prepared when nobody told the westernmost destroyers of the main landing
force that PTs would be operating nearby. The skippers of the destroyers
_Swanson_ and _Roe_, nervous anyway because of the Italian torpedo-boat
nest at Empedocle, charged into the PT patrol area when they saw radar
pips on their screens. Lieut. Commander Barnes flashed a recognition
signal, but the destroyer signal crews ignored it.
[Illustration: TYRRHENIAN SEA]
TUNISIA
PT 205 "CAPTURES" BIZERTE
SICILY
PT FAKE LANDINGS
U.S. LANDING FORCS
LANDING FORCES
ITALIAN PATROL BASE
PT BASE
AELIAN ISLES CAPTURED BY PTS
AXIS FERRY
ITALY
SWAY SHOOTS UP GEN. MARK CLARK IN PT 201
ANZIO LANDINGS
SARDINIA
PT BASE
Just as the destroyer unit commander was about to open fire at 1,500
yards, Roe rammed Swanson at the forward stack. _Roe’s_ bow folded up
and both ships went dead in the water. The _Swanson’s_ forward fireroom
was partly flooded. Both ships had to be sent to the rear for repairs,
carrying with them, of course, their five-inch cannon which were sorely
missed by the assault troops of that morning’s landings.
Two nights later, on July 12th, Lieut. Commander Barnes split his PTs
into two forces to escort twelve crash boats for another fraudulent
demonstration of strength at Cape Granitola. The two forces ran parallel
to the beach behind smoke, and noisily imitated the din of a force a
thousand times their true size.
Searchlights blazed out from the shore, and the second salvo from shore
batteries landed so close to the boats that the skippers hauled out to
sea.
“The shore batteries were completely alerted,” said Lieut. Commander
Barnes. “Apparently the enemy was convinced that a landing was about to
take place when it detected the ‘large number’ of boats in our group
approaching the beach, for they opened a heavy and accurate fire with
radar control.... I immediately reversed course and opened the range.
One shell damaged the rudder of a crash boat and another fell ten yards
astern of a PT.
“The demonstration was called a success and we withdrew.”
The next day enemy newspapers reported that an attempted landing on the
southwest coast of Sicily had been bloodily repulsed.
Soldiers of the American and British landing forces swarmed over Sicily,
taking Italian prisoners by the hundreds. Some Americans were amused,
some depressed by the standard joke of many surrendering Italian
soldiers: “Don’t be sorry for me. I’m going to America and you’re
staying in Sicily.”
Palermo, major city on the northwestern coast, fell to the Allies on
July 22nd, and the jaunty boats of Squadron Fifteen were the first
Allied naval power to show the flag in the harbor. They picked their way
through the sunken hulks of fifty ships. The dockside was a shambles. In
a word, Palermo was a typical PT advanced base.
The squadron moved up from Bizerte the same day and began patrolling the
Tyrrhenian Sea, those waters boxed in by Sicily, Italy, Sardinia and
Corsica.
Isolated in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about thirty miles north of Palermo, is
the island of Ustica. On the first Tyrrhenian patrol Lieut. Commander
Barnes led his boats toward Ustica to see what was going on in those
backwaters of the war.
“At dawn we were off Ustica,” the squadron leader reports. “First thing,
we saw a fishing boat putt-putting toward Italy. We found a handful of
very scared individuals crawling out from under the floor plates,
hopefully waving white handkerchiefs. This was the staff of an Italian
admiral at Trapani [site of the Italian torpedo-boat base at the western
tip of Sicily, bypassed by the fall of Palermo].
“Only reason we didn’t get the admiral was that he was late getting down
to the dock and his staff said the hell with him.
“In addition to a few souvenir pistols and binoculars, we captured a
whole fruit crate of thousand-lira notes which we reluctantly turned
over to Army authorities later. One of the other boats saw a raft with
seven Germans on it, feebly paddling out to sea. We picked them up too.”
The next night three PTs of Squadron Fifteen patrolled to the Strait of
Messina, right against the toe of the Italian mainland itself, and two
nights later, off Cape Vaticano, the same three boats—under Lieut. E. A.
Arbuckle—found the 8,800-ton Italian freighter _Viminale_ being towed
toward Naples by a tug.
For some reason, the freighter was being towed backward, almost causing
the PT skippers to take a lead in the wrong direction, but they sank
both ships in the first U.S. Naval victory in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
On the night of July 26th, near the island of Stromboli, three PTs
commanded by Lieut. J. B. Mutty ran into their first F-lighters, those
powerfully armed German landing craft and general-duty blockade runners
that were to become the Number One enemy of PTs in the Mediterranean.
The F-lighters were slow and cumbersome, but they were armored and
mounted extremely heavy antiaircraft batteries which could saw a PT into
toothpicks. Gun turrets were lined with cement and often mounted the
much-feared 88-mm. rifle, thus enormously outgunning the PTs.
Holds of the F-lighters were so well compartmented that they could take
terrible punishment without going down. With only four and one-half feet
of draft, they usually slid over PT torpedoes, set to run at eight-foot
depth. An F-lighter was a serious opponent for a destroyer and much more
than a match for a PT—in theory.
The three PT skippers at Stromboli didn’t know about that theory,
however, and probably wouldn’t have hesitated about attacking even if
they had known how dangerous an F-lighter was. They fired six fish and
thought they had blown up two of the F-lighters, but postwar assessment
says No. Neither side was badly hurt in this first duel, but more
serious fighting was to come.
The next night, July 28th, three boats commanded by Lieut. Arbuckle
fired at what the skippers thought were F-lighters, but were really
Italian torpedo boats. American torpedoes passed harmlessly under the
hulls of the enemy boats; Italian machine-gunners punched sixty holes in
PT 218 and seriously wounded three officers, including Lieut. Arbuckle.
The boat got back to Palermo with 18 inches of water sloshing about
below decks.
The F-lighters were ferrying Axis troops out of Sicily, across the
Strait of Messina. The Allied high command had hoped to catch the whole
Axis force on Sicily in a gigantic trap, and the Messina ferry had to be
broken up.
The Navy tried a combined torpedo boat-destroyer operation against the
ferry, but as usual, communications between the American ships were bad
and the destroyers opened fire on their own PTs.
The first salvo from the American destroyers splashed water on the PT
decks. The PTs were five knots slower than the American cans. (Remember
those news stories, in the early days of the war, about the dazzling
70-knot PTs—fast enough to “run rings around any warship afloat”? During
the summer of 1943, few of the Squadron Fifteen boats could top 25 to 27
knots.) Because they couldn’t run away from their deadly friends and
because they feared American gunnery more than they feared Italian
gunnery, the PT boats actually ran for the enemy shore to snuggle under
the protection of Italian batteries on Cape Rasocolmo. The enemy guns
obligingly fired on the American destroyers and drove them away. The PT
sailors went home, enormously grateful to the enemy for his involuntary
but effective act of good will.
In August the Axis powers ferried most of their power to the mainland
across the three-mile-wide Strait of Messina, in a brilliant escape from
the Sicilian trap.
PT skippers knew about the evacuation, but had orders to stay away from
the scene. British torpedo boats that tried to break up the evacuation
train were badly mauled by shore batteries. One torpedo boat
disappeared, with all hands, in the flash of a direct hit from a
gigantic nine and one-half-inch shell.
Chafing at the order that kept it out of the action, the PT command
dreamed up an operation to relieve the tedium. It decided to mount an
invasion of its own to capture an island.
Setting up a jury-rig invasion staff, the officers pored over charts,
looking for the ideal enemy island to add to the PT bag. Lieut. Dubose,
returning from a fight with German mine sweepers on the night of August
15th, picked up an Italian merchant seaman from a small boat off Lipari
Island, in the Aeolian Group, a few miles northwest of the Strait of
Messina. The sailor said there were no Germans on Lipari and the
islanders would undoubtedly be delighted to be captured by the American
Navy.
When the admiral heard the squadron’s proposal he radioed: “Demand the
unconditional surrender of the islands, suppress any opposition, bring
back as prisoners all who are out of sympathy.”
Three PTs, their crews beefed up by 17 extra sailors, six soldiers and a
military government man—with a destroyer following behind as main fire
support—sailed into Lipari Harbor at 11 A.M. on August 17th, guns manned
and trained on the beach. At precisely the critical moment, the
destroyer hove into view around a headland, giving the impression of a
mighty fleet backing up the puny invaders.
The commandant of the Italian naval garrison came down to the dock
himself to handle mooring lines for his captors.
The American Military Government man stepped gracefully ashore in the
first assault wave and set up a government on the spot. PT men rounded
up military prisoners, hauled down the Italian and hoisted the American
flag.
The Italian commodore slipped off in the excitement and tried to burn
his papers, but a sailor persuaded him to stop by pressing the muzzle of
a 45 automatic to his brow.
Sailors confiscated the documents and collected souvenirs, while the
commandant radioed the other islands in the group and the PT skippers
accepted their surrender by long distance. Only Stromboli resisted, so
the PTs chugged over to find out what was holding up the breaking out of
peace on that volcanic pimple.
They found an Italian chief petty officer and a 30-man detail, blowing
up their radio equipment. The American sailors indignantly halted the
sabotage—then destroyed the stuff themselves.
All the Italian navy saboteurs were put under armed guard for transport
to American prisons in Sicily, but a pregnant woman burst into sobs,
pleading that one of the men was her husband, a fisherman who had never
spent a night away from Stromboli in his life. Six other women joined
their wails to the chorus. The local priest assured Lieut. Dubose that
their stories were true, so Dubose granted the prisoners a reprieve.
The boats returned to Lipari, picked up fifty merry military prisoners
there, and departed for Palermo to the cheers of the entire town.
Messina fell that same day, and the Sicilian campaign was over.
Three weeks after the fall of Sicily, on the morning of September 9th,
Allied troops went ashore in force on the mainland around the
magnificent Bay of Salerno, just across a headland from Naples, second
port of Italy.
Invasion chores were not strenuous for the PTs—a little anti-E-boat
patrol in the bay and some light courier and taxi service for Army and
Navy brass. Dull duty, but the boats had to fly low and slow, because
they were almost out of aviation gasoline; their tanker had failed to
arrive on schedule.
By October 4th, however, the gasoline was in and the British had taken a
splendid harbor at La Maddalena, off northeast Sardinia, so Squadron
Fifteen sailed to Sardinia, from where it and the British boats could
prey on enemy traffic north of Naples. Almost immediately, part of
Squadron Fifteen moved still farther north to Bastia, on Corsica, which
the Free French had just taken back from the enemy. These two bases put
PTs on the flanks of coastal shipping lanes deep in the heart of enemy
waters. Genoa itself, the largest port in Italy, was now within reach of
the squadron’s torpedoes. Hunting was especially good in the Tuscan
Archipelago, a group of islets and rocks between the PT base and the
mainland.
Something had to be done about the PT torpedoes, however, for the
squadron was equipped with old Mark VIIIs, built in the 1920’s,
crotchety, unreliable, and worst of all, designed to run so far below
the surface that they couldn’t touch a shallow-draft F-lighter.
PT torpedomen tinkered with their fish to set them for a shallow run,
but the Mark VIII was frisky without eight feet of water to hold it
down. The shallow-set Mark VIIIs porpoised, alternately leaping from the
water and diving like sportive dolphins. PT skippers set them shallow
anyhow, and fired them with the idea that there was a fifty-fifty chance
the porpoising torpedo would be on the upswing when it got to the target
and might at least punch a hole in the side.
In Italy, as the contending armies fought slowly up the peninsula, the
German situation became somewhat like the Japanese situation at that
same moment in New Guinea. Powerful Allied air strikes disrupted supply
by rail from Genoa and Rome to the front, so the Germans had to rely on
waterborne transport to run down the coast at night.
To protect themselves from marauding Allied destroyers, the Germans
fenced off a channel close to the shore with a barrier of thousands of
underwater mines. At salient points they mounted heavy, radar-directed
cannon—some as big as nine and one-half inches in bore—to keep raiding
destroyers pushed away from the mine-protected channel.
The mine fields worked. Deep-draft destroyers did not dare chase Axis
vessels too close to the beach. The shallow-bottom PTs skimmed over the
top of the mine fields, however, so the Germans countered by arming many
types of small ships as anti-PT boats. They took over a type of Italian
warship called a torpedo boat, but actually a small destroyer, fast and
heavily gunned, eminently qualified for PT-elimination work.
Night patrols became lively, with PTs harrying Axis coastal shipping and
the Germans hunting them with E-boats and armed minesweepers, torpedo
boats and F-lighters.
The first brawl after the PTs set up base on Sardinia and Corsica came
on the night between October 22nd and 23rd. Three PTs, under the
indefatigable Lieut. Dubose, sneaked up on a cargo ship escorted by four
E-boats and minesweepers. The PTs fired a silent spread of four, and the
cargo ship disappeared in a violent blast. Lieut. (jg) T. L. Sinclair
was lining up his 212 to work a little more destruction, when a wobbly
out-of-control Mark VIII torpedo from another PT flashed by under his
stern.
“How many have you fired?” Lieut. Dubose asked Lieut. Sinclair by radio.
“None yet. I’m too damned busy dodging yours.”
Between Giglio and Elba, in the Tuscan Archipelago, on the night between
November 2nd and 3rd, two PTs, under Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien, made a
torpedo run on a subchaser and blew a satisfactorily fatal hole in the
hull with a solid hit. The stricken vessel went down, all right, but it
went down fighting, and one of the last incendiary bullets from the
dying ship bored through the gasoline tank of the 207, touching off an
explosion that blew off a deck hatch. Flames as high as the radar mast
shot through the open hatchway.
A radioman turned on a fire extinguisher, threw it into the flaming
compartment, and slammed down the hatch again. Miraculously, the fire
went out.
Early in November, Lieut. Commander Barnes, who had been doing some deep
thinking about the war against F-lighters, came up with a new tactical
idea.
His reasoning was: PTs are radar-equipped, hence better than British
boats at finding enemy vessels and maneuvering for attack; British
torpedo boats use better torpedoes than American Mark VIIIs, for they
are faster and carry heavier explosive charges; British gunboats have
heavier firepower than PTs, for they usually carry at least six-pounder
cannon and so can take on heavier opponents.
So Lieut. Commander Barnes and his British counterpart worked out a
scheme of joint patrolling, the Americans acting as a scout force and
finding targets by radar. The targets once found, the PTs were to guide
the British boats in a coordinated attack. From November 1943 until
April 1944, joint patrols had fourteen actions, in which skippers
claimed 15 F-lighters, two E-boats, a tug and an oil barge sunk; three
F-lighters, a destroyer, a trawler, and an E-boat damaged.
As winter came on, winds mounted and seas ran high, but the PTs
maintained their patrols. On the foul night of November 29th, Lieut.
(jg) Eugene A. Clifford took his 204 out with another PT for a patrol
near Genoa. Within two hours the wind built up to 35 knots, water
smashed over the bow in blinding sheets and drowned out the radar,
visibility dropped to less than a hundred yards. The PTs gave up the
patrol and turned back toward Bastia. In the stormy night the boats were
separated and the 204 plugged along alone, lookouts almost blinded by
the spray.
Out of the darkness four E-boats appeared within slingshot range,
laboring on an opposite course. A fifth E-boat “crossed the T,” but not
fast enough, for the PT and the E-boat struck each other a glancing blow
with their bows.
From a ten-yard range, the two small craft ripped into each other with
every gun that would bear. The other four E-boats joined the affray, and
for fifteen seconds the 204 was battered from broad-jumping distance by
the concentrated fire of five enemy boats.
The PT escaped in the darkness and the crew set about counting its
wounds. Bullets had torn up torpedo tubes, ventilators, ammunition
lockers, gun mounts. The deck and the superstructure were a ruin of
splinters. The engine room had a hundred new and undesired ventilation
apertures.
The skipper polled his crew to prepare the melancholy roll of dead and
wounded. Not a man had been nicked! The gas tank was intact. The engines
still purred along like electric clocks. The 204, outnumbered five to
one, had stood up to a fifteen-second eyeball-to-eyeball Donnybrook and
was nevertheless bringing all its sailors home in good health.
Two of the squadron’s PTs were detached in January 1944, and went south
again for duty in the ill-fated Anzio landing. Lieut. General Mark
Clark, commanding the Fifth American Army, wanted the boats for
water-taxi duty between the main American lines near Naples and the
Anzio beachhead, thirty miles south of Rome. Usually the taxi runs were
dull for sailors of the PT temperament, but not always.
On the morning of January 28th, General Clark and some of his staff
boarded Lieut. (jg) George Patterson’s 201 at the mouth of the Volturno
River, and in company with 216 set sail for Anzio, seventy-five miles to
the north.
Twenty-five miles south of Anzio, the minesweeper _Sway_ patrolled the
southern approaches to the beachhead. The captain had just been warned
that enemy airplanes were attacking Anzio, and he knew that the Germans
often coordinated air and E-boat strikes, so when he saw two small boats
ripping along at high speed and coming down the sun’s track, he
challenged them by blinker light.
Without reducing speed, Lieut. Patterson answered with a six-inch light,
too small a light for that distance in the daylight. Besides, the
signalmen on the _Sway_ were partly blinded by the glare of the sun,
just rising behind the 201.
_Sway’s_ guns opened fire. Lieut. Patterson fired an emergency
recognition flare, but it burst directly in the face of the sun, and the
_Sway’s_ bridge crew missed the second friendly signal from the torpedo
boat. The 201 even reduced speed as a further friendly gesture, but the
slower speed only made the boat a better target.
The next shot hit the boat in the charthouse, wounding Lieut. Patterson
and his executive officer, Ensign Paul B. Benson, and killing an officer
passenger and a sailor.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” suggested General Clark.
Ensign Benson, though wounded, took the wheel from the sagging skipper
and zigzagged the boat away at high speed back toward Naples, until he
was out of range of the _Sway’s_ batteries. A few miles down the coast
the crew of 201 transferred dead and wounded to a British minesweeper.
The _Sway_ still stood between the boat and Anzio, but General Clark
wanted to go to the Anzio beach, so the 201 crept back at a
peaceful-looking speed and spoke up from long distance with a bigger
light. The sun was higher, _Sway’s_ signalmen read the message, and the
skipper waved them by.
Lieut. Commander Barnes still restlessly experimented with armaments and
tactics, looking for a combination of weapons and methods that would
counter the dangerous weapons of the F-lighters. Rocket launchers were
being mounted on landing craft, and the small vessels were delivering
devastating ripples on enemy beaches. Their firepower was all out of
proportion to the size of the craft. A few PTs were playing around with
rocket launchers in the Pacific. It’s worth at least a try, thought
Lieut. Commander Barnes.
On the night of February 18th, 1944, Barnes went out in Lieut. (jg) Page
H. Tullock’s 211, with Lieut. Robert B. Reader’s 203 and Lieut. (jg)
Robert D. McLeod’s 202.
As Lieut. Commander Barnes tells the story:
“I saw a small radar target come out from behind the peninsula and head
over toward one of the small islands south of Giglio. Thinking it might
be an F-lighter, I ordered rocket racks loaded.
“He must have seen us, because whatever it was—probably an
E-boat—speeded up and ducked into the island before we could make
contact. That presented the first difficulty of a rocket installation.
There we were with the racks all loaded and the safety pins out. The
weather had picked up a little, and getting those pins back in the
rockets and the racks unloaded was going to be a touchy job in the pitch
dark on wet, tossing decks. I decided to leave them there for a while to
see what would happen.
“About midnight it started to kick up a good deal more. I had just about
decided that whatever it was we were looking for wasn’t going to show
up, and I was getting pretty worried about the rockets heaving out of
the racks and rolling around in a semiarmed condition on deck. I decided
to take one last turn around our patrol area and head for the barn.
“On our last southerly leg we picked up a target coming north at about
eight knots, and I closed right away, thinking to spend all our rockets
on whatever it was. As we got closer, it appeared to be two small
targets in column—a conclusion which I later used as an outstanding
example of ‘Don’t trust your interpretation of radar too blindly.’
“Just about the time we got to the 1,000-yard firing range the lookouts
started reporting vessels everywhere, all the way from our port back
around to our starboard bow. I had arranged the other two boats on
either side in line abreast and ordered them to stand by to fire on my
order over the radio. I gave the order and we all let go together.
“During the eleven seconds the rockets were in flight nobody fired a
shot, but a couple of seconds after the rockets landed what seemed like
a dozen enemy craft opened up. The formation was probably three or four
F-lighters escorted by two groups of E-boats. We had passed through the
two groups of escorts on our way to our firing position.
“Now it was time to turn away, and as my boat turned to the right we
found that the 202 was steaming right into the convoy. To avoid
collision we had to turn back and parallel the 202.
“Just at that time the engines on my boat started to labor and
unbelievably coughed and died—all three of them. We were smack dab in
the center of the whole outfit, with the enemy shooting from all
sides.... The volume was terrific.
“The 203 had lost all electric power, including the radar and compass
lights. She saw the two of us off our original course and came back to
join us, making a wide circle at high speed and laying smoke. It is
impossible to say exactly what happened; the melee was too terrific.