THE MOSQUITO FLEET
BERN KEATING
SBS SCHOLASTIC BOOK SERVICES
New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney
_To Lieut. Commander Brinkley Bass and Lieut. Commander Clyde Hopkins
McCroskey, Jr., who gallantly gave their lives during World War II. They
were brave seamen and good friends._
Photographs used on the cover are courtesy of the U.S. Navy. This book
is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, or
otherwise circulated in any binding or cover other than that in which it
is published—unless prior written permission has been obtained from the
publisher—and without a similar condition, including this condition,
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Copyright © 1963 by Bern Keating. This edition is published by
Scholastic Book Services, a division of Scholastic Magazines, Inc., by
arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 4th printing January 1969
Printed in the U.S.A.
CONTENTS
1. The First PTs: Facts and Fictions 1
2. Attrition at Guadalcanal 13
3. Battering Down the Gate: the Western Hinge 51
4. Battering Down the Gate: the Eastern Hinge 71
5. Along the Turkey’s Back 92
6. The War in Europe: Mediterranean 125
7. The War in Europe: English Channel 170
8. The War in Europe: Azure Coast 181
9. I Shall Return—Round Trip by PT 201
Appendix 1. Specifications, Armament, and Crew 249
Appendix 2. Losses Suffered by PT Squadrons 250
Appendix 3. Decorations Won by PT Sailors 251
Historical material in this book comes from action reports, squadron
histories, and other naval records on file at the historical records
section in Arlington, Va. Most valuable was the comprehensive history of
PT actions written by Commodore Robert Bulkley for the Navy. The Bulkley
history was in manuscript form at the time I did research for this book.
The broad outline of naval history comes mostly from the _History of U.
S. Naval Operations in World War II_ of Samuel Eliot Morison. I am
grateful to several PT veterans for their generous contribution of
diaries, letters, anecdotes, etc., which have been drawn on for human
interest material. Among these kind correspondents are: James Cunningham
of Shreveport, La., Roger Jones of Nassau, Bahama Islands, Lieut.
Commander R. W. Brown of Scituate, Mass., Capt. Stanley Barnes of the
War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa., James Newberry of Memphis, Tenn.,
and Arthur Murray Preston, of Washington, D. C. The officers of Peter
Tare Inc., a PT veterans organization, have been helpful.
1.
The First PTs: Facts and Fictions
In March 17, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur arrived safely in Australia
after a flight from his doomed army in the Philippine Islands. The
people of America, staggering from three months of unrelieved disaster,
felt a tremendous lift of spirits.
America needed a lift of spirits.
Three months before, without the formality of declaring war, Japan had
sneaked a fleet of planes from a carrier force into the main American
naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and in one Sunday morning’s work
the planes had smashed America’s Pacific battle line under a shower of
bombs and torpedoes. Without a fighting fleet, America had been helpless
to stop the swift spread of the Japanese around the far shores and
islands of the Pacific basin.
Guam and Wake Island had been overrun; Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, the
East Indies, had been gobbled up. Our fighting sailors, until the
disaster of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, had been boasting around
the navy clubs that the American fleet could sail up one side of the
Japanese homeland and down the other side, shooting holes in the islands
and watching them sink from sight. Now they ground their teeth in
humiliation and rage, unable to get at the Japanese because the Pacific
Fleet battle line lay in the ooze on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. His
Imperial Japanese Majesty’s navy was steaming, virtually unopposed,
wherever its infuriatingly cocky admirals willed.
When a combined Dutch-American flotilla had tried to block the Japanese
landings on Java, the Allied navies had promptly lost 13 of their
pitifully few remaining destroyers and cruisers—and the tragic sacrifice
had not even held up the Japanese advance for more than a few hours.
The naval officers of the Allies had had to make a painful change in
their opinion of the Japanese sailor’s ability; he had turned out to be
a formidable fighting man.
On land, the Japanese army was even more spectacularly competent. Years
of secret training in island-hopping and jungle warfare had paid off for
the Japanese. With frightening ease, they had brushed aside opposition
everywhere—everywhere, that is, except in the Philippine Islands, where
General MacArthur’s outnumbered and underequipped Filipino and American
fighters had improvised a savage resistance; had patched together a kind
of Hooligan’s Army, fleshing out the thin ranks of the defenders with
headquarters clerks and ship’s cooks, with electrician’s mates and
chaplain’s assistants, with boatless boatswain’s mates and planeless
pilots.
MacArthur’s patchwork army had harried the Japanese advance and had
stubbornly fought a long retreat down the Island of Luzon. It was
bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula and on the island fortress of
Corregidor in Manila Bay, and it was already doomed, everybody knew
that. The flight of its commanding general only emphasized that it had
been written off, but the tremendous fight it was putting up had salved
every American’s wounded national pride. Besides, the very fact that
MacArthur had been ordered out of the islands clearly meant that America
was going back, once the nation had caught its breath and recovered from
Pearl Harbor.
General MacArthur, with a talent for flamboyant leadership that amounted
to genius of a sort, emitted the sonorous phrase: “I shall return.”
A few sour critics, immune to the MacArthur charm, deplored his use of
the first person singular when the first person plural would have been
more graceful—and more accurate—but the phrase caught on in the free
world.
“I shall return.” The phrase promised brave times ahead, when the
galling need to retreat would end and America would begin the journey
back to Bataan.
A stirring prospect, but what a long journey it was going to be. The
most ignorant could look at a map and see that MacArthur’s return trip
was going to take years. And yet his trip out had taken only days. A few
of the curious wondered how his escape had been engineered. News stories
said that MacArthur had flown into Australia. But where had he found a
plane? For days America had been told that on the shrinking Luzon
beachhead no airstrips remained in American hands. Where had MacArthur
gone to find a friendly airfield, and how had he gone there through the
swarming patrols of the Japanese naval blockade?
The full story of MacArthur’s escape, when it was told, became one of
the top adventure stories of World War II.
First came the bare announcement that it was on a motor torpedo boat—a
PT boat in Navy parlance, and a mosquito boat in journalese—that the
general had made the first leg of his flight across enemy-infested seas.
Then a crack journalist named William L. White interviewed the officers
of the PT rescue squadron and wrote a book about the escape and about
the days when the entire American naval striking force in the
Philippines had shrunk to six, then four, then three, then one of the
barnacle-encrusted plywood motorboats hardly bigger than a stockbroker’s
cabin cruiser.
The book was called _They Were Expendable_, and it became a runaway
best-seller. It was condensed for _Reader’s Digest_ and featured in
_Life_ Magazine, and it made the PT sailor the glamour boy of America’s
surface fleet. _They Were Expendable_ makes exciting reading today, but
the book’s success spawned a swarm of magazine and newspaper articles
about the PT navy, and some of them were distressingly irresponsible.
Quite innocently, William White himself added to the PT’s exaggerated
reputation for being able to lick all comers, regardless of size. He
wrote his book in wartime and so had no way of checking the squadron’s
claims of torpedo successes. Naturally, as any generous reporter would
have done, he gave full credit to its claims of an amazing bag—two light
cruisers, two transports and an oil tanker, besides enemy barges,
landing craft and planes.
Postwar study of Japanese naval archives shows no evidence that any
Japanese ships were torpedoed at the times and places the Squadron Three
sailors claim to have hit them. Of course, airplane and PT pilots are
notoriously overoptimistic—they have to be optimistic by nature even to
get into the cockpits of their frail craft and set out for combat. And
yet any realistic person who has worked in government archives hesitates
to give full weight to a damage assessment by an office research clerk
as opposed to the evidence of combat eyewitnesses.
Postwar evaluation specialists would not confirm the sinking of a
5,000-ton armed merchant vessel at Binanga on January 19, 1942, but Army
observers on Mount Mariveles watched through 20-power glasses as a ship
sank, and they reported even the number and caliber of the guns in its
armament.
On February 2, 1942, Army lookouts reported that a badly crippled
cruiser was run aground (and later cut up for scrap) at the right time
and place to be the cruiser claimed by PT 32. Evaluation clerks could
not find a record of this ship sinking either, so the PT claim is
denied.
Unfortunately, the most elaborately detailed claim of all, the sinking
of a _Kuma_ class cruiser off Cebu Island by PTs 34 and 41, most
certainly is not valid, because the cruiser itself sent a full report of
the battle to Japanese Navy headquarters and admitted being struck by
one dud torpedo (so much at least of the PT claim is true), but the
cruiser, which happened to be the _Kuma_ itself, was undamaged and
survived to be sunk by a British submarine late in the war.
The undeniable triumph of Squadron Three was the flight of MacArthur. On
March 11, 1942, at Corregidor, the four surviving boats of the squadron
picked up the general, his staff and selected officers and technicians,
the general’s wife and son and—most astonishingly—a Chinese nurse for
the four-year-old boy. In a series of night dashes from island to island
through Japanese-infested seas, the little flotilla carried the escaping
brass to the island of Mindanao, where the generals and admirals caught
a B 17 Flying Fortress bomber flight for Australia.
The fantastic and undeniably exaggerated claims of sinkings are
regrettable, but in no way detract from the bravery of the sailors of
Squadron Three. They were merely the victims of the nation’s desperate
need for victories.
William White’s contribution to the false giant-killer image of the PTs
is understandable, but other correspondents were less responsible. One,
famous and highly respected, said that all PTs were armed with
three-inch cannon. Putting such a massive weapon on the fragile plywood
deck of a PT boat was a bit like arming a four-year-old boy with a
big-league baseball bat—it’s just too much weapon for such a little
fellow to carry. The same reckless writer said that PT boats cruised at
70 knots. Another said that a PT could pace a new car—which amounts to
another claim for a 70-knot speed. Almost all of the reporters, some of
whom surely knew better, wrote about the PTs’ armament as though the
little boats could slug it out with ships of the line.
In the fantasies spun by the nation’s press, the PTs literally ran rings
around enemy destroyers and socked so many torpedoes into Japanese
warships that you almost felt sorry for the outclassed and floundering
enemy.
PT sailors read these romances and gritted their teeth. They knew too
painfully well that the stories were not true.
What was the truth about the PT?
Early in World War II, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pulled
the United States into the war then raging in Europe against Germany and
Italy and in China against Japan, the American Navy had been tinkering
around with various designs of fast small boats armed with torpedoes.
British coastal forces had been making good use of small, fast torpedo
boats, and the American Navy borrowed much from British designs.
On July 24, 1941—four and a half months before America entered the
war—the Navy held the Plywood Derby, a test speed run of experimental
PTs in the open Atlantic off Long Island. The course ran around the east
end of Block Island, around the Fire Island lightship to a finish line
at Montauk Point Whistling Buoy. Two PTs of the Elco design finished
with best average speeds—39.72 and 37.01 knots—but boats of other
designs had smaller turning circles. Over a measured mile the Elcos did
45.3 knots with a light load and 44.1 knots with a heavy load.
On a second Plywood Derby, the Elcos raced against the destroyer
_Wilkes_. Seas were running eight feet high—in one stretch the destroyer
skipper reported 15-foot waves—and the little cockleshells took a
terrible beating. Most of the time they were out of sight in the trough
of the seas or hidden by flying spray. The destroyer won the race, but
the Navy board had been impressed by the seaworthiness of the tough
little boats, and the Navy decided to go ahead with a torpedo-boat
program. The board standardized on the 80-foot Elco and the 78-foot
Higgins designs, and the boatyards fell to work.
The boats were built of layers of plywood. Draft to the tips of the
propellers was held to a shallow five feet six inches, so that the PT
could sneak close to an enemy beach on occasion as a kind of seagoing
cavalry, to do dirty work literally at the crossroads.
Three Packard V-12 engines gave a 4,500-shaft horsepower and drove the
boats, under ideal conditions, as fast as 45 knots—but conditions were
seldom ideal. A PT in the battle zone was almost never in top racing
form. In action the PT was usually overloaded, was often running on
jury-rig repairs and spare parts held together with adhesive tape and
ingenuity. In tropic waters the hull was soon sporting a long, green
beard of water plants that could cut the PT’s speed in half. Many of the
PTs that fought the bloody battles that follow in these pages were doing
well to hit 29 or even 27 knots.
The American Navy had learned the hard way that any enemy destroyer
could make 35 knots, and many of them could do considerably
better—plenty fast enough to run down a PT boat, especially after a few
months of action had cut the PT’s speed.
The normal boat crew was three officers and 14 men, though the
complement varied widely under combat conditions. The boat carried
enough provisions for about five days.
As for that bristling armament the correspondents talked about, a PT
boat originally carried four torpedoes and tubes, and two 50-caliber
twin machine-gun mounts. In combat PT skippers improvised installation
of additional weapons, and by the war’s end all boats had added some
combination of 40-mm. autocannon, 37-mm. cannon, 20-mm. antiaircraft
autocannon, rocket launchers, and 60-mm. mortars. In some zones they
even discarded the torpedoes and added still more automatic weapons, to
give themselves heavier broadsides for duels with armed enemy small
craft.
Pound for pound, the PT boat was by far the most heavily armed vessel
afloat, but that does not mean that a PT flyweight, no matter how tough
for its size, was a match for an enemy heavyweight. PT sailors never
hesitated to tackle an enemy destroyer, but they knew that a torpedo
boat could stand up to an all-out brawl with an alert and aroused
destroyer the way a spunky rat terrier can stand up to a hungry wolf.
After all, the full and proper name of a destroyer is _torpedo-boat_
destroyer.
The PT’s main tactic was not the hell-roaring dash of the
correspondents’ romances, but a sneaky, quiet approach in darkness or
fog. The PT was designed to slip slowly and quietly into an enemy
formation in bad visibility, to fire torpedoes at the handiest target,
and to escape behind a smoke screen with whatever speed the condition of
the boat permitted. With luck, the screening destroyers would lose the
PT in the smoke, the confusion, and the darkness. Without luck—well, in
warfare everybody has to take some chances.
What most annoyed the PT sailors about their lurid press was that the
truth made an even better story. After all, they argued, it takes guts
to ease along at night in an agonizingly slow approach to an enemy
warship that will chew you to bloody splinters if the lookouts ever spot
you. And it takes real courage to bore on into slingshot range when you
know that the enemy can easily run you down if your torpedoes miss or
fail to explode, as they did all too often. Compared to this reality,
one of those imaginary 70-knot blitzes would be a breeze.
One disgusted PT sailor wrote: “Publicity has reached the point where
glorified stories are not genuinely flattering. Most PT men resent the
wild, fanciful tales that tend to belittle their real experience....
There is actually little glamour for a PT. The excitement of battle is
tempered by many dull days of inactivity, long nights of fruitless
patrol, and dreary hours of foul weather at sea in a small boat.”
He griped that the PT sailor would prefer the tribute of “They were
dependable” to “They were expendable.”
Maybe so, but the public just would not have it that way. The dash and
audacity of the sailors of those little boats had appealed to the
American mind. It was the story of David and Goliath again, and the
sailors in the slingshot navy, no matter how they balked, joined the
other wild and woolly heroes of legend who go joyously into battle
against giants.
This is the story of what the mosquito fleet really did.
2.
Attrition at Guadalcanal
In August 7, 1942, exactly eight months after Pearl Harbor, American
Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands, as the
first step on the long road to Tokyo. The Japanese reacted violently.
They elected to have it out right there—to stop the Allied recovery
right at the start and at all costs.
Down from their mighty base at Rabaul, they sent reinforcements and
supplies through a sea lane flanked by two parallel rows of islands in
the Solomons archipelago. The sea lane quickly became known as The Slot,
and the supply ships, usually fast destroyers, became known as the Tokyo
Express.
The night runs of the Tokyo Express were wearing down the Marines. As
they became more and more dirty and tired they became more and more
irritated to find that the Japanese they killed were dressed in spruce
new uniforms—sure sign that they were newcomers to the island.
Even worse was the sleep-robbing uproar of the night naval bombardments
that pounded planes and installations at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal,
the only American base where friendly fighters and bombers could find a
home. The American hold on the island was in danger from sheer physical
fatigue.
The American and Japanese fleets clashed in the waters around the
Guadalcanal landing beaches in a series of bloody surface battles that
devoured ships and men on both sides in a hideous contest of attrition.
Whichever side could hang on fifteen seconds longer than the
other—whichever side could stand to lose one more ship and one more
sailor—was going to win.
At the very moment of one of the big cruiser-destroyer clashes (October
11-12, 1942)—officially called the Battle of Cape Esperance—American
naval reinforcements of a sort arrived in the area. Forty miles east of
the battle, four fresh, unbloodied fighting ships were sailing into
Tulagi Harbor at Florida Island, just across a narrow strait from
Guadalcanal.
It was half of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, four PT boats, the
first American torpedo boats to arrive in combat waters since the last
boat of Lieut. John Bulkeley’s disbanded Squadron Three had been burned
in the Philippines seven months before.
[Illustration: SOLOMON ISLANDS]
The PT sailors came topside as they entered the harbor to watch the
flash of cannonading in the sky to the west where American and Japanese
sailors were blowing each other to bloody bits. For them, training time
was over, the shooting time was now, and the PT navy was once again on
the firing line.
All day on October 13, the PT sailors scurried about, getting the little
warships ready for a fight. Their preparations made only a ripple in the
maelstrom of activity around the islands.
Coast watchers—friendly observers who hid on islands behind the Japanese
lines and reported by radio on ship and plane movements—reported a new
menace to Guadalcanal. They had spotted a Japanese naval force coming
down The Slot, but they said it was made up only of destroyers.
When Lieut. Commander Alan R. Montgomery, the PT squadron commander at
Tulagi, heard that only destroyers were coming, he begged off from the
fight—on the extraordinary grounds that he preferred waiting for bigger
game.
Montgomery’s decision is not as cocky as it first sounds. The Japanese
presumably did not know about the arrival of the PTs on the scene, and
if ever a PT was going to shoot a torpedo into a big one—a cruiser or a
battleship—it was going to be by surprise. No use tipping off the enemy
until the big chance came.
The big chance was really on the way. The coast watchers had
underestimated the size of the Japanese force. It was actually built
around a pair of battleships, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, all
bent on pounding Henderson Field and its pesky planes out of existence.
The Japanese command obviously expected no American naval resistance,
because ammunition hoists of the Japanese fleet were loaded with a new
kind of thin-skinned shell especially designed for blowing into jagged
fragments that would slice planes and people to useless shreds. The
bombardment shells would not be much use against armor. The Japanese
ammunition load would have been a disaster for the task force if it had
run into armored opposition—cruisers or battleships of the American
Navy—but the Japanese knew as well as we did that there was little
likelihood our badly mauled fleet, manned by exhausted sailors, would be
anywhere near the scene. The Japanese sailed down The Slot with one hand
voluntarily tied behind them, in a sense, supremely confident that they
could pound Henderson Field Without interference.
Shortly after midnight on October 14th, two Japanese battleships opened
up on Henderson Field with gigantic 14-inch rifles shooting the special
fragmentation and incendiary shells. The two battleships were
accompanied by a cruiser and either eight or nine destroyers. A Japanese
scouting plane dropped flares to make the shooting easier. An American
searchlight at Lunga Point, on Guadalcanal, probed over the water,
looking for the Japanese, but American 5-inch guns—the largest American
guns ashore—were too short of range to reach the battleships and
cruisers even if the searchlight had found them. The big ships hove to
and poured in a merciless cascade of explosive.
For almost an hour and a half, Marines, soldiers and Seabees lay in
foxholes and suffered while the Cyclopean 14-inchers tore holes in the
field, riddled planes with shell fragments, started fires and filled the
air with shards from exploding shell casings—shards that could slice a
man in two without even changing the pitch of his screams.
At the PT base in Tulagi, Lieut. Commander Montgomery was awakened by
the din across the way. He knew that no destroyer force could make that
kind of uproar. The earth-shaking cannonading meant that the big boys
were shooting up Guadalcanal, blithely assuming that the U. S. Navy was
not present.
But it was. Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three was on the scene and
waiting for just such a target.
Montgomery called in his four young skippers—Lieuts. (jg) Henry S.
(Stilly) Taylor of PT 46, Robert C. Wark of PT 48, John M. Searles of PT
60, and his brother Robert Searles of PT 38.
At two o’clock in the morning of October 14th, Commander Montgomery
ordered: “Prepare for action. All boats under way immediately.”
It was the first combat order given to PT boats since the debacle in the
Philippines.
The PTs left the harbor together but scattered quickly. They had all
spotted the Japanese bombardment fleet by the orange flashes of its
guns, and they lost each other in the darkness as they deployed to
attack.
Somebody on a Japanese cruiser must have been at least mildly nervous,
for a searchlight came on, swept the water toward Tulagi, zipped right
across Bob Searles in 38, and then went black. Searles stretched his
luck; he cut his speed to 10 knots and began a slow stalk of the cruiser
that had muffed its chance to sound the alarm.
So cocky were the Japanese that the cruiser was almost dead in the
water; even at 10 knots, the 38 closed the range from behind.
Bob Searles greased the 38 along the still waters of the sound, holding
his breath and dreading to see the glare of that searchlight again. He
could see the target clearly silhouetted in the gun flashes, and it was
a brute—a light cruiser, Bob thought, judging from its shape, its size,
and the roar of its guns. Searles figured that he would probably be the
first and only PT skipper to enjoy the carefully preserved surprise that
the PT sailors hoped would bag them a big one—so he had to make his
first shot good or waste the chance they had all been hoarding.
A torpedo, like any other weapon that has to be aimed, is more likely to
hit the closer you get to your target before you shoot. So Bob went in
to 400 yards in stealthy silence. Four hundred yards in a naval battle
is the equivalent of arm’s length in an infantry fire fight. At 400
yards, a spread of torpedoes will usually score, but the machine guns
and autocannon of a cruiser’s secondary battery, guided by a
searchlight, will almost certainly tear up a torpedo boat. Searles, just
to be sure of a hit, was doing the same thing as a commando would do if,
armed with a high-powered rifle, he crept to within five feet of a
sentry armed with a sawed-off shotgun. At any range that rifle is a
deadly weapon—like a torpedo—but at close range the shotgun is just as
deadly and ten times surer of hitting with the first shot.
At 400 yards Bob fired two fish. He chased along behind them to 200-yard
range—almost rock-throwing range—and fired his last two torpedoes. The
instant he felt the boat jump from those shots, he poured on the coal
and roared past the cruiser, 100 yards astern. As they went by, all
hands topside on the PT felt the scorching blast of a double explosion
forward of the cruiser’s bridge.
The surprise was over. From here on the whole Japanese task force would
be alarmed and shooting back—but that big boy the PT sailors had been
after was in the bag. The 38’s crew was sure of it. Searles had the good
sense not to hang around the hornet’s nest he had stirred up. His
torpedoes were gone anyhow, so he lit out for home, convinced that he
had scored the first PT victory of the comeback trail.
The other PTs had scattered, looking for other targets in the dark.
There were plenty of targets, for they had penetrated the destroyer
screen, without either side knowing it, and were in the heart of the
Japanese formation. After the blast from the 38’s torpedo attack on the
cruiser, the PTs themselves were as much targets as they were hunters.
Lieut. Commander Montgomery, riding with John Searles on the 60, was
stalking a big ship—possibly the same cruiser Bob Searles had already
attacked—but the escorting destroyers were roiled up and rallying
around.
A searchlight poked about the water, looking for the 60 which had
probably been dimly spotted by a lookout. The searchlight never found
the 60, but it did silhouette the PT for another destroyer. Japanese
shells from the second destroyer screamed over the PT, but Montgomery
held steadily to his attack course on the cruiser—or whatever it
was—until two of the 60’s fish were off and running.
John Searles spun the rudder over hard left and shoved the throttles up
to the stops. Smoke poured from the generator on the stern, to cover
their escape, and so the crew of the 60 didn’t see the end of the
torpedo run, but it claimed a hit, anyhow, from the sound of a massive
explosion.
If it was a torpedo hit and if the hit was on the same cruiser Bob
Searles said he hit, that cruiser was in sad shape. Not so the
destroyers. They were full of fight and boring in on the 60.
Smoke makes a fine screen for covering escape, but only for a time.
After the initial escape is successful, a continuing smoke cloud only
marks the course of the fleeing PT boat, just as a tracer’s
phosphorescent trail tracks a bullet through the night. So Montgomery
shut off the smoke when he thought they were free, but he had waited a
moment too long.
Just as the smoke-screen generator hissed to a halt, a destroyer pinned
the 60 down in the blue glare of a searchlight and a salvo of Japanese
shells, landing 20 feet astern, almost lifted the 60 out of the water.
The Japanese destroyer captain did not know it, probably still doesn’t
know it if he is even alive, but when he turned his light on the 60, he
simultaneously lost the chance to sink one PT boat by ramming and just
possibly saved his own ship from being sunk by still another PT.
Robert Wark’s 48 was sneaking up on the destroyer in a torpedo attack on
one side; Henry Taylor’s 46 was roaring across the water, looking for
targets on the other side, quite unaware that the destroyer was in its
path. When the searchlight glare hit the 60, Taylor saw the Japanese
ship dead ahead and put the rudder of the 46 over hard. He barely missed
a collision with the can, a collision that would have reduced his little
warship to a floating carpet of matchsticks. But, in skimming by the
destroyer, Taylor almost rammed Wark’s 48 and spoiled its torpedo
attack. Wark lost contact with the destroyer in the wild careering
around the sound that followed the double near-collision, and he didn’t
get off his torpedoes.
The whole time the Japanese captain was so intent on sinking the 60,
pinned down by his searchlight, he apparently missed the near-collisions
right under his nose. His shells were creeping up the wake of the
fleeting 60 and he doggedly plowed into the stream of 50-caliber bullets
from the PT antiaircraft machine-gun battery, willing to take the
punishment in exchange for a chance to run the torpedo boat down.
Lieut. Commander Montgomery turned on the smoke generator again and had
the inspiration to drop two depth charges into his wake. The charges
exploded just ahead of the Japanese destroyer, and the Japanese skipper
shied away from the chase, fearful that the closer he got to the PT
boat, the more likely he was to be blown in two by a depth charge right
under the bridge. The 60 escaped in the smoke, lay close to the beach
for the rest of that night, and drifted aground on a coral reef near
morning.
Wark, who had picked up his original target again, was still trying to
shoot a fish into the destroyer that had abandoned the chase of the 60.
Wark did not know it, but he was himself being stalked. From 200 yards
away, a Japanese destroyer caught the 48 in a searchlight beam and fired
all the guns that would bear.
A searchlight beam is a two-edged tool. It helps the aim of the gunners
on the destroyer; at the same time it makes a beautiful mark for the
PT’s machine guns. C. E. Todd, the ship’s cook, pumped 50-caliber
bullets into the destroyer’s bridge and superstructure until the light
was shattered. The destroyer disappeared and nobody knows what damage it
suffered, but it is highly improbable that it could be raked by
50-caliber fire from 200 yards away without serious damage and
casualties.
The 48’s skipper could say: “He never laid a glove on me.”
Aboard the Japanese flagship, the admiral, apparently alarmed by
unexpected naval resistance no matter how puny, ordered a cease fire and
a withdrawal. Eighty minutes of shellfire had left Henderson Field in a
shambles anyhow. Forever after, Guadalcanal veterans of the night
between October 13 and 14, 1942, talked about The Bombardment—not the
bombardment of this date or the bombardment of that date. Simply The
Bombardment. Everybody knew which one they meant.
What had the PTs accomplished on their first sortie? Bob and John
Searles claimed solid hits on a cruiser. Postwar assessment of claims
says that there is “no conclusive evidence that any major Japanese ship
was sunk” on that night. But the next day a coast watcher reported that
natives had seen a large warship sink off the New Georgia coast, to the
north on the withdrawal route. Radio Tokyo itself acknowledged the loss
of a cruiser that night under the attack of “nineteen torpedo boats of
which we destroyed fourteen.”
That last bit—public admission by the Japanese of the loss of a cruiser
to a PT—is the most convincing. The Japanese played down their own
losses ridiculously. Sometimes they even believed their own propaganda,
so much so that they deployed for battle forces which had been destroyed
but whose loss they had never admitted, even to themselves.
A curious incident during the almost nightly naval bombardments of
Henderson Field shows the Japanese sailor’s fatal desire to believe his
own propaganda. Eight Japanese destroyers and a light cruiser bombarded
the field the night of October 25, 1942. They sank two small ships, but
they called off the shore bombardment after only a feeble effort.
The reason?
A Japanese officer ashore had sent a message: BANZAI. OCCUPIED AIRFIELD
AT 2300.
He had done no such thing. Indeed, the very planes spared by that
spurious message sank the cruiser the next morning.
Perhaps a more important result of the first PT foray than the hit on a
cruiser was the shock to the Japanese nervous system. The Japanese navy
had an inordinate horror of torpedo boats—possibly because the Japanese
themselves were so diabolically good at surface torpedo attack. The
knowledge that American torpedo boats were back on the scene must have
been a jolt to their sensitivities.
Nobody can prove that the Japanese admiral called off the bombardment
because of the torpedo attacks—after all, he had already shot up
Henderson Field for eighty minutes and had expended almost all his
special bombardment ammunition—but it is a remarkable coincidence that
the shooting stopped almost immediately after the PTs arrived, and the
withdrawal followed soon after the torpedoes started swimming around.
Half an hour after their sortie from Tulagi, the PTs saw a vast armada
of Japanese ships turn tail and leave the field to them.
The Marines didn’t quibble. They crawled out of their foxholes, those
who could, and thanked God for whoever had run off the 14-inchers.
Henderson Field had survived, but barely, and the Marines were willing
to give anybody credit for running off the battleships, if whoever it
was would just keep them off. The PTs were willing to try.
The night between October 14th and 15th was the low point of the Navy’s
contribution to the Guadalcanal campaign. Two Japanese cruisers
insolently pounded Henderson Field with 752 eight-inch shells, and the
Navy could not lift a finger to stop them. The only Navy fighting ships
in the area were the four PTs of Squadron Three, but the 60 was still
aground on a reef, the 38 had left all of its torpedoes inside a
Japanese cruiser the night before, and the other two PTs were escorting
two little supply ships across the channel between Tulagi and
Guadalcanal. The cruisers had a field day.
The next night two Japanese cruisers fired 1,500 punishing eight-inch
shells at Henderson Field.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, in Washington, after studying the
battle report, could say only: “Everybody _hopes_ we can hang on.”
Admiral Chester Nimitz was even more grim. “It now appears that we are
unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of
the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is
not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.”
Perhaps the PTs had arrived too late to do any good. Certainly a navy
that consisted of three torpedo boats afloat and one on a reef was not
going to win the battle for Guadalcanal.
The Japanese, beginning on November 2nd, spent a week running destroyer
and cruiser deckloads of soldiers down The Slot—65 destroyer deckloads
and two cruiser loads in all.
On November 8th, PTs hit the destroyer _Mochizuki_ but did not sink it.
This kind of reinforcement by dribbles was not fast enough to satisfy
the Japanese brass, so they planned to stop sending a boy to do a man’s
job. At Truk, they organized a mighty task force of two light carriers,
four battleships, 11 cruisers and 36 destroyers to escort 11 fast
transports to Guadalcanal on November 14th.
Before risking the transports, jammed with soldiers to be landed at
Tassafaronga, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson Field for two
straight nights to eliminate once and for all the dangerous Marine
airplanes based there.
The climactic sea struggle for Guadalcanal began on the night of
November 12, 1942.
American scouting planes and Allied coast watchers sent word that a
frighteningly powerful bombardment force was on its way down The Slot,
and the most optimistic defenders of Guadalcanal wondered if this was
going to be the end. Two Japanese battleships, the _Hiei_ and the
_Kirishima_, a cruiser, and fourteen destroyers were in the Japanese
fleet. (The Japanese had learned to fear the PT boats of Tulagi; the
fleet commander had posted two destroyers on one advanced flank and
three destroyers on the other, as a torpedo-boat screen. In addition, he
had assigned three other destroyers, not counted among the 14 under his
direct command, to rove ahead on an anti-PT patrol.)
In a swirling, half-hour action on Friday, November 13th—the opening of
the three-day naval Battle of Guadalcanal—the United States Navy lost
the cruiser _Atlanta_, the destroyers _Barton_, _Cushing_, _Laffey_, and
_Monssen_, and suffered severe damage to the cruisers _Portland_, _San
Francisco_, _Helena_, _Juneau_, and to three destroyers. Admiral Daniel
J. Callaghan was killed.
Limping home after the battle, the cruiser _Juneau_ was torpedoed by the
submarine I-26 (whose skipper admits that he was aiming at another ship
entirely). The _Juneau_ disappeared in a blast of smoke and flame. In
one of the most tragic and inexplicable misadventures of the war, the
survivors of the _Juneau_, floating within easy reach of the PTs at
Tulagi, were abandoned, and no attempt was made to rescue them until all
but a handful had died of exposure.
It is possible that the PTs—excellent rescue craft manned by sailors
eager to help stricken shipmates—were so new to the theatre that the top
brass didn’t even know of their presence, or at least weren’t in the
habit of thinking about them. At any rate, the PTs were tied up at
Tulagi while American sailors drowned almost within sight of the harbor.
On the night between November 13th and 14th, two Japanese heavy
cruisers, screened by a light cruiser and four destroyers, steamed
toward Guadalcanal with another load of bombardment shells.
The situation on Guadalcanal was grave. The base was crammed with the
sick and weary survivors of the naval battle. The veteran defenders knew
another punishing flotilla was on its way with possibly the final, fatal
load of fragmentation shells aboard—and there were no big American ships
near enough to say them nay.
The United States Navy had almost shot its bolt, at least temporarily.
Almost but not quite.
Two PTs were still in the fight.
One, commanded by Stilly Taylor, and another, commanded by John Searles,
had been screening the heavy cruiser _Portland_, which had been badly
damaged in the previous night’s battle and was being towed to Tulagi.
Stilly Taylor tells what happened in one of the most momentously
important torpedo-boat adventures of the Pacific War:
“The Japs began to shell Henderson Field, first putting a very bright
flare in the vicinity of the field, and so naturally both of us [the two
PTs] started in on them independently....
“As soon as the Japs opened fire it was obvious to us that there was at
least one fairly heavy ship. We thought it was probably a battleship....
We could tell it was definitely a heavy ship because of the long orange
flash from its gunfire rather than the short white flash which we knew
from experience was the smaller fire of the destroyers....
“Due to the light put up by the Nip flares, I was able to use my
director for the first time. I set the target’s speed at about 20 knots,
and I think he was doing slightly more than this. I kept him in the
director for approximately seven of his salvos and really had a
beautiful line on him. [PT boats usually were forced, by bad visibility
at night and in bad weather, to shoot from the hip. A chance to use a
director for visually aimed fire was an unaccustomed luxury well worth
gloating over in an action report.]
“After closing to about 1,000 yards, I decided that if we went in any
farther we would get tangled up in the destroyer screen which I knew
would be surrounding him at about 500 to 700 yards.
“I therefore fired three fish. The fourth misfired and never left the
tube. The three fish landed beautifully and made no flash as we fired
them.
“We immediately turned around and started back for the base, but we had
the torpedoes running hot and straight toward the target.
“I am positive that at least one of them found its mark.
“_Certainly the Nips ceased fire immediately and apparently turned right
around and limped home._”
Nobody knows what damage these two PTs did that night. Planes the next
day found a badly damaged cruiser leaving the scene, and that could well
have been Taylor’s victim. At any rate, the material damage inflicted by
these two brave seamen and their crews is comparatively unimportant.
What is important is the almost incredible but quite possible fact that
the two cockleshells ran off a horribly dangerous Japanese surface fleet
prepared to give Henderson Field what might well have been its death
blow. As soon as the torpedo boats attacked, the Japanese stopped
shooting and ran.
It is not hard to understand why. The American fleet had been badly
battered during the previous night’s battle, but so had the Japanese
fleet, and Japanese nerves were probably raw and jumpy.
The two PTs achieved complete surprise, and a surprise attack in
restricted waters is always unsettling to naval officers, even the most
cocksure and well rested. The Japanese could not be sure exactly who was
attacking and in what force. They could have had only a dim idea of what
damage they had done to the American Navy the night before, and, for all
they knew, the torpedo tracks they saw came from a dangerous destroyer
flotilla, backed up by who knows how many mighty ships of the line.
With their nerves shaken by the suddenness of the torpedo attack and
with no knowledge of what was prowling around out there in the dark, it
apparently seemed best to the Japanese commanders to abandon the
bombardment quickly and save their ships for another day.
The two glorified cabin cruisers had driven off the Japanese task force
when only three planes had been destroyed and 17 damaged (all the
damaged planes were in the air before the end of the next day), and
Henderson Field was still in action. The next day, November 14th, a
smoothly functioning Henderson Field was host not only to the Marine
planes permanently based there but also to Navy planes from the carrier
_Enterprise_ which landed at Henderson for refueling during shuttle
trips to attack 11 fast Japanese transports coming down The Slot.
All-day attacks on November 14th, by the Marine, Navy, and Army planes,
saved from destruction by the two PT boats, sank seven of the transports
and worked a hideous massacre among the Japanese soldiers on their decks
and in their holds. Four of the transports and 11 destroyers survived
and at sunset were sailing for the Japanese beach-head of Tassafaronga
Point. The destroyers carried deckloads of survivors from the sunken
transports.
The destroyer commander was Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, perhaps the most
brilliant combat officer of the Japanese navy. He repeatedly showed a
fantastic devotion to duty that enabled him to carry out his missions in
spite of seemingly impossible difficulties. Tanaka _was_ the Tokyo
Express.
To give Tanaka a little help with the disembarkation of the troops at
Guadalcanal, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson during the
landings as a diversion—and just possibly as a _coup de grâce_ to
further American air resistance. They sent a battleship, two heavy
cruisers, two light cruisers and nine destroyers to do the job. This
time the light cruisers and destroyers were deployed in a formidable
anti-torpedo-boat screen to prevent a recurrence of the previous night’s
spooking from a measly two-boat PT raid.
The Japanese had lost their chance, however, for much more American
naval power than a brace of torpedo boats stood between the Japanese and
Henderson Field. Admiral W. A. Lee, on the battleship _Washington_, had
arrived from the south, accompanied by the battleship _South Dakota_ and
four destroyers. He sailed north to meet the Japanese across Iron Bottom
Bay (so called because the bottom was littered with the hulks of
Japanese and American ships sunk in earlier battles. There were so many
hulls on the ocean’s floor that quartermasters reported to their
skippers that magnetic compasses were deflected by the scrap iron).
The American admiral—known to his intimates as “Ching” Lee—had a bad
moment when he overheard two PTs gossiping about his battleships over
the voice radio.
“There go two big ones, but I don’t know whose they are,” said one PT
skipper.
Admiral Lee grabbed the microphone and quickly identified himself to
shore headquarters before the PTs could get off a nervous shot.
“Refer your big boss about Ching Lee; Chinese, catchee? Call off your
boys.”
The PT skippers answered, with good humor, that they were well
acquainted with old “Ching” and promised not to go after him.
The PT crews watched Admiral Lee sail into the decisive last action of
the three-day Battle of Guadalcanal. That night his ships sank the
Japanese battleship and routed the Japanese bombardment fleet. But the
mixed transport and destroyer reinforcement flotilla was taken,
nevertheless, by the stubborn and wily Admiral Tanaka, around the action
and to the beach at Tassafaronga where he carried out his reinforcement
mission almost literally “come hell or high water.”
The Japanese had made a mighty effort, but American fliers, sailors, and
PT boatmen had spoiled the assault. The only profit to the Japanese from
the bloody three days was the landing of 2,000 badly shaken soldiers,
260 cases of ammunition, and 1,500 bags of rice.
But the Japanese were not totally discouraged. They had the redoubtable
Tanaka on their side, and so they went back to supply by the Tokyo
Express. The idea was for Tanaka’s fast destroyers to run down The Slot
by night to Tassafaronga Point, where sailors would push overboard drums
of supplies. Troops ashore would then round up the floating drums in
small boats. In that way, Tanaka’s fast destroyers would not have to
stop moving and would make a less tempting target for the Tulagi PTs
than a transport at anchor.
On November 30, 1942, Admiral Tanaka shoved off from Bougainville Island
with eight destroyers loaded with 1,100 drums of supplies. At the same
moment an American task force of five cruisers and six destroyers—a most
formidable task force indeed, especially for a night action—left the
American base at Espiritu Santo to break up just the kind of supply run
Tanaka was undertaking.
The two forces converged on Tassafaronga Point from opposite directions.
The American force enormously outgunned Tanaka’s destroyers and also had
the tremendous advantage of being, to some extent, equipped with radar,
then a brand-new and little-understood gadget. Thus the American force
could expect to enjoy an additional superiority of surprise.