eventually got out by ducking around several vessels, passing as close
as 100 yards. The 203 likewise got out by ducking in and out of the
enemy formation, but we on the 211 just sat there helpless, watching the
whole show.
“This business lasted for at least four or five minutes and even the
shore batteries came into illuminate with starshells. Fortunately, there
was enough smoke in the air to keep the issue confused. That confusion
was the only thing that saved us.
“None of our boats was using guns at all, and it was obvious that the
enemy was frightfully confused with us weaving through the formation.
They were hard at work shooting each other up. I am sure they sank at
least one of the E-boats, because several minutes later they started
firing again off to the north, and there was a large gasoline fire in
the channel which burned for a long time.
“We got clear by the simple process of just sitting still and letting
the enemy pass around us and continue north.
“I finally got one engine engaged and went to our rendezvous which was
only a couple of miles away, but by the time I got there I could just
see the other two boats, on the radar screen, leaving. I tried to call
them back, but I couldn’t get a soul and waited around for some time
thinking they would come back. They didn’t, however, and went on back
individually, for which they got a little private hell from me later.
“I had no alternative but to go back myself. I expected to find the
other two boats pretty well shot up, as it was a miracle that we weren’t
lost ourselves. Strangely enough, I found that they were not damaged,
and except for the fantastic coincidence of all three of us being more
or less disabled simultaneously, we were OK.”
Apparently, the rockets did no damage, and further installation of
rocket racks on his PTs was firmly rejected by Lieut. Commander Barnes.
The American PT commander was not the only one concerned about the heavy
ordnance of the F-lighters. Captain J. F. Stevens of the British Navy’s
Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean said:
“While coastal forces are the most suitable forces to operate in mined
areas, the enemy has so strengthened his escorts and armed his shipping
that our coastal craft find themselves up against considerably heavier
metal. Furthermore, the enemy’s use of F-lighters of shallow draft does
not provide good torpedo targets. Everything that can be done to improve
our chances of successful attack is being done. Torpedoes will, if
possible, be fired at even shallower settings. Meanwhile, if they cannot
achieve destruction, coastal forces will harry the enemy and endeavour
to cause him the utmost possible alarm, damage, and casualties.”
Officers at La Maddalena gave longer thought to the problem and came up
with an idea called Operation Gun.
Lieut. Commander Barnes’ combined operation—the plan to use American
radar for scouting and conning heavier-armed British boats to
targets—had been a promising beginning, but even the MBG gunboats were
not a real match for the F-lighters.
Commander Robert A. Allan, British Commandant of the Sardinia base, cut
three landing craft out of the British amphibious fleet and armed them
with 4.7 naval guns and 40-mm. autocannon. The landing craft were big,
flat-bottomed tubs, wonderful platforms for the hard-hitting 4.7
inchers. To man the guns, he assigned crack gunners of the Royal Marine
Artillery.
Commander Allan organized an interesting task force around the three
landing-craft gunboats (designated LCGs) as his main battle line. They
were screened against E-boat attack by British torpedo boats, and
controlled by the radar-equipped American PT scouting force.
Commander Allan himself went out on the first sweep of his beefed-up
inshore patrol on the night of March 27th. He rode Lieut. (jg) Thaddeus
Grundy’s PT 218, so that he could use American radar to assign targets
to his gunboats and give them opening salvo ranges and bearings by
remote control.
When the gunboat battle line arrived off San Vicenzo, south of Leghorn,
a scouting group of two PTs, under Lieut. Dubose, went off on a fast
sweep, looking for targets. At 10 P.M. the PTs had found six F-lighters
going south, and Commander Allan brought his main battle force up
quickly to intercept them.
At 11 P.M. Lieut. Dubose sharply warned the main force that two
destroyers were escorting the lighters on the seaward side. “I am
preparing to attack the destroyers,” he added.
Commander Allan continues the story: “Until he carried out this attack,
it was not possible for us to engage the convoy, as our starshells being
fired inshore over the target [to illuminate the F-lighters for the
gunboats] would illuminate us for the escorting destroyers which were
even farther to seaward than we were. Fire was therefore withheld during
several anxious minutes.”
During this ten-minute wait for the PT scouts to take on the destroyers,
both the German forces, escort and convoy, came on Commander Allan’s
radar screen.
The PT scouts crept to within 400 yards before firing torpedoes, and ran
away behind heavy smoke. Nevertheless, the destroyers laid down such a
heavy fire that they hit 214, even in the smoke screen, wounding the
engineer of the watch, Joseph F. Grossman, MoMM2c, and damaging the
center engine. Grossman ignored his wounds and tended the stricken
engine until it was running well again, staying below with his engines
until the boat was out of danger.
The skippers of the scouting PTs heard the usual large explosions on one
of the destroyers and hoped they had scored but couldn’t be sure. Hit or
no hit, the destroyers reversed course and ran up the coast, abandoning
their convoy—an unthinkable act of cowardice for Allied escorts.
Sunk or run off, it was all the same to Commander Allan, who wanted only
a free hand with the F-lighters. When the destroyers were gone, he
passed radar ranges and bearings to the gunboats, and the Royal Marines
lit up the night over the convoy with a perfect spread of starshells.
Startled gunners on the F-lighters, unused to this kind of treatment in
waters where vessels with 4.7-inch guns had never dared venture before,
took the lights for plane flares and fired wildly into the clouds.
The Royal Marine gunners took their time for careful aim under the
bright glare of the slowly sinking magnesium lights. At the first salvo,
one of the F-lighters blew up with a tremendous explosion. Within ten
minutes three F-lighters were burning briskly. The gunboats spread out
and pinned the surviving boats against the beach while the Marine
artillerymen methodically pounded them to scrap.
“Of the six F-lighters destroyed,” says Commander Allan, “two, judging
by the impressive explosions, were carrying petrol, two ammunition, and
one a mixed cargo of both.”
With what sounds like a note of wistful disappointment, Commander Allan
added: “The sixth sank without exploding.”
The Operation Gun Task Force sortied again on the night of April 24th.
The coastal waters around the Tuscan Archipelago were swarming with
traffic that night. Early in the evening the gunboats blew two
F-lighters out of the water. Burning debris, cascading from the sky
after the explosions, set fires on the beach.
Shortly afterward the Marine sharpshooters picked off a tug and three
more F-lighters.
Radar picked up still another group and star-shell from the gunboats
showed that they were three flak lighters—medium-size craft powerfully
armed as antiaircraft escorts for daylight convoys. The Royal Marine
gunners smacked their first salvos into two of the flak lighters, which
burned in a fury of exploding ammunition.
The third lighter poured an astonishing volume of fire at the unarmored
gunboats, and Commander Allan, in PT 218, made a fast run at the enemy
to draw fire away from his gunboats. The Marines put a shell into the
flak lighter, and it ran off behind smoke, but the 209 led a charge
through the smoke, fired off its fish, caught the flak ship squarely
amidships, and blew it in two.
Lieut. Dubose’s scouting torpedo boats found a convoy escorted by a flak
lighter, but at that moment the gunboats were engaged in another fight,
so rather than break up the show of the main battle line, the PTs
attacked the enemy themselves. At least one of three fish connected, for
the flak lighter blew up in a jarring explosion.
Ashore, fifty miles away at Bastia, squadron mates sat outdoors to watch
the flash and glare of the all-night battle against the eastern sky.
Things were just threatening to get dull after midnight when shore radio
at Bastia called Commander Allan with a radar-contact report of an Axis
convoy between the gunboats and Corsica. The PTs got there first and
found two destroyers and an E-boat in column.
When the PTs were still 2,500 yards away—too far for a good torpedo shot
from a small boat—the destroyers fired a starshell. PT 202 was ready for
just that emergency. A sailor standing by with a captured five-star
recognition flare fired the correct answering lights and calmed the
enemy’s nerves.
The PTs moved in under the guise of friends and fired four fish at 1,700
yards. As they ran away they felt a violent underwater explosion, so
they claimed a possible hit.
On this one wild night of action Commander Allan’s strange little navy
had, without damage to itself, sunk five of the formidable F-lighters,
four heavily armed flak lighters, and a tug; scored a possible torpedo
hit on a destroyer; and pulled a dozen German prisoners from the water.
Hearts of the PT sailors were lifted with joy in May 1944, when the Mark
XIII torpedoes began to trickle into their bases and the heavy
old-fashioned torpedo tubes were replaced with light launching racks
that gave the boats badly needed extra bursts of speed. More boats had
been arriving, too, and eventually there were three PT squadrons working
out of Sardinia and Corsica.
As torpedomen installed the new fish and the new launching rigs, a PT
skipper rubbed his hands and said: “Wait till we get a good target now.
These Mark Thirteens are going to sweep these waters clean.”
Lieut. Eugene A. Clifford, in 204, led two other PTs in the first attack
with the new torpedoes on the night of May 18th in the Tuscan
Archipelago. The PTs had two flak lighters on their radarscopes.
Determined to try out the new torpedoes, they bored through the massive
barrage from the flak lighters’ antiaircraft guns, firing from 1,000
yards.
One of the highly vaunted Mark XIII’s made a typical Mark VIII run and
hit the 204 in the stern. Fortunately, when this Mark XIII goofed, it
really goofed, so it did not explode, but punched through the PT’s skin
and lodged its warhead inside. Its body dangled in the PT’s wake, like a
sucker-fish clamped to a shark’s tail.
Lewis H. Riggsby, TM2c, went into the lazaret to stuff towels into the
vanes of the impeller to keep the torpedo from arming and exploding.
The flak lighters chased the PTs and hit 204 with 20-mm fire, but the
boat escaped behind smoke, one of the famous Mark XIII torpedoes bobbing
and dangling from the stern.
Dominating the Tuscan Archipelago, within sight of the Italian mainland,
is the island of Elba, first home of Napoleon in exile. The island
attracted the Allies, because big guns on the point closest to the
mainland could reach the coastal road and also close off the inshore
passage to coastal craft. Once Elba was in Allied hands, southbound Axis
land traffic might be chased a few miles inland to less-developed
mountain roads, and sea traffic would certainly be squeezed into the
thirty miles of water between two Allied bases at Elba and Corsica.
One problem annoyed the planners of the Elba landings. What to do for
naval support? The waters around Elba were probably the most heavily
mined on the Italian Coast, and deep-draft ships could not be risked
there. But then, hadn’t PTs been scooting about the coast of Elba for
nine months?
On the night between June 16th and 17th thirty-seven PTs joined other
shallow-draft vessels of the Coastal Force to support landings of
Senegalese troops of the French Ninth Colonial Division, plus mixed
elements from other Allied forces.
Five PTs approached the northern coast at midnight, and about a half
mile from shore put 87 French raiders in the water in rubber rafts. The
five PTs joined another quintet at the farthest northeast point of Elba,
the point closest to the mainland.
At 2 A.M. three of the ten PTs went roaring along the northern coast,
smoke generators wide open and smoke pots dropping over the side in a
steady stream. When the shoreline was sealed off behind a 16,000-yard
curtain of smoke, four more PTs moved down the seaward side, with
loudspeakers blaring the sounds of a great fleet of landing craft. The
PTs launched occasional ripples of rockets at the beach to imitate a
preinvasion shore bombardment.
The three remaining PT skippers carried on a lively radio exchange,
straining their imaginations to invent a torrent of orders for an
imaginary invasion armada.
Searchlights from the beach swept the water, looking for a hole in the
screen. Land guns on the shore and in the mountains to the west poured
shells into the smoke screen, thus pinpointing themselves nicely for an
Allied air strike that slipped in just before dawn.
At the true landing beach on the south coast, Lieut. (jg) Eads
Poitevent, Jr., captain of the 211, was posted as radar picket to guide
landing craft ashore. He was alarmed when he saw a radar target creep
out of the harbor at Marina de Campo. He could not attack without
alerting the beach, and yet the oncoming enemy vessel had to be kept
away from the landing flotilla at any cost.
Poitevent boldly sailed close to the target—an E-boat—and made friendly
looking signals on a blinker light. He eased off in a direction away
from the convoy, luring the patrol into harmless waters. It took him
fifteen minutes to tease the E-boat off the scene and return to his
duties.
The E-boat would not stay away, however, and in its aimless wanderings
it blundered across the path of a PT with a deckload of British
commandos destined for a preinvasion landing. The commandos slipped over
the side, three-quarters of a mile farther out than they had planned,
and silently paddled their rubber boats successfully to the beach,
around the lackadaisical enemy patrol.
Another PT saw the E-boat also, and thinking it was a friendly, tried to
form up in column. Lieut. (jg) Harold J. Nugent, on 210, who was
following the bumbling drama on radar, broke radio silence just long
enough to cheep the smallest of warnings to his squadron mate. The
E-boat crew incredibly fumbled about those waters, teeming with Allied
boats, for most of the night and never lost their happy belief that they
were alone with the stars and the sea.
PT radarscopes now showed a more interesting target. Coming right up the
patrol line was something big, in fact, a formation of big ships, so PT
skippers prepared for a torpedo attack. They held back, however, for
full identification of the targets, because the ships could just
possibly be the invasion flotilla, slightly off course.
At 400 yards, Nugent challenged the approaching formation by blinker.
The nearest vessel answered correctly, and a few seconds later repeated
the correct code phrase for the period.
Lieut. Nugent continues:
“Being convinced that the ships were part of the invasion convoy which
had probably become lost, I called to my executive officer, Lieut.
(jg) Joel W. Bloom, to be ready to look up the ships’ correct position
in our copy of the invasion plan. I brought the 210 up to the
starboard side of the nearest ship, took off my helmet, put the
megaphone to my mouth and called over ‘What ship are you?’
“I shall never forget the answer.
“First there was a string of guttural words, followed by a broadside
from the ship’s two 88-mm. guns and five or six 20-mm. guns. The first
blast carried the megaphone away and tore the right side off a pair of
binoculars that I was wearing around my neck. It also tore through the
bridge of the boat, jamming the helm, knocking out the bridge engine
controls, and scoring a direct hit on the three engine emergency
cutout switches which stopped the engines.
“I immediately gave the order to open fire, and though we were dead in
the water and had no way of controlling the boat, she was in such a
position as to deliver a full broadside.
“After a few minutes of heavy fire, we had reduced the firepower of
the closest ship to one wildly wavering 20-mm. and one 88-mm. cannon
which continued to fire over our heads throughout the engagement.
“It was easy to identify the ships, as the scene was well lighted with
tracers. They were three ships traveling in a close V, an E-boat in
the center with an F-lighter on either flank.
“We were engaging the F-lighter on the starboard flank of the
formation. As the ships started to move toward our stern the injured
F-lighter screened us from the fire of the other two ships, so I gave
the order to cease fire.
“In the ensuing silence we clearly heard screams and cries from the
F-lighter.
“Two members of our engine-room crew, who were topside as gun loaders
during battle, were sent to the engine room to take over the chief
engineer’s duties, for I was sure he was dead or wounded. However, he
had been working on the engines throughout the battle and had already
found the trouble. We immediately got under way.
“We found out, however, that our rudder was jammed in a dead-ahead
position, but by great good fortune we were headed directly away from
the enemy, so I dropped a couple of smoke pots over the side and we
moved off. The enemy shifted its fire to the smoke pots, and we lay to
and started repairs.
“Much to our surprise, we found that none of us had even been wounded,
but the boat had absorbed a great deal of punishment. A burst of 20
mm. had zipped through the charthouse, torn the chart table to bits,
knocked out the lighting system, and de-tuned and scarred the radio
and radar. Another burst had gone through the engine room, damaged
control panels, torn the hull. All hits, however, were above the
waterline. Turrets, turret lockers, ventilators, and the deck were
holed.
“We called the 209 alongside, and sent off a radio report to the
flagship on the action and the direction in which the ships retired.”
Lieut. Nugent learned from the skipper of the 209 that his boat had been
hit only twice, but one of the shells had scored a direct hit on a
40-mm. gun loader and killed him instantly.
The tall, black warriors from French Senegal swept over the island in
two days of brisk fighting and Elba was Allied. The sea roads to the
south were blocked, and PT action shifted to the north, to the Ligurian
Sea, the Gulf of Genoa, and the lovely blue waters off the Côte d’Azur.
7.
The War in Europe:
English Channel
In England, as May 1944 turned into June, it didn’t take a genius to
know that something big was afoot. Military traffic choked the roads
leading to the Channel seacoast and the coastal villages. Troops were in
battle dress, officers were grim faced, all hands hustled about on the
thousands of mysterious errands that presage an offensive. Everybody
knew it was the Big Landing—the assault on Fortress Europe—but where?
Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Two, under Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley
(with only three boats this was the smallest squadron ever organized),
had helped to make the decision where to land. Assigned to the Office of
Strategic Services—America’s cloak-and-dagger outfit for all kinds of
secret business—Squadron Two had run a ferry service between England and
the enemy-occupied continent to deliver secret agents, saboteurs, spies,
resistance officers, and couriers for the governments in exile.
The sailors of Squadron Two carried out their orders, of course, but on
some of their errands they could mutter the old Navy adage: “I may have
to take it, but I don’t have to like it.”
For example, the night they were sent across the Channel to land on the
Normandy shore, there to scoop up several bucketfuls of sand. The crews
grumbled about taking their fragile craft under the guns of Hitler’s
mighty Western Wall just to fill the First Sea Lord’s sandbox.
They did not find out, until long after that night, why they were sent
to play with shovels and buckets on the Normandy beach. A scientist who
claimed to know the beaches well—beaches that had already been picked
for the Normandy landings—said that they were made of spongy peat
covered with a thin layer of sand, and that Allied trucks and tanks
would bog down helplessly on the soft strand, once they left the hard
decks of the landing craft.
The samples brought back by the PT sailors proved that the scientist
didn’t know sand from shinola about Normandy beach conditions, and the
operation went ahead as planned.
On June 6, 1944, the first waves of American and British troops landed
on Omaha and Utah beaches and began the long slugging match with Marshal
Erwin Rommel’s Nazis to twist Normandy out of German hands.
During the landings proper, PTs were used as anti-E-boat screens, but
made their biggest contribution by dousing flare floats dropped by
German aircraft to guide their night bombers.
At the beginning the assigned duties of the PTs were not heavy, but
there is always work for a fleet of small, handy armed boats in a big
amphibious operation.
On June 8th, for instance, as the destroyer _Glennon_ jockeyed about off
the Saint Marcouf Islands, north of Utah Beach, getting ready to bombard
a shore battery, she struck a mine astern. One minesweeper took the
damaged destroyer under tow, and another went ahead to sweep a clear
escape channel. Just before 9 A.M., the destroyer-escort _Rich_ closed
the ships, and the skipper asked if he could help. The captain of the
_Glennon_ answered: “Negative; clear area cautiously, live mines.”
Too late. A heavy explosion stopped the _Rich_ dead in the water. A
second explosion tore away fifty feet of the stern. A third mine
exploded forward. The destroyer-escort was a shambles, its keel broken
and folded in a V. The superstructure was festooned with a grisly
drapery of bodies and parts of bodies.
PTs rallied around the _Rich_ to take survivors from the deck or from
the mine-filled waters around the shattered vessel. Crewmen on the 508
saw a sailor bobbing by in the sea, and the bowman picked up a heaving
line to throw to his rescue. The man in the water calmly refused
assistance.
“Never mind the line,” he said, “I have no arms to catch it.”
The PT skipper, Lieut. Calvin R. Whorton, dove into the icy Channel
waters, but the armless sailor had gone to the bottom.
The _Rich_ followed him in fifteen minutes, with 79 of the crew.
Seventy-three survivors were wounded.
The _Glennon_ itself went aground, and two days later a German shore
battery put two salvos aboard. The destroyer rolled over and sank.
American soldiers ashore pushed rapidly northwestward along the coast of
the Cherbourg Peninsula, to capture the port of Cherbourg, sorely needed
as a terminal to replace the temporary harbor behind a jury-rig
breakwater of sunken ships at the landing beaches. The Nazi garrison at
Cherbourg put up a last-ditch stand, however, and on June 27th, forts on
the outer breakwater and a few coastal batteries still held out.
The Navy sent a curiously composed task force to reduce the forts. With
the destroyer _Shubrick_, the Navy sent six PTs to deal with the holdout
Germans. It is hard to understand what PTs were expected to accomplish
against heavy guns behind concrete casemates. Perhaps the reputation of
the PT commander had overpowered the judgment of the Navy brass, for it
was none other than Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley, hero of the
MacArthur rescue run and the New Guinea blockade, come to try his mettle
in European waters.
Leaving four PTs with the destroyer as a screen, Bulkeley, in 510, with
521 in company, cruised by the forts and sprayed them with machine guns
at 150-yard range. The stubborn Nazis poured out a stream of 88-mm.
shells and hit 521 hard enough to stop her dead for five minutes while a
motor machinist mate made frantic repairs. Lieut. Commander Bulkeley ran
rings around the stalled craft, laying a doughnut of smoke around her
for a screen.