slightly more than a mile from Carro, to say a Mass on Sunday morning
for the five men we had lost. A High Mass was celebrated in the church,
crowded to the doors, at 10:30.
“The pastor and local people had gone to considerable trouble to
decorate the church with French and American flags and flowers. The
choir sang, despite the broken organ, and the _curé_ gave a moving
sermon in French. Four FFI [Underground] men, gotten up in a uniform of
French helmets, blue shirts, and white trousers, stood as a guard of
honor before symbolical coffins draped with American flags.
“After Mass our men fell in ranks behind a platoon of FFI, and followed
by the whole town, we marched to the World War I monument. There a
little ceremony was held and a wreath was placed in honor of the five
American sailors.
“We were told that a collection was in the process of being taken up
amongst the local people, in order to have a plaque made for the
monument planned for their own dead in this war. The plaque will bear
the names of the five Americans who gave their lives here for the
liberation of France.”
The people of La Couronne did not forget. In that tiny village, on the
lonely coast at the mouth of the Rhone River, is a monument with a
plaque reading: To Our Allies, Ralph W. Bangert, Thomas F. Devaney, John
J. Dunleavy, Harold R. Guest, Victor Sippin.
One of the most brilliant Anglo-American teams was Lieut. R. A. Nagle’s
559 and the British MTB 423, both under command of the dashing British
Lieut. A. C. Blomfield.
During the night of August 24th, the marauding pair entered the harbor
of Genoa to raise a bit of general hell. Off Pegli, about five miles
from Genoa, they sighted what they thought was a destroyer, and put a
torpedo into it. The vessel was only a harbor-defense craft, but a fair
exchange for the one torpedo it cost.
Two nights later the pair jumped a convoy of three armed barges, and
sank two of them. For the next nine nights they tangled almost hourly
with F-lighters (four sunk), armed barges (eight sunk), and even a
full-grown corvette, the UJ 2216, formerly the French _l’Incomprise_,
which they riddled and sent to the bottom as the top prize of their
11-day spree.
Hunting got progressively meager as winter came on. PTs prowled farther
afield and closer inshore in a ferocious search for targets. On November
17th, Lieut. B. W. Creelman’s PT 311 pressed the search too far, hit a
mine, and sank. Killed were the skipper and his executive officer and
eight of the 13-man crew.
The last big fight of the American PTs with enemy surface craft came two
nights later when Lieut. (jg) Charles H. Murphy’s 308 and two British
torpedo boats sank a thousand-ton German corvette, the UJ 2207, formerly
the French _Cap Nord_.
The naval war was nearing its end for the Germans, and they turned to
strange devices—human torpedoes, remote-control explosive boats, and
semisuicide explosive boats. The remote-control craft didn’t work any
better for the Germans than they had for Americans in the Normandy
landings. So it was, also, with the human torpedo.
Lieut. Edwin Dubose, on PT 206, on September 10th, spotted a human
torpedo in the waters off the French-Italian frontier. The PT sank the
torpedo and pulled the pilot from the water. With great insouciance, the
pilot chatted with his rescuers and treacherously told them where to
find and kill a comrade piloting another torpedo.
In those waters that same day, planes, PTs and bigger ships sank ten
human torpedoes.
As naval resistance lessened, the Western Naval Task Force, under
American Rear Admiral H. K. Hewitt, was broken up and redistributed.
Many PTs were assigned to the Flank Force, Mediterranean. Since most of
the ships in the force were French, the PTs came under the command of
French Contre-Amiral Jaujard.
Because Mark XIIIs were arriving in good numbers—the torpedo targets
were getting scarce—the French admiral authorized the PTs in his command
to fire their old and unlamented Mark VIIIs into enemy harbors.
On the night of March 21st, PTs 310 and 312 fired four Mark VIIIs, from
two miles, into the harbor of Savona, Italy. Three exploded on the
beach.
The same boats, on April 4th, fired four at the resort town of San Remo.
Two exploded, one of them with such a crash that it jarred the boats far
out to sea.
On April 11th, the 313 and the 305 fired four into Vado, touching off
one large explosion and four smaller ones.
The last three Mark VIIIs were fired from the 302 and the 305 on April
19th. Lieut. Commander R. J. Dressling, the squadron leader, launched
them into Imperia where a single boom was heard.
“During these torpedoings of the harbors,” said Dressling, “Italian
partisans were rising against the Germans, and there is little doubt
that the explosions of our torpedoes were taken by the enemy as sabotage
attempts by the partisans. At no time were we fired on, despite the fact
that we were well inside the range of enemy shore batteries.”
Lieut. Commander Dressling thought that “to a small extent the actions
assisted the partisans in taking over the Italian ports on April 27th.”
The night after the Italian ports all fell to the Italian Underground,
Admiral Jaujard, with a fine Gallic sense of the ceremonial, led his
entire Flank Force, including PT Squadron Twenty-two, in a stately sweep
of the Riviera coast. It was partly the last combat patrol and partly a
victory parade.
Ten days later, on May 8th, the Germans surrendered and the war was
over—the war was over in Europe, that is, for on the other side of the
world the PTs were involved in the bitterest fighting yet.
PTs had operated in the Mediterranean for two years. The three squadrons
lost four boats, five officers and 19 men killed in action, seven
officers and 28 men wounded in action. They fired 354 torpedoes and
claimed 38 vessels sunk, totaling 23,700 tons, and 49 damaged, totaling
22,600 tons. In joint patrols with the British they claimed 15 vessels
sunk and 17 damaged.
9.
I Shall Return:
Round Trip by PT
With the whole of New Guinea and the island base at Morotai in Allied
hands, the Philippine Islands were within reach of Allied fighter planes
and it was time for General MacArthur to make good his promise.
There was a lot of mopping up to do around Morotai, however, because the
taking of the island had been a typical MacArthur leapfrog job. Morotai
was a small and lightly defended island, but twelve miles away was the
big island of Halmahera, defended by 40,000 Japanese. MacArthur had
jumped over it to continue his successful New Guinea policy of seizing
bases between the Japanese and their home, then isolating the by-passed
garrison with a naval blockade.
The best way to bottle up the Halmahera garrison was to call on the PT
veterans of the New Guinea blockade, so the day after the landings on
Morotai, September 16, 1944, the tenders _Oyster Bay_ and _Mobjack_,
with the boats of Squadrons Ten, Twelve, Eighteen, and Thirty-three,
dropped anchor in Morotai roadstead. The first adventure of the Morotai
PTs was the rescue, on the very day of their arrival, of a wounded Navy
fighter pilot. (A full account of this is given at the end of [Chapter
5].)
PT sailors sometimes wondered what the Stone Age people of Halmahera,
people who fought with barbed ironwood spears, made of the strange war
being fought in their waters by the white and yellow intruders from the
twentieth century. Lieut. (jg) Roger M. Jones, skipper of PT 163, tells
about an encounter that has probably entered the mythology of these
pagan people.
In October 1944, Lieut. Jones’s boat and the 171 left Morotai for a
routine patrol to keep the bypassed Japanese of Halmahera from crossing
to Morotai. In the six weeks since the landings, PTs had already sunk
fifty Japanese barges, schooners, and luggers carrying troops and
supplies.
During the New Guinea campaign, as the use of torpedoes shriveled for
lack of suitable targets, the 163 had mounted an awesome battery of ten
50-caliber machine guns in twin mounts, two 20-mm., a 37-mm., a 40-mm.
autocannon, and a 60-mm. mortar.
The night’s problem was simple. Intelligence had told the PT skippers
that there would be no friendlies in the patrol area on the west coast
of Halmahera—no friendlies at all. “Shoot anything that moves.”
[Illustration: PHILIPPINE ISLANDS]
LUZON
MACARTHUR MAKES ROUND TRIP TO CORREGIDOR BY PT
MINDORO
PT 233 SINKS DESTROYER KIYOSHIMO
LANDING BEACHES
KAMIKAZES STRIKE AT PTs
BRESTES HIT
SAMAR
TRACK OF CENTRAL STRIKING FORCE
BATTLE OFF SAMAR WITH CENTRAL STRIKING FORCE
PTs SINK SC 53, PC 105 and UZUKI
LEYTE
BATTLE OF SURIGAO STRAITS
PT 493 LOST HERE
MINDANAO
TRACK OF SOUTHERN STRIKING FORCE
1st PT SIGHTING OF JAPANESE FLEET
To make a coordinated attack, the two PTs hardly needed to communicate.
They had gone through the motions so many times that they performed the
maneuver like a reflex. The drill was to close a radar target slowly and
silently to 200 yards, fire a mortar flare, and open fire with every gun
that would bear instantly as the flare burst to smother the surprised
Japanese before they could answer.
That split-second timing, the business of opening fire simultaneously
with the bursting of the star-shell, was drilled into gunners repeatedly
by dummy attacks on floating logs.
Twenty-five miles short of the patrol area, the radar man found a target
five miles off the beach. The two skippers were jubilant; here was a
target made to order—too far out to sea to run for the beach, out of the
range of protecting shore batteries, in water deep enough for a
high-speed strafing run by the PTs, with no chance of hitting a rock.
The boats went to general quarters and closed the target.
Lieut. Jones took the unnecessary precaution of warning his gunners.
“Look alive, now—open fire the _instant_ the flare goes off.”
At 200 yards the skippers could make out a dim shape, but details of the
target were hidden in the darkness. Lieut. Jones gave a last warning to
gunners to be quick on the trigger, and fired his flare. Twenty-four gun
barrels swung to bear on target.
The flare burst.
Lieut. Jones continues:
“There was the perfect target, a Jap barge loaded with troops—you could
see their heads sticking up over the gunwale.
“_Open fire! Open fire!_ I screamed in my mind, but no words came out of
my mouth.
“What was the matter? Why weren’t the guns firing? Thousands of tracers
should be pouring into that enemy craft, but no gun on either PT fired.
The flare died and I ordered another.
“Why was I doing this? Why wasn’t the barge sinking now, holed by
hundreds of shells? Why hadn’t the gunners opened fire as ordered when
the flare went off? And what was the matter on the Jap barge? Why
weren’t they tearing us up with their guns, for the flare lit us up as
brightly as it illuminated them?
“We closed to 75 yards, still frozen in that strange paralysis under the
glare of the dying starshell.
“My helmsman spoke up. ‘They’re not Japs, sir, they’re natives.’
“I flipped on the searchlight, and our two boats circled the canoe,
searchlights blazing, guns trained. That eerie scene will remain in my
memory as long as I live. Thirty natives—some of them boys—sat rigidly
still, staring forward unblinkingly. I don’t know if it was native
discipline or sheer terror that held them. Even the children didn’t
blink an eye or twitch a finger.
“We shouted to them that we were Americans, but we gave up trying to get
through to them, for they refused to answer or even to turn their heads
and look at us. We left them rigidly motionless and staring straight
ahead at nothing.
“Back at the base we discussed our strange paralysis. Everybody agreed
he had first thought it was a Jap barge when the flare burst, and nobody
could give a reason for not shooting instantly. If even one gunner had
fired, the whole weight of our broadside would have come down on that
canoe.
“We’ll never understand it, but we are all grateful to Whoever or
Whatever it was that held our hands that night and spared those poor
natives. And what woolly stories those Halmaherans must be telling their
children about that night. I’ll bet by now we are part of the sacred
tribal legends of the whole Moluccan Archipelago.”
Almost from the beginning of the return trip to the Philippines two
years before, General MacArthur had had his eye on Mindanao, the
southernmost large island of the group and hence the closest to Morotai.
It was on Mindanao that he planned to land first, and from there he
could advance up the island chain.
Before daring to venture into the Philippines, however, the Allied High
Command wanted to make more landings—one at Yap Island, northeast of
Palau (where Marines had landed the same day as the Morotai invasion),
and another at Talaud Island, another steppingstone, about halfway
between Morotai and Mindanao.
While the Palau and Morotai landings were going on—indeed a few days
before they started, but too late to stop them—Admiral Halsey made a
bold proposal to cancel all intermediate landings and take the biggest
jump of all, completely over Talaud, over Yap, even over Mindanao
itself, all the way to Leyte in the Central Philippines.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of all the Allies, then at a conference in
Quebec, swiftly accepted the recommendation and set October 20th as
target date, chopping two months (and nobody will ever know how many
casualties) off the life of the Pacific war.
In a wild flurry of activity, planners concentrated the preparations of
three months into a month, diverted the forces for the other landings
into Leyte force, and made bold carrier strikes at Formosa, in
preparation for the landings in the Central Philippines.
An example of the incurable tendency of high-level Japanese officers to
believe in their own foolish propaganda is the fact that on the very eve
of the Leyte landings the Japanese defenders of the Philippines relaxed
their guard, because they thought the Third Fleet had been wiped out.
American carriers had been roving the waters off Formosa during the week
before the landings, and carrier planes had chewed up enemy airpower.
Japanese Intelligence officers, however, believed the fantasies told
them by their pilots returning from attacks on the American fleet. Radio
Tokyo solemnly announced that the Third Fleet had been annihilated with
the loss of 11 carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one
destroyer.
The Japanese public went wild with enthusiasm. The Emperor made a
special announcement of felicitation to his people, and victory
celebrations were held at army and navy headquarters in the Philippines.
The Third Fleet had actually suffered two cruisers damaged.
The first American troops—a scouting force—landed on October 17th on
Dinegat and Suluan islands, across the gulf from Leyte. Minesweepers
swept the gulf and frogmen poked about the shoreline. Bombardment ships
pounded the beaches, and carrier planes blasted enemy airfields. Ships
of the attack landing forces entered Leyte Gulf during the night of
October 19th, and next morning troops went ashore on four beaches on the
west side of Leyte Gulf and on both sides of Panoan Strait, to the
south.
PTs were rushed up from New Guinea, 1,200 miles away. Forty-five of the
boats, under the tactical command of Lieut. Commander Robert Leeson,
made the trip on their own power with a stop-over for rest of a sort in
Palau and a refueling at sea, so as to arrive with enough gas to start
patrols immediately. They arrived in the combat zone on the morning of
October 21st, and began prowling that same night.
Times were lively in Surigao Strait, and the PTs had good hunting, but
nothing compared to what was coming.
Since a series of stinging setbacks from America’s carrier planes during
operations in the Central Pacific, the main body of the Japanese
fleet—still a formidable host—had held back from fighting American ships
in strength. Landings in the Philippines were too much to put up with,
however—too close to the beloved homeland; His Imperial Japanese
Majesty’s ships had to fight now, no matter how desperate the
situation—or rather because the situation _was_ so desperate.
The Japanese executed a plan long held in readiness for just this
event—the _Sho_ plan, or Plan of Victory, as it was hopefully called,
though the Japanese navy’s chief of staff more realistically called it
“Our last line of home defense.”
The stage was set for the greatest naval battle of all time, the Battle
of Leyte Gulf.
The naval lineup on the eve of battle—greatly simplified, perhaps
oversimplified—was as follows:
U. S. Navy
_Seventh Fleet_, under Vice-Admiral Thomas Kincaid:
This slow but powerful force included six over-age battleships, 18
small, slow escort carriers, five heavy cruisers, six light cruisers,
86 destroyers, 25 destroyer escorts, 11 frigates, and the usual
gunboats, supply train and landing craft for an amphibious
operation—plus all the PTs on the scene, the 45 veterans of the New
Guinea blockade. Mission of the Seventh Fleet was close support of the
Sixth Army landing force.
_Third Fleet_, under Admiral William Halsey:
This fast and mighty force had six new fast battleships, 16 fast
carriers, six heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers and 58 destroyers.
Mission of the Third Fleet was to prowl the waters north of the
landings on the lookout for a chance to destroy once and for all the
main Japanese battle fleet, especially its remaining carriers.
Japanese Navy
_Northern Decoy Force_, under Vice-Admiral Ozawa:
Four fat carriers, prime targets for the aggressive Halsey, were
screened by eight destroyers and one light cruiser. Mission of the
force was suicidal. Without enough planes to make a serious fight,
Admiral Ozawa nevertheless hoped to lure Halsey’s powerful Third Fleet
away from the landing beach, thus exposing American transports to
attack by two powerful Japanese surface striking forces that were to
sneak into Leyte Gulf through the back door, or rather two back doors
at San Bernardino and Surigao Straits, north and south of Leyte
Island.
_Central Striking Force_, under Vice-Admiral Kurita:
Five battleships, ten heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and 15
destroyers. Admiral Kurita was to take this formidable surface fleet
through San Bernardino Straits, at the northern tip of Samar, to come
down on the transports “like a wolf on the fold” while Halsey’s force
was wasting time on the sacrificial carrier decoy in the north.
_Southern Striking Force_, under Vice-Admiral Shima:
Formed of two task units—a vanguard under Admiral Nishima of two
battleships, one heavy cruiser and four destroyers, plus a second
section under Admiral Shima of two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser
and four destroyers. These two southern forces were to come up from
the East Indies and pass through Surigao Straits—happy hunting grounds
of the PTs—to join with the Central Striking Force in Leyte Gulf for
the unopposed and leisurely destruction of the Sixth Army.
The Japanese apparently could not believe that the U.S. Navy—once Halsey
had been suckered into chasing off after the decoy carriers—had enough
ships left afloat to resist the two striking forces. Had not the entire
Japanese nation just celebrated an Imperial proclamation of the near
annihilation of the American fleet?
All three Japanese forces converged on the Philippines simultaneously.
By October 24th, the three forces had been spotted and reported by
Allied scouts. Torpedoes and bombs from planes and submarines had made
punishing hits on the advancing Central and Southern Striking Forces,
but the ships kept plodding on toward the straits north and south of
Leyte.
And Admiral Halsey snapped at the bait dangled by Admiral Ozuma’s
carriers. For a man of Admiral Halsey’s temperament, the reported
sighting of the northern carrier group was too much to resist. He lit
out to get them all—leaving unguarded the Strait of San Bernardino, back
gate into Leyte Gulf and the transport area.
For once, an American command staff had fallen into the chronic error of
the Japanese. Admiral Halsey apparently believed the exaggerated claims
of his pilots and thought that the Central Striking Force had been
decimated and the remnants driven off. The Japanese had actually lost
only three cruisers to submarines and a battleship to aircraft. After a
short retreat, Admiral Kurita reconsidered and turned back during the
night to resume the transit of San Bernardino Strait. His powerful fleet
was steaming toward the transport area at 20 knots.
Admiral Kincaid misinterpreted a message from Admiral Halsey and thought
a part of his Third Fleet was still on station, corking up San
Bernardino, so Kincaid dismissed the central force from his mind and
turned his attention to the southern force heading for Surigao Strait.
Not even a scout submarine was watching the northern pass into Leyte
Gulf.
Shortly after noon of October 24th, Admiral Kincaid notified his entire
command to prepare for a battle that night. He cleared Surigao Strait of
all unnecessary traffic, and gave Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf the job
of not only stopping but destroying the enemy column.
Admiral Oldendorf had been commanding the bombardment and support
forces, and had in his control all the heavy guns of the Seventh Fleet.
In a phrase which infuriated the Japanese when they heard it, Oldendorf
said that he deployed his forces according to the professional gambler’s
code: “Never give a sucker a chance.”
Surigao Strait is a narrow strip of water about thirty-five miles long,
running almost north-south between Leyte and Dinegat islands. By its
shape and location, the strait was going to force the Southern Striking
Force to approach Leyte Gulf in a long, narrow column. Admiral Oldendorf
deployed his ancient but still hard-punching battleships in a line
across the mouth of the strait where it opens into Leyte Gulf. Thus,
without further maneuver, Oldendorf was certain to open fire with his
battle line already crossing the T of the Japanese column. His fleet
could swing its entire broadside to bear simultaneously; the enemy could
fire only the forward turrets on the lead ship.
Admiral Oldendorf was not satisfied with depending entirely on this
setup, murderous as it was, so he deployed every other fighting ship in
his command to work maximum destruction on the Japanese. He posted
cruisers and destroyers between the battleships and the mouth of the
straits, as a combined screen and supplementary battle line. Other
destroyer squadrons were posted near the strait, so that they could
launch torpedoes and then get out of the way during the gunfire phase of
the battle.
Admiral Oldendorf’s position was good—except for one thing. The warships
had fired off most of their ammunition in beach bombardment, and
magazine stocks were low, especially in the armor-piercing shells needed
for fighting heavy battleships. Oldendorf ordered the battleships to
hold their fire until they were sure of making hits—and he ordered
maximum use of torpedoes.
That meant torpedo boats, so 39 of Commander Selman Bowling’s PTs were
deployed in 13 sections of three boats each along the shores of Surigao
Strait, and also along the coasts of Mindanao and Bohol islands, far
into the Mindanao Sea on the other end of Surigao Strait. The farthest
PTs were stationed 100 miles from the battleline.
The Seventh Fleet had no night scouting planes, so Admiral Oldendorf
informed the PTs that their primary mission was scouting. The boats were
to patrol the approaches to the strait and to hide along the wooded
shores fringing the coming scene of battle. They were to relay radio
contact reports as the Japanese passed their station.
_Then_ they were to attack and do all the torpedo damage possible before
the Japanese came within gunshot of the Seventh Fleet battleline.
The PTs took up their stations during the night, and all hands topside
peered out to sea, watching for the telltale white bow wave of the first
Japanese ship.