the skipper recalled the PTs and departed the scene. The two
“bombardment” PTs followed suit, having accomplished little except to
exercise the crew. Fortunately no American sailors were hurt in this
most inappropriate use of PT capabilities.
Even after the Allies had taken the whole Normandy coast, the Germans
clung to the offshore Channel Islands of Jersey, Alderney, Guernsey, and
Sark. On Jersey, they maintained a base for small craft which made
annoying nightly sorties.
To seal off the Jersey base, the Navy ordered PT Squadrons Thirty and
Thirty-four to patrol nightly from Cherbourg to the Channel Islands in
the company of a destroyer escort for backstop firepower and for radar
scouting.
[Illustration: ENGLISH CHANNEL]
NETHERLANDS
BELGIUM
FRANCE
PT 509 SUNK BY MINESWEEPER
PTs 510 and 521 “BOMBARD” FORTS
RICH SUNK BY MINES
On the night between August 8th and 9th, the _Maloy_ and five PTs were
patrolling west of Jersey. The weather was good all night, but shortly
before dawn a thick fog settled over the sea. At 5:30 A.M. the radar
watch on the _Maloy_ picked up six German minesweepers.
Lieut. H. J. Sherertz, as the officer in tactical command of the PT
patrol, was riding _Maloy_ to use its superior radar. He dispatched
three PTs from the northern end of the scouting line to attack the
Germans. The skipper of PT 500, one of the north scout group, was Lieut.
Douglas Kennedy, now editor of _True_ magazine. Blinded by the
peasouper, the PTs fired torpedoes by radar, but missed.
Thirty minutes later, Lieut. Sherertz vectored the southern pair of
torpedo boats to the attack. The 508 and 509 approached the firing line
through the fog at almost 50 knots. Lieut. Harry M. Crist, a veteran of
many PT battles in Pacific waters and skipper of 509, risked one fish by
radar aim from 500 yards. Lieut. Whorton (the officer who had tried in
vain to save the armless sailor of the _Rich_) couldn’t fire, because
his radar conked out at the critical moment, so the PTs circled and
Lieut. Crist conned the 508 by radio. The boats fired but missed.
As they came about to circle again, Whorton reported that he heard heavy
firing break out between the other PT and a minesweeper, but he couldn’t
shoot because his buddies were between him and the Germans. Whorton lost
the 509 in the swirling fog, and when he came around again, everybody
had disappeared. He searched almost an hour and returned to the _Maloy_
on orders of Lieut. Sherertz, because his burned-out radar made his
search ineffective.
The 503 and the 507 took up the search for their missing comrades. At 8
A.M. they picked up a radar target in the St. Helier roadstead at
Jersey, and closed to 200 yards. The fog lifted briefly and unveiled a
minesweeper dead ahead and on a collision course. The 503 fired a
torpedo, and both boats raked the enemy’s decks, but suffered hard
punishment themselves from the enemy’s return fire. Before the boats
escaped from the enemy waters, two PT sailors were killed and four
wounded on 503, and one wounded on 507.
The next day a search plane found the body of a sailor from the 509, and
ten days later a bullet-riddled section of the hull was found floating
in the Channel. It was not until after the war that the fate of the 509
was learned from the sole survivor, a liberated prisoner of war named
John L. Page, RdM3c. Here is his story:
“After firing one torpedo by radar, the 509 circled and came in for a
gunnery run. I was in the charthouse on the radar. Lieut. (jg) John K.
Pavlis was at the wheel. I remember we were moving fast and got pretty
close before receiving return fire. When it came it was heavy and
accurate.
“One shell burst in the charthouse, knocking me out. When I came to, I
was trying to beat out flames with my hands. I was wounded and the boat
was on fire, but I pulled the detonator switch to destroy the radar and
then crawled on deck.
“The bow of our boat was hung up on the side of a 180-foot minesweeper.
From the deck of the enemy sweeper, Germans were pouring in small-arms
fire and grenades. Everything aft of the cockpit was burning. I
struggled forward through the bullets and bursting grenades to the bow—I
have no idea how long that journey took—and the Germans tossed me a
line. I had just enough strength to take it and they hauled me aboard.”
The Germans stretched Page out on the deck and attacked the PT’s carcass
with crowbars, frantically trying to pry themselves loose from its
clutches. Just as the PT broke loose, it exploded with a tremendous
roar.
“I couldn’t see it,” says Page, “but I felt the heat and the blast.”
Free of the PT, the minesweeper ran for the shelter of home base at St.
Helier. The Germans carried Page back to the crew’s quarters to tend his
wounds. He had a broken right arm and leg, thirty-seven bullet and
shrapnel holes in his body, and a large-caliber slug in his lungs. While
they were working on him they were carrying in their own dead and
wounded.
“I managed to count the dead. There were fifteen of them and a good
number of wounded. It’s difficult to estimate how many, because they
kept milling around. I guess I conked out for a while. The first thing I
remember is a first-aid man putting a pack on my back and arm. Then I
could hear the noise of the ship docking.
“After they removed their dead and wounded, they took me ashore at St.
Helier. They laid me out on the dock for quite a while, and a couple of
civilians—I found out later they were Gestapo agents—tried to question
me, but they saw I was badly shot up, so they didn’t try to question me
further.”
Page was taken to a former English hospital at St. Helier, where
skillful German surgeons performed many operations—he couldn’t remember
how many—to remove dozens of bullets and fragments from every part of
his body. The final operation was on December 27, 1944.
While he was in the hospital, the bodies of three of his shipmates
washed ashore on Jersey. The British Red Cross took over the bodies and
buried them with military honors.
Page was regularly annoyed by Gestapo men, but he said: “I found that
being very correct and stressing the fact that my government didn’t
permit me to answer was very effective. They tried a few times and
finally let me alone.”
Page was liberated on May 8, 1945.
The Channel Island battles were vicious and inconclusive, in a sense,
but the German gadflies stayed more and more in port—became more and
more timid when they did patrol. Nightly sweeps of the PT-destroyer
escort teams bottled up the German boats and cleared the Channel waters
for the heavy traffic serving the voracious appetite of the armies on
the continent.
8.
The War in Europe:
Azure Coast
After Allied troops had chopped out a good firm foothold on the
northwestern coast of France, the Allied Command found that the Channel
ports were not enough to handle the immense reserve of men and materials
waiting in America to be thrown into the European battle. Another port
was needed, preferably one on the German flank in order to give the
enemy another problem to fret about.
Marseilles was the choice, with the naval base at Toulon to be taken in
the same operation. The Allies set H-hour for 8 A.M. on August 15, 1944,
and assembled their Mediterranean naval power in Italian ports. Among
the destroyers assigned to the shore fire-support flotilla were ships of
the Free Polish and Free Greek fleets.
Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, when he heard about these new comrades
in arms, paraded his PTs past the Greek destroyer in daylight so that
the Hellenic sailors could see what an American torpedo boat looked
like. With a strong sense of history, Barnes remembered the Battle of
Salamis, and he didn’t want the Greeks to mistake his boats for
Persians.
As it turned out, the first duty for the PTs was to be mistaken for what
they were not.
With two British gunboats, a fighter director ship and three slow,
heavily armed motor launches, PTs of Squadron Twenty-Two sailed from
Corsica on August 14th, bound for the coast of France. This task unit
was under the command of Lieut. Commander Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the
American movie star.
Three of the PTs were detached to sail for the northwest as an
anti-E-boat patrol. Four others took 70 French commandos northwest to
land at the Pointe des Deux Frères, in the beautiful Gulf of Napoule
that washes the beach at Cannes. (The French commandos ran into a mine
field ashore, were strafed by friendly planes, and captured by the
Germans.)
The rest of the task unit sailed straight north, as though headed for
Genoa, trailing balloons as radar targets, with the hope that the enemy
would think a big invasion force was bound for the Italian seaport.
At Genoa, the phony flotilla turned west for the waters off Cannes and
Nice, still trailing its radar target balloons. The launches and PTs
maneuvered off Antibes, making as much of an uproar as possible, while
the British gunboats bombarded the beach.
[Illustration: AZURE COAST]
SARDINIA
MADDALENA BASE
PT HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS
CORSICA
BASTIA BASE
TUSCAN ARCHIPELAGO
LANDING BEACHES
ITALY
PT DIVRSION SMOKE SCREEN
OPERATION GUN
PT 206 VS. HUMAN TORPEDOS
FRANCE
PT FAKE LANDING
PTs 202 and 208 SUNK BY MINES
PTs FAKE A LANDING
PT 555 SUNK HERE
BOOBY-TRAPPED DUMMY PARATROOPERS DROPPED HERE
SPAIN
The minuscule fleet was delighted to hear from Radio Berlin that a
massive Allied landing near Cannes had been pushed into the sea with
heavy losses, and that Antibes and Nice had been bombarded by four large
battleships.
Captain Henry C. Johnson, commanding the diversion groups, said: “The
decoy screen proved effective as in addition to several enemy salvos
falling short of or bursting in the air over the gunboats, the PTs and
the launches were subjected to a considerable degree of large-caliber
fire which passed well over them.”
Happy with the confusion they had sown, the eastern diversion group
sailed west to join a western task unit with a similar mission.
Off the Baie de la Ciotat, between Marseilles and the port of Toulon,
the eastern group joined company with four more launches, 11 crash
boats, and eight PTs of Squadron Twenty-Nine, under the control of the
destroyer _Endicott_. Skipper of the destroyer was a sailor who might be
expected to know a bit about a PT’s capabilities. His name was Lieut.
Commander John Bulkeley.
The armed motor launches and the destroyer bombarded the beach behind a
screen of PTs. The crash boats trailed balloons, laid smoke screens,
fired ripples of rockets at the beach, laid delayed-action bombs in
shallow water to imitate frogmen at work, and broadcast noises of many
landing craft. The crash boats hoped to give the impression of a convoy
ten miles long and eight miles wide.
At 4 A.M. troop-carrier planes flew over the town of La Ciotat and
dropped 300 booby-trapped dummy paratroopers.
Radio Berlin broadcast an alarm. “The Allies are landing forces west of
Toulon and east of Cannes. Thousands of enemy paratroops are being
dropped in areas northwest of Toulon.”
With great bitterness, five hours later, Radio Berlin broadcast: “These
paratroops were found later to be only dummies which had booby traps
attached and which subsequently killed scores of innocent civilians.
This deception could only have been conceived in the sinister
Anglo-Saxon mind.”
This complaint came from the nation that was the world’s acknowledged
master at the nasty and unmanly art of booby-trappery.
Radio Berlin continued: “Large assault forces have attempted to breach
defenses west of Toulon, but as the first waves have been wiped out by
mine fields, the rest lost heart and withdrew and returned to an area in
the east.”
For two more nights the deception forces shelled the beach and made
noises like a mighty host.
For two days the Germans announced that the main Allied intention was to
take Toulon and Marseilles by direct assault, and talked of driving off
an invasion force including five battleships.
Before sailing away after the last phony demonstration, Lieut. Commander
Bulkeley broadcast a message, saying that the landings at La Ciotat
would be postponed for a few days “because of the furious resistance on
the beach,” but that they would definitely come. The Germans reinforced
the La Ciotat area with mobile artillery and infantry units, sorely
needed elsewhere.
Radio Berlin, after the final demonstration, said: “An additional and
futile attempt of the American forces to land large bodies of troops
west of Toulon has failed miserably.”
Lord Haw Haw, the English traitor who broadcast for the Axis, said: “The
assault convoy was twelve miles long, but for the second time in three
nights the Allies have learned of the determined resistance of the
_Wehrmacht_, to their cost.”
The Axis broadcasts had the unexpected result of terrifying crews of
German warships ordered out to attack the “invasion fleet.” Prisoners of
war later reported that some of the ships would not sail because they
had lost heart after listening to their own broadcast alarms.
Some ships did venture out, however, for one of the crash boats,
retiring from the demonstration area after the final show, ran into two
enemy corvettes—heavily armed escort vessels. The crash boat called
loudly for help, and two antique British river gunboats, the _Aphis_ and
the _Scarab_, came running. The British and German ships battled for
twenty minutes. Lieut. Commander Bulkeley’s _Endicott_, already almost
out of sight on the southern horizon, steamed back at flank speed and
opened fire at seven and one-half-mile range. Fire was slow, however,
for the _Endicott_, trying to imitate a large bombardment force earlier
that night, had shot its five-inchers so fast that all but one breech
block was fused from the heat. The one remaining gun shifted fire from
one corvette to the other.
Two PTs, screening the destroyer, closed the corvettes to 300 yards and
fired two fish, but missed. The _Endicott_ also fired torpedoes, and the
corvettes turned bow on to comb their tracks, thus masking their own
broadside. The _Endicott_ closed to 1,500 yards and raked the corvette
decks with 20-mm. and 40-mm. autocannon, driving gunners from their
stations.
The British gunboats and the destroyer pounded the now silent corvettes
until they sank. The ships and PT boats picked up 211 prisoners from the
_Nimet Allah_, a converted Egyptian yacht, and the _Capriolo_, a smartly
rigged light warship taken from the Italian navy.
In southern waters the PTs had been immune to mines, but off the
Mediterranean shores of France they suffered terribly from a new type of
underwater menace.
Following standard PT practice of moving the base as close to the
fighting front as possible, Lieut. Commander Barnes set up a boat pool
in the Baie de Briande, near Saint Tropez, almost as soon as the troops
went ashore. The boats were close to the fighting and ready for action,
but their gas tanker didn’t show up. By the evening of August 16th the
boats were low on fuel, so the skippers puttered about the coast,
running down rumors of gas tankers anchored here and there.
Lieut. (jg) Wesley Gallagher in 202, and Lieut. Robert Dearth in 218,
set sail together to look for a tanker reported to be in the Gulf of
Fréjus, fifteen miles to the northeast, the other side of Saint Tropez.
At 11 P.M., as the boats were rounding the point of St. Aygulf to enter
the harbor at Fréjus, the bow lookout on 202 sang out that he saw a
boxlike object floating 150 yards dead ahead. The skipper turned out to
sea to avoid it.
During the turn a mine tore the stern off the boat, blew stunned sailors
into the water, and threw a column of water, smoke, and splinters
hundreds of feet into the air. Four sailors jumped overboard to rescue
their shipmates.
Lieut. Dearth brought the 218 over to pick up the swimming sailors and
tried to approach the floating section of the 202 to take off survivors,
but the stern of his boat was blown off in the stunning explosion of
another mine.
The two skippers abandoned the shattered hulks of their boats. In the
life rafts they held a muster. One man was missing and six men were
wounded. Amazingly, the engineers of the watch on both boats survived,
though they had been stationed right over blasts so powerful that heavy
storage batteries had whizzed by them to land on the forecastle.
The sailors paddled shoreward. German planes were raiding the beach at
that moment, and shrapnel from the antiaircraft barrage rained down on
the rafts.
Shortly after midnight, the sailors landed on a rocky point chosen by
the skippers because it looked least likely to be land mined. Lieut.
Gallagher picked his way through a barbed-wire barricade along the beach
and found a deserted and partly destroyed fisherman’s cottage where the
sailors lay low for the rest of the night, not knowing whether they had
landed in friendly or enemy territory.
Soon after dawn the skippers made a tentative venture into the open.
Half a mile from the cottage they ran into soldiers—American
soldiers—who took over the wounded men and guided the other sailors to a
Navy beachmaster who gave them a boat ride back to their base.
A week later, on August 24th, task-force commander Rear Admiral L. A.
Davidson heard that the Port-de-Bouc in the Gulf of Fos, west of
Marseilles and at the mouth of the Rhone Delta, had been captured by the
French Underground. He ordered minesweepers to clear the gulf, and he
sent Capitaine de Frégate M. J. B. Bataille, French naval liaison
officer on his staff, to scout the shore around the harbor. Capt.
Bataille rode to the gulf in Lieut. Bayard Walker’s ill-fated PT 555.
The boat passed the minesweepers and came close aboard an American
destroyer whose skipper notified Lieut. Walker that coastal shore
batteries were still shooting near the mouth of the Gulf of Fos.
Lieut. Bayard reported: “It was decided that we could enter the Gulf of
Fos, despite fire from enemy coastal batteries, since we presented such
a small target.”
So—as he put it—they “entered the bay cautiously.”
One wonders how you go about entering a mine-filled bay, by an enemy
shore battery, “cautiously.”
The crew saw the French flag flying in a dozen places on the beach, and
landed at Port-de-Bouc where they were welcomed by a cheering crowd,
waving little French flags. Capt. Bataille met a fellow officer, French
Navy Lieut. Granry, who had parachuted into the area several weeks
before, in civilian clothes, and had organized a resistance cell to
prevent demolition of the port when the Germans retreated. After a
pleasant half-hour ashore, gathering information (Lieut. Walker spoke
excellent French), the party re-embarked, set a two-man watch on the
bow, and headed for sea at 29 knots.
“A few minutes later,” said Lieut. Walker, “a terrific blast exploded
beneath our stern, carrying away the 40-mm. gun and the gun crew and
almost everything else up to the forward bulkhead of the engine room....
The four torpedoes were immediately jettisoned and we anchored with two
anchors from separate lines.”
Volunteers manned the life rafts to pick up the men in the water. They
returned with a body, one uninjured sailor, and a man with a broken leg.
Four other sailors were never found.
One of the rafts could not return to the boat because of strong
currents, so Lieut. Stanley Livingston, a powerful swimmer, swam the 300
yards, towing the bitter end of a line patched together of all available
manila, electric cable, halyards, and odds and ends, buoyed at intervals
with life jackets. Sailors on the boat then pulled the raft alongside.
A French pilot boat and a fisherman in an open boat came out from the
beach to help. Overhead, fighter planes, attracted by the explosion,
took in the situation and set up an impromptu umbrella.
The sailor with the broken leg needed help. Lieut. Walker put him and
the dead sailor’s body into the fisherman’s boat with the pharmacist’s
mate, and climbed in himself, as interpreter. They shoved off for
Port-de-Bouc.
One hundred yards from the PT boat, Walker saw in the water a green line
with green floats spaced every foot. He yelled a warning at the
fisherman, but too late. A violent explosion lifted the boat in the air
and threw the four men into the water.
Lieut. Walker came up under the boat and had to fight himself free of
the sinking craft. He took stock. The dead sailor had disappeared
forever. The pharmacist’s mate, about sixty feet away, was shouting that
he couldn’t swim, so Walker went to the rescue. The injured man was
hauled up to the bottom of the overturned boat where, in Walker’s words,
“He appeared to be comfortable.”
The ordinary non-PT man might consider a perch on the bottom of an
overturned and sinking fishing boat as being somewhat short of
“comfortable” for a man with an unset broken leg.
“The situation seemed so good,” continued Lieut. Walker in the same
happy vein, “that I decided not to take off my pistol and belt.... The
French pilot boat came to our rescue, and the injured man was put aboard
without further harm. The fishermen’s boat upended and sank as the last
man let go.”
Walker confessed to a tiny twinge of disappointment at this point in his
narrative. A scouting float plane from the cruiser _Philadelphia_ had
landed near the shattered boat, and the PT officers had hoped to get off
their message to the task-force commander, but the pilot took fright
when the second mine went off under the fishing boat, and he left for
home.
“We had two narrow escapes getting back to the PT boat,” Lieut. Walker
said. “I requested the pilot, Ensign Moneglia of the French Navy, to go
between two sets of lines I could see, rather than back down and turn
around as the majority seemed to wish. It proved to be the safe way
between two mines.”
The crew jettisoned all topside weights except one twin 50-caliber
mount, so that they would have some protection against air attack.
Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston set out in a rubber boat for the
town of Carro, at the eastern entrance of the Gulf of Fos, about five
miles away. They were frantic to complete their mission by sending a
message to the task-force commander, and they hoped to find an Army
message center to relay their report that Port-de-Bouc was in French
hands.
Two teams of bucket brigades bailed out the leaking hulk, but the water
gained on them steadily. At midnight the sailors jettisoned the radar
and brought up confidential publications in a lead-weighted sack, ready
to be heaved over if they had to abandon the boat. The off-duty bucket
brigade had to share a few blankets, because the night was chilly.
About an hour after sunrise Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston
returned from Carro in a fishing boat, followed by another. That brought
the little flotilla to two pilot boats, two fishing boats, and a
battered piece of a PT. The two message-bearers had been unable to find
an Army radio.
Two of the boats passed lines to the PT to tow it ashore, and the other
two went ahead with Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston in the bows,
as lookouts for moored mines. They found so many on the road to
Port-de-Bouc that the flotilla turned and headed for Carro, on Cape
Couronne, instead.
At the Carro dock, the PT settled to the bottom. An abandoned house
beside the dock was turned over to the homeless sailors, and the French
Underground trotted up five Italian prisoners to do the dirty work of
making the place presentable.
Best news in Carro was that the cruiser _Philadelphia_ had just sent an
officer ashore with a radio, to send out some news of possible targets
along the shore. Lieut. Walker tracked down his colleague, and after
bloody travail, finally sent off his message to the task-force commander
that Port-de-Bouc was indeed in friendly hands, but that the harbor
waters were still acting in a very unfriendly manner indeed.
Walker threw in a little bonus of the fact that 3,000 enemy troops were
only a few kilometers away and that the French Underground fighters were
afraid they might escape via Martigues. He relayed the resistance
officer’s plea for an air strike to break up the escape attempt long
enough for American troops to arrive and sweep up the Germans.
Lieut. Walker adds a touching finale to his report: