miles away, and Ensign Cutter decided to make for the island, with the
idea that he and his crew would hide in the woods. Maybe they would find
food, water, shelter—who knows, just possibly a native canoe or
sailboat.
All afternoon the sailors paddled for the island, but the devilish
currents were not through with them. Every time they came close to the
beach a current would sweep them out to sea again.
Floating on the same currents were two logs which the sailors tied to
the raft. After dark the skipper, still hopeful of finding a boat on the
island, set out with Ensign Bales to swim to the beach, using the logs
as a crude substitute for water wings. For three hours the two young
officers swam, only to bump gently against their own raft again. The
currents had carried them in a giant circle, back to their starting
point.
Hyde and Gregory, tired of inaction, set out for the beach. They were
never seen again.
That night the sailors watched the flash of gunfire at Hansa Bay, where
their squadron mates shot up the beach in revenge for their loss. No PTs
came close enough for the shipwrecked sailors to hail.
By their very nature, PT sailors were men of action. Their solution to
any problem was, “Don’t just sit there, _do_ something.” The inactivity
of waiting passively for rescue was too much for some of them.
Just before dawn Mitchell set out for the island, and just after dawn
Ensign Bales, Fucili, Watson, and Schmidt followed. The others would
have gone, too, but they were too weak.
Watson returned to the raft in the middle of the morning. He had swum to
within 75 yards of the shore, he said, and he had seen Ensign Bales
walking around on dry land, but he had also seen Japanese workmen
building boats in a shipyard, so he came back to the raft. All hands
abandoned the idea of going to the island. After the war, captured
documents showed that the Japanese on Manam Island had captured one
officer and two enlisted men of the sailors who had swum ashore, but
these three luckless sailors were never heard of after this brief
mention.
That night, their third in the water, the sailors were exposed to a
nerve-racking and mysterious inspection. A small boat pulled out from
shore and circled the raft at 200 yards. Two Japanese trained a brace of
machine guns on the Americans, but held their fire. The shivering
sailors looked down the muzzles of those two machine guns until four
o’clock in the morning, when a squall with six-foot waves drove the
patrol craft back to the beach. After the squall passed, the PT sailors
were alone again—more alone than ever, for the delirious Canterbury had
swum away during the storm. Barnett, a first-rate swimmer, had chased
after Canterbury to bring him back, but had lost him in the heavy seas.
That morning the five surviving sailors spied an overturned Japanese
boat. It was fifteen feet long and a luxurious yacht compared to their
flimsy raft, so they righted the boat and bailed it out. A crab was
running about the bottom, and during the chase for this tasty tidbit the
sailors let their life raft drift away. Nobody really cared; they had no
fond memories of the balsa boat.
The sailors suffered horribly from thirst and they eagerly pulled in a
drifting coconut, but it was dry. They were badly sunburned and covered
with salt-water sores. Another chilly night and another blazing morning
passed without relief.
At noon on March 10th, three Army B 25s flew over. The planes circled
the frantically waving sailors, and Ensign Cutter sent a message by
semaphore, a dubious method of communication with Army pilots, but
better than nothing.
One bomber dropped a box which collapsed and sank. On his next pass, he
dropped two more boxes and a small package fixed to a life preserver.
They plunked into the sea not ten feet from the boat. The sailors
eagerly tore open the packages and found food, water, cigarettes, and
medicine. A marked chart showed them their position, and a message said
a Catalina flying boat was on its way to pick them up.
The Catalina took its time, however, for the sailors had one more trying
night to endure before the Cat, screened by two P 47s, landed on the
water and picked up the five exhausted survivors.
The old problem of bad communications between the different services
bothered the PTs worse than ever in New Guinea waters.
On the morning of March 27th, Lieut. Crowell C. Hall, on Ensign George
H. Guckert’s PT 353, accompanied by Ensign Richard B. Secrest’s 121,
went into Bangula Bay to investigate a reported enemy schooner.
That morning, at Australian fighter squadron headquarters on Kiriwina
Island, a careless clerk put the report of the PT patrol in the wrong
file basket, so fighter pilots flew over Bangula Bay, with the
information that no friendly PTs would be out. This was the same setup
that had already caused repeated tragedies and near-tragedies in other
waters.
At 7:45 in the morning, admittedly an unusual hour for the
night-prowling PTs to be abroad, four P 40s of the Australian squadron
flew over the boats. Lieut. Hall asked them, by radio, to investigate
the schooner, which was beyond a dangerous reef from the PT boats. The
plane pilots looked it over and told the PT skipper that it had already
been badly strafed and wasn’t worth attacking further.
The boats turned to go home. Four other P 40s and two Beaufighters of
the same squadron came down out of the sun in a strafing run on the PTs.
One of the Beaufighter pilots recognized the boats and frantically tried
to call his mates off the attack, but nobody listened. The gallant
Australian pilot even put his fighter between the strafing planes and
the boats, trying to block the attack with his own body. No luck.
The PT officers held their men under tight discipline for several
punishing runs, but the nerves of the gunners finally gave way, and each
boat fired a short burst from 37- and 40-mm. cannon and the 50-caliber
machine guns. The officers sharply ordered a cease-fire, and for the
rest of the attack the PT crews suffered helplessly while the planes
riddled their craft and killed their shipmates. Both boats exploded and
sank.
The first quartet of P 40s, the planes that had chatted with Lieut.
Hall, rushed back to the scene when they heard the radio traffic between
the attacking fighters and suspected what was happening. They dropped a
life raft to the swimming survivors and radioed headquarters the story
of the disaster. Two PTs were dispatched to the rescue.
Four officers and four enlisted men were killed, four officers and eight
enlisted men were wounded, two PT boats were lost to the deadly fire of
the friendly fighters—all because one slipshod clerk had put a piece of
paper in a wrong file basket.
Even worse was coming.
The combat zone in the Pacific was divided into the Southwest and the
South Pacific commands. Communication between the two commands at the
junior officer level was almost nonexistent. Everybody was supposed to
stay in his own backyard and not cross the dividing line.
On the night of April 28th, Lieut. (jg) Robert J. Williams’ 347 was
patrolling with Lieut. (jg) Stanley L. Manning’s 350. The 347 went hard
aground on a reef at Cape Pomas, only five miles from the dividing line
between the south and southwest zones. Lieut. Manning passed a line to
the stranded boat, and the two crews set about the all-too-familiar job
of freeing a PT from an uncharted rock.
At 7 A.M. two Marine Corps Corsairs from the South Pacific zone, through
faulty navigation, crossed the dividing line without knowing it.
Naturally they had no word of these PTs patrolling in their area,
because they weren’t in their area. They attacked.
The PTs did not recognize the Corsairs as friendly, and shot one of them
down. (This is an extraordinary mistake, also, for the gull-winged
Corsair was probably the easiest of all warplanes on both sides to
identify, especially from the head-on view presented during a strafing
run.)
Three men were killed in the first attack on the 350, and both boats
were badly damaged. The skippers called for help. The tender _Hilo_, at
Talasea, asked for air cover from Cape Gloucester (in the Southwest
Pacific zone and hence out of communications with the South Pacific base
of the Corsair pilots). The tender sent Lieut. (jg) James B. Burk to the
rescue in PT 346.
The pilot of the surviving Corsair reported to his base at Green Island,
in the South Pacific zone, that he had attacked two Japanese gunboats
125 feet long in Lassul Bay. (The PTs were slightly more than half that
long. Lassul Bay was actually 20 miles from Cape Pomas, the true scene
of the attack, and hence fifteen miles inside the South Pacific zone and
not in the Southwest Pacific zone.)
Green Island scrambled four Corsairs, six Avengers, four Hellcats, and
eight Dauntless dive bombers to finish off the stricken PTs. The
powerful striking force, enough air-power to take on a cruiser division,
found no boats in Lassul Bay, but they, too, wandered across the
dividing line and found the PTs at Cape Pomas.
By then the 346 had arrived. The skipper saw the approaching planes, but
recognized them as friendly types and thought they were the air cover
from Cape Gloucester, so the PT crews ignored the planes and continued
with the salvage and rescue work.
First hint that something had gone wrong was a shower of bombs that
burst among the PT boats. The PT officers frantically tried every trick
in the catalogue to identify themselves, and in despair finally turned
loose their gunners, who shot down one of the planes. The loss of one of
their mates angered the pilots and they pressed their attacks harder.
Two of the three PTs went down.
The plane flight commander called for a Catalina rescue boat to pick up
the downed pilot. The Cat never found the pilot, but instead picked up
thirteen survivors of the torpedo boats. Their arrival at Green Island
was the first word the horrified pilots there had that their targets had
been friendly.
Three PT officers and 11 men were killed, two plane pilots were lost,
four officers and nine men were wounded, two PTs and two planes were
destroyed, in this useless and tragic encounter.
Most PT patrols were not as disastrous, of course, but it was a rare
night that did not provide some adventure. Lieut. (jg) James Cunningham
kept a diary during 1944, and a few extracts from this journal show the
nature of a typical PT’s blockade duty:
_March 12, 1944_: PTs 149 (_The Night Hawk_) and 194 patrol the north
coast of New Britain. At 2300 we picked up a target on radar—closed in
and saw a small Jap surface craft. We made a run on it and found out
it was aground and apparently destroyed. We destroyed it some more.
We moved to the other side of Garove Island, where we saw a craft
under way heading across the mouth of the harbor. Over one part of the
harbor were very high cliffs, an excellent spot for gun emplacements.
We blindly chased the craft and closed in on it for a run. Just then
the guns—six-inchers—opened up from the cliffs on us, and it seemed
for a while that they would blow us out of the water. We left the
decoy and headed out to sea, laying a smoke screen. The concussion of
the exploding shells was terrific. I still believe the craft was a
decoy to pull us into the harbor, and we readily took the bait. The
thing that saved us was that the Japs were too eager. They fired too
soon before we were really far into the harbor. On the way home, about
10 miles offshore from New Britain, we picked up three large radar
pips and figured they were enemy destroyers, because they were in
enemy waters and we were authorized to destroy anything in this grid
sector. We chased within one mile, tracking them with radar, and got
set to make our run. We could see them by eye at that range and
identified them as a destroyer and two large landing craft.
We radioed for airplanes to help us with this valuable prize. Just as
we started our torpedo run from about 500 yards away, the destroyer
shot a recognition flare and identified themselves as friendly. It was
a close call. We were within seconds of firing our fish. The task unit
was off course and had wandered into a forbidden zone.
_June 23, 1944_: PTs 144 (_The Southern Cross_) and 189 departed
Aitape Base, New Guinea, for patrol to the west.
We closed the beach at Sowam after noticing lots of lights moving.
They appeared to be trucks, moving very slow. Muffled down, hidden by
a black, moonless night, we sneaked to within 150 yards off the beach
and waited for a truck to come around the bend and onto the short
stretch of road that ran along the beach. Here came one, lights
blazing. Both boats blasted away. The truck burst into flames and
stopped, lights still burning. The last we saw of the truck (shore
batteries fired on us immediately, so we got out) it was still
standing there with headlights burning and flames leaping up in the
New Guinea night. It has become quite a sport, by the way, shooting
enemy trucks moving along the beach with lights on. The Japs never
seem to learn. We fire at them night after night. They turn off the
lights briefly, then they turn them back on again when they think we
have gone. But we haven’t gone. We shoot them up some more, and they
turn off the lights again. And so on all night long.
The Japanese apparently smarted under these truck-busting attacks, for
Lieut. Cunningham’s entry three nights later tells a different story:
_June 26, 1944_: PTs 144 and 149 left Aitape Base, New Guinea, to
patrol toward Sowam Village, where the road comes down to the beach.
We were after trucks. We closed cautiously to three-quarters of a mile
off the beach, then it seemed that everything opened up on us, 50 and
30 calibers, 40 mms and three-inchers. At the time they fired on us we
were dead in the water, with all three engines in neutral. To get the
engines into gear, the drill is to signal the engine room where the
motor mack of the watch puts the engine in gear by hand. There is no
way to do it from the cockpit. Then, when the gears are engaged, the
skipper can control the speed by three throttles.
I was at the helm in the cockpit when the batteries opened fire, and I
shoved all three throttles wide open, forgetting that the gears
weren’t engaged. Of course, the boat almost shook apart from the
wildly racing engines, but we didn’t move. The motor mack in the
engine room below wrestled against me to push the throttles back. He
was stronger than I was and finally got the engines slowed down enough
to put them into gear. _Then_ we got moving fast. We made it out to
sea OK without being hit, but I sure pulled a boo boo that time.
_August 28, 1944_: PTs 188 and 144 west toward Hollandia, with a squad
of Army radio-men aboard to contact a land patrol. This is enemy-held
territory and the patrol was in hopes of taking a few prisoners.
Just after sunrise we received a radio message to pick up Jap
prisoners at Ulau Mission. We proceeded to the mission and I asked
some P 39s that were strafing the beach to cover us while we made the
landing.
Lieut. (jg) Harry Suttenfield, skipper of the 188, and I launched a
life raft and headed in to pick up prisoners from the Army patrol.
We made it OK until we got into the surf, then the breakers swamped
us. There were many dead Japs lying around, and the soldiers were
burning the village. The natives took the prisoners out to the boats
and then swam us through the surf, pushing the raft.
We turned the prisoners over to the Army at Aitape.
More and more as the by-passed Japanese became progressively demoralized
by lack of food and rest, the PTs were pressed into service as Black
Marias, police vans for carrying Japanese captives from the front lines,
or even from behind the lines, to Army headquarters where Intelligence
officers interrogated the prisoners.
Most Japanese simply would not be captured, and killed themselves rather
than surrender. Many of them made dangerous prisoners, for they
surrendered only to get close enough to their captors to kill them with
concealed weapons.
On the night of July 7, 1944, Lieut. (jg) William P. Hall, on the 329,
dropped a fatal depth charge under a 130-foot lugger south of Cape
Oransbari. The crew snagged four prisoners, one of them a lieutenant
colonel, one of the highest ranking officers taken prisoner in New
Guinea.
One of the prisoners attacked Lieut. Hall, who flattened him with a
right to the mouth. Hall sprained his thumb and badly gashed his hand on
the prisoner’s teeth. He was awarded the Purple Heart for being wounded
“in the face of the enemy.”
Oddly enough, what few Japanese did let themselves be taken made docile,
even eagerly cooperative, prisoners. PT crewmen could never tell what
was coming on a Black Maria mission. Either the captives tried to kill
themselves or their guards—or they tried to help the guards kill their
former comrades.
On the night between March 16th and 17th, Lieut. H. M. S. Swift (the
Lieut. Swift of the great air battle at Aitape) was out with Lieut. (jg)
Eugene E. Klecan’s 367 and 325. Off Pak Island, the two boats caught
nine Japanese in a canoe. As the PTs approached, one Japanese killed
himself and three others with a grenade. Another was shot by PT sailors
when he resisted capture. The others came aboard willingly.
One of the captives asked for a pencil and wrote: “My name is Kamingaga.
After finished Ota High School, I worked in a Yokohama army factory as
an American spy. I set fire to Yokohama’s arsenal. Later, I was
conscripted into the Japanese army, unfortunately. I was very unhappy,
but now I am very happy because I was saved by American Army. To repay
your kindness I will work as a spy for your American Army.”
He was turned over to skeptical Army officers, who did not make a deal
with the traitorous captive.
Another Japanese canary, however, sang a most profitable song to his
captors.
On the night between April 28th and 29th, Ensign Francis L. Cappaert, in
370, and Ensign Louis A. Fanget, in 388, sank three barges in
Nightingale Bay, east of Wewak.
One of the barges had been loaded with two 75-mm. cannon and 45
soldiers. The PT crews tried to pull prisoners from the water, but all
but two deliberately drowned themselves.
One of the two captives said to Ensign Cappaert, “Me officer,” and
eagerly volunteered the advice that more barges were coming into
Nightingale Bay in a few minutes. The PT skippers didn’t know what kind
of trap their prisoner might be baiting for them, but they stayed around
anyhow. Three more barges came around the bend on schedule, however, and
the PT’s riddled them from ambush as “Me Officer” looked on.
The only surviving Japanese from the last three barges was a courier
with a consignment of secret documents. The first lesson drilled into
American sailors was that all secret documents, code books, maps, and
combat instruction, were to go to the bottom if capture was imminent.
The Japanese courier clung to his package, at some risk to himself, for
it would have been easier to swim without it. He willingly turned over
the secret papers to the PT officers.
At headquarters in Aitape, officers questioned the prisoners in their
own language, and to the astonishment of the Navy, the Japanese officer
dictated a barge movement timetable that helped PTs knock off fifteen
barges and a picket boat in the next five nights.
Commander Robert J. Bulkley, Jr., a PT veteran who later became the
official naval historian of the PT fleet (not to be confused with John
Bulkeley of the MacArthur rescue mission), said of the Japanese conduct
as prisoners:
“Most of them preferred death to capture, but once taken prisoner they
were usually docile and willing, almost eager, to give information. And
while their information might be limited, it was generally reliable.
They seldom attempted deception.
“The big job was to capture them, and PT crews became fairly adept at
it. One method was to crack a man over the head with a boathook and haul
him up on deck. Another technique, more certain, was to drop a cargo net
over the bow. Two men climbed down on the net. Other members of the crew
held them by lines around their waist so that their hands were free.
“They would blackjack the floating Japanese and put a line on him so
that he could be hauled aboard. Those were rough methods, but the gentle
ones didn’t work. The Japanese almost never took a line willingly, and
as long as they were conscious would fight to free themselves from a
boathook.”
As a nice contrast to this careless betrayal of secret information by
the Japanese, consider an American PT officer’s reaction to the loss of
a secret code book.
On the night of April 2nd, the 114 went aground 400 yards off Yarin, on
Kairiru Island. The crew jettisoned torpedoes and depth charges and the
boat was pulled off the rock by _The Southern Cross_ (144). The
propellers were so badly damaged, however, that the 114 was abandoned.
Confidential publications, including a code book, were put into a raft,
but the crew carelessly let it drift to the Japanese-held beach.
When the boats returned to the tender, the skipper reported the loss of
the codes to Lieut. Commander Robert Leeson, who jumped into 129,
commanded by his brother Ensign A. D. Leeson, and took off for Yarin.
Ensign Edmund F. Wakelin tagged along in 134.
The two PTs hove to off the beach at Yarin, and the officers studied the
situation. They could see the raft on the shore, but it was in full view
of a Japanese military hut, 600 yards away, and Yarin was the site of a
known powerful shore battery.
Commander Leeson wanted those books, though, and he wanted them badly,
so he jumped over the side and in full daylight swam the 400 yards
across the reef to the beach. While crews of the two boats watched the
beach with fingers crossed, dreading the sight of the first puff of
flame from the hidden shore battery, Commander Leeson pushed the raft
into the water and towed it back to the boat. The secret publications
were taken aboard intact.
The Japanese chose that moment—the moment just after their last
chance—to wake up and plunk a salvo of shells around the boats.
Commander Leeson, not satisfied with having saved the PT code in one of
the most daring exploits of the Pacific war, decided to hang around
until after nightfall. After all, the PTs had come all that long way
from the tender and had not yet worked any mischief.
After dark the boats slipped in close to the beach and sank two out of
three heavily loaded barges. The third barge blew a 14-inch hole in the
exhaust stack of the 196, knocked out the starboard engine, and started
a fire.
Clarence L. Nelson, MoMM2c, put out the fire, but he and A. F. Hall,
MoMM3c, passed out from the fumes. Ensign Richard Holt dropped his
battle duties long enough to give the two sailors artificial
respiration, and very probably saved Hall’s life. The 129’s engine was
definitely dead, however, and nothing would bring it back to life, so
Commander Leeson went on fighting with two-thirds power.
After airing out the 129’s engine room, the redoubtable Leeson, with his
crippled boat, led a limping charge straight into the mouth of the
Japanese cannon. The two boats launched a ripple of twenty-four rockets
at close range, and nothing more was heard from the beach.
When the sky turned light in the east, Commander Leeson took his sailors
home.
The spearhead of the Allied advance left New Guinea for Morotai Island
in September 1944. The landings there were supported by navy planes from
six escort carriers. On D-Day plus one, Ensign Harold Allen Thompson
took off from the deck of the carrier _Santee_ in his fighter plane to
strafe Japanese positions around Wasile Bay on nearby Halmahera. His
sortie touched off one of the most heroic adventures of the Pacific war.
According to the report of the carrier division commander: “Success of
the landings on Morotai depended upon keeping the Japanese continually
on the defensive ... thus making it impossible for them to launch
counteroffensives until American forces were established in strength on
the smaller island [Morotai].”
Ensign Thompson’s job was to beat up Japanese barges in Wasile Bay.
While he was in a steep dive on his fourth strafing run, the Japanese
made a direct hit with a heavy shell on Ensign Thompson’s plane.