Part 1

THE MOSQUITO FLEET

BERN KEATING

SBS SCHOLASTIC BOOK SERVICES New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney

_To Lieut. Commander Brinkley Bass and Lieut. Commander Clyde Hopkins McCroskey, Jr., who gallantly gave their lives during World War II. They were brave seamen and good friends._

Photographs used on the cover are courtesy of the U.S. Navy. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, or otherwise circulated in any binding or cover other than that in which it is published—unless prior written permission has been obtained from the publisher—and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Copyright © 1963 by Bern Keating. This edition is published by Scholastic Book Services, a division of Scholastic Magazines, Inc., by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 4th printing January 1969 Printed in the U.S.A.

CONTENTS

1. The First PTs: Facts and Fictions 1 2. Attrition at Guadalcanal 13 3. Battering Down the Gate: the Western Hinge 51 4. Battering Down the Gate: the Eastern Hinge 71 5. Along the Turkey’s Back 92 6. The War in Europe: Mediterranean 125 7. The War in Europe: English Channel 170 8. The War in Europe: Azure Coast 181 9. I Shall Return—Round Trip by PT 201 Appendix 1. Specifications, Armament, and Crew 249 Appendix 2. Losses Suffered by PT Squadrons 250 Appendix 3. Decorations Won by PT Sailors 251

Historical material in this book comes from action reports, squadron histories, and other naval records on file at the historical records section in Arlington, Va. Most valuable was the comprehensive history of PT actions written by Commodore Robert Bulkley for the Navy. The Bulkley history was in manuscript form at the time I did research for this book. The broad outline of naval history comes mostly from the _History of U. S. Naval Operations in World War II_ of Samuel Eliot Morison. I am grateful to several PT veterans for their generous contribution of diaries, letters, anecdotes, etc., which have been drawn on for human interest material. Among these kind correspondents are: James Cunningham of Shreveport, La., Roger Jones of Nassau, Bahama Islands, Lieut. Commander R. W. Brown of Scituate, Mass., Capt. Stanley Barnes of the War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa., James Newberry of Memphis, Tenn., and Arthur Murray Preston, of Washington, D. C. The officers of Peter Tare Inc., a PT veterans organization, have been helpful.

1. The First PTs: Facts and Fictions

In March 17, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur arrived safely in Australia after a flight from his doomed army in the Philippine Islands. The people of America, staggering from three months of unrelieved disaster, felt a tremendous lift of spirits.

America needed a lift of spirits.

Three months before, without the formality of declaring war, Japan had sneaked a fleet of planes from a carrier force into the main American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and in one Sunday morning’s work the planes had smashed America’s Pacific battle line under a shower of bombs and torpedoes. Without a fighting fleet, America had been helpless to stop the swift spread of the Japanese around the far shores and islands of the Pacific basin.

Guam and Wake Island had been overrun; Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, the East Indies, had been gobbled up. Our fighting sailors, until the disaster of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, had been boasting around the navy clubs that the American fleet could sail up one side of the Japanese homeland and down the other side, shooting holes in the islands and watching them sink from sight. Now they ground their teeth in humiliation and rage, unable to get at the Japanese because the Pacific Fleet battle line lay in the ooze on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s navy was steaming, virtually unopposed, wherever its infuriatingly cocky admirals willed.

When a combined Dutch-American flotilla had tried to block the Japanese landings on Java, the Allied navies had promptly lost 13 of their pitifully few remaining destroyers and cruisers—and the tragic sacrifice had not even held up the Japanese advance for more than a few hours.

The naval officers of the Allies had had to make a painful change in their opinion of the Japanese sailor’s ability; he had turned out to be a formidable fighting man.

On land, the Japanese army was even more spectacularly competent. Years of secret training in island-hopping and jungle warfare had paid off for the Japanese. With frightening ease, they had brushed aside opposition everywhere—everywhere, that is, except in the Philippine Islands, where General MacArthur’s outnumbered and underequipped Filipino and American fighters had improvised a savage resistance; had patched together a kind of Hooligan’s Army, fleshing out the thin ranks of the defenders with headquarters clerks and ship’s cooks, with electrician’s mates and chaplain’s assistants, with boatless boatswain’s mates and planeless pilots.

MacArthur’s patchwork army had harried the Japanese advance and had stubbornly fought a long retreat down the Island of Luzon. It was bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula and on the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay, and it was already doomed, everybody knew that. The flight of its commanding general only emphasized that it had been written off, but the tremendous fight it was putting up had salved every American’s wounded national pride. Besides, the very fact that MacArthur had been ordered out of the islands clearly meant that America was going back, once the nation had caught its breath and recovered from Pearl Harbor.

General MacArthur, with a talent for flamboyant leadership that amounted to genius of a sort, emitted the sonorous phrase: “I shall return.”

A few sour critics, immune to the MacArthur charm, deplored his use of the first person singular when the first person plural would have been more graceful—and more accurate—but the phrase caught on in the free world.

“I shall return.” The phrase promised brave times ahead, when the galling need to retreat would end and America would begin the journey back to Bataan.

A stirring prospect, but what a long journey it was going to be. The most ignorant could look at a map and see that MacArthur’s return trip was going to take years. And yet his trip out had taken only days. A few of the curious wondered how his escape had been engineered. News stories said that MacArthur had flown into Australia. But where had he found a plane? For days America had been told that on the shrinking Luzon beachhead no airstrips remained in American hands. Where had MacArthur gone to find a friendly airfield, and how had he gone there through the swarming patrols of the Japanese naval blockade?

The full story of MacArthur’s escape, when it was told, became one of the top adventure stories of World War II.

First came the bare announcement that it was on a motor torpedo boat—a PT boat in Navy parlance, and a mosquito boat in journalese—that the general had made the first leg of his flight across enemy-infested seas. Then a crack journalist named William L. White interviewed the officers of the PT rescue squadron and wrote a book about the escape and about the days when the entire American naval striking force in the Philippines had shrunk to six, then four, then three, then one of the barnacle-encrusted plywood motorboats hardly bigger than a stockbroker’s cabin cruiser.

The book was called _They Were Expendable_, and it became a runaway best-seller. It was condensed for _Reader’s Digest_ and featured in _Life_ Magazine, and it made the PT sailor the glamour boy of America’s surface fleet. _They Were Expendable_ makes exciting reading today, but the book’s success spawned a swarm of magazine and newspaper articles about the PT navy, and some of them were distressingly irresponsible. Quite innocently, William White himself added to the PT’s exaggerated reputation for being able to lick all comers, regardless of size. He wrote his book in wartime and so had no way of checking the squadron’s claims of torpedo successes. Naturally, as any generous reporter would have done, he gave full credit to its claims of an amazing bag—two light cruisers, two transports and an oil tanker, besides enemy barges, landing craft and planes.

Postwar study of Japanese naval archives shows no evidence that any Japanese ships were torpedoed at the times and places the Squadron Three sailors claim to have hit them. Of course, airplane and PT pilots are notoriously overoptimistic—they have to be optimistic by nature even to get into the cockpits of their frail craft and set out for combat. And yet any realistic person who has worked in government archives hesitates to give full weight to a damage assessment by an office research clerk as opposed to the evidence of combat eyewitnesses.

Postwar evaluation specialists would not confirm the sinking of a 5,000-ton armed merchant vessel at Binanga on January 19, 1942, but Army observers on Mount Mariveles watched through 20-power glasses as a ship sank, and they reported even the number and caliber of the guns in its armament.

On February 2, 1942, Army lookouts reported that a badly crippled cruiser was run aground (and later cut up for scrap) at the right time and place to be the cruiser claimed by PT 32. Evaluation clerks could not find a record of this ship sinking either, so the PT claim is denied.

Unfortunately, the most elaborately detailed claim of all, the sinking of a _Kuma_ class cruiser off Cebu Island by PTs 34 and 41, most certainly is not valid, because the cruiser itself sent a full report of the battle to Japanese Navy headquarters and admitted being struck by one dud torpedo (so much at least of the PT claim is true), but the cruiser, which happened to be the _Kuma_ itself, was undamaged and survived to be sunk by a British submarine late in the war.

The undeniable triumph of Squadron Three was the flight of MacArthur. On March 11, 1942, at Corregidor, the four surviving boats of the squadron picked up the general, his staff and selected officers and technicians, the general’s wife and son and—most astonishingly—a Chinese nurse for the four-year-old boy. In a series of night dashes from island to island through Japanese-infested seas, the little flotilla carried the escaping brass to the island of Mindanao, where the generals and admirals caught a B 17 Flying Fortress bomber flight for Australia.

The fantastic and undeniably exaggerated claims of sinkings are regrettable, but in no way detract from the bravery of the sailors of Squadron Three. They were merely the victims of the nation’s desperate need for victories.

William White’s contribution to the false giant-killer image of the PTs is understandable, but other correspondents were less responsible. One, famous and highly respected, said that all PTs were armed with three-inch cannon. Putting such a massive weapon on the fragile plywood deck of a PT boat was a bit like arming a four-year-old boy with a big-league baseball bat—it’s just too much weapon for such a little fellow to carry. The same reckless writer said that PT boats cruised at 70 knots. Another said that a PT could pace a new car—which amounts to another claim for a 70-knot speed. Almost all of the reporters, some of whom surely knew better, wrote about the PTs’ armament as though the little boats could slug it out with ships of the line.

In the fantasies spun by the nation’s press, the PTs literally ran rings around enemy destroyers and socked so many torpedoes into Japanese warships that you almost felt sorry for the outclassed and floundering enemy.

PT sailors read these romances and gritted their teeth. They knew too painfully well that the stories were not true.

What was the truth about the PT?

Early in World War II, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into the war then raging in Europe against Germany and Italy and in China against Japan, the American Navy had been tinkering around with various designs of fast small boats armed with torpedoes. British coastal forces had been making good use of small, fast torpedo boats, and the American Navy borrowed much from British designs.

On July 24, 1941—four and a half months before America entered the war—the Navy held the Plywood Derby, a test speed run of experimental PTs in the open Atlantic off Long Island. The course ran around the east end of Block Island, around the Fire Island lightship to a finish line at Montauk Point Whistling Buoy. Two PTs of the Elco design finished with best average speeds—39.72 and 37.01 knots—but boats of other designs had smaller turning circles. Over a measured mile the Elcos did 45.3 knots with a light load and 44.1 knots with a heavy load.

On a second Plywood Derby, the Elcos raced against the destroyer _Wilkes_. Seas were running eight feet high—in one stretch the destroyer skipper reported 15-foot waves—and the little cockleshells took a terrible beating. Most of the time they were out of sight in the trough of the seas or hidden by flying spray. The destroyer won the race, but the Navy board had been impressed by the seaworthiness of the tough little boats, and the Navy decided to go ahead with a torpedo-boat program. The board standardized on the 80-foot Elco and the 78-foot Higgins designs, and the boatyards fell to work.

The boats were built of layers of plywood. Draft to the tips of the propellers was held to a shallow five feet six inches, so that the PT could sneak close to an enemy beach on occasion as a kind of seagoing cavalry, to do dirty work literally at the crossroads.

Three Packard V-12 engines gave a 4,500-shaft horsepower and drove the boats, under ideal conditions, as fast as 45 knots—but conditions were seldom ideal. A PT in the battle zone was almost never in top racing form. In action the PT was usually overloaded, was often running on jury-rig repairs and spare parts held together with adhesive tape and ingenuity. In tropic waters the hull was soon sporting a long, green beard of water plants that could cut the PT’s speed in half. Many of the PTs that fought the bloody battles that follow in these pages were doing well to hit 29 or even 27 knots.

The American Navy had learned the hard way that any enemy destroyer could make 35 knots, and many of them could do considerably better—plenty fast enough to run down a PT boat, especially after a few months of action had cut the PT’s speed.

The normal boat crew was three officers and 14 men, though the complement varied widely under combat conditions. The boat carried enough provisions for about five days.

As for that bristling armament the correspondents talked about, a PT boat originally carried four torpedoes and tubes, and two 50-caliber twin machine-gun mounts. In combat PT skippers improvised installation of additional weapons, and by the war’s end all boats had added some combination of 40-mm. autocannon, 37-mm. cannon, 20-mm. antiaircraft autocannon, rocket launchers, and 60-mm. mortars. In some zones they even discarded the torpedoes and added still more automatic weapons, to give themselves heavier broadsides for duels with armed enemy small craft.

Pound for pound, the PT boat was by far the most heavily armed vessel afloat, but that does not mean that a PT flyweight, no matter how tough for its size, was a match for an enemy heavyweight. PT sailors never hesitated to tackle an enemy destroyer, but they knew that a torpedo boat could stand up to an all-out brawl with an alert and aroused destroyer the way a spunky rat terrier can stand up to a hungry wolf. After all, the full and proper name of a destroyer is _torpedo-boat_ destroyer.

The PT’s main tactic was not the hell-roaring dash of the correspondents’ romances, but a sneaky, quiet approach in darkness or fog. The PT was designed to slip slowly and quietly into an enemy formation in bad visibility, to fire torpedoes at the handiest target, and to escape behind a smoke screen with whatever speed the condition of the boat permitted. With luck, the screening destroyers would lose the PT in the smoke, the confusion, and the darkness. Without luck—well, in warfare everybody has to take some chances.

What most annoyed the PT sailors about their lurid press was that the truth made an even better story. After all, they argued, it takes guts to ease along at night in an agonizingly slow approach to an enemy warship that will chew you to bloody splinters if the lookouts ever spot you. And it takes real courage to bore on into slingshot range when you know that the enemy can easily run you down if your torpedoes miss or fail to explode, as they did all too often. Compared to this reality, one of those imaginary 70-knot blitzes would be a breeze.

One disgusted PT sailor wrote: “Publicity has reached the point where glorified stories are not genuinely flattering. Most PT men resent the wild, fanciful tales that tend to belittle their real experience.... There is actually little glamour for a PT. The excitement of battle is tempered by many dull days of inactivity, long nights of fruitless patrol, and dreary hours of foul weather at sea in a small boat.”

He griped that the PT sailor would prefer the tribute of “They were dependable” to “They were expendable.”

Maybe so, but the public just would not have it that way. The dash and audacity of the sailors of those little boats had appealed to the American mind. It was the story of David and Goliath again, and the sailors in the slingshot navy, no matter how they balked, joined the other wild and woolly heroes of legend who go joyously into battle against giants.

This is the story of what the mosquito fleet really did.

2. Attrition at Guadalcanal

In August 7, 1942, exactly eight months after Pearl Harbor, American Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands, as the first step on the long road to Tokyo. The Japanese reacted violently. They elected to have it out right there—to stop the Allied recovery right at the start and at all costs.

Down from their mighty base at Rabaul, they sent reinforcements and supplies through a sea lane flanked by two parallel rows of islands in the Solomons archipelago. The sea lane quickly became known as The Slot, and the supply ships, usually fast destroyers, became known as the Tokyo Express.

The night runs of the Tokyo Express were wearing down the Marines. As they became more and more dirty and tired they became more and more irritated to find that the Japanese they killed were dressed in spruce new uniforms—sure sign that they were newcomers to the island.

Even worse was the sleep-robbing uproar of the night naval bombardments that pounded planes and installations at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, the only American base where friendly fighters and bombers could find a home. The American hold on the island was in danger from sheer physical fatigue.

The American and Japanese fleets clashed in the waters around the Guadalcanal landing beaches in a series of bloody surface battles that devoured ships and men on both sides in a hideous contest of attrition. Whichever side could hang on fifteen seconds longer than the other—whichever side could stand to lose one more ship and one more sailor—was going to win.

At the very moment of one of the big cruiser-destroyer clashes (October 11-12, 1942)—officially called the Battle of Cape Esperance—American naval reinforcements of a sort arrived in the area. Forty miles east of the battle, four fresh, unbloodied fighting ships were sailing into Tulagi Harbor at Florida Island, just across a narrow strait from Guadalcanal.

It was half of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, four PT boats, the first American torpedo boats to arrive in combat waters since the last boat of Lieut. John Bulkeley’s disbanded Squadron Three had been burned in the Philippines seven months before.

The PT sailors came topside as they entered the harbor to watch the flash of cannonading in the sky to the west where American and Japanese sailors were blowing each other to bloody bits. For them, training time was over, the shooting time was now, and the PT navy was once again on the firing line.

All day on October 13, the PT sailors scurried about, getting the little warships ready for a fight. Their preparations made only a ripple in the maelstrom of activity around the islands.

Coast watchers—friendly observers who hid on islands behind the Japanese lines and reported by radio on ship and plane movements—reported a new menace to Guadalcanal. They had spotted a Japanese naval force coming down The Slot, but they said it was made up only of destroyers.

When Lieut. Commander Alan R. Montgomery, the PT squadron commander at Tulagi, heard that only destroyers were coming, he begged off from the fight—on the extraordinary grounds that he preferred waiting for bigger game.

Montgomery’s decision is not as cocky as it first sounds. The Japanese presumably did not know about the arrival of the PTs on the scene, and if ever a PT was going to shoot a torpedo into a big one—a cruiser or a battleship—it was going to be by surprise. No use tipping off the enemy until the big chance came.

The big chance was really on the way. The coast watchers had underestimated the size of the Japanese force. It was actually built around a pair of battleships, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, all bent on pounding Henderson Field and its pesky planes out of existence.

The Japanese command obviously expected no American naval resistance, because ammunition hoists of the Japanese fleet were loaded with a new kind of thin-skinned shell especially designed for blowing into jagged fragments that would slice planes and people to useless shreds. The bombardment shells would not be much use against armor. The Japanese ammunition load would have been a disaster for the task force if it had run into armored opposition—cruisers or battleships of the American Navy—but the Japanese knew as well as we did that there was little likelihood our badly mauled fleet, manned by exhausted sailors, would be anywhere near the scene. The Japanese sailed down The Slot with one hand voluntarily tied behind them, in a sense, supremely confident that they could pound Henderson Field Without interference.

Shortly after midnight on October 14th, two Japanese battleships opened up on Henderson Field with gigantic 14-inch rifles shooting the special fragmentation and incendiary shells. The two battleships were accompanied by a cruiser and either eight or nine destroyers. A Japanese scouting plane dropped flares to make the shooting easier. An American searchlight at Lunga Point, on Guadalcanal, probed over the water, looking for the Japanese, but American 5-inch guns—the largest American guns ashore—were too short of range to reach the battleships and cruisers even if the searchlight had found them. The big ships hove to and poured in a merciless cascade of explosive.

For almost an hour and a half, Marines, soldiers and Seabees lay in foxholes and suffered while the Cyclopean 14-inchers tore holes in the field, riddled planes with shell fragments, started fires and filled the air with shards from exploding shell casings—shards that could slice a man in two without even changing the pitch of his screams.