instant a lookout on the PT saw the destroyer. Making a split-second
decision, Japanese Commander Hanami ordered the helmsman to spin the
wheel to starboard and ram.
The _Amagiri_ crashed into the starboard side of the 109 and killed the
lookout on the spot. The boat was cut in two; the rear section sank;
burning gasoline covered the sea. The _Amagiri_ sailed on, but at a
reduced speed, because the 109, in its death agony, had bent vanes on
the _Amagiri’s_ starboard propeller, causing violent vibration at high
speeds.
PT 169 fired torpedoes at the _Amagiri_, but at too close a range for
them to arm and explode. PT 157 fired two that missed. Thirty torpedoes
were fired that night, and the only damage inflicted on the destroyers
was by the quite involuntary and fatal body block of the 109. It was not
the greatest night of the war for the PT navy.
Eleven survivors of the 109 searched surrounding waters for two missing
shipmates, but never found them. They spent the night and the next
morning on the still-floating bow section. By midafternoon they decided
that no rescue was on the way. Since they felt naked and exposed to
Japanese plane and ship patrols, they set out to swim three and a half
miles to a desert island, the skipper towing a badly burned shipmate for
four hours by a life-jacket tie-tie gripped between his teeth.
After harrowing nights spent on several desert islands—nights during
which the skipper showed most extraordinary stamina, resourcefulness,
and courage—the ship-wrecked sailors were found by native scouts. They
took the heroic skipper by canoe to a coast-watcher station, and there
he boarded a rescue PT and returned for his marooned companions.
The skipper of the 109 was, of course, the same John F. Kennedy who on
January 20, 1961, became the thirty-fifth President of the United
States.
After Munda fell and with it all of New Georgia, American strategists
studied the map and decided that island-by-island reduction of Japanese
strength was too tedious. They decided to start by-passing some of the
bases, cutting off the by-passed garrisons and starving them behind an
American sea blockade. More night work for the PTs.
Up the line a bit was the island of Vella Lavella, only lightly held by
the Japanese. American strategists chose a beach called Barakoma as a
possible landing spot and ordered a reconnaissance.
Four PTs, on the night between August 12th and 13th, carried a scouting
party of 45 men to the beach at Barakoma. A Japanese plane nagged the
boats with strafing and bombing runs for two hours. A near miss tore up
the planking on the 168 and wounded four sailors, so the 168 had to drop
out of the operation, but the other three boats put their passengers
ashore safely. Scouts reported that the only Japanese around that part
of the island were ship-wrecked survivors of an earlier sea battle, so
thirty-six hours later four more PTs landed reinforcements.
Japanese snooper planes spotted the PT passenger runs, but apparently
the Japanese high command couldn’t think of torpedo boats as invasion
craft, so the scout landings were made without interference.
The main force followed, and by October 1st all of Vella Lavella was in
American hands.
The Japanese began shrinking their Solomon Islands perimeter, falling
back to the islands on the near side of the new American base at Vella
Lavella. American destroyers, out to smash the evacuation bargeline, met
a Japanese destroyer screen for the _daihatsus_ on the night between
October 6th and 7th. As usual, Japanese torpedoes were deadly. One
American destroyer went down and two others were sorely damaged. More
important, the Japanese supply and evacuation train ran its errands
without molestation from the American cans.
The American destroyers did sink the Japanese _Yugumo_, and American PTs
were sent to pick up 78 survivors. Aboard the 163, an American sailor
offered a cup of coffee to one of the captive Japanese, who killed the
Good Samaritan (and of course died himself at the hands of the murdered
sailor’s shipmates). PT sailors felt less uneasy about the massacre of
the shipwrecked Japanese at the Bismarck Sea after the treacherous
murder of their comrade by a rescued Japanese.
Having successfully leapfrogged once, American strategists looked at the
map again. The whole point to the island-hopping campaign was to put
American fighter planes close enough to Rabaul so that they could screen
bombers over that base and keep the Japanese pinned down there under
constant bombardment. The best site for a fighter base was Bougainville
Island, so American planners put their fingers on the map and said:
“This is the place for the next one.”
Accordingly, Marines landed at Cape Torokina, on Bougainville, on
November 1st. Their mission was to capture enough of the island to build
and protect a fighter strip. The rest of the island could be left to the
15,000 Japanese soldiers who defended it. Nobody cared about them.
Rabaul was the real target.
The Japanese high command at Rabaul sent down a cruiser-destroyer force
with the mission of getting among the American transports in Empress
Augusta Bay, off Torokina, and tearing up the helpless train ships like
a pack of wolves in a herd of sheep.
An American cruiser-destroyer force met them just after midnight on
November 2nd, and sank one Japanese cruiser and a destroyer. More
important, the American flotilla ran off the Japanese marauders before
they reached the transports.
American reconnaissance planes, however, spotted a massive concentration
of heavy cruisers and destroyers building up in Rabaul Harbor, a
concentration too great for American naval forces then in the South
Pacific to handle, because most American capital ships of the Pacific
Fleet had been pulled back toward Hawaii to support an operation in the
Gilbert Islands.
Admiral Halsey scratched together a carrier task force, and even though
a carrier raid near a land-based airfield was then against doctrine, he
sent the carrier’s planes into the harbor. They damaged the cruisers
badly enough to relieve the immediate threat to the Torokina landings.
The carrier raids stirred up a hornet’s nest around Rabaul.
Eighteen Japanese torpedo bombers took off to smash the brazen carrier
task force. Just before total dark they found American ships and
attacked. Radio Tokyo broadcast, with jubilation, that the score in this
“First Air Battle of Bougainville” was “one large carrier blown up and
sunk, one medium carrier set ablaze and later sunk, and two heavy
cruisers and one cruiser and destroyer sunk.” Rabaul’s torpedo bombers
won a group commendation.
An American staff officer, hearing the account of this First Air Battle
of Bougainville as reported by Japanese pilots, could only hold his head
in his hands and hope his own pilots were not feeding him the same kind
of foolishness.
Here is what really happened in the First Air Battle of Bougainville.
A landing craft, the LCI 70, and the PT 167, were lumbering back from a
landing party on the Torokina beachhead. Just after sunset the Japanese
bombers struck in low-level torpedo runs. The PT brought down the leader
by the novel method of snagging him with its mast. The plane’s torpedo
punched clean through the PT’s nose, leaving its tail assembly,
appropriately enough, in the crew’s head.
The torpedo boat’s 20-mm. cannon shot down a second torpedo bomber so
close to the ship that the sailors on the fantail were soaked.
Four torpedo bombers launched their fish at the LCI, but since the
torpedoes were set for attack on a deep-draft carrier, they passed
harmlessly under the landing craft’s shallow hull—except for one which
porpoised and jumped through the LCI’s thin skin, unfortunately killing
one sailor. The unexploded warhead came to rest on a starchy bed in the
bread locker. The torpedo was still smoking, so the LCI’s skipper,
Lieut. (jg) H. W. Frey, ordered “Abandon ship!”
Time passed. No explosion. A damage-control party reboarded the LCI and
rigged her for a tow back to Torokina. PT 167 raced ahead with the
wounded.
Rear Admiral T. S. Wilkinson radioed congratulations to Ensign Theodore
Berlin, skipper of the PT, for knocking down a plane with his mast.
“Fireplug sprinkles dog,” is the way the admiral put it.
So ended the First Air Battle of Bougainville.
PTs quickly set up a base on Puruata Island, just off the Torokina
beachhead, even though the Marine foothold was still feeble. Sea patrols
of the torpedo boats were still vexed by poor communications. The night
of November 8th, for instance, the destroyers _Hudson_ and _Anthony_
came up to Torokina, sure that there were no friendly PTs in the bay,
because higher-ups on the beach had told them so. Naturally, when radar
picked up the pips of patrolling PTs 163, 169 and 170, they let fly with
everything.
The PTs, equally misinformed about what friendlies to expect, took the
destroyer broadsides to be a most unfriendly action and maneuvered for a
torpedo run. The skipper of the 170 tried to decoy the two American
destroyers into a trap. He called the 163 by radio, to warn him that he
was leading “three Nip cans” into their torpedo range. PT 163 got off a
long shot at the “three” cans, which fortunately missed.
There has been much fruitless speculation about that third mysterious
can reported by 170. Aboard the 170, the radar screen showed a big
target—not one of the two American destroyers—10,000 yards dead ahead. A
salvo of shells that “looked like ashcans” passed overhead, coming from
the same direction as the radar target. To this day nobody knows who was
the assailant with guns big enough to fire ashcan-sized projectiles.
The running duel lit up the bay for forty-five minutes. The torpedo
boats were just coming around for a new torpedo run when _Anthony_
figured out what was going on.
“Humblest apologies,” the _Anthony_ said by radio in a handsome bid to
accept all the blame. “We are friendly vessels.”
Farther west near Arawe, on New Britain, on Christmas Day 1943, Lieut.
Ed Farley’s 190, with Lieut. Commander H. M. S. Swift aboard, and Ensign
Rumsey Ewing’s 191 were returning to the Dregar Harbor base in New
Guinea, after a dull patrol.
Between 30 and 38 Japanese dive bombers and fighters came down from the
north and bombed and strafed the boats in groups of three and four. The
two little PTs were in a jam, for the force attacking them was large
enough to take on a carrier task force, screen destroyers and all. The
boats separated, went to top speed, and zigzagged toward a bank of low
clouds twelve miles away.
Japanese planes often made one pass at PTs and then dropped the job if
they did not score, but this overwhelming big flight of planes returned
for repeated attacks. PT skippers clamored for fighter cover from the
beach.
Aboard the 191, the skipper was hit in the lungs and Ensign Fred Calhoun
took command. A machine-gun bullet pierced his thigh, but he hung on to
the wheel to play a deadly game of tag with the attackers. He held a
steady course, his eye fixed to the bomb racks of the attacking plane,
until the bomb was away and committed to its course. Then he whipped
over the wheel to put the boat where the bomb wasn’t when it landed.
Nevertheless, fragments from a near miss knocked out a 20-mm. gun and
severely wounded the gunner, Chief Motor Machinist Mate Thomas Dean, and
the loader, Motor Machinist Mate Second Class August Sciutto. Another
near miss punched an 18-inch hole in the portside and peppered the
superstructure with steel splinters.
Japanese strafers hit the port and starboard engines and punctured the
water jackets, which spurted jets of boiling water into the engine room.
Engineer of the Watch Victor Bloom waded into the streams of scalding
water to tape and stuff leaks so that the engines would not overheat and
fuse into a solid mass.
Fearing that the gas fumes from punctured lines might explode, he closed
off the fuel-tank compartment and pulled a release valve to smother it
with carbon dioxide. When he had tidied up his engine room, Bloom gave
first aid to the wounded. (Not surprisingly, Victor Bloom won a Navy
Cross for this action.)
By this time the two PTs had knocked four planes into the sea near the
boats.
“Toward the end of the attack,” said Lieut. Farley, “the enemy became
more and more inaccurate and less willing to close us. It is possible
that we may have knocked down the squadron leader as the planes milled
about in considerable confusion, as if lacking leadership.”
Forty minutes after they were called, P 47 fighter planes from
Finschhafen arrived to drive off the shaken Japanese apparently startled
by the two floating buzz saws.
One of the P 47s was hit and made a belly landing about half a mile from
the 190. The pilot, though badly wounded in the head and arm, freed
himself and escaped from the cockpit before his plane went down. The 190
went to the rescue of its rescuer, and Lieut. Commander Swift and Seaman
First Class Joe Cope jumped overboard to tow the groggy pilot to the
undamaged PT.
Authorities were as astonished as the Japanese attackers had been by the
savage and effective response of the two PTs to the massive attack which
should have wiped them out, according to all the rules. Smaller and less
determined air attacks had sunk cruisers and destroyers in other waters.
Commander Mumma, with justifiable pride in his two boats, said of the
action: “It has shown that the automatic weapon armament is most
effective. It has demonstrated that ably handled PTs can, in daylight,
withstand heavy air attack.”
On the same Christmas Day 1943, the Bougainville bomber strip went into
business, and the fighter strips were so well established that American
forces could afford to settle down behind the barbed wire of The
Perimeter, content with what they already held. From here on out, they
could afford to ignore as much as possible the 15,000 Japanese still on
the island. From that day Rabaul was doomed to comparative impotence
under a merciless shower of bombs.
Not that Rabaul was a feeble outpost. One hundred thousand Japanese
soldiers, behind powerful fortifications and with immense supplies, made
Rabaul a formidable fortress—too tough for a direct frontal
assault—until the end of the war. Without air power, however, the
Japanese there could do nothing to hold back the Allied advance except
to glower at the task forces passing by just out of gun range on their
way to new island bases farther up the line.
The Japanese gate was unhinged at both ends and the Allies poured
through the gap.
American strategists decided to jump over Rabaul, leaving its defenders
to shrivel away behind a sea blockade. Some of the PTs leapfrogged with
the rest of the Allied forces and readied for more night patrol in the
waters farther along the sea lanes to Tokyo; some of them stayed behind
to make life as miserable as possible for the bypassed Japanese on
Bougainville and the other islands cut off from home.
PTs played a big part in the last jump that isolated Rabaul. The
landings in the Admiralty Islands were on Leap Year Day, February 29,
1944, by units of the First Cavalry Division. The Admiralty Islands are
a ring of long, thin islands enclosing a magnificent anchorage called
Seeadler Harbor. The fine anchorage and the airstrips planned for the
islands would give the Allies the last brick in the wall around Rabaul.
Faulty reconnaissance from the air had shown that the islands were free
of Japanese. Actually there were 4,000 Japanese in the islands, and
their commander was insulted that the Americans landed a force only a
fraction the size of his. He counterattacked violently. The only Navy
fire support available was from destroyers and small craft.
Among the small craft were MTB Squadron Twenty-One, commanded by
Lieutenant Paul Rennell, and Squadron Eighteen, commanded by the same
Lieut. Commander H. M. S. Swift who had surprised the Japanese air
command by the vicious antiaircraft fire of his two torpedo boats near
Arawe on Christmas Day.
The PTs went to work for the cavalry as a kind of sea cavalry, running
errands, carrying wounded, towing stranded boats off the beach, handling
the leadline to measure a poorly charted harbor bottom, and even
carrying cavalry generals on scouting missions.
From inside Seeadler Harbor they gave the cavalry close fire support
with machine guns and mortars. A keen-eyed sailor on 363 knocked a
sniper out of a tree with a short burst, for instance, and the crew of
the 323 demolished, with 50 calibers, a Japanese radio and observation
platform in another tree.
The island of Manus fell quickly, and Major General I. P. Swift,
commanding general of the First Cavalry Division, in a generous tribute
to a sister service, said: “The bald statement, ‘The naval forces
supported this action’ ... is indeed a masterpiece of understatement....
Without the Navy there would not have been any action.”
5.
Along the Turkey’s Back
From the time that American planes stopped the Japanese onrush at the
Coral Sea and at Midway, it was a two-year job for the Allies to batter
down the Japanese gate at Rabaul and at the Huon Gulf. Once the gate was
down, it took MacArthur’s forces only four months to make the 1,200-mile
trip down the turkey’s back to a perch on the turkey’s head, just across
from the East Indies and the Philippines.
The swift trip was made possible, however, by a leap-frogging technique
that left behind a monumental job for the PT navy. General MacArthur
made almost all of his New Guinea landings where the Japanese weren’t,
by-passing tens of thousands of tough jungle fighters and leaving the
job of starving them out to the blockading navy. Except for the brief
loan of ships from the battle-line for special missions, the blockading
navy was the PT fleet.
The New Guinea PT force was beefed up for the blockade by many new boats
and officers. MacArthur had been deeply impressed by the torpedo boats
during his escape from Corregidor and used all his influence—which was
considerable in those days—to impress every PT possible into his force.
The PTs in New Guinea lost almost all use for their torpedoes, except
when they chanced to catch a blockade-running supply submarine on the
surface. The boat skippers wanted more guns, more auto-cannon and
machine guns for shooting up the Number One blockade-runner, the armored
_daihatsu_—and they got them.
Early in November 1943, Squadron Twenty-One arrived at Morobe base armed
with 40-mm. auto-cannon, a tremendously effective weapon for all-around
mischief. It was the first New Guinea squadron armed with the newer and
deadlier weapon.
More than the size of the new cannon, however, the size of the new
officers astonished the veteran PT sailors. Commander Selman S. Bowling,
who had replaced Commander Mumma as chief of PTs in the Southwest
Pacific, had voluntarily ridden on the Tulagi boats before his new
assignment, and he had decided then that PT officers should be tough and
athletic. When he went to the States to organize new squadrons, he had
recruited the biggest, toughest athletes he could find.
Among the newcomers were Ensign Ernest W. Pannell, All-American tackle
from Texas A. and M. and professional football player for the Green Bay
Packers; Ensign Alex Schibanoff of Franklin and Marshall College and the
Detroit Lions; Ensign Steven L. Levanitis of Boston College and the
Philadelphia Eagles; Ensign Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American from Notre
Dame; Lieut. (jg) Paul B. Lillis, captain of the Notre Dame team; Ensign
Louis E. Smith, University of California halfback; Ensign Kermit W.
Montz, Franklin and Marshall; Ensign John M. Eastham, Jr., Texas A. and
M.; Ensign Stuart A. Lewis, University of California; Ensign Cedric J.
Janien, Harvard; and Ensign William P. Hall, Wabash.
Also bulging with muscle were Ensign Joseph W. Burk, holding the world’s
record as single-sculls champion; Ensign Kenneth D. Molloy, All-American
lacrosse player from Syracuse University; Lieut. John B. Williams,
Olympic swimmer from Oregon State; and Ensign James F. Foran, swimmer
from Princeton.
Commander Bowling was right. PT crews had to be tough for the kind of
warfare they were waging. Shallow-draft _daihatsus_ clung to the shore,
and the PTs had to come in as close as 100 yards from the beach to find
their prey. For 1,200 miles the shoreline was lined with ten of
thousands of blockaded Japanese soldiers, every one of them itching to
get a crack at the patrol boats that were starving them to death. The
Japanese set up shore batteries and baited traps with helpless-looking
_daihatsus_ to lure the PT marauders within range. In this deadly
cat-and-mouse game, the PT did not always win.
About 2 A.M. on March 7th, PTs 337 and 338 slipped into Hansa Bay, a
powerfully garrisoned Japanese base by-passed early in the Allied
forward movement. The PTs poked about the enemy harbor and picked up a
radar target close to shore. From 400 yards away, the two skippers saw
that their radar pip came from two heavily camouflaged luggers moored
together, a prime bit of business for PTs. Before they could open fire,
however, they discovered that they had been baited into an ambush.
Machine guns opened up on the beach, and the PTs returned the fire, but
the best they could do was to strafe the bush at random, because the
Japanese gun positions were well concealed.
The machine guns at close range were bad enough, but the PT crews
“pulled 20 Gs” when a heavy battery began firing from the mouth of the
bay. The PTs, already deep inside the bay, would have to pass close to
the heavy guns to escape from the harbor. The worst was that the gunners
were obviously crack artillerymen, for the first shell hit so close to
the port bow of the 337 that water from the spout sluiced down the decks
and shrapnel whizzed overhead.
The sharpshooting gunners of the shore battery put a shell from the next
salvo into the tank compartment below the port turret. All engines went
dead and the boat burst into flame. The skipper, Ensign Henry W. Cutter,
pulled the CO₂ release valve but it was too late—the boat was doomed.
Francis C. Watson, Motor Machinist Mate, Third Class, who had been blown
from the port turret by the shell blast, got to his feet and started
forward, away from the searing flames, but he turned back into the fire
to help William Daley, Jr., who was crawling painfully out of the
burning engine room. Daley had been badly wounded in the neck and jaw.
Watson pulled Daley from the flames and with Morgan J. Canterbury,
Torpedomen’s Mate, Second Class, carried him forward. Ensign Cutter put
a life raft into the water on the side away from the big guns, and
Daley, dazed but obedient, tried to get into the raft, but slipped
overboard. The skipper and Ensign Robert W. Hyde jumped after him and
towed him to the raft.
The crew paddled and pushed the raft away from the burning boat and out
to sea, but a strong current worked against them and in two hours they
made only 700 yards. When their boat exploded, the concussion hurt.
Searchlights swept the bay and guns fired all night at the 338, which
had escaped behind smoke and was now trying to get back _into_ the
death-trap to find out what had happened to their comrades of the 337.
The crack gunners ashore were too good, however, and repeated brackets
from heavy salvos kept the 338 outside until the rising sun drove the
worried sailors home.
Daley died before sunrise, and—in the formal language of the Navy
report—“was committed to the sea.”
Survivors clinging to the three-by-seven-foot balsa oval were the
skipper and Ensign Hyde, Watson, Canterbury; Ensign Bruce S. Bales;
Allen B. Gregory, QM2c; Harry E. Barnett, RM2c; Henry S. Timmons, Y2c;
Edgar L. Schmidt, TM3c; Evo A. Fucili, MoMM3c; and James P. Mitchell,
SC3c.
The raft was not built for an 11-man load, so the sailors took turns
riding in the slat-bottom craft and swimming alongside. Currents nagged
them, and at dawn the raft was still less than a mile off the entrance
to the bay, within easy reach of Japanese patrol boats.