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,