Part 11

“A few minutes later,” said Lieut. Walker, “a terrific blast exploded beneath our stern, carrying away the 40-mm. gun and the gun crew and almost everything else up to the forward bulkhead of the engine room.... The four torpedoes were immediately jettisoned and we anchored with two anchors from separate lines.”

Volunteers manned the life rafts to pick up the men in the water. They returned with a body, one uninjured sailor, and a man with a broken leg. Four other sailors were never found.

One of the rafts could not return to the boat because of strong currents, so Lieut. Stanley Livingston, a powerful swimmer, swam the 300 yards, towing the bitter end of a line patched together of all available manila, electric cable, halyards, and odds and ends, buoyed at intervals with life jackets. Sailors on the boat then pulled the raft alongside.

A French pilot boat and a fisherman in an open boat came out from the beach to help. Overhead, fighter planes, attracted by the explosion, took in the situation and set up an impromptu umbrella.

The sailor with the broken leg needed help. Lieut. Walker put him and the dead sailor’s body into the fisherman’s boat with the pharmacist’s mate, and climbed in himself, as interpreter. They shoved off for Port-de-Bouc.

One hundred yards from the PT boat, Walker saw in the water a green line with green floats spaced every foot. He yelled a warning at the fisherman, but too late. A violent explosion lifted the boat in the air and threw the four men into the water.

Lieut. Walker came up under the boat and had to fight himself free of the sinking craft. He took stock. The dead sailor had disappeared forever. The pharmacist’s mate, about sixty feet away, was shouting that he couldn’t swim, so Walker went to the rescue. The injured man was hauled up to the bottom of the overturned boat where, in Walker’s words, “He appeared to be comfortable.”

The ordinary non-PT man might consider a perch on the bottom of an overturned and sinking fishing boat as being somewhat short of “comfortable” for a man with an unset broken leg.

“The situation seemed so good,” continued Lieut. Walker in the same happy vein, “that I decided not to take off my pistol and belt.... The French pilot boat came to our rescue, and the injured man was put aboard without further harm. The fishermen’s boat upended and sank as the last man let go.”

Walker confessed to a tiny twinge of disappointment at this point in his narrative. A scouting float plane from the cruiser _Philadelphia_ had landed near the shattered boat, and the PT officers had hoped to get off their message to the task-force commander, but the pilot took fright when the second mine went off under the fishing boat, and he left for home.

“We had two narrow escapes getting back to the PT boat,” Lieut. Walker said. “I requested the pilot, Ensign Moneglia of the French Navy, to go between two sets of lines I could see, rather than back down and turn around as the majority seemed to wish. It proved to be the safe way between two mines.”

The crew jettisoned all topside weights except one twin 50-caliber mount, so that they would have some protection against air attack.

Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston set out in a rubber boat for the town of Carro, at the eastern entrance of the Gulf of Fos, about five miles away. They were frantic to complete their mission by sending a message to the task-force commander, and they hoped to find an Army message center to relay their report that Port-de-Bouc was in French hands.

Two teams of bucket brigades bailed out the leaking hulk, but the water gained on them steadily. At midnight the sailors jettisoned the radar and brought up confidential publications in a lead-weighted sack, ready to be heaved over if they had to abandon the boat. The off-duty bucket brigade had to share a few blankets, because the night was chilly.

About an hour after sunrise Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston returned from Carro in a fishing boat, followed by another. That brought the little flotilla to two pilot boats, two fishing boats, and a battered piece of a PT. The two message-bearers had been unable to find an Army radio.

Two of the boats passed lines to the PT to tow it ashore, and the other two went ahead with Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston in the bows, as lookouts for moored mines. They found so many on the road to Port-de-Bouc that the flotilla turned and headed for Carro, on Cape Couronne, instead.

At the Carro dock, the PT settled to the bottom. An abandoned house beside the dock was turned over to the homeless sailors, and the French Underground trotted up five Italian prisoners to do the dirty work of making the place presentable.

Best news in Carro was that the cruiser _Philadelphia_ had just sent an officer ashore with a radio, to send out some news of possible targets along the shore. Lieut. Walker tracked down his colleague, and after bloody travail, finally sent off his message to the task-force commander that Port-de-Bouc was indeed in friendly hands, but that the harbor waters were still acting in a very unfriendly manner indeed.

Walker threw in a little bonus of the fact that 3,000 enemy troops were only a few kilometers away and that the French Underground fighters were afraid they might escape via Martigues. He relayed the resistance officer’s plea for an air strike to break up the escape attempt long enough for American troops to arrive and sweep up the Germans.

Lieut. Walker adds a touching finale to his report:

“I had asked the pastor of the Catholic church at La Couronne, a village 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.”

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: