Part 10

Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Two, under Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley (with only three boats this was the smallest squadron ever organized), had helped to make the decision where to land. Assigned to the Office of Strategic Services—America’s cloak-and-dagger outfit for all kinds of secret business—Squadron Two had run a ferry service between England and the enemy-occupied continent to deliver secret agents, saboteurs, spies, resistance officers, and couriers for the governments in exile.

The sailors of Squadron Two carried out their orders, of course, but on some of their errands they could mutter the old Navy adage: “I may have to take it, but I don’t have to like it.”

For example, the night they were sent across the Channel to land on the Normandy shore, there to scoop up several bucketfuls of sand. The crews grumbled about taking their fragile craft under the guns of Hitler’s mighty Western Wall just to fill the First Sea Lord’s sandbox.

They did not find out, until long after that night, why they were sent to play with shovels and buckets on the Normandy beach. A scientist who claimed to know the beaches well—beaches that had already been picked for the Normandy landings—said that they were made of spongy peat covered with a thin layer of sand, and that Allied trucks and tanks would bog down helplessly on the soft strand, once they left the hard decks of the landing craft.

The samples brought back by the PT sailors proved that the scientist didn’t know sand from shinola about Normandy beach conditions, and the operation went ahead as planned.

On June 6, 1944, the first waves of American and British troops landed on Omaha and Utah beaches and began the long slugging match with Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Nazis to twist Normandy out of German hands.

During the landings proper, PTs were used as anti-E-boat screens, but made their biggest contribution by dousing flare floats dropped by German aircraft to guide their night bombers.

At the beginning the assigned duties of the PTs were not heavy, but there is always work for a fleet of small, handy armed boats in a big amphibious operation.

On June 8th, for instance, as the destroyer _Glennon_ jockeyed about off the Saint Marcouf Islands, north of Utah Beach, getting ready to bombard a shore battery, she struck a mine astern. One minesweeper took the damaged destroyer under tow, and another went ahead to sweep a clear escape channel. Just before 9 A.M., the destroyer-escort _Rich_ closed the ships, and the skipper asked if he could help. The captain of the _Glennon_ answered: “Negative; clear area cautiously, live mines.”

Too late. A heavy explosion stopped the _Rich_ dead in the water. A second explosion tore away fifty feet of the stern. A third mine exploded forward. The destroyer-escort was a shambles, its keel broken and folded in a V. The superstructure was festooned with a grisly drapery of bodies and parts of bodies.

PTs rallied around the _Rich_ to take survivors from the deck or from the mine-filled waters around the shattered vessel. Crewmen on the 508 saw a sailor bobbing by in the sea, and the bowman picked up a heaving line to throw to his rescue. The man in the water calmly refused assistance.

“Never mind the line,” he said, “I have no arms to catch it.”

The PT skipper, Lieut. Calvin R. Whorton, dove into the icy Channel waters, but the armless sailor had gone to the bottom.

The _Rich_ followed him in fifteen minutes, with 79 of the crew. Seventy-three survivors were wounded.

The _Glennon_ itself went aground, and two days later a German shore battery put two salvos aboard. The destroyer rolled over and sank.

American soldiers ashore pushed rapidly northwestward along the coast of the Cherbourg Peninsula, to capture the port of Cherbourg, sorely needed as a terminal to replace the temporary harbor behind a jury-rig breakwater of sunken ships at the landing beaches. The Nazi garrison at Cherbourg put up a last-ditch stand, however, and on June 27th, forts on the outer breakwater and a few coastal batteries still held out.

The Navy sent a curiously composed task force to reduce the forts. With the destroyer _Shubrick_, the Navy sent six PTs to deal with the holdout Germans. It is hard to understand what PTs were expected to accomplish against heavy guns behind concrete casemates. Perhaps the reputation of the PT commander had overpowered the judgment of the Navy brass, for it was none other than Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley, hero of the MacArthur rescue run and the New Guinea blockade, come to try his mettle in European waters.

Leaving four PTs with the destroyer as a screen, Bulkeley, in 510, with 521 in company, cruised by the forts and sprayed them with machine guns at 150-yard range. The stubborn Nazis poured out a stream of 88-mm. shells and hit 521 hard enough to stop her dead for five minutes while a motor machinist mate made frantic repairs. Lieut. Commander Bulkeley ran rings around the stalled craft, laying a doughnut of smoke around her for a screen.

The _Shubrick_ herself was taking near misses from shore batteries, so 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.

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.

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.