that the skippers hauled out to
sea.

“The shore batteries were completely alerted,” said Lieut. Commander
Barnes. “Apparently the enemy was convinced that a landing was about to
take place when it detected the ‘large number’ of boats in our group
approaching the beach, for they opened a heavy and accurate fire with
radar control.... I immediately reversed course and opened the range.
One shell damaged the rudder of a crash boat and another fell ten yards
astern of a PT.

“The demonstration was called a success and we withdrew.”

The next day enemy newspapers reported that an attempted landing on the
southwest coast of Sicily had been bloodily repulsed.


Soldiers of the American and British landing forces swarmed over Sicily,
taking Italian prisoners by the hundreds. Some Americans were amused,
some depressed by the standard joke of many surrendering Italian
soldiers: “Don’t be sorry for me. I’m going to America and you’re
staying in Sicily.”

Palermo, major city on the northwestern coast, fell to the Allies on
July 22nd, and the jaunty boats of Squadron Fifteen were the first
Allied naval power to show the flag in the harbor. They picked their way
through the sunken hulks of fifty ships. The dockside was a shambles. In
a word, Palermo was a typical PT advanced base.

The squadron moved up from Bizerte the same day and began patrolling the
Tyrrhenian Sea, those waters boxed in by Sicily, Italy, Sardinia and
Corsica.

Isolated in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about thirty miles north of Palermo, is
the island of Ustica. On the first Tyrrhenian patrol Lieut. Commander
Barnes led his boats toward Ustica to see what was going on in those
backwaters of the war.

“At dawn we were off Ustica,” the squadron leader reports. “First thing,
we saw a fishing boat putt-putting toward Italy. We found a handful of
very scared individuals crawling out from under the floor plates,
hopefully waving white handkerchiefs. This was the staff of an Italian
admiral at Trapani [site of the Italian torpedo-boat base at the western
tip of Sicily, bypassed by the fall of Palermo].

“Only reason we didn’t get the admiral was that he was late getting down
to the dock and his staff said the hell with him.

“In addition to a few souvenir pistols and binoculars, we captured a
whole fruit crate of thousand-lira notes which we reluctantly turned
over to Army authorities later. One of the other boats saw a raft with
seven Germans on it, feebly paddling out to sea. We picked them up too.”


The next night three PTs of Squadron Fifteen patrolled to the Strait of
Messina, right against the toe of the Italian mainland itself, and two
nights later, off Cape Vaticano, the same three boats—under Lieut. E. A.
Arbuckle—found the 8,800-ton Italian freighter _Viminale_ being towed
toward Naples by a tug.

For some reason, the freighter was being towed backward, almost causing
the PT skippers to take a lead in the wrong direction, but they sank
both ships in the first U.S. Naval victory in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

On the night of July 26th, near the island of Stromboli, three PTs
commanded by Lieut. J. B. Mutty ran into their first F-lighters, those
powerfully armed German landing craft and general-duty blockade runners
that were to become the Number One enemy of PTs in the Mediterranean.

The F-lighters were slow and cumbersome, but they were armored and
mounted extremely heavy antiaircraft batteries which could saw a PT into
toothpicks. Gun turrets were lined with cement and often mounted the
much-feared 88-mm. rifle, thus enormously outgunning the PTs.

Holds of the F-lighters were so well compartmented that they could take
terrible punishment without going down. With only four and one-half feet
of draft, they usually slid over PT torpedoes, set to run at eight-foot
depth. An F-lighter was a serious opponent for a destroyer and much more
than a match for a PT—in theory.

The three PT skippers at Stromboli didn’t know about that theory,
however, and probably wouldn’t have hesitated about attacking even if
they had known how dangerous an F-lighter was. They fired six fish and
thought they had blown up two of the F-lighters, but postwar assessment
says No. Neither side was badly hurt in this first duel, but more
serious fighting was to come.

The next night, July 28th, three boats commanded by Lieut. Arbuckle
fired at what the skippers thought were F-lighters, but were really
Italian torpedo boats. American torpedoes passed harmlessly under the
hulls of the enemy boats; Italian machine-gunners punched sixty holes in
PT 218 and seriously wounded three officers, including Lieut. Arbuckle.
The boat got back to Palermo with 18 inches of water sloshing about
below decks.


The F-lighters were ferrying Axis troops out of Sicily, across the
Strait of Messina. The Allied high command had hoped to catch the whole
Axis force on Sicily in a gigantic trap, and the Messina ferry had to be
broken up.

The Navy tried a combined torpedo boat-destroyer operation against the
ferry, but as usual, communications between the American ships were bad
and the destroyers opened fire on their own PTs.

The first salvo from the American destroyers splashed water on the PT
decks. The PTs were five knots slower than the American cans. (Remember
those news stories, in the early days of the war, about the dazzling
70-knot PTs—fast enough to “run rings around any warship afloat”? During
the summer of 1943, few of the Squadron Fifteen boats could top 25 to 27
knots.) Because they couldn’t run away from their deadly friends and
because they feared American gunnery more than they feared Italian
gunnery, the PT boats actually ran for the enemy shore to snuggle under
the protection of Italian batteries on Cape Rasocolmo. The enemy guns
obligingly fired on the American destroyers and drove them away. The PT
sailors went home, enormously grateful to the enemy for his involuntary
but effective act of good will.

In August the Axis powers ferried most of their power to the mainland
across the three-mile-wide Strait of Messina, in a brilliant escape from
the Sicilian trap.

PT skippers knew about the evacuation, but had orders to stay away from
the scene. British torpedo boats that tried to break up the evacuation
train were badly mauled by shore batteries. One torpedo boat
disappeared, with all hands, in the flash of a direct hit from a
gigantic nine and one-half-inch shell.

Chafing at the order that kept it out of the action, the PT command
dreamed up an operation to relieve the tedium. It decided to mount an
invasion of its own to capture an island.

Setting up a jury-rig invasion staff, the officers pored over charts,
looking for the ideal enemy island to add to the PT bag. Lieut. Dubose,
returning from a fight with German mine sweepers on the night of August
15th, picked up an Italian merchant seaman from a small boat off Lipari
Island, in the Aeolian Group, a few miles northwest of the Strait of
Messina. The sailor said there were no Germans on Lipari and the
islanders would undoubtedly be delighted to be captured by the American
Navy.

When the admiral heard the squadron’s proposal he radioed: “Demand the
unconditional surrender of the islands, suppress any opposition, bring
back as prisoners all who are out of sympathy.”

Three PTs, their crews beefed up by 17 extra sailors, six soldiers and a
military government man—with a destroyer following behind as main fire
support—sailed into Lipari Harbor at 11 A.M. on August 17th, guns manned
and trained on the beach. At precisely the critical moment, the
destroyer hove into view around a headland, giving the impression of a
mighty fleet backing up the puny invaders.

The commandant of the Italian naval garrison came down to the dock
himself to handle mooring lines for his captors.

The American Military Government man stepped gracefully ashore in the
first assault wave and set up a government on the spot. PT men rounded
up military prisoners, hauled down the Italian and hoisted the American
flag.

The Italian commodore slipped off in the excitement and tried to burn
his papers, but a sailor persuaded him to stop by pressing the muzzle of
a 45 automatic to his brow.

Sailors confiscated the documents and collected souvenirs, while the
commandant radioed the other islands in the group and the PT skippers
accepted their surrender by long distance. Only Stromboli resisted, so
the PTs chugged over to find out what was holding up the breaking out of
peace on that volcanic pimple.

They found an Italian chief petty officer and a 30-man detail, blowing
up their radio equipment. The American sailors indignantly halted the
sabotage—then destroyed the stuff themselves.

All the Italian navy saboteurs were put under armed guard for transport
to American prisons in Sicily, but a pregnant woman burst into sobs,
pleading that one of the men was her husband, a fisherman who had never
spent a night away from Stromboli in his life. Six other women joined
their wails to the chorus. The local priest assured Lieut. Dubose that
their stories were true, so Dubose granted the prisoners a reprieve.

The boats returned to Lipari, picked up fifty merry military prisoners
there, and departed for Palermo to the cheers of the entire town.

Messina fell that same day, and the Sicilian campaign was over.


Three weeks after the fall of Sicily, on the morning of September 9th,
Allied troops went ashore in force on the mainland around the
magnificent Bay of Salerno, just across a headland from Naples, second
port of Italy.

Invasion chores were not strenuous for the PTs—a little anti-E-boat
patrol in the bay and some light courier and taxi service for Army and
Navy brass. Dull duty, but the boats had to fly low and slow, because
they were almost out of aviation gasoline; their tanker had failed to
arrive on schedule.

By October 4th, however, the gasoline was in and the British had taken a
splendid harbor at La Maddalena, off northeast Sardinia, so Squadron
Fifteen sailed to Sardinia, from where it and the British boats could
prey on enemy traffic north of Naples. Almost immediately, part of
Squadron Fifteen moved still farther north to Bastia, on Corsica, which
the Free French had just taken back from the enemy. These two bases put
PTs on the flanks of coastal shipping lanes deep in the heart of enemy
waters. Genoa itself, the largest port in Italy, was now within reach of
the squadron’s torpedoes. Hunting was especially good in the Tuscan
Archipelago, a group of islets and rocks between the PT base and the
mainland.

Something had to be done about the PT torpedoes, however, for the
squadron was equipped with old Mark VIIIs, built in the 1920’s,
crotchety, unreliable, and worst of all, designed to run so far below
the surface that they couldn’t touch a shallow-draft F-lighter.

PT torpedomen tinkered with their fish to set them for a shallow run,
but the Mark VIII was frisky without eight feet of water to hold it
down. The shallow-set Mark VIIIs porpoised, alternately leaping from the
water and diving like sportive dolphins. PT skippers set them shallow
anyhow, and fired them with the idea that there was a fifty-fifty chance
the porpoising torpedo would be on the upswing when it got to the target
and might at least punch a hole in the side.


In Italy, as the contending armies fought slowly up the peninsula, the
German situation became somewhat like the Japanese situation at that
same moment in New Guinea. Powerful Allied air strikes disrupted supply
by rail from Genoa and Rome to the front, so the Germans had to rely on
waterborne transport to run down the coast at night.

To protect themselves from marauding Allied destroyers, the Germans
fenced off a channel close to the shore with a barrier of thousands of
underwater mines. At salient points they mounted heavy, radar-directed
cannon—some as big as nine and one-half inches in bore—to keep raiding
destroyers pushed away from the mine-protected channel.

The mine fields worked. Deep-draft destroyers did not dare chase Axis
vessels too close to the beach. The shallow-bottom PTs skimmed over the
top of the mine fields, however, so the Germans countered by arming many
types of small ships as anti-PT boats. They took over a type of Italian
warship called a torpedo boat, but actually a small destroyer, fast and
heavily gunned, eminently qualified for PT-elimination work.

Night patrols became lively, with PTs harrying Axis coastal shipping and
the Germans hunting them with E-boats and armed minesweepers, torpedo
boats and F-lighters.

The first brawl after the PTs set up base on Sardinia and Corsica came
on the night between October 22nd and 23rd. Three PTs, under the
indefatigable Lieut. Dubose, sneaked up on a cargo ship escorted by four
E-boats and minesweepers. The PTs fired a silent spread of four, and the
cargo ship disappeared in a violent blast. Lieut. (jg) T. L. Sinclair
was lining up his 212 to work a little more destruction, when a wobbly
out-of-control Mark VIII torpedo from another PT flashed by under his
stern.

“How many have you fired?” Lieut. Dubose asked Lieut. Sinclair by radio.

“None yet. I’m too damned busy dodging yours.”


Between Giglio and Elba, in the Tuscan Archipelago, on the night between
November 2nd and 3rd, two PTs, under Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien, made a
torpedo run on a subchaser and blew a satisfactorily fatal hole in the
hull with a solid hit. The stricken vessel went down, all right, but it
went down fighting, and one of the last incendiary bullets from the
dying ship bored through the gasoline tank of the 207, touching off an
explosion that blew off a deck hatch. Flames as high as the radar mast
shot through the open hatchway.

A radioman turned on a fire extinguisher, threw it into the flaming
compartment, and slammed down the hatch again. Miraculously, the fire
went out.


Early in November, Lieut. Commander Barnes, who had been doing some deep
thinking about the war against F-lighters, came up with a new tactical
idea.

His reasoning was: PTs are radar-equipped, hence better than British
boats at finding enemy vessels and maneuvering for attack; British
torpedo boats use better torpedoes than American Mark VIIIs, for they
are faster and carry heavier explosive charges; British gunboats have
heavier firepower than PTs, for they usually carry at least six-pounder
cannon and so can take on heavier opponents.

So Lieut. Commander Barnes and his British counterpart worked out a
scheme of joint patrolling, the Americans acting as a scout force and
finding targets by radar. The targets once found, the PTs were to guide
the British boats in a coordinated attack. From November 1943 until
April 1944, joint patrols had fourteen actions, in which skippers
claimed 15 F-lighters, two E-boats, a tug and an oil barge sunk; three
F-lighters, a destroyer, a trawler, and an E-boat damaged.

As winter came on, winds mounted and seas ran high, but the PTs
maintained their patrols. On the foul night of November 29th, Lieut.
(jg) Eugene A. Clifford took his 204 out with another PT for a patrol
near Genoa. Within two hours the wind built up to 35 knots, water
smashed over the bow in blinding sheets and drowned out the radar,
visibility dropped to less than a hundred yards. The PTs gave up the
patrol and turned back toward Bastia. In the stormy night the boats were
separated and the 204 plugged along alone, lookouts almost blinded by
the spray.

Out of the darkness four E-boats appeared within slingshot range,
laboring on an opposite course. A fifth E-boat “crossed the T,” but not
fast enough, for the PT and the E-boat struck each other a glancing blow
with their bows.

From a ten-yard range, the two small craft ripped into each other with
every gun that would bear. The other four E-boats joined the affray, and
for fifteen seconds the 204 was battered from broad-jumping distance by
the concentrated fire of five enemy boats.

The PT escaped in the darkness and the crew set about counting its
wounds. Bullets had torn up torpedo tubes, ventilators, ammunition
lockers, gun mounts. The deck and the superstructure were a ruin of
splinters. The engine room had a hundred new and undesired ventilation
apertures.

The skipper polled his crew to prepare the melancholy roll of dead and
wounded. Not a man had been nicked! The gas tank was intact. The engines
still purred along like electric clocks. The 204, outnumbered five to
one, had stood up to a fifteen-second eyeball-to-eyeball Donnybrook and
was nevertheless bringing all its sailors home in good health.


Two of the squadron’s PTs were detached in January 1944, and went south
again for duty in the ill-fated Anzio landing. Lieut. General Mark
Clark, commanding the Fifth American Army, wanted the boats for
water-taxi duty between the main American lines near Naples and the
Anzio beachhead, thirty miles south of Rome. Usually the taxi runs were
dull for sailors of the PT temperament, but not always.

On the morning of January 28th, General Clark and some of his staff
boarded Lieut. (jg) George Patterson’s 201 at the mouth of the Volturno
River, and in company with 216 set sail for Anzio, seventy-five miles to
the north.

Twenty-five miles south of Anzio, the minesweeper _Sway_ patrolled the
southern approaches to the beachhead. The captain had just been warned
that enemy airplanes were attacking Anzio, and he knew that the Germans
often coordinated air and E-boat strikes, so when he saw two small boats
ripping along at high speed and coming down the sun’s track, he
challenged them by blinker light.

Without reducing speed, Lieut. Patterson answered with a six-inch light,
too small a light for that distance in the daylight. Besides, the
signalmen on the _Sway_ were partly blinded by the glare of the sun,
just rising behind the 201.

_Sway’s_ guns opened fire. Lieut. Patterson fired an emergency
recognition flare, but it burst directly in the face of the sun, and the
_Sway’s_ bridge crew missed the second friendly signal from the torpedo
boat. The 201 even reduced speed as a further friendly gesture, but the
slower speed only made the boat a better target.

The next shot hit the boat in the charthouse, wounding Lieut. Patterson
and his executive officer, Ensign Paul B. Benson, and killing an officer
passenger and a sailor.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” suggested General Clark.

Ensign Benson, though wounded, took the wheel from the sagging skipper
and zigzagged the boat away at high speed back toward Naples, until he
was out of range of the _Sway’s_ batteries. A few miles down the coast
the crew of 201 transferred dead and wounded to a British minesweeper.

The _Sway_ still stood between the boat and Anzio, but General Clark
wanted to go to the Anzio beach, so the 201 crept back at a
peaceful-looking speed and spoke up from long distance with a bigger
light. The sun was higher, _Sway’s_ signalmen read the message, and the
skipper waved them by.


Lieut. Commander Barnes still restlessly experimented with armaments and
tactics, looking for a combination of weapons and methods that would
counter the dangerous weapons of the F-lighters. Rocket launchers were
being mounted on landing craft, and the small vessels were delivering
devastating ripples on enemy beaches. Their firepower was all out of
proportion to the size of the craft. A few PTs were playing around with
rocket launchers in the Pacific. It’s worth at least a try, thought
Lieut. Commander Barnes.

On the night of February 18th, 1944, Barnes went out in Lieut. (jg) Page
H. Tullock’s 211, with Lieut. Robert B. Reader’s 203 and Lieut. (jg)
Robert D. McLeod’s 202.

As Lieut. Commander Barnes tells the story:

“I saw a small radar target come out from behind the peninsula and head
over toward one of the small islands south of Giglio. Thinking it might
be an F-lighter, I ordered rocket racks loaded.

“He must have seen us, because whatever it was—probably an
E-boat—speeded up and ducked into the island before we could make
contact. That presented the first difficulty of a rocket installation.
There we were with the racks all loaded and the safety pins out. The
weather had picked up a little, and getting those pins back in the
rockets and the racks unloaded was going to be a touchy job in the pitch
dark on wet, tossing decks. I decided to leave them there for a while to
see what would happen.

“About midnight it started to kick up a good deal more. I had just about
decided that whatever it was we were looking for wasn’t going to show
up, and I was getting pretty worried about the rockets heaving out of
the racks and rolling around in a semiarmed condition on deck. I decided
to take one last turn around our patrol area and head for the barn.

“On our last southerly leg we picked up a target coming north at about
eight knots, and I closed right away, thinking to spend all our rockets
on whatever it was. As we got closer, it appeared to be two small
targets in column—a conclusion which I later used as an outstanding
example of ‘Don’t trust your interpretation of radar too blindly.’

“Just about the time we got to the 1,000-yard firing range the lookouts
started reporting vessels everywhere, all the way from our port back
around to our starboard bow. I had arranged the other two boats on
either side in line abreast and ordered them to stand by to fire on my
order over the radio. I gave the order and we all let go together.

“During the eleven seconds the rockets were in flight nobody fired a
shot, but a couple of seconds after the rockets landed what seemed like
a dozen enemy craft opened up. The formation was probably three or four
F-lighters escorted by two groups of E-boats. We had passed through the
two groups of escorts on our way to our firing position.

“Now it was time to turn away, and as my boat turned to the right we
found that the 202 was steaming right into the convoy. To avoid
collision we had to turn back and parallel the 202.

“Just at that time the engines on my boat started to labor and
unbelievably coughed and died—all three of them. We were smack dab in
the center of the whole outfit, with the enemy shooting from all
sides.... The volume was terrific.

“The 203 had lost all electric power, including the radar and compass
lights. She saw the two of us off our original course and came back to
join us, making a wide circle at high speed and laying smoke. It is
impossible to say exactly what happened; the melee was too terrific.

“The 202 had a jammed rudder which they were able to clear. She
eventually got out by ducking around several vessels, passing as close
as 100 yards. The 203 likewise got out by ducking in and out of the
enemy formation, but we on the 211 just sat there helpless, watching the
whole show.

“This business lasted for at least four or five minutes and even the
shore batteries came into illuminate with starshells. Fortunately, there
was enough smoke in the air to keep the issue confused. That confusion
was the only thing that saved us.

“None of our boats was using guns at all, and it was obvious that the
enemy was frightfully confused with us weaving through the formation.
They were hard at work shooting each other up. I am sure they sank at
least one of the E-boats, because several minutes later they started
firing again off to the north, and there was a large gasoline fire in
the channel which burned for a long time.

“We got clear by the simple process of just sitting still and letting
the enemy pass around us and continue north.

“I finally got one engine engaged and went to our rendezvous which was
only a couple of miles away, but by the time I got there I could just
see the other two boats, on the radar screen, leaving. I tried to call
them back, but I couldn’t get a soul and waited around for some time
thinking they would come back. They didn’t, however, and went on back
individually, for which they got a little private hell from me later.

“I had no alternative but to go back myself. I expected to find the
other two boats pretty well shot up, as it was a miracle that we weren’t
lost ourselves. Strangely enough, I found that they were not damaged,
and except for the fantastic coincidence of all three of us being more
or less disabled simultaneously, we were OK.”

Apparently, the rockets did no damage, and further installation of
rocket racks on his PTs was firmly rejected by Lieut. Commander Barnes.

The American PT commander was not the only one concerned about the heavy
ordnance of the F-lighters. Captain J. F. Stevens of the British Navy’s
Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean said:

“While coastal forces are the most suitable forces to operate in mined
areas, the enemy has so strengthened his escorts and armed his shipping
that our coastal craft find themselves up against considerably heavier
metal. Furthermore, the enemy’s use of F-lighters of shallow draft does
not provide good torpedo targets. Everything that can be done to improve
our chances of successful attack is being done. Torpedoes will, if
possible, be fired at even shallower settings. Meanwhile, if they cannot
achieve destruction, coastal forces will harry the enemy and endeavour
to cause him the utmost possible alarm, damage, and casualties.”

Officers at La Maddalena gave longer thought to the problem and came up
with an idea called Operation Gun.

Lieut. Commander Barnes’ combined operation—the plan to use American
radar for scouting and conning heavier-armed British boats to
targets—had been a promising beginning, but even the MBG gunboats were
not a real match for the F-lighters.

Commander Robert A. Allan, British Commandant of the Sardinia base, cut
three landing craft out of the British amphibious fleet and armed them
with 4.7 naval guns and 40-mm. autocannon. The landing craft were big,
flat-bottomed tubs, wonderful platforms for the hard-hitting 4.7
inchers. To man the guns, he assigned crack gunners of the Royal Marine
Artillery.

Commander Allan organized an interesting task force around the three
landing-craft gunboats (designated LCGs) as his main battle line. They
were screened against E-boat attack by British torpedo boats, and
controlled by the radar-equipped American PT scouting force.

Commander Allan himself went out on the first sweep of his beefed-up
inshore patrol on the night of March 27th. He rode Lieut. (jg) Thaddeus
Grundy’s PT 218, so that he could use American radar to assign targets
to his gunboats and give them opening salvo ranges and bearings by
remote control.

When the gunboat battle line arrived off San Vicenzo, south of Leghorn,
a scouting group of two PTs, under Lieut. Dubose, went off on a fast
sweep, looking for targets. At 10 P.M. the PTs had found six F-lighters
going south, and Commander Allan brought his main battle force up
quickly to intercept them.

At 11 P.M. Lieut. Dubose sharply warned the main force that two
destroyers were escorting the lighters on the seaward side. “I am
preparing to attack the destroyers,” he added.

Commander Allan continues the story: “Until he carried out this attack,
it was not possible for us to engage the convoy, as our starshells being
fired inshore over the target [to illuminate the F-lighters for the
gunboats] would illuminate us for the escorting destroyers which were
even farther to seaward than we were. Fire was therefore withheld during
several anxious minutes.”

During this ten-minute wait for the PT scouts to take on the destroyers,
both the German forces, escort and convoy, came on Commander Allan’s
radar screen.

The PT scouts crept to within 400 yards before firing torpedoes, and ran
away behind heavy smoke. Nevertheless, the destroyers laid down such a
heavy fire that they hit 214, even in the smoke screen, wounding the
engineer of the watch, Joseph F. Grossman, MoMM2c, and damaging the
center engine. Grossman ignored his wounds and tended the stricken
engine until it was running well again, staying below with his engines
until the boat was out of danger.

The skippers of the scouting PTs heard the usual large explosions on one
of the destroyers and hoped they had scored but couldn’t be sure. Hit or
no hit, the destroyers reversed course and ran up the coast, abandoning
their convoy—an unthinkable act of cowardice for Allied escorts.

Sunk or run off, it was all the same to Commander Allan, who wanted only
a free hand with the F-lighters. When the destroyers were gone, he
passed radar ranges and bearings to the gunboats, and the Royal Marines
lit up the night over the convoy with a perfect spread of starshells.

Startled gunners on the F-lighters, unused to this kind of treatment in
waters where vessels with 4.7-inch guns had never dared venture before,
took the lights for plane flares and fired wildly into the clouds.

The Royal Marine gunners took their time for careful aim under the
bright glare of the slowly sinking magnesium lights. At the first salvo,
one of the F-lighters blew up with a tremendous explosion. Within ten
minutes three F-lighters were burning briskly. The gunboats spread out
and pinned the surviving boats against the beach while the Marine
artillerymen methodically pounded them to scrap.

“Of the six F-lighters destroyed,” says Commander Allan, “two, judging
by the impressive explosions, were carrying petrol, two ammunition, and
one a mixed cargo of both.”

With what sounds like a note of wistful disappointment, Commander Allan
added: “The sixth sank without exploding.”

The Operation Gun Task Force sortied again on the night of April 24th.
The coastal waters around the Tuscan Archipelago were swarming with
traffic that night. Early in the evening the gunboats blew two
F-lighters out of the water. Burning debris, cascading from the sky
after the explosions, set fires on the beach.

Shortly afterward the Marine sharpshooters picked off a tug and three
more F-lighters.

Radar picked up still another group and star-shell from the gunboats
showed that they were three flak lighters—medium-size craft powerfully
armed as antiaircraft escorts for daylight convoys. The Royal Marine
gunners smacked their first salvos into two of the flak lighters, which
burned in a fury of exploding ammunition.

The third lighter poured an astonishing volume of fire at the unarmored
gunboats, and Commander Allan, in PT 218, made a fast run at the enemy
to draw fire away from his gunboats. The Marines put a shell into the
flak lighter, and it ran off behind smoke, but the 209 led a charge
through the smoke, fired off its fish, caught the flak ship squarely
amidships, and blew it in two.

Lieut. Dubose’s scouting torpedo boats found a convoy escorted by a flak
lighter, but at that moment the gunboats were engaged in another fight,
so rather than break up the show of the main battle line, the PTs
attacked the enemy themselves. At least one of three fish connected, for
the flak lighter blew up in a jarring explosion.

Ashore, fifty miles away at Bastia, squadron mates sat outdoors to watch
the flash and glare of the all-night battle against the eastern sky.
Things were just threatening to get dull after midnight when shore radio
at Bastia called Commander Allan with a radar-contact report of an Axis
convoy between the gunboats and Corsica. The PTs got there first and
found two destroyers and an E-boat in column.

When the PTs were still 2,500 yards away—too far for a good torpedo shot
from a small boat—the destroyers fired a starshell. PT 202 was ready for
just that emergency. A sailor standing by with a captured five-star
recognition flare fired the correct answering lights and calmed the
enemy’s nerves.

The PTs moved in under the guise of friends and fired four fish at 1,700
yards. As they ran away they felt a violent underwater explosion, so
they claimed a possible hit.

On this one wild night of action Commander Allan’s strange little navy
had, without damage to itself, sunk five of the formidable F-lighters,
four heavily armed flak lighters, and a tug; scored a possible torpedo
hit on a destroyer; and pulled a dozen German prisoners from the water.


Hearts of the PT sailors were lifted with joy in May 1944, when the Mark
XIII torpedoes began to trickle into their bases and the heavy
old-fashioned torpedo tubes were replaced with light launching racks
that gave the boats badly needed extra bursts of speed. More boats had
been arriving, too, and eventually there were three PT squadrons working
out of Sardinia and Corsica.

As torpedomen installed the new fish and the new launching rigs, a PT
skipper rubbed his hands and said: “Wait till we get a good target now.
These Mark Thirteens are going to sweep these waters clean.”

Lieut. Eugene A. Clifford, in 204, led two other PTs in the first attack
with the new torpedoes on the night of May 18th in the Tuscan
Archipelago. The PTs had two flak lighters on their radarscopes.
Determined to try out the new torpedoes, they bored through the massive
barrage from the flak lighters’ antiaircraft guns, firing from 1,000
yards.

One of the highly vaunted Mark XIII’s made a typical Mark VIII run and
hit the 204 in the stern. Fortunately, when this Mark XIII goofed, it
really goofed, so it did not explode, but punched through the PT’s skin
and lodged its warhead inside. Its body dangled in the PT’s wake, like a
sucker-fish clamped to a shark’s tail.

Lewis H. Riggsby, TM2c, went into the lazaret to stuff towels into the
vanes of the impeller to keep the torpedo from arming and exploding.

The flak lighters chased the PTs and hit 204 with 20-mm fire, but the
boat escaped behind smoke, one of the famous Mark XIII torpedoes bobbing
and dangling from the stern.


Dominating the Tuscan Archipelago, within sight of the Italian mainland,
is the island of Elba, first home of Napoleon in exile. The island
attracted the Allies, because big guns on the point closest to the
mainland could reach the coastal road and also close off the inshore
passage to coastal craft. Once Elba was in Allied hands, southbound Axis
land traffic might be chased a few miles inland to less-developed
mountain roads, and sea traffic would certainly be squeezed into the
thirty miles of water between two Allied bases at Elba and Corsica.

One problem annoyed the planners of the Elba landings. What to do for
naval support? The waters around Elba were probably the most heavily
mined on the Italian Coast, and deep-draft ships could not be risked
there. But then, hadn’t PTs been scooting about the coast of Elba for
nine months?

On the night between June 16th and 17th thirty-seven PTs joined other
shallow-draft vessels of the Coastal Force to support landings of
Senegalese troops of the French Ninth Colonial Division, plus mixed
elements from other Allied forces.

Five PTs approached the northern coast at midnight, and about a half
mile from shore put 87 French raiders in the water in rubber rafts. The
five PTs joined another quintet at the farthest northeast point of Elba,
the point closest to the mainland.

At 2 A.M. three of the ten PTs went roaring along the northern coast,
smoke generators wide open and smoke pots dropping over the side in a
steady stream. When the shoreline was sealed off behind a 16,000-yard
curtain of smoke, four more PTs moved down the seaward side, with
loudspeakers blaring the sounds of a great fleet of landing craft. The
PTs launched occasional ripples of rockets at the beach to imitate a
preinvasion shore bombardment.

The three remaining PT skippers carried on a lively radio exchange,
straining their imaginations to invent a torrent of orders for an
imaginary invasion armada.

Searchlights from the beach swept the water, looking for a hole in the
screen. Land guns on the shore and in the mountains to the west poured
shells into the smoke screen, thus pinpointing themselves nicely for an
Allied air strike that slipped in just before dawn.

At the true landing beach on the south coast, Lieut. (jg) Eads
Poitevent, Jr., captain of the 211, was posted as radar picket to guide
landing craft ashore. He was alarmed when he saw a radar target creep
out of the harbor at Marina de Campo. He could not attack without
alerting the beach, and yet the oncoming enemy vessel had to be kept
away from the landing flotilla at any cost.

Poitevent boldly sailed close to the target—an E-boat—and made friendly
looking signals on a blinker light. He eased off in a direction away
from the convoy, luring the patrol into harmless waters. It took him
fifteen minutes to tease the E-boat off the scene and return to his
duties.

The E-boat would not stay away, however, and in its aimless wanderings
it blundered across the path of a PT with a deckload of British
commandos destined for a preinvasion landing. The commandos slipped over
the side, three-quarters of a mile farther out than they had planned,
and silently paddled their rubber boats successfully to the beach,
around the lackadaisical enemy patrol.

Another PT saw the E-boat also, and thinking it was a friendly, tried to
form up in column. Lieut. (jg) Harold J. Nugent, on 210, who was
following the bumbling drama on radar, broke radio silence just long
enough to cheep the smallest of warnings to his squadron mate. The
E-boat crew incredibly fumbled about those waters, teeming with Allied
boats, for most of the night and never lost their happy belief that they
were alone with the stars and the sea.

PT radarscopes now showed a more interesting target. Coming right up the
patrol line was something big, in fact, a formation of big ships, so PT
skippers prepared for a torpedo attack. They held back, however, for
full identification of the targets, because the ships could just
possibly be the invasion flotilla, slightly off course.

At 400 yards, Nugent challenged the approaching formation by blinker.
The nearest vessel answered correctly, and a few seconds later repeated
the correct code phrase for the period.

Lieut. Nugent continues:

  “Being convinced that the ships were part of the invasion convoy which
  had probably become lost, I called to my executive officer, Lieut.
  (jg) Joel W. Bloom, to be ready to look up the ships’ correct position
  in our copy of the invasion plan. I brought the 210 up to the
  starboard side of the nearest ship, took off my helmet, put the
  megaphone to my mouth and called over ‘What ship are you?’

  “I shall never forget the answer.

  “First there was a string of guttural words, followed by a broadside
  from the ship’s two 88-mm. guns and five or six 20-mm. guns. The first
  blast carried the megaphone away and tore the right side off a pair of
  binoculars that I was wearing around my neck. It also tore through the
  bridge of the boat, jamming the helm, knocking out the bridge engine
  controls, and scoring a direct hit on the three engine emergency
  cutout switches which stopped the engines.

  “I immediately gave the order to open fire, and though we were dead in
  the water and had no way of controlling the boat, she was in such a
  position as to deliver a full broadside.

  “After a few minutes of heavy fire, we had reduced the firepower of
  the closest ship to one wildly wavering 20-mm. and one 88-mm. cannon
  which continued to fire over our heads throughout the engagement.

  “It was easy to identify the ships, as the scene was well lighted with
  tracers. They were three ships traveling in a close V, an E-boat in
  the center with an F-lighter on either flank.

  “We were engaging the F-lighter on the starboard flank of the
  formation. As the ships started to move toward our stern the injured
  F-lighter screened us from the fire of the other two ships, so I gave
  the order to cease fire.

  “In the ensuing silence we clearly heard screams and cries from the
  F-lighter.

  “Two members of our engine-room crew, who were topside as gun loaders
  during battle, were sent to the engine room to take over the chief
  engineer’s duties, for I was sure he was dead or wounded. However, he
  had been working on the engines throughout the battle and had already
  found the trouble. We immediately got under way.

  “We found out, however, that our rudder was jammed in a dead-ahead
  position, but by great good fortune we were headed directly away from
  the enemy, so I dropped a couple of smoke pots over the side and we
  moved off. The enemy shifted its fire to the smoke pots, and we lay to
  and started repairs.

  “Much to our surprise, we found that none of us had even been wounded,
  but the boat had absorbed a great deal of punishment. A burst of 20
  mm. had zipped through the charthouse, torn the chart table to bits,
  knocked out the lighting system, and de-tuned and scarred the radio
  and radar. Another burst had gone through the engine room, damaged
  control panels, torn the hull. All hits, however, were above the
  waterline. Turrets, turret lockers, ventilators, and the deck were
  holed.

  “We called the 209 alongside, and sent off a radio report to the
  flagship on the action and the direction in which the ships retired.”

Lieut. Nugent learned from the skipper of the 209 that his boat had been
hit only twice, but one of the shells had scored a direct hit on a
40-mm. gun loader and killed him instantly.

The tall, black warriors from French Senegal swept over the island in
two days of brisk fighting and Elba was Allied. The sea roads to the
south were blocked, and PT action shifted to the north, to the Ligurian
Sea, the Gulf of Genoa, and the lovely blue waters off the Côte d’Azur.




                                   7.
                           The War in Europe:
                            English Channel


In England, as May 1944 turned into June, it didn’t take a genius to
know that something big was afoot. Military traffic choked the roads
leading to the Channel seacoast and the coastal villages. Troops were in
battle dress, officers were grim faced, all hands hustled about on the
thousands of mysterious errands that presage an offensive. Everybody
knew it was the Big Landing—the assault on Fortress Europe—but where?

Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Two, under Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley
(with only three boats this was the smallest squadron ever organized),
had helped to make the decision where to land. Assigned to the Office of
Strategic Services—America’s cloak-and-dagger outfit for all kinds of
secret business—Squadron Two had run a ferry service between England and
the enemy-occupied continent to deliver secret agents, saboteurs, spies,
resistance officers, and couriers for the governments in exile.

The sailors of Squadron Two carried out their orders, of course, but on
some of their errands they could mutter the old Navy adage: “I may have
to take it, but I don’t have to like it.”

For example, the night they were sent across the Channel to land on the
Normandy shore, there to scoop up several bucketfuls of sand. The crews
grumbled about taking their fragile craft under the guns of Hitler’s
mighty Western Wall just to fill the First Sea Lord’s sandbox.

They did not find out, until long after that night, why they were sent
to play with shovels and buckets on the Normandy beach. A scientist who
claimed to know the beaches well—beaches that had already been picked
for the Normandy landings—said that they were made of spongy peat
covered with a thin layer of sand, and that Allied trucks and tanks
would bog down helplessly on the soft strand, once they left the hard
decks of the landing craft.

The samples brought back by the PT sailors proved that the scientist
didn’t know sand from shinola about Normandy beach conditions, and the
operation went ahead as planned.

On June 6, 1944, the first waves of American and British troops landed
on Omaha and Utah beaches and began the long slugging match with Marshal
Erwin Rommel’s Nazis to twist Normandy out of German hands.

During the landings proper, PTs were used as anti-E-boat screens, but
made their biggest contribution by dousing flare floats dropped by
German aircraft to guide their night bombers.

At the beginning the assigned duties of the PTs were not heavy, but
there is always work for a fleet of small, handy armed boats in a big
amphibious operation.

On June 8th, for instance, as the destroyer _Glennon_ jockeyed about off
the Saint Marcouf Islands, north of Utah Beach, getting ready to bombard
a shore battery, she struck a mine astern. One minesweeper took the
damaged destroyer under tow, and another went ahead to sweep a clear
escape channel. Just before 9 A.M., the destroyer-escort _Rich_ closed
the ships, and the skipper asked if he could help. The captain of the
_Glennon_ answered: “Negative; clear area cautiously, live mines.”

Too late. A heavy explosion stopped the _Rich_ dead in the water. A
second explosion tore away fifty feet of the stern. A third mine
exploded forward. The destroyer-escort was a shambles, its keel broken
and folded in a V. The superstructure was festooned with a grisly
drapery of bodies and parts of bodies.

PTs rallied around the _Rich_ to take survivors from the deck or from
the mine-filled waters around the shattered vessel. Crewmen on the 508
saw a sailor bobbing by in the sea, and the bowman picked up a heaving
line to throw to his rescue. The man in the water calmly refused
assistance.

“Never mind the line,” he said, “I have no arms to catch it.”

The PT skipper, Lieut. Calvin R. Whorton, dove into the icy Channel
waters, but the armless sailor had gone to the bottom.

The _Rich_ followed him in fifteen minutes, with 79 of the crew.
Seventy-three survivors were wounded.

The _Glennon_ itself went aground, and two days later a German shore
battery put two salvos aboard. The destroyer rolled over and sank.


American soldiers ashore pushed rapidly northwestward along the coast of
the Cherbourg Peninsula, to capture the port of Cherbourg, sorely needed
as a terminal to replace the temporary harbor behind a jury-rig
breakwater of sunken ships at the landing beaches. The Nazi garrison at
Cherbourg put up a last-ditch stand, however, and on June 27th, forts on
the outer breakwater and a few coastal batteries still held out.

The Navy sent a curiously composed task force to reduce the forts. With
the destroyer _Shubrick_, the Navy sent six PTs to deal with the holdout
Germans. It is hard to understand what PTs were expected to accomplish
against heavy guns behind concrete casemates. Perhaps the reputation of
the PT commander had overpowered the judgment of the Navy brass, for it
was none other than Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley, hero of the
MacArthur rescue run and the New Guinea blockade, come to try his mettle
in European waters.

Leaving four PTs with the destroyer as a screen, Bulkeley, in 510, with
521 in company, cruised by the forts and sprayed them with machine guns
at 150-yard range. The stubborn Nazis poured out a stream of 88-mm.
shells and hit 521 hard enough to stop her dead for five minutes while a
motor machinist mate made frantic repairs. Lieut. Commander Bulkeley ran
rings around the stalled craft, laying a doughnut of smoke around her
for a screen.

The _Shubrick_ herself was taking near misses from shore batteries, so
the skipper recalled the PTs and departed the scene. The two
“bombardment” PTs followed suit, having accomplished little except to
exercise the crew. Fortunately no American sailors were hurt in this
most inappropriate use of PT capabilities.


Even after the Allies had taken the whole Normandy coast, the Germans
clung to the offshore Channel Islands of Jersey, Alderney, Guernsey, and
Sark. On Jersey, they maintained a base for small craft which made
annoying nightly sorties.

To seal off the Jersey base, the Navy ordered PT Squadrons Thirty and
Thirty-four to patrol nightly from Cherbourg to the Channel Islands in
the company of a destroyer escort for backstop firepower and for radar
scouting.

                    [Illustration: ENGLISH CHANNEL]

  NETHERLANDS
  BELGIUM
  FRANCE
    PT 509 SUNK BY MINESWEEPER
    PTs 510 and 521 “BOMBARD” FORTS
    RICH SUNK BY MINES

On the night between August 8th and 9th, the _Maloy_ and five PTs were
patrolling west of Jersey. The weather was good all night, but shortly
before dawn a thick fog settled over the sea. At 5:30 A.M. the radar
watch on the _Maloy_ picked up six German minesweepers.

Lieut. H. J. Sherertz, as the officer in tactical command of the PT
patrol, was riding _Maloy_ to use its superior radar. He dispatched
three PTs from the northern end of the scouting line to attack the
Germans. The skipper of PT 500, one of the north scout group, was Lieut.
Douglas Kennedy, now editor of _True_ magazine. Blinded by the
peasouper, the PTs fired torpedoes by radar, but missed.

Thirty minutes later, Lieut. Sherertz vectored the southern pair of
torpedo boats to the attack. The 508 and 509 approached the firing line
through the fog at almost 50 knots. Lieut. Harry M. Crist, a veteran of
many PT battles in Pacific waters and skipper of 509, risked one fish by
radar aim from 500 yards. Lieut. Whorton (the officer who had tried in
vain to save the armless sailor of the _Rich_) couldn’t fire, because
his radar conked out at the critical moment, so the PTs circled and
Lieut. Crist conned the 508 by radio. The boats fired but missed.

As they came about to circle again, Whorton reported that he heard heavy
firing break out between the other PT and a minesweeper, but he couldn’t
shoot because his buddies were between him and the Germans. Whorton lost
the 509 in the swirling fog, and when he came around again, everybody
had disappeared. He searched almost an hour and returned to the _Maloy_
on orders of Lieut. Sherertz, because his burned-out radar made his
search ineffective.

The 503 and the 507 took up the search for their missing comrades. At 8
A.M. they picked up a radar target in the St. Helier roadstead at
Jersey, and closed to 200 yards. The fog lifted briefly and unveiled a
minesweeper dead ahead and on a collision course. The 503 fired a
torpedo, and both boats raked the enemy’s decks, but suffered hard
punishment themselves from the enemy’s return fire. Before the boats
escaped from the enemy waters, two PT sailors were killed and four
wounded on 503, and one wounded on 507.

The next day a search plane found the body of a sailor from the 509, and
ten days later a bullet-riddled section of the hull was found floating
in the Channel. It was not until after the war that the fate of the 509
was learned from the sole survivor, a liberated prisoner of war named
John L. Page, RdM3c. Here is his story:

“After firing one torpedo by radar, the 509 circled and came in for a
gunnery run. I was in the charthouse on the radar. Lieut. (jg) John K.
Pavlis was at the wheel. I remember we were moving fast and got pretty
close before receiving return fire. When it came it was heavy and
accurate.

“One shell burst in the charthouse, knocking me out. When I came to, I
was trying to beat out flames with my hands. I was wounded and the boat
was on fire, but I pulled the detonator switch to destroy the radar and
then crawled on deck.

“The bow of our boat was hung up on the side of a 180-foot minesweeper.
From the deck of the enemy sweeper, Germans were pouring in small-arms
fire and grenades. Everything aft of the cockpit was burning. I
struggled forward through the bullets and bursting grenades to the bow—I
have no idea how long that journey took—and the Germans tossed me a
line. I had just enough strength to take it and they hauled me aboard.”

The Germans stretched Page out on the deck and attacked the PT’s carcass
with crowbars, frantically trying to pry themselves loose from its
clutches. Just as the PT broke loose, it exploded with a tremendous
roar.

“I couldn’t see it,” says Page, “but I felt the heat and the blast.”

Free of the PT, the minesweeper ran for the shelter of home base at St.
Helier. The Germans carried Page back to the crew’s quarters to tend his
wounds. He had a broken right arm and leg, thirty-seven bullet and
shrapnel holes in his body, and a large-caliber slug in his lungs. While
they were working on him they were carrying in their own dead and
wounded.

“I managed to count the dead. There were fifteen of them and a good
number of wounded. It’s difficult to estimate how many, because they
kept milling around. I guess I conked out for a while. The first thing I
remember is a first-aid man putting a pack on my back and arm. Then I
could hear the noise of the ship docking.

“After they removed their dead and wounded, they took me ashore at St.
Helier. They laid me out on the dock for quite a while, and a couple of
civilians—I found out later they were Gestapo agents—tried to question
me, but they saw I was badly shot up, so they didn’t try to question me
further.”

Page was taken to a former English hospital at St. Helier, where
skillful German surgeons performed many operations—he couldn’t remember
how many—to remove dozens of bullets and fragments from every part of
his body. The final operation was on December 27, 1944.

While he was in the hospital, the bodies of three of his shipmates
washed ashore on Jersey. The British Red Cross took over the bodies and
buried them with military honors.

Page was regularly annoyed by Gestapo men, but he said: “I found that
being very correct and stressing the fact that my government didn’t
permit me to answer was very effective. They tried a few times and
finally let me alone.”

Page was liberated on May 8, 1945.

The Channel Island battles were vicious and inconclusive, in a sense,
but the German gadflies stayed more and more in port—became more and
more timid when they did patrol. Nightly sweeps of the PT-destroyer
escort teams bottled up the German boats and cleared the Channel waters
for the heavy traffic serving the voracious appetite of the armies on
the continent.




                                   8.
                           The War in Europe:
                              Azure Coast


After Allied troops had chopped out a good firm foothold on the
northwestern coast of France, the Allied Command found that the Channel
ports were not enough to handle the immense reserve of men and materials
waiting in America to be thrown into the European battle. Another port
was needed, preferably one on the German flank in order to give the
enemy another problem to fret about.

Marseilles was the choice, with the naval base at Toulon to be taken in
the same operation. The Allies set H-hour for 8 A.M. on August 15, 1944,
and assembled their Mediterranean naval power in Italian ports. Among
the destroyers assigned to the shore fire-support flotilla were ships of
the Free Polish and Free Greek fleets.

Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, when he heard about these new comrades
in arms, paraded his PTs past the Greek destroyer in daylight so that
the Hellenic sailors could see what an American torpedo boat looked
like. With a strong sense of history, Barnes remembered the Battle of
Salamis, and he didn’t want the Greeks to mistake his boats for
Persians.

As it turned out, the first duty for the PTs was to be mistaken for what
they were not.

With two British gunboats, a fighter director ship and three slow,
heavily armed motor launches, PTs of Squadron Twenty-Two sailed from
Corsica on August 14th, bound for the coast of France. This task unit
was under the command of Lieut. Commander Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the
American movie star.

Three of the PTs were detached to sail for the northwest as an
anti-E-boat patrol. Four others took 70 French commandos northwest to
land at the Pointe des Deux Frères, in the beautiful Gulf of Napoule
that washes the beach at Cannes. (The French commandos ran into a mine
field ashore, were strafed by friendly planes, and captured by the
Germans.)

The rest of the task unit sailed straight north, as though headed for
Genoa, trailing balloons as radar targets, with the hope that the enemy
would think a big invasion force was bound for the Italian seaport.

At Genoa, the phony flotilla turned west for the waters off Cannes and
Nice, still trailing its radar target balloons. The launches and PTs
maneuvered off Antibes, making as much of an uproar as possible, while
the British gunboats bombarded the beach.

                      [Illustration: AZURE COAST]

  SARDINIA
    MADDALENA BASE
    PT HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS
  CORSICA
    BASTIA BASE
  TUSCAN ARCHIPELAGO
    LANDING BEACHES
  ITALY
    PT DIVRSION SMOKE SCREEN
    OPERATION GUN
    PT 206 VS. HUMAN TORPEDOS
  FRANCE
    PT FAKE LANDING
    PTs 202 and 208 SUNK BY MINES
    PTs FAKE A LANDING
    PT 555 SUNK HERE
    BOOBY-TRAPPED DUMMY PARATROOPERS DROPPED HERE
  SPAIN

The minuscule fleet was delighted to hear from Radio Berlin that a
massive Allied landing near Cannes had been pushed into the sea with
heavy losses, and that Antibes and Nice had been bombarded by four large
battleships.

Captain Henry C. Johnson, commanding the diversion groups, said: “The
decoy screen proved effective as in addition to several enemy salvos
falling short of or bursting in the air over the gunboats, the PTs and
the launches were subjected to a considerable degree of large-caliber
fire which passed well over them.”

Happy with the confusion they had sown, the eastern diversion group
sailed west to join a western task unit with a similar mission.

Off the Baie de la Ciotat, between Marseilles and the port of Toulon,
the eastern group joined company with four more launches, 11 crash
boats, and eight PTs of Squadron Twenty-Nine, under the control of the
destroyer _Endicott_. Skipper of the destroyer was a sailor who might be
expected to know a bit about a PT’s capabilities. His name was Lieut.
Commander John Bulkeley.

The armed motor launches and the destroyer bombarded the beach behind a
screen of PTs. The crash boats trailed balloons, laid smoke screens,
fired ripples of rockets at the beach, laid delayed-action bombs in
shallow water to imitate frogmen at work, and broadcast noises of many
landing craft. The crash boats hoped to give the impression of a convoy
ten miles long and eight miles wide.

At 4 A.M. troop-carrier planes flew over the town of La Ciotat and
dropped 300 booby-trapped dummy paratroopers.

Radio Berlin broadcast an alarm. “The Allies are landing forces west of
Toulon and east of Cannes. Thousands of enemy paratroops are being
dropped in areas northwest of Toulon.”

With great bitterness, five hours later, Radio Berlin broadcast: “These
paratroops were found later to be only dummies which had booby traps
attached and which subsequently killed scores of innocent civilians.
This deception could only have been conceived in the sinister
Anglo-Saxon mind.”

This complaint came from the nation that was the world’s acknowledged
master at the nasty and unmanly art of booby-trappery.

Radio Berlin continued: “Large assault forces have attempted to breach
defenses west of Toulon, but as the first waves have been wiped out by
mine fields, the rest lost heart and withdrew and returned to an area in
the east.”

For two more nights the deception forces shelled the beach and made
noises like a mighty host.

For two days the Germans announced that the main Allied intention was to
take Toulon and Marseilles by direct assault, and talked of driving off
an invasion force including five battleships.

Before sailing away after the last phony demonstration, Lieut. Commander
Bulkeley broadcast a message, saying that the landings at La Ciotat
would be postponed for a few days “because of the furious resistance on
the beach,” but that they would definitely come. The Germans reinforced
the La Ciotat area with mobile artillery and infantry units, sorely
needed elsewhere.

Radio Berlin, after the final demonstration, said: “An additional and
futile attempt of the American forces to land large bodies of troops
west of Toulon has failed miserably.”

Lord Haw Haw, the English traitor who broadcast for the Axis, said: “The
assault convoy was twelve miles long, but for the second time in three
nights the Allies have learned of the determined resistance of the
_Wehrmacht_, to their cost.”

The Axis broadcasts had the unexpected result of terrifying crews of
German warships ordered out to attack the “invasion fleet.” Prisoners of
war later reported that some of the ships would not sail because they
had lost heart after listening to their own broadcast alarms.

Some ships did venture out, however, for one of the crash boats,
retiring from the demonstration area after the final show, ran into two
enemy corvettes—heavily armed escort vessels. The crash boat called
loudly for help, and two antique British river gunboats, the _Aphis_ and
the _Scarab_, came running. The British and German ships battled for
twenty minutes. Lieut. Commander Bulkeley’s _Endicott_, already almost
out of sight on the southern horizon, steamed back at flank speed and
opened fire at seven and one-half-mile range. Fire was slow, however,
for the _Endicott_, trying to imitate a large bombardment force earlier
that night, had shot its five-inchers so fast that all but one breech
block was fused from the heat. The one remaining gun shifted fire from
one corvette to the other.

Two PTs, screening the destroyer, closed the corvettes to 300 yards and
fired two fish, but missed. The _Endicott_ also fired torpedoes, and the
corvettes turned bow on to comb their tracks, thus masking their own
broadside. The _Endicott_ closed to 1,500 yards and raked the corvette
decks with 20-mm. and 40-mm. autocannon, driving gunners from their
stations.

The British gunboats and the destroyer pounded the now silent corvettes
until they sank. The ships and PT boats picked up 211 prisoners from the
_Nimet Allah_, a converted Egyptian yacht, and the _Capriolo_, a smartly
rigged light warship taken from the Italian navy.


In southern waters the PTs had been immune to mines, but off the
Mediterranean shores of France they suffered terribly from a new type of
underwater menace.

Following standard PT practice of moving the base as close to the
fighting front as possible, Lieut. Commander Barnes set up a boat pool
in the Baie de Briande, near Saint Tropez, almost as soon as the troops
went ashore. The boats were close to the fighting and ready for action,
but their gas tanker didn’t show up. By the evening of August 16th the
boats were low on fuel, so the skippers puttered about the coast,
running down rumors of gas tankers anchored here and there.

Lieut. (jg) Wesley Gallagher in 202, and Lieut. Robert Dearth in 218,
set sail together to look for a tanker reported to be in the Gulf of
Fréjus, fifteen miles to the northeast, the other side of Saint Tropez.
At 11 P.M., as the boats were rounding the point of St. Aygulf to enter
the harbor at Fréjus, the bow lookout on 202 sang out that he saw a
boxlike object floating 150 yards dead ahead. The skipper turned out to
sea to avoid it.

During the turn a mine tore the stern off the boat, blew stunned sailors
into the water, and threw a column of water, smoke, and splinters
hundreds of feet into the air. Four sailors jumped overboard to rescue
their shipmates.

Lieut. Dearth brought the 218 over to pick up the swimming sailors and
tried to approach the floating section of the 202 to take off survivors,
but the stern of his boat was blown off in the stunning explosion of
another mine.

The two skippers abandoned the shattered hulks of their boats. In the
life rafts they held a muster. One man was missing and six men were
wounded. Amazingly, the engineers of the watch on both boats survived,
though they had been stationed right over blasts so powerful that heavy
storage batteries had whizzed by them to land on the forecastle.

The sailors paddled shoreward. German planes were raiding the beach at
that moment, and shrapnel from the antiaircraft barrage rained down on
the rafts.

Shortly after midnight, the sailors landed on a rocky point chosen by
the skippers because it looked least likely to be land mined. Lieut.
Gallagher picked his way through a barbed-wire barricade along the beach
and found a deserted and partly destroyed fisherman’s cottage where the
sailors lay low for the rest of the night, not knowing whether they had
landed in friendly or enemy territory.

Soon after dawn the skippers made a tentative venture into the open.
Half a mile from the cottage they ran into soldiers—American
soldiers—who took over the wounded men and guided the other sailors to a
Navy beachmaster who gave them a boat ride back to their base.


A week later, on August 24th, task-force commander Rear Admiral L. A.
Davidson heard that the Port-de-Bouc in the Gulf of Fos, west of
Marseilles and at the mouth of the Rhone Delta, had been captured by the
French Underground. He ordered minesweepers to clear the gulf, and he
sent Capitaine de Frégate M. J. B. Bataille, French naval liaison
officer on his staff, to scout the shore around the harbor. Capt.
Bataille rode to the gulf in Lieut. Bayard Walker’s ill-fated PT 555.

The boat passed the minesweepers and came close aboard an American
destroyer whose skipper notified Lieut. Walker that coastal shore
batteries were still shooting near the mouth of the Gulf of Fos.

Lieut. Bayard reported: “It was decided that we could enter the Gulf of
Fos, despite fire from enemy coastal batteries, since we presented such
a small target.”

So—as he put it—they “entered the bay cautiously.”

One wonders how you go about entering a mine-filled bay, by an enemy
shore battery, “cautiously.”

The crew saw the French flag flying in a dozen places on the beach, and
landed at Port-de-Bouc where they were welcomed by a cheering crowd,
waving little French flags. Capt. Bataille met a fellow officer, French
Navy Lieut. Granry, who had parachuted into the area several weeks
before, in civilian clothes, and had organized a resistance cell to
prevent demolition of the port when the Germans retreated. After a
pleasant half-hour ashore, gathering information (Lieut. Walker spoke
excellent French), the party re-embarked, set a two-man watch on the
bow, and headed for sea at 29 knots.

“A few minutes later,” said Lieut. Walker, “a terrific blast exploded
beneath our stern, carrying away the 40-mm. gun and the gun crew and
almost everything else up to the forward bulkhead of the engine room....
The four torpedoes were immediately jettisoned and we anchored with two
anchors from separate lines.”

Volunteers manned the life rafts to pick up the men in the water. They
returned with a body, one uninjured sailor, and a man with a broken leg.
Four other sailors were never found.

One of the rafts could not return to the boat because of strong
currents, so Lieut. Stanley Livingston, a powerful swimmer, swam the 300
yards, towing the bitter end of a line patched together of all available
manila, electric cable, halyards, and odds and ends, buoyed at intervals
with life jackets. Sailors on the boat then pulled the raft alongside.

A French pilot boat and a fisherman in an open boat came out from the
beach to help. Overhead, fighter planes, attracted by the explosion,
took in the situation and set up an impromptu umbrella.

The sailor with the broken leg needed help. Lieut. Walker put him and
the dead sailor’s body into the fisherman’s boat with the pharmacist’s
mate, and climbed in himself, as interpreter. They shoved off for
Port-de-Bouc.

One hundred yards from the PT boat, Walker saw in the water a green line
with green floats spaced every foot. He yelled a warning at the
fisherman, but too late. A violent explosion lifted the boat in the air
and threw the four men into the water.

Lieut. Walker came up under the boat and had to fight himself free of
the sinking craft. He took stock. The dead sailor had disappeared
forever. The pharmacist’s mate, about sixty feet away, was shouting that
he couldn’t swim, so Walker went to the rescue. The injured man was
hauled up to the bottom of the overturned boat where, in Walker’s words,
“He appeared to be comfortable.”

The ordinary non-PT man might consider a perch on the bottom of an
overturned and sinking fishing boat as being somewhat short of
“comfortable” for a man with an unset broken leg.

“The situation seemed so good,” continued Lieut. Walker in the same
happy vein, “that I decided not to take off my pistol and belt.... The
French pilot boat came to our rescue, and the injured man was put aboard
without further harm. The fishermen’s boat upended and sank as the last
man let go.”

Walker confessed to a tiny twinge of disappointment at this point in his
narrative. A scouting float plane from the cruiser _Philadelphia_ had
landed near the shattered boat, and the PT officers had hoped to get off
their message to the task-force commander, but the pilot took fright
when the second mine went off under the fishing boat, and he left for
home.

“We had two narrow escapes getting back to the PT boat,” Lieut. Walker
said. “I requested the pilot, Ensign Moneglia of the French Navy, to go
between two sets of lines I could see, rather than back down and turn
around as the majority seemed to wish. It proved to be the safe way
between two mines.”

The crew jettisoned all topside weights except one twin 50-caliber
mount, so that they would have some protection against air attack.

Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston set out in a rubber boat for the
town of Carro, at the eastern entrance of the Gulf of Fos, about five
miles away. They were frantic to complete their mission by sending a
message to the task-force commander, and they hoped to find an Army
message center to relay their report that Port-de-Bouc was in French
hands.

Two teams of bucket brigades bailed out the leaking hulk, but the water
gained on them steadily. At midnight the sailors jettisoned the radar
and brought up confidential publications in a lead-weighted sack, ready
to be heaved over if they had to abandon the boat. The off-duty bucket
brigade had to share a few blankets, because the night was chilly.

About an hour after sunrise Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston
returned from Carro in a fishing boat, followed by another. That brought
the little flotilla to two pilot boats, two fishing boats, and a
battered piece of a PT. The two message-bearers had been unable to find
an Army radio.

Two of the boats passed lines to the PT to tow it ashore, and the other
two went ahead with Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston in the bows,
as lookouts for moored mines. They found so many on the road to
Port-de-Bouc that the flotilla turned and headed for Carro, on Cape
Couronne, instead.

At the Carro dock, the PT settled to the bottom. An abandoned house
beside the dock was turned over to the homeless sailors, and the French
Underground trotted up five Italian prisoners to do the dirty work of
making the place presentable.

Best news in Carro was that the cruiser _Philadelphia_ had just sent an
officer ashore with a radio, to send out some news of possible targets
along the shore. Lieut. Walker tracked down his colleague, and after
bloody travail, finally sent off his message to the task-force commander
that Port-de-Bouc was indeed in friendly hands, but that the harbor
waters were still acting in a very unfriendly manner indeed.

Walker threw in a little bonus of the fact that 3,000 enemy troops were
only a few kilometers away and that the French Underground fighters were
afraid they might escape via Martigues. He relayed the resistance
officer’s plea for an air strike to break up the escape attempt long
enough for American troops to arrive and sweep up the Germans.

Lieut. Walker adds a touching finale to his report:

“I had asked the pastor of the Catholic church at La Couronne, a village
slightly more than a mile from Carro, to say a Mass on Sunday morning
for the five men we had lost. A High Mass was celebrated in the church,
crowded to the doors, at 10:30.

“The pastor and local people had gone to considerable trouble to
decorate the church with French and American flags and flowers. The
choir sang, despite the broken organ, and the _curé_ gave a moving
sermon in French. Four FFI [Underground] men, gotten up in a uniform of
French helmets, blue shirts, and white trousers, stood as a guard of
honor before symbolical coffins draped with American flags.

“After Mass our men fell in ranks behind a platoon of FFI, and followed
by the whole town, we marched to the World War I monument. There a
little ceremony was held and a wreath was placed in honor of the five
American sailors.

“We were told that a collection was in the process of being taken up
amongst the local people, in order to have a plaque made for the
monument planned for their own dead in this war. The plaque will bear
the names of the five Americans who gave their lives here for the
liberation of France.”

The people of La Couronne did not forget. In that tiny village, on the
lonely coast at the mouth of the Rhone River, is a monument with a
plaque reading: To Our Allies, Ralph W. Bangert, Thomas F. Devaney, John
J. Dunleavy, Harold R. Guest, Victor Sippin.


One of the most brilliant Anglo-American teams was Lieut. R. A. Nagle’s
559 and the British MTB 423, both under command of the dashing British
Lieut. A. C. Blomfield.

During the night of August 24th, the marauding pair entered the harbor
of Genoa to raise a bit of general hell. Off Pegli, about five miles
from Genoa, they sighted what they thought was a destroyer, and put a
torpedo into it. The vessel was only a harbor-defense craft, but a fair
exchange for the one torpedo it cost.

Two nights later the pair jumped a convoy of three armed barges, and
sank two of them. For the next nine nights they tangled almost hourly
with F-lighters (four sunk), armed barges (eight sunk), and even a
full-grown corvette, the UJ 2216, formerly the French _l’Incomprise_,
which they riddled and sent to the bottom as the top prize of their
11-day spree.


Hunting got progressively meager as winter came on. PTs prowled farther
afield and closer inshore in a ferocious search for targets. On November
17th, Lieut. B. W. Creelman’s PT 311 pressed the search too far, hit a
mine, and sank. Killed were the skipper and his executive officer and
eight of the 13-man crew.


The last big fight of the American PTs with enemy surface craft came two
nights later when Lieut. (jg) Charles H. Murphy’s 308 and two British
torpedo boats sank a thousand-ton German corvette, the UJ 2207, formerly
the French _Cap Nord_.

The naval war was nearing its end for the Germans, and they turned to
strange devices—human torpedoes, remote-control explosive boats, and
semisuicide explosive boats. The remote-control craft didn’t work any
better for the Germans than they had for Americans in the Normandy
landings. So it was, also, with the human torpedo.

Lieut. Edwin Dubose, on PT 206, on September 10th, spotted a human
torpedo in the waters off the French-Italian frontier. The PT sank the
torpedo and pulled the pilot from the water. With great insouciance, the
pilot chatted with his rescuers and treacherously told them where to
find and kill a comrade piloting another torpedo.

In those waters that same day, planes, PTs and bigger ships sank ten
human torpedoes.


As naval resistance lessened, the Western Naval Task Force, under
American Rear Admiral H. K. Hewitt, was broken up and redistributed.
Many PTs were assigned to the Flank Force, Mediterranean. Since most of
the ships in the force were French, the PTs came under the command of
French Contre-Amiral Jaujard.

Because Mark XIIIs were arriving in good numbers—the torpedo targets
were getting scarce—the French admiral authorized the PTs in his command
to fire their old and unlamented Mark VIIIs into enemy harbors.

On the night of March 21st, PTs 310 and 312 fired four Mark VIIIs, from
two miles, into the harbor of Savona, Italy. Three exploded on the
beach.

The same boats, on April 4th, fired four at the resort town of San Remo.
Two exploded, one of them with such a crash that it jarred the boats far
out to sea.

On April 11th, the 313 and the 305 fired four into Vado, touching off
one large explosion and four smaller ones.

The last three Mark VIIIs were fired from the 302 and the 305 on April
19th. Lieut. Commander R. J. Dressling, the squadron leader, launched
them into Imperia where a single boom was heard.

“During these torpedoings of the harbors,” said Dressling, “Italian
partisans were rising against the Germans, and there is little doubt
that the explosions of our torpedoes were taken by the enemy as sabotage
attempts by the partisans. At no time were we fired on, despite the fact
that we were well inside the range of enemy shore batteries.”

Lieut. Commander Dressling thought that “to a small extent the actions
assisted the partisans in taking over the Italian ports on April 27th.”

The night after the Italian ports all fell to the Italian Underground,
Admiral Jaujard, with a fine Gallic sense of the ceremonial, led his
entire Flank Force, including PT Squadron Twenty-two, in a stately sweep
of the Riviera coast. It was partly the last combat patrol and partly a
victory parade.


Ten days later, on May 8th, the Germans surrendered and the war was
over—the war was over in Europe, that is, for on the other side of the
world the PTs were involved in the bitterest fighting yet.


PTs had operated in the Mediterranean for two years. The three squadrons
lost four boats, five officers and 19 men killed in action, seven
officers and 28 men wounded in action. They fired 354 torpedoes and
claimed 38 vessels sunk, totaling 23,700 tons, and 49 damaged, totaling
22,600 tons. In joint patrols with the British they claimed 15 vessels
sunk and 17 damaged.




                                   9.
                            I Shall Return:
                            Round Trip by PT


With the whole of New Guinea and the island base at Morotai in Allied
hands, the Philippine Islands were within reach of Allied fighter planes
and it was time for General MacArthur to make good his promise.

There was a lot of mopping up to do around Morotai, however, because the
taking of the island had been a typical MacArthur leapfrog job. Morotai
was a small and lightly defended island, but twelve miles away was the
big island of Halmahera, defended by 40,000 Japanese. MacArthur had
jumped over it to continue his successful New Guinea policy of seizing
bases between the Japanese and their home, then isolating the by-passed
garrison with a naval blockade.

The best way to bottle up the Halmahera garrison was to call on the PT
veterans of the New Guinea blockade, so the day after the landings on
Morotai, September 16, 1944, the tenders _Oyster Bay_ and _Mobjack_,
with the boats of Squadrons Ten, Twelve, Eighteen, and Thirty-three,
dropped anchor in Morotai roadstead. The first adventure of the Morotai
PTs was the rescue, on the very day of their arrival, of a wounded Navy
fighter pilot. (A full account of this is given at the end of [Chapter
5].)

PT sailors sometimes wondered what the Stone Age people of Halmahera,
people who fought with barbed ironwood spears, made of the strange war
being fought in their waters by the white and yellow intruders from the
twentieth century. Lieut. (jg) Roger M. Jones, skipper of PT 163, tells
about an encounter that has probably entered the mythology of these
pagan people.

In October 1944, Lieut. Jones’s boat and the 171 left Morotai for a
routine patrol to keep the bypassed Japanese of Halmahera from crossing
to Morotai. In the six weeks since the landings, PTs had already sunk
fifty Japanese barges, schooners, and luggers carrying troops and
supplies.

During the New Guinea campaign, as the use of torpedoes shriveled for
lack of suitable targets, the 163 had mounted an awesome battery of ten
50-caliber machine guns in twin mounts, two 20-mm., a 37-mm., a 40-mm.
autocannon, and a 60-mm. mortar.

The night’s problem was simple. Intelligence had told the PT skippers
that there would be no friendlies in the patrol area on the west coast
of Halmahera—no friendlies at all. “Shoot anything that moves.”

                   [Illustration: PHILIPPINE ISLANDS]

  LUZON
    MACARTHUR MAKES ROUND TRIP TO CORREGIDOR BY PT
  MINDORO
    PT 233 SINKS DESTROYER KIYOSHIMO
    LANDING BEACHES
    KAMIKAZES STRIKE AT PTs
    BRESTES HIT
  SAMAR
    TRACK OF CENTRAL STRIKING FORCE
    BATTLE OFF SAMAR WITH CENTRAL STRIKING FORCE
    PTs SINK SC 53, PC 105 and UZUKI
  LEYTE
    BATTLE OF SURIGAO STRAITS
    PT 493 LOST HERE
  MINDANAO
    TRACK OF SOUTHERN STRIKING FORCE
    1st PT SIGHTING OF JAPANESE FLEET

To make a coordinated attack, the two PTs hardly needed to communicate.
They had gone through the motions so many times that they performed the
maneuver like a reflex. The drill was to close a radar target slowly and
silently to 200 yards, fire a mortar flare, and open fire with every gun
that would bear instantly as the flare burst to smother the surprised
Japanese before they could answer.

That split-second timing, the business of opening fire simultaneously
with the bursting of the star-shell, was drilled into gunners repeatedly
by dummy attacks on floating logs.

Twenty-five miles short of the patrol area, the radar man found a target
five miles off the beach. The two skippers were jubilant; here was a
target made to order—too far out to sea to run for the beach, out of the
range of protecting shore batteries, in water deep enough for a
high-speed strafing run by the PTs, with no chance of hitting a rock.
The boats went to general quarters and closed the target.

Lieut. Jones took the unnecessary precaution of warning his gunners.
“Look alive, now—open fire the _instant_ the flare goes off.”

At 200 yards the skippers could make out a dim shape, but details of the
target were hidden in the darkness. Lieut. Jones gave a last warning to
gunners to be quick on the trigger, and fired his flare. Twenty-four gun
barrels swung to bear on target.

The flare burst.

Lieut. Jones continues:

“There was the perfect target, a Jap barge loaded with troops—you could
see their heads sticking up over the gunwale.

“_Open fire! Open fire!_ I screamed in my mind, but no words came out of
my mouth.

“What was the matter? Why weren’t the guns firing? Thousands of tracers
should be pouring into that enemy craft, but no gun on either PT fired.
The flare died and I ordered another.

“Why was I doing this? Why wasn’t the barge sinking now, holed by
hundreds of shells? Why hadn’t the gunners opened fire as ordered when
the flare went off? And what was the matter on the Jap barge? Why
weren’t they tearing us up with their guns, for the flare lit us up as
brightly as it illuminated them?

“We closed to 75 yards, still frozen in that strange paralysis under the
glare of the dying starshell.

“My helmsman spoke up. ‘They’re not Japs, sir, they’re natives.’

“I flipped on the searchlight, and our two boats circled the canoe,
searchlights blazing, guns trained. That eerie scene will remain in my
memory as long as I live. Thirty natives—some of them boys—sat rigidly
still, staring forward unblinkingly. I don’t know if it was native
discipline or sheer terror that held them. Even the children didn’t
blink an eye or twitch a finger.

“We shouted to them that we were Americans, but we gave up trying to get
through to them, for they refused to answer or even to turn their heads
and look at us. We left them rigidly motionless and staring straight
ahead at nothing.

“Back at the base we discussed our strange paralysis. Everybody agreed
he had first thought it was a Jap barge when the flare burst, and nobody
could give a reason for not shooting instantly. If even one gunner had
fired, the whole weight of our broadside would have come down on that
canoe.

“We’ll never understand it, but we are all grateful to Whoever or
Whatever it was that held our hands that night and spared those poor
natives. And what woolly stories those Halmaherans must be telling their
children about that night. I’ll bet by now we are part of the sacred
tribal legends of the whole Moluccan Archipelago.”


Almost from the beginning of the return trip to the Philippines two
years before, General MacArthur had had his eye on Mindanao, the
southernmost large island of the group and hence the closest to Morotai.
It was on Mindanao that he planned to land first, and from there he
could advance up the island chain.

Before daring to venture into the Philippines, however, the Allied High
Command wanted to make more landings—one at Yap Island, northeast of
Palau (where Marines had landed the same day as the Morotai invasion),
and another at Talaud Island, another steppingstone, about halfway
between Morotai and Mindanao.

While the Palau and Morotai landings were going on—indeed a few days
before they started, but too late to stop them—Admiral Halsey made a
bold proposal to cancel all intermediate landings and take the biggest
jump of all, completely over Talaud, over Yap, even over Mindanao
itself, all the way to Leyte in the Central Philippines.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff of all the Allies, then at a conference in
Quebec, swiftly accepted the recommendation and set October 20th as
target date, chopping two months (and nobody will ever know how many
casualties) off the life of the Pacific war.

In a wild flurry of activity, planners concentrated the preparations of
three months into a month, diverted the forces for the other landings
into Leyte force, and made bold carrier strikes at Formosa, in
preparation for the landings in the Central Philippines.

An example of the incurable tendency of high-level Japanese officers to
believe in their own foolish propaganda is the fact that on the very eve
of the Leyte landings the Japanese defenders of the Philippines relaxed
their guard, because they thought the Third Fleet had been wiped out.

American carriers had been roving the waters off Formosa during the week
before the landings, and carrier planes had chewed up enemy airpower.
Japanese Intelligence officers, however, believed the fantasies told
them by their pilots returning from attacks on the American fleet. Radio
Tokyo solemnly announced that the Third Fleet had been annihilated with
the loss of 11 carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one
destroyer.

The Japanese public went wild with enthusiasm. The Emperor made a
special announcement of felicitation to his people, and victory
celebrations were held at army and navy headquarters in the Philippines.

The Third Fleet had actually suffered two cruisers damaged.


The first American troops—a scouting force—landed on October 17th on
Dinegat and Suluan islands, across the gulf from Leyte. Minesweepers
swept the gulf and frogmen poked about the shoreline. Bombardment ships
pounded the beaches, and carrier planes blasted enemy airfields. Ships
of the attack landing forces entered Leyte Gulf during the night of
October 19th, and next morning troops went ashore on four beaches on the
west side of Leyte Gulf and on both sides of Panoan Strait, to the
south.

PTs were rushed up from New Guinea, 1,200 miles away. Forty-five of the
boats, under the tactical command of Lieut. Commander Robert Leeson,
made the trip on their own power with a stop-over for rest of a sort in
Palau and a refueling at sea, so as to arrive with enough gas to start
patrols immediately. They arrived in the combat zone on the morning of
October 21st, and began prowling that same night.

Times were lively in Surigao Strait, and the PTs had good hunting, but
nothing compared to what was coming.


Since a series of stinging setbacks from America’s carrier planes during
operations in the Central Pacific, the main body of the Japanese
fleet—still a formidable host—had held back from fighting American ships
in strength. Landings in the Philippines were too much to put up with,
however—too close to the beloved homeland; His Imperial Japanese
Majesty’s ships had to fight now, no matter how desperate the
situation—or rather because the situation _was_ so desperate.

The Japanese executed a plan long held in readiness for just this
event—the _Sho_ plan, or Plan of Victory, as it was hopefully called,
though the Japanese navy’s chief of staff more realistically called it
“Our last line of home defense.”

The stage was set for the greatest naval battle of all time, the Battle
of Leyte Gulf.

The naval lineup on the eve of battle—greatly simplified, perhaps
oversimplified—was as follows:


                               U. S. Navy

  _Seventh Fleet_, under Vice-Admiral Thomas Kincaid:

  This slow but powerful force included six over-age battleships, 18
  small, slow escort carriers, five heavy cruisers, six light cruisers,
  86 destroyers, 25 destroyer escorts, 11 frigates, and the usual
  gunboats, supply train and landing craft for an amphibious
  operation—plus all the PTs on the scene, the 45 veterans of the New
  Guinea blockade. Mission of the Seventh Fleet was close support of the
  Sixth Army landing force.

  _Third Fleet_, under Admiral William Halsey:

  This fast and mighty force had six new fast battleships, 16 fast
  carriers, six heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers and 58 destroyers.
  Mission of the Third Fleet was to prowl the waters north of the
  landings on the lookout for a chance to destroy once and for all the
  main Japanese battle fleet, especially its remaining carriers.


                             Japanese Navy

  _Northern Decoy Force_, under Vice-Admiral Ozawa:

  Four fat carriers, prime targets for the aggressive Halsey, were
  screened by eight destroyers and one light cruiser. Mission of the
  force was suicidal. Without enough planes to make a serious fight,
  Admiral Ozawa nevertheless hoped to lure Halsey’s powerful Third Fleet
  away from the landing beach, thus exposing American transports to
  attack by two powerful Japanese surface striking forces that were to
  sneak into Leyte Gulf through the back door, or rather two back doors
  at San Bernardino and Surigao Straits, north and south of Leyte
  Island.

  _Central Striking Force_, under Vice-Admiral Kurita:

  Five battleships, ten heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and 15
  destroyers. Admiral Kurita was to take this formidable surface fleet
  through San Bernardino Straits, at the northern tip of Samar, to come
  down on the transports “like a wolf on the fold” while Halsey’s force
  was wasting time on the sacrificial carrier decoy in the north.

  _Southern Striking Force_, under Vice-Admiral Shima:

  Formed of two task units—a vanguard under Admiral Nishima of two
  battleships, one heavy cruiser and four destroyers, plus a second
  section under Admiral Shima of two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser
  and four destroyers. These two southern forces were to come up from
  the East Indies and pass through Surigao Straits—happy hunting grounds
  of the PTs—to join with the Central Striking Force in Leyte Gulf for
  the unopposed and leisurely destruction of the Sixth Army.

The Japanese apparently could not believe that the U.S. Navy—once Halsey
had been suckered into chasing off after the decoy carriers—had enough
ships left afloat to resist the two striking forces. Had not the entire
Japanese nation just celebrated an Imperial proclamation of the near
annihilation of the American fleet?

All three Japanese forces converged on the Philippines simultaneously.
By October 24th, the three forces had been spotted and reported by
Allied scouts. Torpedoes and bombs from planes and submarines had made
punishing hits on the advancing Central and Southern Striking Forces,
but the ships kept plodding on toward the straits north and south of
Leyte.

And Admiral Halsey snapped at the bait dangled by Admiral Ozuma’s
carriers. For a man of Admiral Halsey’s temperament, the reported
sighting of the northern carrier group was too much to resist. He lit
out to get them all—leaving unguarded the Strait of San Bernardino, back
gate into Leyte Gulf and the transport area.

For once, an American command staff had fallen into the chronic error of
the Japanese. Admiral Halsey apparently believed the exaggerated claims
of his pilots and thought that the Central Striking Force had been
decimated and the remnants driven off. The Japanese had actually lost
only three cruisers to submarines and a battleship to aircraft. After a
short retreat, Admiral Kurita reconsidered and turned back during the
night to resume the transit of San Bernardino Strait. His powerful fleet
was steaming toward the transport area at 20 knots.

Admiral Kincaid misinterpreted a message from Admiral Halsey and thought
a part of his Third Fleet was still on station, corking up San
Bernardino, so Kincaid dismissed the central force from his mind and
turned his attention to the southern force heading for Surigao Strait.
Not even a scout submarine was watching the northern pass into Leyte
Gulf.

Shortly after noon of October 24th, Admiral Kincaid notified his entire
command to prepare for a battle that night. He cleared Surigao Strait of
all unnecessary traffic, and gave Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf the job
of not only stopping but destroying the enemy column.

Admiral Oldendorf had been commanding the bombardment and support
forces, and had in his control all the heavy guns of the Seventh Fleet.
In a phrase which infuriated the Japanese when they heard it, Oldendorf
said that he deployed his forces according to the professional gambler’s
code: “Never give a sucker a chance.”

Surigao Strait is a narrow strip of water about thirty-five miles long,
running almost north-south between Leyte and Dinegat islands. By its
shape and location, the strait was going to force the Southern Striking
Force to approach Leyte Gulf in a long, narrow column. Admiral Oldendorf
deployed his ancient but still hard-punching battleships in a line
across the mouth of the strait where it opens into Leyte Gulf. Thus,
without further maneuver, Oldendorf was certain to open fire with his
battle line already crossing the T of the Japanese column. His fleet
could swing its entire broadside to bear simultaneously; the enemy could
fire only the forward turrets on the lead ship.

Admiral Oldendorf was not satisfied with depending entirely on this
setup, murderous as it was, so he deployed every other fighting ship in
his command to work maximum destruction on the Japanese. He posted
cruisers and destroyers between the battleships and the mouth of the
straits, as a combined screen and supplementary battle line. Other
destroyer squadrons were posted near the strait, so that they could
launch torpedoes and then get out of the way during the gunfire phase of
the battle.

Admiral Oldendorf’s position was good—except for one thing. The warships
had fired off most of their ammunition in beach bombardment, and
magazine stocks were low, especially in the armor-piercing shells needed
for fighting heavy battleships. Oldendorf ordered the battleships to
hold their fire until they were sure of making hits—and he ordered
maximum use of torpedoes.

That meant torpedo boats, so 39 of Commander Selman Bowling’s PTs were
deployed in 13 sections of three boats each along the shores of Surigao
Strait, and also along the coasts of Mindanao and Bohol islands, far
into the Mindanao Sea on the other end of Surigao Strait. The farthest
PTs were stationed 100 miles from the battleline.

The Seventh Fleet had no night scouting planes, so Admiral Oldendorf
informed the PTs that their primary mission was scouting. The boats were
to patrol the approaches to the strait and to hide along the wooded
shores fringing the coming scene of battle. They were to relay radio
contact reports as the Japanese passed their station.

_Then_ they were to attack and do all the torpedo damage possible before
the Japanese came within gunshot of the Seventh Fleet battleline.

The PTs took up their stations during the night, and all hands topside
peered out to sea, watching for the telltale white bow wave of the first
Japanese ship.

The torpedo boat actions that followed are often hard to understand.
PTs, by the nature of their attack, provoke wild melees, and survivors
of melees rarely remember precisely what happened. What they do claim to
remember is usually faulty and contradicted by circumstantial evidence.
PT skippers kept only sketchy logs, and those entries giving the time an
action took place are often especially inaccurate. As nearly as a
historian can tell, however, here is what happened to the PTs.

At 10:15 P.M. Ensign Peter B. Gadd, skipper of PT 131, on station 18
miles south of Bohol Island almost exactly in the middle of the Mindanao
Sea and 100 miles from Admiral Oldendorf, picked up two targets on his
radar screen. They were between the three-boat section commanded by
Lieut. W. C. Pullen, and Bohol Island to the north. Lieut. Pullen tried
to reach Admiral Oldendorf by radio, but failed, so he led the PTs 152,
130 and 131, in a torpedo approach.

The radar pips broke into five separate targets, and when a light haze
lifted, the skippers clearly saw what they thought were two battleships,
two cruisers and a destroyer. The enemy opened fire at three-mile range,
with his biggest batteries. Starshells burst overhead and the PTs tore
away through a ghastly glare that made them feel naked under the rain of
high explosive.

An eight-inch shell hit a torpedo of 130 smack on the warhead and tore
through the bow. Miraculously, there was no explosion.

The 152 was hit by a 4.7-incher, probably from a destroyer that was
closing fast, with searchlight blazing. (This destroyer, the _Shigure_,
was the only ship of the Japanese van to survive the coming massacre.)
The explosion tore away the 37-mm. cannon, killed the gunner, stunned
the loader, and wounded three sailors. The boat was afire.

Aboard the stricken 152, Lieut. (jg) Joseph Eddins dumped two
shallow-set depth charges into his wake and pumped 40-mm. shells at the
pursuing destroyer.

“Our 40 mm. made the enemy reluctant to continue the use of the
searchlight,” said Lieut Eddins.

The destroyer snapped off the light and sheered away from the geysers of
exploding depth charges.

The fight had lasted 23 minutes. Now there were two more targets on the
radar screen and the PT sailors were frantic to get their radio report
through to the waiting battleline.

Lieut. (jg) Ian D. Malcolm of 130 ran south until he found Lieut. (jg)
John A. Cady’s section near Camiguin Island. He boarded PT 127 and
borrowed its radio. Just after midnight on October 25th, Lieut. Malcolm
made the first contact report of the position, course, and speed of the
enemy. It was the first word of the enemy received by Admiral Oldendorf
in fourteen hours.

Aboard the 152, the crew put out the fire, and the skipper gave the boat
a little test run. The bow was stove in, but the plucky boat could still
make 24 knots, so Lieut. Pullen ordered a stern chase of the
disappearing Japanese. He had to abandon the attack, however, because
the Japanese were too fast for him to catch. There is something touching
and ludicrous in the picture of the tiny, bashed-up PT trying to catch
the mammoth Japanese battleline.


Lieut. (jg) Dwight H. Owen, in charge of a section near Limasawa Island
next picked up signs of the approaching fleet. He tells how it looked:

“The prologue began just before midnight. Off to the southwest over the
horizon we saw distant flashes of gunfire, starshells bursting and
far-off sweep of searchlights. The display continued about fifteen
minutes, then blacked out. Squalls came and went. One moment the moon
shone bright as day, and the next you couldn’t make out the bow of your
boat. Then the radar developed the sort of pips you read about.”

Lieut. Owen jumped for the radio, but the enemy was jamming the circuit
and he could not get his report off. He did the next best thing—he
attacked.

At 1,800 yards, the cruiser _Mogami_ snapped on its searchlight and
probed for the boats. PT 146 (Ensign B. M. Grosscup), and 150 (Ensign J.
M. Ladd), fired one fish each, but missed. The destroyer _Yumagumo_
caught the 151 and the 190 in a searchlight beam, but the boats raked
the destroyer with 40-mm. fire and knocked out the lights. The boats
zigzagged away behind smoke.

Admiral Nishimura, commanding this van force of the two-section Southern
Striking Force, was delighted with himself at this point, and sent a
message to Admiral Shima, congratulating himself on having sunk several
torpedo boats.


At the southern entrance to Surigao Strait, Lieut. Commander Robert
Leeson, on PT 134, commanded the section posted on the western shore.
The boat crews saw flashes of the battle with Lieut. Owen’s boats, and
half an hour later picked up radar pips ten miles away. Leeson promptly
passed the radar sighting to Admiral Oldendorf, and then—the milder duty
done—led a torpedo attack.

Lieut. (jg) Edmund F. Wakelin’s 134 was caught by a searchlight while
still 3,000 yards from the two battleships. Shells fell close aboard on
both sides, splashing water over the boat, and shrapnel from air bursts
banged against the deck, but the skipper bore in another 500 yards to
launch his fish. The boat escaped from the Japanese and hid in the
shadow of Panaon Island, where later in the night the sailors fumed
helplessly as four Japanese ships steamed, “fat, dumb, and happy,” past
their empty torpedo tubes at 1,000-yard range.

All the torpedo tubes of the section were not empty, however, for Lieut.
(jg) I. M. Kovar, in 137, at 3:55 A.M., picked up an enemy formation at
the southern end of the strait and attacked. He had no way of knowing
it, but this was Admiral Shima’s second section, coming up to the relief
of Admiral Nishimura’s van that had already entered the strait, and
indeed had at that very moment been shattered by a vicious American
destroyer-torpedo attack.

Lieut. Kovar crept up on a Japanese destroyer, maneuvering to take
station at the rear of the enemy column. He let fly at the can and had
the incredible good luck to miss his target entirely and smack a light
cruiser he hadn’t even seen. Aboard the cruiser _Abukuma_, the explosion
killed thirty sailors, destroyed the radio shack and slowed the cruiser
to ten knots, forcing it to fall out of formation.

The crippled _Abukuma_ was caught and polished off by Army bombers the
next day. It was the only victim of Army aviation in this battle and the
only positively verified victim of PT torpedoes, though there is some
evidence that a PT may have made one of the hits claimed by American
destroyers.

The rest of Admiral Shima’s formation sailed majestically up the strait,
fired a spread of torpedoes at two small islands it mistook for American
warships, and managed somehow to collide with the fiercely burning
cruiser _Mogami_, only survivor—except for the destroyer _Shigure_—of
the vanguard’s slaughter by the torpedoes and guns of the Seventh Fleet.

Gathering in the two surviving ships, Admiral Shima led a retreat down
the strait. At the moment _Shigure_ joined the formation, Lieut. C. T.
Gleason’s section attacked, and the Japanese destroyer, which was doing
some remarkably able shooting, hit Ensign L. E. Thomas’ 321.

Most sorely hit of the torpedo boats, however, was Lieut. (jg) R. W.
Brown’s 493, which had had John F. Kennedy aboard, as an instructor, for
a month in Miami. The crew had named the boat the _Carole Baby_ after
the skipper’s daughter, who, incidentally, was celebrating her first
birthday the night of the Battle of Surigao Strait.

Lieut. Brown tells the _Carole Baby’s_ story:

“I was assigned a division of boats to take position directly down the
middle of the strait between Panaon and Dinegat.

“While we were under way to take station, the moon was out but heavy
overcast on the horizon threatened to bring complete darkness later. We
spotted an occasional light on the beach and we passed an occasional
native sailing craft, so the crew’s light mood changed to tension,
because they thought we were being spied on.

“When we were on station, strung out across the channel so that the Japs
couldn’t get by without our seeing them, I stretched out on the dayroom
deck for a little relaxation, but the radio crackled the report that the
first PT patrols had made contact.

“‘All hands to General Quarters,’ I ordered. ‘Take echelon formation and
prepare to attack.’

“The radarman called up ‘Skipper, eight targets distant twelve miles,
estimated speed 28 knots.’

“We closed to three miles, and seconds later my number two boat reported
its four torpedoes were in the water. Number Three reported two more
fish off and running. I had been maneuvered out of firing position and
hadn’t launched any torpedoes yet, so I came around for another attack
and was separated from the rest of the section.

“Powerful searchlights pinpointed the two other boats, and starshells
lit up the night with their ugly green glare. The two other boats shot
up the enemy can and knocked out two of the lights. I didn’t open fire,
because the Japs hadn’t seen the _Carole Baby_ yet and I wanted to shoot
my fish before they found me.

“At about 500 yards, I fired two and opened up with my guns. The enemy
fired starshells and turned on the searchlights. At this close range we
could see Japanese sailors scrambling about the ship, and we poured it
into them, but the concussion of their exploding shells was creeping
steadily closer, so I ordered my executive officer, Nick Carter, to come
hard left, open the throttles and GET OUT!

“I went aft to release smoke for a screen so we could return to fire our
remaining torpedoes, but we had penetrated an outer destroyer screen
without knowing it and had Japs all around us. Eight searchlights pinned
us down like a bug on a needle.

“It’s a funny thing how the mind works. I took time at that moment to
notice that all those searchlights were turning the sea about us to a
beautiful phosphorescent green.

“Our guns blew up two of the searchlights, but we were being hit hard.
A. W. Brunelle reported from the engine room that the boat was badly
holed at the waterline. I found out later that he took off his kapok
life jacket and stuffed it into the hole as the only cork he could find
right at hand.

“A blinding flash and terrific concussion threw me out of the cockpit.
Stunned, I reeled forward to find that most of the chartroom had been
blown away.

“I told Nick to head the _Carole Baby_ for the Island of Panaon, and we
limped off with the Jap cans chasing us. When we were out of torpedo
range of the capital ships, they turned back but kept throwing shells at
us to be sure we didn’t return to attack.

“_Return to attack!_ We weren’t even sure we could stay afloat. The
engines were almost completely underwater and though they were still
working, they couldn’t chug along forever with water steadily rising in
the hold.

“The last destroyer left us just as the bow of the _Carole Baby_ scraped
on a coral reef one hundred yards off the beach at Panaon.

“When the shooting stopped, a weird silence settled over us. I went over
the boat to see what condition we were in. We were in bad condition. The
_Carole Baby_ had been hit by five shells. Two of them had passed clean
through us without exploding, but the one that had exploded in the
charthouse had killed two and wounded nine of my crew.

“And that isn’t all. We were high on a reef, within rock-throwing
distance of an enemy shore. I had to know if those lights we could see
came from a Japanese camp, so I armed ten of us with machine guns and
grenades and we slipped over the side.

“We found a little village. Somebody had been there, but had run off as
we approached, so we decided to search farther. This type of warfare was
different from the one the crew was used to, and everybody was ill at
ease.”

It is interesting to note that by inference the sailors were _not_ “ill
at ease” in the type of warfare they had just been subjected to.

“One of the sailors was almost strangled by what he thought was a
low-hanging vine, but we found it was a telephone wire leading to a
small hut. We crept close to the hut and listened. No good. Japanese!

“We cut the wire and returned to the safety of our reef.”

Again, consider the character of sailors who talk about the “safety” of
a shattered boat, filled with dead and wounded shipmates, stranded on a
rock in the midst of history’s greatest naval battle and within pistol
range of an enemy shore.

“We expected that wire-cutting bit would stir up some Jap patrols, so we
made ourselves into a Little Gibraltar with all the weapons we could
scrape together—and on a PT boat that is plenty of weapons.”

Lieut. Brown tells of settling down to enjoy the unaccustomed role of
spectator at a battle. Through the night the crew watched the flash and
glare of gunfire and exploding ships up the straits.

“We couldn’t tell who was faring best. Through binoculars we could see
ships afire and sinking, but we couldn’t tell if they were Japanese or
American. Long before dawn the eastern sky looked like sunrise, because
of the orange glow of burning ships.

“When day did break we saw natives creeping back to their village, so we
waved and yelled ‘_Americanos_’ and ‘_Amigos_’ and friendly stuff like
that. They finally believed us and waded out to our boat where the
sailors set about their eternal bargaining for souvenirs. I believe an
American sailor would bargain with a cannibal tribe while they’re
putting him into the pot.

“One of the crew yelled and pointed out to sea. Three PTs were roaring
up the straits in broad daylight and we could see what they were
after—it was the crippled cruiser _Mogami_, trying to limp home after
the fight.

“I watched one of the PTs fire two fish and then race toward us when the
cruiser fired at her. We were glad to see her coming, but then we
realized with horror that the skipper thought our poor beat-up old
_Carole Baby_ was a Japanese barge, and he was getting ready to make a
strafing run on us. We jumped up and down and waved our arms and yelled
like crazy, even though we knew they couldn’t hear us.

“Just before they got to the spot where I would have opened fire if I
had been skipper, we saw the gunners relax and point those gun muzzles
away as they recognized us. It was PT 491 that came to our rescue.

“We tried to pull the _Carole Baby_ off the reef, but she was too far
gone. She went down in deep water—the only American ship, incidentally,
lost in the Battle of Surigao Strait.”

Admiral Chester W. Nimitz radioed from Hawaii:

  THE SKILL, DETERMINATION AND COURAGE DISPLAYED BY THE PERSONNEL OF
  THESE SMALL BOATS IS WORTHY OF THE HIGHEST PRAISE.... THE PT ACTION
  VERY PROBABLY THREW THE JAPANESE COMMAND OFF BALANCE AND CONTRIBUTED
  TO THE COMPLETENESS OF THEIR SUBSEQUENT DEFEAT.

By contrast to the corking of Surigao Strait, at the unguarded San
Bernardino Strait, the powerful Central Striking Force that morning
passed unopposed into Leyte Gulf and jumped the escort carriers and
their screen. Something close to worldwide panic broke out in American
command centers when the brass realized that the Central Striking Force
was already in the gulf and Admiral Halsey’s force was off chasing the
carrier decoy—too far off to engage Kurita’s fleet.

A handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts of the screen threw
themselves between the Japanese wolf and the transport sheep. Planes
from the escort carriers made real and dummy bombing runs on Kurita’s
ships. Between them the desperate escort forces—planes and
destroyers—battled Kurita to a standstill in the most spectacular show
of sheer fighting courage in all of naval history.

Incredibly, Admiral Kurita, with a victory as great as Pearl Harbor
within his grasp—the very victory that the northern decoy carrier force
was being sacrificed to buy—turned his mighty fleet about and steamed
back through San Bernardino Strait, content with sinking two of the
escort carriers and three of the screen ships whose gallant skippers had
put their destroyers between the enemy and the helpless transport fleet.

Admiral Halsey sank all four carriers, three destroyers, one light
cruiser and a fleet oiler of the decoy force.

The _Sho_ plan had worked almost perfectly for the Japanese—but with an
unexpected outcome; the Japanese surface fleet, instead of wiping out
the American transport fleet, was shattered. Its carrier force virtually
vanished. His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s navy could never mount a major
attack again.


With the main battleline of the Japanese fleet driven from the scene,
the PTs were right back where they had been in New Guinea and
Guadalcanal—busting barges and derailing the Tokyo Express.

On the far side of Leyte Island the waters are reef filled, the channels
shallow and tortuous. The Japanese were using the dangerous waters of
the Camotes Sea and Ormoc Bay to land supplies at night behind their
lines. A familiar enough situation for the PT sailors, so the skippers
took their shallow-draft torpedo boats into Ormoc Bay, looking for
trouble.

On the night between November 28th and 29th, Lieut. Roger H. Hallowell
took PTs 127, 331, 128, and 191 around the tip of Leyte and headed up
the western shore for Ormoc Bay in the first combat patrol of these
waters.

PTs 127 and 331 entered the bay while the other two boats patrolled the
islands outside. In the light of a tropical moon, the skippers inside
saw a subchaser and crept to within 800 yards before the Japanese opened
fire. The two boats launched eight torpedoes and a ripple of rockets
(enough explosive to tear a battleship in two, much less a little patrol
craft). The retiring PT skippers reported the usual loud explosion,
indicating a torpedo hit, which virtually all retiring torpedo-boat
captains always reported. This time, however, they were right. The
Japanese themselves later admitted the loss of the subchaser SC 53.

The two retiring boats, all their torpedoes spent, met the 128 and 191
at the entrance to the bay, and Lieut. Hallowell “transferred his flag”
to the 128 to lead the two still-armed boats in a second attack.

All four boats went in, the two boats with spent tubes planning to give
gunfire support to the armed duo. All hands searched for the original
target, but could not find it—for the good reason that it was on the
bottom.

Lieut. Hallowell saw what he thought was a freighter tied to a dock, so
the two skippers, ignoring fire from the beach, launched all torpedoes.

Ten days later, when the Army had landed at Ormoc and taken over the
harbor, the PTs promptly moved in and discovered that Lieut. Hallowell’s
“freighter” was the Japanese PC 105, clearly visible at the dock,
sitting on the bottom with a fatal gash in her side.


Lieut. Melvin W. Haines, early on the morning of December 12th, led PTs
492 and 490 in a classic attack on a convoy in Ormoc Bay. The PTs
stalked silently to close range, launched torpedoes, and retired
zigzagging behind smoke in a maneuver right out of the PT textbook. They
were rewarded by a great stab of light behind them. One of the boats, or
perhaps both, had hit the destroyer _Uzuki_, which went up in a great
column of orange flame.

This kind of night warfare was only too tediously familiar to PT
sailors, but right then the war took a nasty new turn for them—indeed
for the whole Pacific Fleet.

Desperate because of the swift deterioration of their position, the
Japanese switched from all reasonable kinds of warfare—if there are
such—and developed the suicidal _kamikaze_ tactic.

Through the war, Japanese fliers—and Americans, too, for that
matter—already hit and doomed, often tried to crash-land on ships under
attack, to take the enemy down to death with them.

During the Leyte surface-air battles, however, many of the Japanese were
dedicated, with great ceremony, to making deliberate suicide dives into
American ships, as a kind of human bomb. The toll was already
frightening to American naval men, and threatened to get worse.

In mid-December two _kamikaze_ planes crashed into the 323 in Surigao
Strait, and destroyed it utterly so that the PTs crews were served
notice that they were not too small a prize to merit attention from the
sinister new air fleet.


MacArthur had returned, all right, when he went ashore at Leyte, but it
was only a kind of tentative return—a one-foot-in-the-door return. Until
he landed on Corregidor in Luzon, he wouldn’t really be back where he
started. Luzon was the goal.

Just across the narrow Verde Island Passage from Luzon is the island of
Mindoro, and MacArthur’s air commanders sorely coveted that piece of
real estate for airstrips so that they could bring Luzon under the
gunsights of their fighters before the Luzon landings began.

On December 12th MTB Squadrons Thirteen and Sixteen, plus PTs 227 and
230, left Leyte Gulf in a convoy with the Eighth Army’s Visayan Task
Force to invade Mindoro Bay, 300 miles to the northwest. Because of the
sharply mounting kamikaze attacks, the Navy did not want to risk a
tender in Mindoro waters, so the squadrons, with the help of the
ingenious Seabees, planned to set up a base of sorts on an LST.

During the afternoon of December 13th, a _kamikaze_ slipped through the
air cover and crashed into the portside of the invasion force flagship,
the cruiser _Nashville_. The pilot carried two bombs, and their
explosion touched off five-inch and 40-mm. ammunition in the ready
lockers topside. The shattering blast killed 133 officers and men,
including both the Army and Navy chiefs of staff and the colonel
commanding the bombardment wing. The _Nashville_ had to return to Leyte
Gulf.

Later, ten more Japanese planes attacked and one got through to the
destroyer _Haraden_. The explosion killed 14 sailors and the destroyer
had to go back to Leyte. The PTs huddled close to the rest of the
convoy, to add their batteries to the curtain of fire.

Troops went ashore on Mindoro at 7 A.M. on December 15th, and met little
opposition. Half an hour later, PTs were operating in the harbor. The
infantry quickly set up a perimeter defense, pushing back the small
Japanese garrison to make room for an airfield at San Jose. As they had
at Bougainville, American planners wanted only enough room on Mindoro to
establish and protect a fighter base. It was not Mindoro but Luzon that
was the basic goal.

The Japanese didn’t intend to let the Americans have even that much
land, however, without lashing back furiously at the invaders of this
island almost within sight of the city of Manila.

Just after 8 A.M. the _kamikazes_ arrived. Three of the planes dove on
destroyers and were shot down by the combined fire of all ships. The
fourth flew over the stern of Ensign J. P. Rafferty’s PT 221, caught the
full blast of the PT battery, and cartwheeled along the surface of the
bay, spraying water and flames until it sank from sight.

Outside the bay, the sailors saw the _kamikazes_ coming, so Lieut.
Commander Alvin W. Fargo, Jr., commanding Squadron Thirteen, ordered the
PTs still escorting the convoy to get between the LSTs and the
approaching planes. Seven _kamikazes_ strafed the PTs ineffectively, and
the boats brought down three of them. Of the four that penetrated the
screen, two were shot down by the combined fire of the LSTs and the PTs.
The other two dived into LST 472 and LST 738, setting them afire.
Eventually, destroyers had to sink the burning hulks with gunfire. PTs
picked up a hundred survivors.

Next morning all the PTs were in Mangarin Bay at Mindoro, site of the
landings, and the LST 605, destined to be their base ship, was unloading
on the beach. PTs 230 and 300 were entering from the night’s patrol,
when a single plane glided out of the sun and strafed the 230, without
hitting it. The _kamikaze_ circled and started his dive on the LST 605.
The landing ship and all the PTs opened fire and shot off the plane’s
tail. The _kamikaze_ crashed on the beach fifty yards from the LST,
killing five men and wounding 11.

Half an hour later eight planes came after the PTs.

Lieut. (jg) Byron F. Kent, whose 230 was a target, tells of applying
broken-field running football tactics to the problem:

“Three of the planes chose my boat as their target. All our fire was
concentrated on the first as it dove for the boat in a gradual sweep,
increasing to an angle of about seventy degrees. I maneuvered at high
speed, to present a starboard broadside to the oncoming plane. When it
was apparent that the plane could not pull out of the dive, I feinted in
several directions and then turned hard right rudder under the plane. It
struck the water thirty feet off the starboard bow.

“The second plane began its dive. When the pilot committed himself to
his final direction, I swung the boat away from the plane’s right bank.
The plane hit the water fifty feet away.

“The third plane came in at a seventy-degree dive. After zigzagging
rapidly as the plane came down, I swung suddenly at right angles. The
plane landed in the water just astern, raising the stern out of the
water and showering the 40-mm. gun crew with flame, smoke, debris, and
water. All of us were slightly dazed, but there were no injuries and the
boat was undamaged.”

Lieut. (jg) Frank A. Tredinnick, in 77, was attacked by a single. He
held a steady course and speed until just before impact, and then
chopped his throttle. The _kamikaze_ pilot, who had quite properly taken
a lead on the speeding boat, crashed ten yards ahead.

Lieut. (jg) Harry Griffin, Jr. swung his 223 hard right just before
impact, and his attacker showered the boat with water.

With two planes after him, Lieut. (jg) J. R. Erickson maneuvered at top
speed.

“The gunners fired a steady stream of shells into one plane as it came
down in a steep dive and crashed fifteen feet off the port bow. The
second plane circled until he saw his partner had missed, and he dived
on our stern, strafing as he came. The gunners fired on him until he
crashed _three feet_ off the starboard bow, spraying the deck with
debris and water. One man was blown over the side by the concussion but
was rescued uninjured.”

The last plane was shot down by the combined fire of the PTs before it
could even pick a target.

That afternoon as 224 and 297 were leaving for the night’s patrol, two
planes dropped three bombs but missed. The ships in the bay shot one
plane into the water. The other was last seen gliding over the treetops,
trailing fire.

On the afternoon of December 17th, three planes came into the bay. One
went into a steep dive aimed at Lieut. Commander Almer P. Colvin’s 300.
The _kamikaze_ had been studying the failure of his comrades, with their
suicidal sacrifice, to inflict any damage on the swift PTs. Lieut.
Commander Colvin gave the 300 a last-second twist to the right, but the
pilot outsmarted him, anticipated that very move, and crashed into the
engine room, splitting the boat in two. The stem sank immediately and
the bow burned for eight hours. Lieut. Commander Colvin was seriously
wounded, four men were killed, four reported missing, one officer and
four men wounded. Only one man aboard escaped without injury.


That night Lieut. Commander N. Burt Davis’ boats carried sealed orders
from General MacArthur to a guerrilla hideout on the other side of
Mindoro and delivered them to Lieut. Commander George F. Rowe, U. S.
Navy liaison officer to the Mindoro Underground. The boats picked up
eleven American pilots, who had been rescued and sheltered by the
guerrillas, and brought them back to Mindoro.

Some of the Japanese High Command wanted to write Mindoro off as already
lost; others wanted to make a massive counterlanding on the north
beaches to fight it out at the perimeter defense and push the American
airfield off the island. The two groups compromised, and as often
happens in a compromise, they sent a boy to do a man’s job.

Admiral Kimura left Indo-China with a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser,
and four destroyers, on a mission of bombarding the Mindoro beachhead.
It wasn’t much of a naval task force to send into those waters, but as
it happens, every American capital ship in the area was at Leyte, too
far off to help. The only naval forces handy were the PTs.

The PTs had been up against this very problem before. Twice, at
Guadalcanal, they had tangled alone with a bombardment force and a far
mightier bombardment force than the one approaching from Indo-China.

“Recall all patrols to assist in the defense of Mindoro,” Lieut. Admiral
Kincaid ordered Lieut. Commander Davis.

A patrol line of the nine most seaworthy boats was strung out three
miles off the beach. Two more boats, under Lieut. P. A. Swart, had
already left to call on the Mindoro guerrillas, but Davis called them
back, vectoring them toward the approaching Japanese, with instructions
to attack on contact.

Army bombers attacked the Japanese bombardment flotilla all night long
(and attacked the patrolling PTs, too, seriously damaging 77 with a near
miss and wounding every member of the crew—which was more than the
_kamikazes_ had been able to do in days of ferocious attack).

Admiral Kimura bombarded the beach for about thirty minutes. It was a
most desultory job, did almost no damage, and caused not a single
casualty. He fired three poorly aimed salvos at the PTs and left.

Halfway up the western coast of Mindoro, Admiral Kimura ran into Lieut.
Swart’s two PTs, hustling back to get into the scrap. Just after
midnight the two boat skippers and the Japanese discovered each other
simultaneously. The Japanese illuminated 220 with a searchlight and
fired dangerously accurate salvos—the first good shooting that force had
done that night.

Lieut. (jg) Harry Griffin, Jr., closed his 223 to 4,000 yards and fired
both his starboard fish. Three minutes later a long lance of flame shot
up from the ship’s side and she went under the waves.

The next afternoon PTs picked up five Japanese sailors from the water.
They were survivors of the brand new destroyer _Kiyoshimo_, victim of
Lieut. Griffin’s steady eye.

The worst ordeal of the Mindoro landings was prepared on December 27th,
when a resupply convoy shaped up near Dulag on Leyte Island. The convoy
led off with 25 LSTs in five columns of five ships; next came three
Liberty ships, one Navy tanker, six Army tankers, two aviation gasoline
tankers and the PT tender _Orestes_ in five columns at the center of the
convoy; last came 23 LCIs in five columns. Nine destroyers formed an
outer screen; 29 PTs formed an inner screen on each flank.

Aboard the _Orestes_ was Captain G. F. Mentz, commander of the
Diversionary Attack Group of LCIs and PTs which was being moved to
Mindoro for mounting amphibious landings behind the Japanese lines.

A Japanese night snooper spotted the convoy about 4 A.M. on December
28th, and at the same time the convoy commander learned that the weather
was so bad over Leyte airfields that he could expect no air cover until
noon the next day. Unfortunately the weather was fine over the
convoy—perfect weather for the _kamikazes_ to draw a bead on the slow
ships of the supply train.

In midmorning three planes attacked. The first tried to crash-dive the
LCIs and was shot down by LCI 1076. Another overshot the aviation
gasoline tanker _Porcupine_, and splashed.

The third _kamikaze_ made perhaps the most spectacular suicide crash of
the war. It hit the _John Burke_, a merchant ship loaded with
ammunition, and pilot, plane, ship, cargo, and crew disappeared in a
blinding flash. A small Army freighter went down with the _John Burke_.
The LCI flagship, LCI 624, ran to the rescue, but only two heads bobbed
in the water, both survivors of the Army ship, and one of those died
almost immediately. All sixty-eight merchant sailors had been vaporized
in the explosion.

Another _kamikaze_ hit the merchant ship _William Ahearne_ on the
bridge, setting it on fire. The ship was towed back to Leyte. Loss of
this ship was a sad blow to the forces ashore at Mindoro, for included
in her cargo was a large stock of beer.

Friendly air cover arrived and ran off that particular flight of planes,
but the convoy was under almost constant attack that night. In the
moonlight, about 7 P.M., a torpedo bomber put a fatal fish into LST 750.

Three LCIs each shot down a plane. Sailors on the LCI flagship had the
harrowing experience of hearing a torpedo scrape along the ship’s flat
bottom from stem to stem without exploding. Some of the LCIs had
surgical units aboard, and many of the wounded were run over to these
handy, impromptu hospital ships.

Air attack was incessant, in daylight and dark, and too monotonously
similar to recount in detail unless there was scoring.

During the morning of December 30th, three planes were shot down, one by
a PT that knocked down its victim as the _kamikaze_ was diving on an
escorting destroyer.

The last attack of the morning came just as the convoy was entering the
harbor at San Jose. The landing-craft flagship shot down a _kamikaze_
with a short burst of 40 mm.

Inside Mangarin Bay the ships hurried with the stevedoring, because the
sailors were eager to leave this unfriendly land. No planes appeared
until almost 4 P.M.

Five Japanese dive-bombers pierced the friendly fighter cover and
whistled down from 14,000 feet in their suicide dives. One hit the
destroyer _Pringle_ and did only light damage. Another hit the aviation
gasoline tanker _Porcupine_ with such an impact that its engine went
clear through the decks and out the bottom, tearing a large hole in the
hull. Seven men were killed and eight wounded. The stern burst into
flames, a dangerous development on a ship carrying a tankful of aviation
gasoline forward.

The fourth plane dove on the destroyer _Gansevoort_ and crashed it
amidships. The main deck was peeled back like the lid of an empty
sardine can. The impact cut power lines and set fires, but caused
surprisingly light casualties.

The destroyer _Wilson_ came alongside and exercised the fire-fighting
crew by putting them aboard the Gansevoort to fight the flames.

The _Gansevoort_ was towed to the PT base. There she was given the
bizarre task of torpedoing the burning _Porcupine_ to knock off the
blazing stern before the fire reached the gasoline tanks forward. The
trick didn’t work, for the blast just spread burning gasoline on the
water, endangering the _Gansevoort_ herself and setting new fires, so
she had to be towed to a new anchorage. There she was abandoned, but a
volunteer crew of a nearby PT boarded the destroyer and put out the
fires. _Porcupine_ burned to the waterline.

The most grievous blow of the _kamikaze_ attack, however, was struck at
the PT navy.

The fifth Japanese dive bomber dove on the PT tender _Orestes_, was hit
by tracers from PTs and LCIs, hit the water and bounced upward into the
starboard side of the tender. The plane’s bombs punched through the side
and exploded within, blowing many officers and men into the bay. The
ship burst into violent flame, and fire mains were ruptured by the
blast. Fifty-nine men were killed and 106 seriously wounded.

The waters around the _Orestes_ were teeming with swimming sailors, and
PTs bustled about, pulling in the stunned survivors of the blast.

The LCI 624 went alongside and Commander A. V. Jannotta, the LCI
flotilla commander, led a volunteer fire-fighting and rescue party
aboard the ship, which had become a hell of exploding ammunition and
burning aviation gasoline.

Commander Jannotta was awarded a Navy Cross for his heroic salvage work
of that afternoon. Captain Mentz had been severely wounded in the
_kamikaze_ blast, and his chief of staff, Commander John Kremer, Jr.,
had been killed, so Commander Jannotta took over as commander of the
whole task group. He was given a Silver Star for his performance in that
capacity.

Led by Lieut. Commander Davis, many PT sailors went aboard the burning
_Orestes_ to pull wounded shipmates out of the fire.

By 9:45 P.M., flames were out on the _Orestes_ and Commander Jannotta
lashed an LCI to either side and pushed it up on the beach.

At dusk, PTs and LCIs scattered and hugged the shoreline, to make the
worst possible targets for night marauders. The small craft had good
reason to be shaken. The five _kamikazes_ had made 100 per cent hits,
and any weapon that is 100 per cent effective is a fearsome weapon.

That same night four PTs shot down a plane as they left the bay on
patrol.

Early in the morning of New Year’s Day, 1945, bombers came over the base
again. One fragmentation bomb killed 11 men and seriously wounded ten
others, most of them survivors of the _Orestes_.

The _kamikazes_ were not through with the Mindoro shipping. On the
afternoon of January 4th, PTs 78 and 81 set fire to one of four enemy
fighters that flew over the bay. Trailing smoke and flame, the plane
glided into the side of the ammunition ship _Lewis Dyche_, anchored a
quarter mile from the two PTs.

The ship exploded with a roar, taking her 71 merchant sailors to the
bottom with her and lifting the PTs out of the water. The concussion
badly damaged the boat hulls; two PT sailors were killed and ten men
wounded by the blast and falling debris. It was the last visit of the
_kamikazes_ to Mindoro, but a spectacular one.

As Commander Jannotta said in his report: “This new weapon employed by
the enemy—the suicide diver or human torpedo—constitutes a serious
threat to naval forces and to shipping.”

The Mindoro PTs won a Navy Unit Commendation which read:

  As the only naval force present after retirement of the invasion
  convoy, this task unit served as the major obstruction to enemy
  counterlandings from nearby Luzon, Panay, and Palawan, and bore the
  brunt of concentrated hostile air attacks through a five-day period,
  providing the only antiaircraft protection available for persons
  ashore. The gallant officers and men ... maintained a vigilant watch
  by night and stood out into the open waters close to base by day to
  fight off repeated Japanese bombing, strafing, and suicide attacks,
  expending in three days the ammunition which had been expected to last
  approximately three weeks in the destruction or damaging of a large
  percentage of attacking planes.

When fighter planes began to fly in Mindoro, Americans went ashore on
Luzon. Some hard fighting remained, but the war was nearing the end.

The last two PTs lost in the war were, sadly enough, victims of their
own mates.

During the landings at Nasugbu, in western Luzon, on the night of
January 31st, ships of the screen were attacked by twenty or more
Japanese midget submarines. One of the little craft sank the PC 1129.
Immediately afterward the destroyer escort _Lough_ attacked a swarm of
thirty or more _kamikaze_ explosive boats. Naturally the screen vessels
were nervous about small vessels in those waters.

On the following night, Lieut. John H. Stillman set out to hunt the
suicide flotillas with PTs 77 and 79. (The 77 had already been treated
roughly by friendlies; it was the boat damaged by American Army bombers
during the repulse of Admiral Kimura’s bombardment flotilla.)

Lieut. Stillman’s orders were to stay south of Talim Point, because the
American destroyers were patrolling north of there. While the PTs were
still three miles south of Talim Point—well within their assigned
area—they ran into the destroyer escort _Lough_, the same ship that had
shot up the explosive boats the night before, and the destroyer
_Conyngham_.

The _Lough_ fired starshells and the PTs fled south at high speed,
trying to identify themselves by radio and signal light. The destroyers
meanwhile were trying to raise the boats by radio but failed. They did
not see the PT light signals.

The PTs still might have escaped, but hard luck 77 picked that evil
moment to run aground. A shell from _Lough_ hit her, blowing the crew
into the water. The _Lough_ shifted fire to 79, and hit her on the
portside. The boat exploded and sank, carrying down with her the
skipper, Lieut. (jg) Michael A. Haughian, Joseph E. Klesh, MoMM1c, and
Vincent A. Berra, QM3c.

The 30 survivors of the two boats, swimming in the light of the burning
77, assembled and held a muster. Besides the three dead on the 79,
Lieut. Stillman was missing. He was never seen again.

The shipwrecked sailors swam together to an enemy-held shore two miles
away. Guerrillas sheltered them until February 3rd, when they were
picked up by PTs 227 and 230.

On March 2, 1945, just two weeks short of three years after he left the
Rock on Lieut. Bulkeley’s PT, General MacArthur landed on recaptured
Corregidor. Finally, he had returned. And he returned the same way he
had left—by PT 373.


In the last days of the war, the PTs fought the familiar kind of mop-up
action against bypassed pockets of Japanese troops that they had been
fighting for three years in the Pacific. Nightly patrols fought minor
actions, but targets became harder and harder to find. When the war
ended on August 14, 1945, the Japanese came out of the woods and the PTs
learned for the first time the tremendous enemy power they had kept
bottled up far from the fighting front.

At Halmahera, for instance, six PTs picked up Lieut. General Ishii,
Commanding General of the army forces there, and Captain Fujita, Naval
Commander, and took them to 93rd Division headquarters on Morotai, where
they surrendered 37,000 troops, 4,000 Japanese civilians, 19,000 rifles,
900 cannon, 600 machine guns, and a mountain of miscellaneous supplies.

For almost a year the PTs of Morotai—down to two understaffed squadrons
at the end—had held at bay a Japanese force powerful enough, in the days
of Japanese glory, to conquer whole nations and to hold vast stretches
of conquered lands in iron control.

The Japanese themselves paid the top tribute to the PT fleet. “The enemy
has used PT boats aggressively,” one of their tactical publications
read, “On their account our naval ships have had many a bitter pill to
swallow.”

So much for the past of the torpedo boat. What about its future?

The PT fleet was quickly disbanded after the war. Today, although the
Soviet navy has more than 500 motor torpedo boats—according to _Jane’s
Fighting Ships_—and even though Soviet-built torpedo boats ply Cuban
waters almost within sight of American shores, the U. S. Navy has not a
single PT in commission.

But in the waters of Long Island Sound and in sheltered bays on the
Pacific Coast strange craft are roaring about—experimental craft that
lift out of the water to skim along on hydrofoils at dazzling speeds
(though even the modern hydrofoil cannot attain the breath-taking speeds
ascribed to the PTs by overeager reporters during the days of the
MacArthur rescue run).

The Navy is puttering about with these hydrofoils, arming them with
homing torpedoes, experimenting with tactics to use against swift
nuclear submarines—the capital ships of future navies.

There may again be a job in the Navy for the dashing young sailor who
prefers the swift give and take of small-boat service to the staid and
plodding duty on ships of the line. There may still be room in America’s
arsenal for David’s giant-killing slingshot.




                              _Appendix 1_
                   Specifications, Armament, and Crew


American PT boats, with only a few exceptions, were of two types,
78-foot Higgins-built boats and 80-foot Elcos. Draft to the tips of
propellers was five feet six inches. Power supply was from three Packard
V-12 engines giving 4,500 shaft horsepower. Tanks held 3,000 gallons of
high-octane gasoline and 200 gallons of potable water. Normal crew was
three officers and 14 men, though the complement varied widely under
combat conditions. The boat could carry enough provisions for about five
days. The boat weighed 121,000 pounds, of which 30,000 were contributed
by four torpedoes and tubes, a 40 mm., two twin 50 caliber, and one
20-mm. antiaircraft gun, one 37-mm. cannon, two rocket launchers with
eight 5-inch rockets, a 60-mm. mortar, and a smoke-screen generator. In
combat, PT skippers often improvised other armaments to adapt to local
conditions. Pound for pound, the PT boat was by far the most heavily
armed vessel afloat. Top speed under ideal conditions was 43 knots.
Conditions were seldom ideal.




                              _Appendix 2_
                    Losses Suffered by PT Squadrons


  Destroyed by surface ships:
    by gunfire, 5;
    by ramming, 1 (this one, 109, was destined to become one of the most
          famous boats of all time, because of the subsequent employment
          of its skipper, John F. Kennedy).
  Destroyed by aircraft:
    strafing, 1;
    bombing, 4;
    _kamikaze_, 2.
  Destroyed by shore batteries: 5.
  Destroyed by mines: 4.
  Damaged by surface ships and beached to prevent capture: 1.
  Lost in transit on transports sunk: 2.
  Grounded in enemy waters and destroyed to prevent capture: 18.
  Destroyed to prevent capture: 3 (the boats left behind by Lt.
          Bulkeley’s squadron on quitting the Philippines).
  Destroyed by U. S. aircraft: 3;
    by Australian aircraft, 2.
  Destroyed by surface friendlies: 2.
  Destroyed possibly by enemy shore battery, possibly by friendly
          destroyer: 1.
  Lost in storms: 5.
  Destroyed by fire and explosion in port: 6.
  Destroyed in collision: 3.
  Total: 69.




                              _Appendix 3_
                     Decorations Won by PT Sailors


  Congressional Medal of Honor: 2.
  Navy Cross: 19, plus two Oak Leaf Clusters.
  Distinguished Service Medal: 1.
  Distinguished Service Cross, Army, with Oak Leaf Cluster: 1.
  Distinguished Service Cross, Army: 2.
  Distinguished Service Medal, Army: 1.
  Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster: 30.
  Silver Star: 342.
  Legion of Merit, Degree of Officer: 1.
  Legion of Merit with Gold Star: 2.
  Legion of Merit: 29.
  Navy and Marine Corps: 57 (including one awarded to John F. Kennedy).
  Bronze Star with Gold Star: 4.
  Bronze Star: 383.
  Commendation Ribbon with Gold Star: 3.
  Commendation Ribbon: 120.
  Distinguished Conduct Star, Philippines Government: 4.
  Distinguished Service Cross, British: 6.
  Distinguished Service Medal, British: 2.

[Illustration: Camouflage paint and nets protect PT boats from detection
              by Japanese air patrols. (New Guinea, 1943)]

[Illustration: High-speed, lightweight “Mosquitoes” on patrol at Midway
                                (1943)]

  [Illustration: The old and the new: Filipino outriggers and PT boats
           combine forces for a sea rescue operation. (1944)]

  [Illustration: PT boats not only spot and attack Japanese craft, but
       also pick up survivors. (Battle of Surigao Strait, 1944)]


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