THE MOSQUITO FLEET

BERN KEATING

SBS SCHOLASTIC BOOK SERVICES
New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney

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

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

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

CONTENTS

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

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

1.
The First PTs: Facts and Fictions

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

America needed a lift of spirits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the truth about the PT?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.
Attrition at Guadalcanal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOLOMON ISLANDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reason?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a swirling, half-hour action on Friday, November 13th—the opening of the three-day naval Battle of Guadalcanal—the United States Navy lost the cruiser Atlanta, the destroyers Barton, Cushing, Laffey, and Monssen, and suffered severe damage to the cruisers Portland, San Francisco, Helena, Juneau, and to three destroyers. Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan was killed.

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

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

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

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

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

Two PTs were still in the fight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A submarine and a destroyer sunk [not counting Makigumo]

Two destroyers badly damaged

Tons of Japanese supply drums riddled and sunk

Dozens of disaster victims pulled from the water

Two massive bombardments just possibly scared off

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

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

3.
Battering Down the Gate:
the Western Hinge

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

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

PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worse was on the way than ordinary bombers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.
Battering Down the Gate:
the Eastern Hinge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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