PTs, by the nature of their attack, provoke wild melees, and survivors
of melees rarely remember precisely what happened. What they do claim to
remember is usually faulty and contradicted by circumstantial evidence.
PT skippers kept only sketchy logs, and those entries giving the time an
action took place are often especially inaccurate. As nearly as a
historian can tell, however, here is what happened to the PTs.
At 10:15 P.M. Ensign Peter B. Gadd, skipper of PT 131, on station 18
miles south of Bohol Island almost exactly in the middle of the Mindanao
Sea and 100 miles from Admiral Oldendorf, picked up two targets on his
radar screen. They were between the three-boat section commanded by
Lieut. W. C. Pullen, and Bohol Island to the north. Lieut. Pullen tried
to reach Admiral Oldendorf by radio, but failed, so he led the PTs 152,
130 and 131, in a torpedo approach.
The radar pips broke into five separate targets, and when a light haze
lifted, the skippers clearly saw what they thought were two battleships,
two cruisers and a destroyer. The enemy opened fire at three-mile range,
with his biggest batteries. Starshells burst overhead and the PTs tore
away through a ghastly glare that made them feel naked under the rain of
high explosive.
An eight-inch shell hit a torpedo of 130 smack on the warhead and tore
through the bow. Miraculously, there was no explosion.
The 152 was hit by a 4.7-incher, probably from a destroyer that was
closing fast, with searchlight blazing. (This destroyer, the _Shigure_,
was the only ship of the Japanese van to survive the coming massacre.)
The explosion tore away the 37-mm. cannon, killed the gunner, stunned
the loader, and wounded three sailors. The boat was afire.
Aboard the stricken 152, Lieut. (jg) Joseph Eddins dumped two
shallow-set depth charges into his wake and pumped 40-mm. shells at the
pursuing destroyer.
“Our 40 mm. made the enemy reluctant to continue the use of the
searchlight,” said Lieut Eddins.
The destroyer snapped off the light and sheered away from the geysers of
exploding depth charges.
The fight had lasted 23 minutes. Now there were two more targets on the
radar screen and the PT sailors were frantic to get their radio report
through to the waiting battleline.
Lieut. (jg) Ian D. Malcolm of 130 ran south until he found Lieut. (jg)
John A. Cady’s section near Camiguin Island. He boarded PT 127 and
borrowed its radio. Just after midnight on October 25th, Lieut. Malcolm
made the first contact report of the position, course, and speed of the
enemy. It was the first word of the enemy received by Admiral Oldendorf
in fourteen hours.
Aboard the 152, the crew put out the fire, and the skipper gave the boat
a little test run. The bow was stove in, but the plucky boat could still
make 24 knots, so Lieut. Pullen ordered a stern chase of the
disappearing Japanese. He had to abandon the attack, however, because
the Japanese were too fast for him to catch. There is something touching
and ludicrous in the picture of the tiny, bashed-up PT trying to catch
the mammoth Japanese battleline.
Lieut. (jg) Dwight H. Owen, in charge of a section near Limasawa Island
next picked up signs of the approaching fleet. He tells how it looked:
“The prologue began just before midnight. Off to the southwest over the
horizon we saw distant flashes of gunfire, starshells bursting and
far-off sweep of searchlights. The display continued about fifteen
minutes, then blacked out. Squalls came and went. One moment the moon
shone bright as day, and the next you couldn’t make out the bow of your
boat. Then the radar developed the sort of pips you read about.”
Lieut. Owen jumped for the radio, but the enemy was jamming the circuit
and he could not get his report off. He did the next best thing—he
attacked.
At 1,800 yards, the cruiser _Mogami_ snapped on its searchlight and
probed for the boats. PT 146 (Ensign B. M. Grosscup), and 150 (Ensign J.
M. Ladd), fired one fish each, but missed. The destroyer _Yumagumo_
caught the 151 and the 190 in a searchlight beam, but the boats raked
the destroyer with 40-mm. fire and knocked out the lights. The boats
zigzagged away behind smoke.
Admiral Nishimura, commanding this van force of the two-section Southern
Striking Force, was delighted with himself at this point, and sent a
message to Admiral Shima, congratulating himself on having sunk several
torpedo boats.
At the southern entrance to Surigao Strait, Lieut. Commander Robert
Leeson, on PT 134, commanded the section posted on the western shore.
The boat crews saw flashes of the battle with Lieut. Owen’s boats, and
half an hour later picked up radar pips ten miles away. Leeson promptly
passed the radar sighting to Admiral Oldendorf, and then—the milder duty
done—led a torpedo attack.
Lieut. (jg) Edmund F. Wakelin’s 134 was caught by a searchlight while
still 3,000 yards from the two battleships. Shells fell close aboard on
both sides, splashing water over the boat, and shrapnel from air bursts
banged against the deck, but the skipper bore in another 500 yards to
launch his fish. The boat escaped from the Japanese and hid in the
shadow of Panaon Island, where later in the night the sailors fumed
helplessly as four Japanese ships steamed, “fat, dumb, and happy,” past
their empty torpedo tubes at 1,000-yard range.
All the torpedo tubes of the section were not empty, however, for Lieut.
(jg) I. M. Kovar, in 137, at 3:55 A.M., picked up an enemy formation at
the southern end of the strait and attacked. He had no way of knowing
it, but this was Admiral Shima’s second section, coming up to the relief
of Admiral Nishimura’s van that had already entered the strait, and
indeed had at that very moment been shattered by a vicious American
destroyer-torpedo attack.
Lieut. Kovar crept up on a Japanese destroyer, maneuvering to take
station at the rear of the enemy column. He let fly at the can and had
the incredible good luck to miss his target entirely and smack a light
cruiser he hadn’t even seen. Aboard the cruiser _Abukuma_, the explosion
killed thirty sailors, destroyed the radio shack and slowed the cruiser
to ten knots, forcing it to fall out of formation.
The crippled _Abukuma_ was caught and polished off by Army bombers the
next day. It was the only victim of Army aviation in this battle and the
only positively verified victim of PT torpedoes, though there is some
evidence that a PT may have made one of the hits claimed by American
destroyers.
The rest of Admiral Shima’s formation sailed majestically up the strait,
fired a spread of torpedoes at two small islands it mistook for American
warships, and managed somehow to collide with the fiercely burning
cruiser _Mogami_, only survivor—except for the destroyer _Shigure_—of
the vanguard’s slaughter by the torpedoes and guns of the Seventh Fleet.
Gathering in the two surviving ships, Admiral Shima led a retreat down
the strait. At the moment _Shigure_ joined the formation, Lieut. C. T.
Gleason’s section attacked, and the Japanese destroyer, which was doing
some remarkably able shooting, hit Ensign L. E. Thomas’ 321.
Most sorely hit of the torpedo boats, however, was Lieut. (jg) R. W.
Brown’s 493, which had had John F. Kennedy aboard, as an instructor, for
a month in Miami. The crew had named the boat the _Carole Baby_ after
the skipper’s daughter, who, incidentally, was celebrating her first
birthday the night of the Battle of Surigao Strait.
Lieut. Brown tells the _Carole Baby’s_ story:
“I was assigned a division of boats to take position directly down the
middle of the strait between Panaon and Dinegat.
“While we were under way to take station, the moon was out but heavy
overcast on the horizon threatened to bring complete darkness later. We
spotted an occasional light on the beach and we passed an occasional
native sailing craft, so the crew’s light mood changed to tension,
because they thought we were being spied on.
“When we were on station, strung out across the channel so that the Japs
couldn’t get by without our seeing them, I stretched out on the dayroom
deck for a little relaxation, but the radio crackled the report that the
first PT patrols had made contact.
“‘All hands to General Quarters,’ I ordered. ‘Take echelon formation and
prepare to attack.’
“The radarman called up ‘Skipper, eight targets distant twelve miles,
estimated speed 28 knots.’
“We closed to three miles, and seconds later my number two boat reported
its four torpedoes were in the water. Number Three reported two more
fish off and running. I had been maneuvered out of firing position and
hadn’t launched any torpedoes yet, so I came around for another attack
and was separated from the rest of the section.
“Powerful searchlights pinpointed the two other boats, and starshells
lit up the night with their ugly green glare. The two other boats shot
up the enemy can and knocked out two of the lights. I didn’t open fire,
because the Japs hadn’t seen the _Carole Baby_ yet and I wanted to shoot
my fish before they found me.
“At about 500 yards, I fired two and opened up with my guns. The enemy
fired starshells and turned on the searchlights. At this close range we
could see Japanese sailors scrambling about the ship, and we poured it
into them, but the concussion of their exploding shells was creeping
steadily closer, so I ordered my executive officer, Nick Carter, to come
hard left, open the throttles and GET OUT!
“I went aft to release smoke for a screen so we could return to fire our
remaining torpedoes, but we had penetrated an outer destroyer screen
without knowing it and had Japs all around us. Eight searchlights pinned
us down like a bug on a needle.
“It’s a funny thing how the mind works. I took time at that moment to
notice that all those searchlights were turning the sea about us to a
beautiful phosphorescent green.
“Our guns blew up two of the searchlights, but we were being hit hard.
A. W. Brunelle reported from the engine room that the boat was badly
holed at the waterline. I found out later that he took off his kapok
life jacket and stuffed it into the hole as the only cork he could find
right at hand.
“A blinding flash and terrific concussion threw me out of the cockpit.
Stunned, I reeled forward to find that most of the chartroom had been
blown away.
“I told Nick to head the _Carole Baby_ for the Island of Panaon, and we
limped off with the Jap cans chasing us. When we were out of torpedo
range of the capital ships, they turned back but kept throwing shells at
us to be sure we didn’t return to attack.
“_Return to attack!_ We weren’t even sure we could stay afloat. The
engines were almost completely underwater and though they were still
working, they couldn’t chug along forever with water steadily rising in
the hold.
“The last destroyer left us just as the bow of the _Carole Baby_ scraped
on a coral reef one hundred yards off the beach at Panaon.
“When the shooting stopped, a weird silence settled over us. I went over
the boat to see what condition we were in. We were in bad condition. The
_Carole Baby_ had been hit by five shells. Two of them had passed clean
through us without exploding, but the one that had exploded in the
charthouse had killed two and wounded nine of my crew.
“And that isn’t all. We were high on a reef, within rock-throwing
distance of an enemy shore. I had to know if those lights we could see
came from a Japanese camp, so I armed ten of us with machine guns and
grenades and we slipped over the side.
“We found a little village. Somebody had been there, but had run off as
we approached, so we decided to search farther. This type of warfare was
different from the one the crew was used to, and everybody was ill at
ease.”
It is interesting to note that by inference the sailors were _not_ “ill
at ease” in the type of warfare they had just been subjected to.
“One of the sailors was almost strangled by what he thought was a
low-hanging vine, but we found it was a telephone wire leading to a
small hut. We crept close to the hut and listened. No good. Japanese!
“We cut the wire and returned to the safety of our reef.”
Again, consider the character of sailors who talk about the “safety” of
a shattered boat, filled with dead and wounded shipmates, stranded on a
rock in the midst of history’s greatest naval battle and within pistol
range of an enemy shore.
“We expected that wire-cutting bit would stir up some Jap patrols, so we
made ourselves into a Little Gibraltar with all the weapons we could
scrape together—and on a PT boat that is plenty of weapons.”
Lieut. Brown tells of settling down to enjoy the unaccustomed role of
spectator at a battle. Through the night the crew watched the flash and
glare of gunfire and exploding ships up the straits.
“We couldn’t tell who was faring best. Through binoculars we could see
ships afire and sinking, but we couldn’t tell if they were Japanese or
American. Long before dawn the eastern sky looked like sunrise, because
of the orange glow of burning ships.
“When day did break we saw natives creeping back to their village, so we
waved and yelled ‘_Americanos_’ and ‘_Amigos_’ and friendly stuff like
that. They finally believed us and waded out to our boat where the
sailors set about their eternal bargaining for souvenirs. I believe an
American sailor would bargain with a cannibal tribe while they’re
putting him into the pot.
“One of the crew yelled and pointed out to sea. Three PTs were roaring
up the straits in broad daylight and we could see what they were
after—it was the crippled cruiser _Mogami_, trying to limp home after
the fight.
“I watched one of the PTs fire two fish and then race toward us when the
cruiser fired at her. We were glad to see her coming, but then we
realized with horror that the skipper thought our poor beat-up old
_Carole Baby_ was a Japanese barge, and he was getting ready to make a
strafing run on us. We jumped up and down and waved our arms and yelled
like crazy, even though we knew they couldn’t hear us.
“Just before they got to the spot where I would have opened fire if I
had been skipper, we saw the gunners relax and point those gun muzzles
away as they recognized us. It was PT 491 that came to our rescue.
“We tried to pull the _Carole Baby_ off the reef, but she was too far
gone. She went down in deep water—the only American ship, incidentally,
lost in the Battle of Surigao Strait.”
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz radioed from Hawaii:
THE SKILL, DETERMINATION AND COURAGE DISPLAYED BY THE PERSONNEL OF
THESE SMALL BOATS IS WORTHY OF THE HIGHEST PRAISE.... THE PT ACTION
VERY PROBABLY THREW THE JAPANESE COMMAND OFF BALANCE AND CONTRIBUTED
TO THE COMPLETENESS OF THEIR SUBSEQUENT DEFEAT.
By contrast to the corking of Surigao Strait, at the unguarded San
Bernardino Strait, the powerful Central Striking Force that morning
passed unopposed into Leyte Gulf and jumped the escort carriers and
their screen. Something close to worldwide panic broke out in American
command centers when the brass realized that the Central Striking Force
was already in the gulf and Admiral Halsey’s force was off chasing the
carrier decoy—too far off to engage Kurita’s fleet.
A handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts of the screen threw
themselves between the Japanese wolf and the transport sheep. Planes
from the escort carriers made real and dummy bombing runs on Kurita’s
ships. Between them the desperate escort forces—planes and
destroyers—battled Kurita to a standstill in the most spectacular show
of sheer fighting courage in all of naval history.
Incredibly, Admiral Kurita, with a victory as great as Pearl Harbor
within his grasp—the very victory that the northern decoy carrier force
was being sacrificed to buy—turned his mighty fleet about and steamed
back through San Bernardino Strait, content with sinking two of the
escort carriers and three of the screen ships whose gallant skippers had
put their destroyers between the enemy and the helpless transport fleet.
Admiral Halsey sank all four carriers, three destroyers, one light
cruiser and a fleet oiler of the decoy force.
The _Sho_ plan had worked almost perfectly for the Japanese—but with an
unexpected outcome; the Japanese surface fleet, instead of wiping out
the American transport fleet, was shattered. Its carrier force virtually
vanished. His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s navy could never mount a major
attack again.
With the main battleline of the Japanese fleet driven from the scene,
the PTs were right back where they had been in New Guinea and
Guadalcanal—busting barges and derailing the Tokyo Express.
On the far side of Leyte Island the waters are reef filled, the channels
shallow and tortuous. The Japanese were using the dangerous waters of
the Camotes Sea and Ormoc Bay to land supplies at night behind their
lines. A familiar enough situation for the PT sailors, so the skippers
took their shallow-draft torpedo boats into Ormoc Bay, looking for
trouble.
On the night between November 28th and 29th, Lieut. Roger H. Hallowell
took PTs 127, 331, 128, and 191 around the tip of Leyte and headed up
the western shore for Ormoc Bay in the first combat patrol of these
waters.
PTs 127 and 331 entered the bay while the other two boats patrolled the
islands outside. In the light of a tropical moon, the skippers inside
saw a subchaser and crept to within 800 yards before the Japanese opened
fire. The two boats launched eight torpedoes and a ripple of rockets
(enough explosive to tear a battleship in two, much less a little patrol
craft). The retiring PT skippers reported the usual loud explosion,
indicating a torpedo hit, which virtually all retiring torpedo-boat
captains always reported. This time, however, they were right. The
Japanese themselves later admitted the loss of the subchaser SC 53.
The two retiring boats, all their torpedoes spent, met the 128 and 191
at the entrance to the bay, and Lieut. Hallowell “transferred his flag”
to the 128 to lead the two still-armed boats in a second attack.
All four boats went in, the two boats with spent tubes planning to give
gunfire support to the armed duo. All hands searched for the original
target, but could not find it—for the good reason that it was on the
bottom.
Lieut. Hallowell saw what he thought was a freighter tied to a dock, so
the two skippers, ignoring fire from the beach, launched all torpedoes.
Ten days later, when the Army had landed at Ormoc and taken over the
harbor, the PTs promptly moved in and discovered that Lieut. Hallowell’s
“freighter” was the Japanese PC 105, clearly visible at the dock,
sitting on the bottom with a fatal gash in her side.
Lieut. Melvin W. Haines, early on the morning of December 12th, led PTs
492 and 490 in a classic attack on a convoy in Ormoc Bay. The PTs
stalked silently to close range, launched torpedoes, and retired
zigzagging behind smoke in a maneuver right out of the PT textbook. They
were rewarded by a great stab of light behind them. One of the boats, or
perhaps both, had hit the destroyer _Uzuki_, which went up in a great
column of orange flame.
This kind of night warfare was only too tediously familiar to PT
sailors, but right then the war took a nasty new turn for them—indeed
for the whole Pacific Fleet.
Desperate because of the swift deterioration of their position, the
Japanese switched from all reasonable kinds of warfare—if there are
such—and developed the suicidal _kamikaze_ tactic.
Through the war, Japanese fliers—and Americans, too, for that
matter—already hit and doomed, often tried to crash-land on ships under
attack, to take the enemy down to death with them.
During the Leyte surface-air battles, however, many of the Japanese were
dedicated, with great ceremony, to making deliberate suicide dives into
American ships, as a kind of human bomb. The toll was already
frightening to American naval men, and threatened to get worse.
In mid-December two _kamikaze_ planes crashed into the 323 in Surigao
Strait, and destroyed it utterly so that the PTs crews were served
notice that they were not too small a prize to merit attention from the
sinister new air fleet.
MacArthur had returned, all right, when he went ashore at Leyte, but it
was only a kind of tentative return—a one-foot-in-the-door return. Until
he landed on Corregidor in Luzon, he wouldn’t really be back where he
started. Luzon was the goal.
Just across the narrow Verde Island Passage from Luzon is the island of
Mindoro, and MacArthur’s air commanders sorely coveted that piece of
real estate for airstrips so that they could bring Luzon under the
gunsights of their fighters before the Luzon landings began.
On December 12th MTB Squadrons Thirteen and Sixteen, plus PTs 227 and
230, left Leyte Gulf in a convoy with the Eighth Army’s Visayan Task
Force to invade Mindoro Bay, 300 miles to the northwest. Because of the
sharply mounting kamikaze attacks, the Navy did not want to risk a
tender in Mindoro waters, so the squadrons, with the help of the
ingenious Seabees, planned to set up a base of sorts on an LST.
During the afternoon of December 13th, a _kamikaze_ slipped through the
air cover and crashed into the portside of the invasion force flagship,
the cruiser _Nashville_. The pilot carried two bombs, and their
explosion touched off five-inch and 40-mm. ammunition in the ready
lockers topside. The shattering blast killed 133 officers and men,
including both the Army and Navy chiefs of staff and the colonel
commanding the bombardment wing. The _Nashville_ had to return to Leyte
Gulf.
Later, ten more Japanese planes attacked and one got through to the
destroyer _Haraden_. The explosion killed 14 sailors and the destroyer
had to go back to Leyte. The PTs huddled close to the rest of the
convoy, to add their batteries to the curtain of fire.
Troops went ashore on Mindoro at 7 A.M. on December 15th, and met little
opposition. Half an hour later, PTs were operating in the harbor. The
infantry quickly set up a perimeter defense, pushing back the small
Japanese garrison to make room for an airfield at San Jose. As they had
at Bougainville, American planners wanted only enough room on Mindoro to
establish and protect a fighter base. It was not Mindoro but Luzon that
was the basic goal.
The Japanese didn’t intend to let the Americans have even that much
land, however, without lashing back furiously at the invaders of this
island almost within sight of the city of Manila.
Just after 8 A.M. the _kamikazes_ arrived. Three of the planes dove on
destroyers and were shot down by the combined fire of all ships. The
fourth flew over the stern of Ensign J. P. Rafferty’s PT 221, caught the
full blast of the PT battery, and cartwheeled along the surface of the
bay, spraying water and flames until it sank from sight.
Outside the bay, the sailors saw the _kamikazes_ coming, so Lieut.
Commander Alvin W. Fargo, Jr., commanding Squadron Thirteen, ordered the
PTs still escorting the convoy to get between the LSTs and the
approaching planes. Seven _kamikazes_ strafed the PTs ineffectively, and
the boats brought down three of them. Of the four that penetrated the
screen, two were shot down by the combined fire of the LSTs and the PTs.
The other two dived into LST 472 and LST 738, setting them afire.
Eventually, destroyers had to sink the burning hulks with gunfire. PTs
picked up a hundred survivors.
Next morning all the PTs were in Mangarin Bay at Mindoro, site of the
landings, and the LST 605, destined to be their base ship, was unloading
on the beach. PTs 230 and 300 were entering from the night’s patrol,
when a single plane glided out of the sun and strafed the 230, without
hitting it. The _kamikaze_ circled and started his dive on the LST 605.
The landing ship and all the PTs opened fire and shot off the plane’s
tail. The _kamikaze_ crashed on the beach fifty yards from the LST,
killing five men and wounding 11.
Half an hour later eight planes came after the PTs.
Lieut. (jg) Byron F. Kent, whose 230 was a target, tells of applying
broken-field running football tactics to the problem: