“The next thing he knows he was being blown _upward_ with such force
that his emergency gear was even blown out of his pockets. He pulled the
ripcord and on the way down he found himself literally looking down the
barrels of almost every gun in the Japanese positions about 300 yards
away.
“On hitting the water, he discovered that his left hand had been badly
torn, presumably by shrapnel. His life jacket had been torn in front and
would only half inflate. His main idea was to get away from the beach
and out into the bay, but progress was difficult.”
His comrades stayed with the downed pilot and strafed the beach until a
PBY patrol plane came, but the rescue Cat could not land. The pilot
dropped a life raft instead, and Ensign Thompson climbed aboard. He put
a tourniquet on his bleeding hand and then paddled to a pier to hide in
the shelter of a camouflaged lugger.
“These pilots heroically covered all the beach area with a devastating
attack so that little or no fire could be directed at the pilot in the
raft,” says the division report. “The attacks drove the Japanese gunners
to shelter, but after the attacks they returned to their guns.”
Ensign Thompson said it was a wonderful show to watch, but it was a
tragically expensive show. Ensign William P. Bannister was hit and
crashed 150 yards from Ensign Thompson, gallantly giving his life to
save his fellow pilot.
Ensign Paul W. Lindskog was also hit, but flew his wobbly plane safely
to a crash landing outside the Japanese lines. Almost all the planes
were holed, but they continued the strafing runs until Thompson had
worked his way behind the armored lugger.
When fuel ran low, another flight of fighters came up to strafe, and the
carrier set up a system of shuttle flights to keep the beach under
constant attack.
So far, so good. But how to get Ensign Thompson out of Wasile Bay if a
Catalina couldn’t land there? After all, the fighters couldn’t cover the
wounded pilot till the war was over. Somebody thought about the PT
fleet, and so the carrier division commander called the PT tender
_Oyster Bay_ and asked if there was anything the PTs could do.
Certainly there was something the PTs could do; they could rescue the
pilot.
Lieut. Arthur Murray Preston, commander of Squadron Thirty-Three, picked
two all-volunteer crews, and they put to sea in Lieut. Wilfred Tatro’s
489 and Lieut. (jg) Hershel F. Boyd’s 363.
The boat arrived off the mouth of Wasile Bay in the middle of the
afternoon. Lieut. Preston knew there was a minefield, backed up by a
light shore battery, at the eastern side of the entrance. A powerful and
hitherto unsuspected battery opened fire on the western shore, however,
and Preston chose the lesser danger of the minefield and the lighter
battery.
Shorefire from both beaches was so heavy that the PTs had to fall back.
The fighter pilots spotted their difficulty and made strafing runs on
the shore batteries. The Japanese guns still fired on the PTs, but at a
slower rate, and Lieut. Preston decided to risk a run through the narrow
straits.
“Strafing by the planes unquestionably reduced the rate of fire to make
a safe passage through the straits possible,” said Lieut. Preston.
“Safe” passage, indeed!
The inside was no improvement on the entrance, for the bay was small and
ringed with guns, all of which could reach the PTs. The shooting was
steadily improving also as Japanese gunners found the range.
Lieut. (jg) George O. Stouffer called from his torpedo bomber to ask
Lieut. Preston if he would like to have a little smoke between the PTs
and the shore gunners.
Would he like a little smoke? Just all there is. Stouffer flew between
the PTs and the beach, laying a dense curtain of smoke to blind the
gunners. He dropped one smoke pot squarely over a particularly dangerous
gun battery, blanking off its view in all directions. The plane also
dropped a smoke float to mark the location of the downed pilot’s raft.
During the approach of the two PTs to the armored lugger, they added
their guns to those of the planes lashing the beach, but lookouts kept a
nervous watch on the Japanese boat—nobody could be sure that the lugger
was not manned by enemy sailors waiting to shoot up the rescue craft at
the moment they were most occupied with the downed pilot. The closer the
boats came to the lugger, the more the planes concentrated their fire on
the nearby beach.
“This strafing was maintained at an almost unbelievable intensity during
the entire time the boats were in the vicinity of the downed pilot. This
was the ultimate factor in the success of the mission,” reads Lieut.
Preston’s report, which makes no mention of another factor—the
incredible tenaciousness of the two PT crews.
The first smoke screen was beginning to thin dangerously when the 363
hove to beyond the lugger and raked the beach with its guns.
The 489 went alongside the lugger.
“Immediately and on their own initiative, Lieut. D. F. Seaman and C. D.
Day, MoMM1c, dove overboard and towed the pilot in his boat to the stern
of 489. The pilot was in no condition to do this for himself and
appeared to be only partly conscious of his circumstances and
surroundings,” wrote Preston. The rescue took ten minutes.
The PTs were not through fighting yet. Lieut. Heston remembered that the
primary mission of PTs in those waters was destruction of Japanese
coastal shipping, so he ordered the two PTs to put a few holes in the
lugger and set it afire before leaving.
The fighter cover ran low on fuel, and there was a near-disastrous
breakdown in the shuttle timetable.
Preston reports what happened:
“While we were hove-to picking up Thompson there was a group of planes
giving us the closest possible cover and support. As we left the scene
the planes did not remain quite as close to us as they had
previously.... It was shortly after this that we learned that the
fighters were critically low on fuel and some of them out of ammunition.
Nevertheless, they were still answering our calls to quiet one gun or
another, sometimes having to dive on the gun positions without firing,
because their own magazines were empty.... They were magnificent.”
The PTs zigzagged across the minefield with heavy shells bursting within
ten yards on all sides. When they finally broke into the open sea and
roared away from the enemy beach, Ensign Thompson had been in the water
for seven hours, the PTs had been under continuous close-range fire from
weapons of all calibers for two and one-half hours. The boats were
peppered with shrapnel, but, miraculously, none of the PT sailors had
been scratched.
Dr. Eben Stoddard had a job, though, trying to save the pilot’s left
hand, which was so badly mangled by shrapnel that three fingers dangled
loosely.
The seven hours of protective strafing had blown up an ammunition dump,
destroyed a fuel dump, wrecked stores, silenced four heavy gun positions
at least temporarily, and certainly prevented the Japanese from getting
to the downed pilot.
Lieut. Preston was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for this
action, one of the two Congressional Medals of Honor awarded to PT
sailors. (The other was given to Lieut. John Bulkeley for his exploits
during the fall of the Philippines.) The two swimmers and the two
skippers won the Navy Cross. Every other member of the two crews won a
Silver Star.
Ironically, the day after incredible escape of all PT hands without
injury, Lieut. Tatro, skipper of the 489, while working on a 20-mm gun,
let a wrench slip and a trunnion spring threw the heavy tool into his
forehead, injuring him seriously.
By November 1944, there was no more work for the PTs in New Guinea, and
the last patrol was made just twenty-three months after the first one,
1,500 miles to the east. The PT navy in New Guinea had grown from one
small tender and six boats to eight tenders and 14 squadrons.
Almost nightly action had taken a terrible toll of the Japanese. The
shore was littered with the wreckage of _daihatsus_ and the jungle was
littered with the skeletons of thousands of Japanese soldiers who had
died for lack of supplies.
Major General F. H. Berryman, Commander of the Second Australian Corps,
wrote the PT commander:
The following evidence emerging from the recent operations will
illustrate the cumulative effect of the activities of your command:
A. The small degree to which the enemy has used artillery indicates a
shortage of ammunition.
B. The enemy, in an endeavor to protect his barges, has been forced to
dispose his normal field artillery over miles of coast when those guns
might well have been used in the coastal sector against our land
troops.
C. Many Japanese diary entries describe the shortage of rations and
the regular fatigues of foraging parties to collect native food, which
is beginning to be increasingly difficult to obtain.
D. A Japanese prisoner of war stated that three days’ rice, augmented
by native food, now has to last nine days. This is supported by the
absence of food and the presence of native roots on enemy dead.
E. There is definite evidence that the enemy has slaughtered and eaten
his pack-carrying animals.
From the above you will see how effective has been the work of your
squadrons and how it has contributed to the recent defeat of the
enemy.
The war in New Guinea was over, but the Allies were still a long way
from Tokyo. Across the water were the Philippine Islands, garrisoned
with tens of thousands of Japanese. There was hard fighting ahead for
the PTs.
6.
The War in Europe:
Mediterranean
While Americans and their Allies were fighting the Japanese in the
Pacific, on the other side of the world their comrades in arms grappled
in a Titanic struggle with the other two Axis powers. Half of the
European Axis partnership was halfhearted Italy, but the other half was
the martial and determined state of Germany, led by an insane genius at
the black arts of killing named Hitler.
The naval war in the coastal waters of Europe was eminently suitable to
torpedo-boat operations. The British had been making spectacular use of
motor torpedo boats for years—in fact, American PTs had been patterned
after British models. The Axis powers also used torpedo boats. German
E-boats prowled the English Channel and the Mediterranean. Even the
Italian MAS boats made Allied Mediterranean naval commanders nervous,
for the torpedo boat had been an Italian specialty since its invention
and the officers who manned Italian small craft were the most aggressive
and warlike in all the Italian Armed Forces.
American troops went ashore in Northwest Africa on November 8, 1942. (On
the other side of the world, the Japanese were just forming the massive
relief fleet that was smashed and dispersed definitively a week later in
the great three-day sea battle of Guadalcanal.) The United States Navy
rushed to put American torpedo boats into the Mediterranean to join the
British in harrying Axis shipping.
In New Orleans, in late 1942, Squadron Fifteen was organized. Its
commander was Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, destined to become
probably the most dashing of all American PT sailors, as the squadron
itself was to become the most spectacularly successful PT command in
either theatre.
On commissioning day the squadron members didn’t feel elated about their
future. Their first assignment was to patrol the warm blue waters off
Midway Island, far behind the fighting lines in the Pacific. While the
Tulagi PTs fought almost nightly battles with Tanaka’s Tokyo Express,
Squadron Fifteen was promised long, lazy afternoons of cribbage, 3,500
miles behind the combat zone. Its assignment gave its members slight
headaches every time they thought about it.
Lieut. Commander Barnes assured his squadron mates that somehow,
somewhere, he was going to find somebody for them to fight. But nobody
believed him—not even he, as he later confessed.
The squadron sailed for the Panama Canal and was well on the way to the
gentle duties of Midway when the radioman came running with a dispatch.
Orders to Midway were canceled! “Report to Commander in Chief, Atlantic
Fleet, in Norfolk,” the message read.
At the giant Virginia naval base, Barnes had his conference with the
upper echelons of brass and rushed back to his squadron mates with the
news that they were indeed going to find somebody somewhere to fight.
They were going to the Mediterranean as the first American torpedo-boat
squadron on the European scene.
The barman at the Navy Officers’ Club in Norfolk was famous in those
days—and may still be—for his Stingers, a most appropriate toast to duty
in the Mediterranean mosquito fleet.
The 201 and 204 crossed the Atlantic immediately as deck passengers on
the _S. S. Enoree_, and Lieut. Commander Barnes followed on the _S. S.
Housatonic_, with 205 and 208. The _Enoree_ arrived at Gibraltar first,
on April 13th. Boats were in the water the next day, and Lieut. Edwin A.
Dubose—also destined to make a name as a brilliant PT sailor—took them
to the British torpedo-boat dock, loaded a full cargo of torpedoes, and
set sail for Oran in North Africa. Skippers of the other boats followed
as fast as longshoremen could swing the PTs into the water.
Disappointment awaited the crews in Oran, where the high command sent
the boats to Cherchel, 300 miles from the nearest action, for an
indefinite period of training.
“I decided to take the bull by the horns and bum a ride to Algiers in an
Army truck to see Vice Admiral Henry K. Hewitt,” said Lieut. Commander
Barnes.
Admiral Hewitt was commander of all U. S. Naval forces in northwest
African waters, and Barnes hoped to persuade him that the PTs should be
based at Bône, 265 miles farther east and within easy reach of trouble
at the front.
“That trip took me several hours and by the time I got there I was
chagrined to find that orders had already been issued and Lieut. Richard
H. O’Brien, my next in command, had gotten the boats under way and was
in Algiers before me. The admiral himself brought me up to date with the
information that my boats were already there. Most embarrassing!”
The next day, April 27th, Lieut. Dubose took his boats to the forward
base at Bône, and that night they went out on their first patrol in
combat waters.
Bône was also the British forward base for motor torpedo boats and
gunboats. Like the American PTs, the British MTBs carried torpedoes, but
the British had already converted some patrol craft to gunboats, similar
to the heavily gunned PTs of New Guinea. The gunboats carried no
torpedoes.
The British had been fighting in the Mediterranean for months, so
American PTs made most of their early patrols with British officers
aboard to tip them off to local conditions.
The North African campaign was drawing to a close. General Erwin
Rommel’s crack Afrika Korps was bottled up in Tunisia, and torpedo boats
patrolled nightly to prevent escape of Rommel’s soldiers to Sicily, just
90 miles across the strait from Tunisia’s Cape Bon.
Lieut. Commander Barnes, in the 106, joined three British torpedo boats
under Lieut. Dennis Germaine, in a patrol down the east side of Cape
Bon. At Ras Idda Bay, Lieut. Germaine took one British MTB inside the
harbor to investigate a possible target.
Lieut. Commander Barnes continues the story:
“Pretty soon Germaine came up on the radio with the startling
statement that there are lots of ships in there, so I took the
remaining British boats with me and started in. It was as black as the
inside of your pocket, but sure enough, right there in front of me was
a ship.
“By the time we saw it against the dark background of the land we were
inside the torpedo-aiming range and had to go all the way around the
other side of it before getting a good shot.
“Thinking there were other targets around, I lined up and fired only
one torpedo—our first!
“It ran hot and straight, and after what seemed like an interminable
time made a beautiful hit forward. The whole ship blew up in our
faces, scattering pieces of debris all around us and on deck. Just
like the movies.
“We immediately started to look for other ships but could find none.
Neither could we find our British friend, who, it turned out, was
temporarily aground, so we just eased around trying to rendezvous.
Pretty soon he found us—and promptly fired two fish at us, one of
which passed right under our bow and the other under the stern, much
to our alarm and his subsequent embarrassment.
“About half an hour later, bombers started working over the airfield a
couple of miles away, and with the light of the flares we managed to
join up with Germaine.
“I personally think that ship was aground—the ship we
torpedoed—although it certainly made a fine spectacle going up, and
one of our officers who was along that night subsequently flew over
the area in a plane and reported it sitting nicely on the bottom.
“Actually, Germaine had not seen any ships and had mistaken some
peculiar rock formations for a group of enemy vessels.”
That was not the last mistake of the British Navy. Unused to working
with their new Allies, the British boats took one more near-lethal crack
at American PTs.
Lieut. Dubose, in Lieut. (jg) Eugene S. Clifford’s 212, with Lieut.
Richard H. O’Brien in 205, left Bône on the night of May 10th to patrol
Cape Bon. On the way home after a dull night, the two boats cut deep
into the Gulf of Tunis to keep clear of a British destroyer area.
The Gulf of Tunis was supposed to belong to torpedo boats that night,
but two British destroyers came roaring out of the night on an opposite
course only 900 yards away. The destroyers opened up with machine guns
as they passed, so the PTs fired two emergency recognition starshells
and ran away behind a smoke screen.
Two German E-boats, lurking in the darkness for a crack at the two
destroyers, opened up on the PTs instead, and the British took _all_ the
torpedo boats under fire, distributing shells and bullets on American
and German boats with impartiality.
The two PT skippers were given the thorny tactical problem of dodging
friendly destroyer fire while simultaneously taking on the German boats.
Lieut. Clifford turned back through his own smoke, surprised the E-boats
at close range when he burst out of the screen, and raked the enemy with
his machine-gun batteries. He ran back into the smoke before they could
swing their mounts to bear on him, so he couldn’t report results of his
attack, but destroyer sailors saw one of the E-boats burst into flame.
The other ran from the fight.
Not so the destroyers. They chased the PTs for an hour, firing
starshells and salvos from their main battery. Fortunately their
shooting was poor, and the PTs got out of the battle with only a few
machine-gun holes.
Days later one of the destroyer skippers called to apologize. “We hadn’t
been able to find any action in our assigned patrol area,” he said, “so
we decided to have a bit of a look in the PT area.”
The destroyer skipper’s action was dashing and bold, but it was also a
fine way to catch a friendly torpedo in his own ship or to kill a dozen
or so of his Allies.
Three E-boats had attacked the destroyers at the precise instant that
the American PTs arrived on the scene, according to the British officer
who had heard a German radio discussion of a plan to attack the
destroyers. Naturally the alarmed British began blasting at any torpedo
boat in sight. Everybody saw Dubose’s recognition flares, but took them
for tracer fire, a common mistake.
A strange aftermath of the running gun battle was the naval occupation
of the great port of Bizerte by a lone PT.
The 205 lost the other boat in the night and put into Bizerte for
gasoline. The port had just been taken by Allied troops a few hours
earlier.
The shore batteries, now in friendly hands, nevertheless fired the
“customary few rounds” at the arriving PT boat, but the imperturbable
Lieut. O’Brien said: “The shots were wide, so I continued in and tied up
at the dock.”
Two hours later a newsreel photographer asked O’Brien to move his PT out
of the way so he could photograph some British landing ships just
arriving as “the first Allied craft to enter Bizerte.”
Lieut. O’Brien wondered what his own boat was if not an Allied craft,
and he had been in Bizerte long enough to be bored with the place, but
he patiently moved aside.
The brush-off from the newsreel man was only the beginning of the
stepchild treatment the PTs suffered at Bizerte.
Squadron Fifteen cleaned up a hangar and scrounged spare parts and
machinery from all over the city. When the big boys came into the
harbor, their skippers were delighted with the tidy PT base and
ruthlessly pushed the little boys out the door.
“We cleaned up half the buildings in Bizerte,” said one veteran of
Squadron Fifteen. “As fast as we made a place presentable, we were
kicked out. We ended up with only a fraction of our original space, and
we had to fight tooth and nail for that.”
Late in May the squadron was filled out to full strength and the newly
arrived boats were fitted with radar. The British boats did not have it,
so the two torpedo-boat fleets began to experiment with a system of
radio signals to vector British boats to American radar targets in
coordinated simultaneous attacks.
After the collapse of the Afrika Korps in Tunisia in mid-May 1943, all
of North Africa was in Allied hands and Allied attention turned toward
Europe, across the narrow sea.
To mislead the enemy about the spot chosen by the Allies for the next
landing, British secret agents of the Royal Navy elaborated a fantastic
hoax worthy of the cheapest dime novel. The amazing thing is that it
worked.
The British dressed the corpse of a man who had died of pneumonia in the
uniform of a major in the Royal Marines. They stuffed his pockets with
forged credentials as a Major William Martin, and they planted forged
letters on the body to make him look like a courier between the highest
Allied commands. The letters “revealed” that the Allies would next land
in Sardinia and Greece. The body was pushed overboard from a submarine
off the coast of Spain. It washed up on the beach as an apparent victim
of a plane crash and was frisked by an Axis agent, just as the British
had hoped.
Hitler was taken in by the hoax and gave priority to reinforcing
Sardinia and Greece, widely separated, not only from each other, but
also from Sicily, where the Allies were actually going to land.
To help along the confusion of Axis officers (most of whom were of a
less romantic nature than their _Fuehrer_ and were not taken in by the
Major William Martin fraud), the Allies mounted another hoax almost as
childishly imaginative as the planted cadaver trick.
On D-Day, July 10, 1943, Commander Hunter R. Robinson in PT 213 led a
flotilla of ten Air Force crash boats to Cape Granitola, at the far
western tip of Sicily, as far as it could get from the true landing
beaches around both sides of the southeastern horn of the triangular
island.
The crash boats and the PT were supposed to charge about offshore during
the early hours of D-Day, sending out phony radio messages, firing
rockets, playing phonograph records of rattling anchor chains and the
clanking and chuffing of landing-craft engines. The demonstration didn’t
seem to fool anybody ashore, but the little craft tried.
Most of Squadron Fifteen was busy elsewhere on the morning of D-Day and
narrowly missed being butchered in one of those ghastly attacks from
friendly forces that were so dangerous to PT boats.
One force of American soldiers was going ashore at Licata. Twenty-four
miles west, at Port Empedocle, was a flotilla of Italian torpedo boats
which so worried the high command that Empedocle had been ruled out as a
possible landing beach. To keep the Italian boats off the back of the
main naval force, a special screen was thrown between Port Empedocle and
the transport fleet, a screen of seventeen of Lieut. Commander Barnes’
PTs and the destroyer _Ordronaux_. After the war, historians discovered
that the much-feared Italian torpedo boats at Empedocle had accidentally
bumped into the invasion fleet the night before the landings, and had
fled in panic to a new base at Trapani at the farthest western tip of
the island.