Part 13

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:

“Three of the planes chose my boat as their target. All our fire was concentrated on the first as it dove for the boat in a gradual sweep, increasing to an angle of about seventy degrees. I maneuvered at high speed, to present a starboard broadside to the oncoming plane. When it was apparent that the plane could not pull out of the dive, I feinted in several directions and then turned hard right rudder under the plane. It struck the water thirty feet off the starboard bow.

“The second plane began its dive. When the pilot committed himself to his final direction, I swung the boat away from the plane’s right bank. The plane hit the water fifty feet away.

“The third plane came in at a seventy-degree dive. After zigzagging rapidly as the plane came down, I swung suddenly at right angles. The plane landed in the water just astern, raising the stern out of the water and showering the 40-mm. gun crew with flame, smoke, debris, and water. All of us were slightly dazed, but there were no injuries and the boat was undamaged.”

Lieut. (jg) Frank A. Tredinnick, in 77, was attacked by a single. He held a steady course and speed until just before impact, and then chopped his throttle. The _kamikaze_ pilot, who had quite properly taken a lead on the speeding boat, crashed ten yards ahead.

Lieut. (jg) Harry Griffin, Jr. swung his 223 hard right just before impact, and his attacker showered the boat with water.

With two planes after him, Lieut. (jg) J. R. Erickson maneuvered at top speed.

“The gunners fired a steady stream of shells into one plane as it came down in a steep dive and crashed fifteen feet off the port bow. The second plane circled until he saw his partner had missed, and he dived on our stern, strafing as he came. The gunners fired on him until he crashed _three feet_ off the starboard bow, spraying the deck with debris and water. One man was blown over the side by the concussion but was rescued uninjured.”

The last plane was shot down by the combined fire of the PTs before it could even pick a target.

That afternoon as 224 and 297 were leaving for the night’s patrol, two planes dropped three bombs but missed. The ships in the bay shot one plane into the water. The other was last seen gliding over the treetops, trailing fire.

On the afternoon of December 17th, three planes came into the bay. One went into a steep dive aimed at Lieut. Commander Almer P. Colvin’s 300. The _kamikaze_ had been studying the failure of his comrades, with their suicidal sacrifice, to inflict any damage on the swift PTs. Lieut. Commander Colvin gave the 300 a last-second twist to the right, but the pilot outsmarted him, anticipated that very move, and crashed into the engine room, splitting the boat in two. The stem sank immediately and the bow burned for eight hours. Lieut. Commander Colvin was seriously wounded, four men were killed, four reported missing, one officer and four men wounded. Only one man aboard escaped without injury.

That night Lieut. Commander N. Burt Davis’ boats carried sealed orders from General MacArthur to a guerrilla hideout on the other side of Mindoro and delivered them to Lieut. Commander George F. Rowe, U. S. Navy liaison officer to the Mindoro Underground. The boats picked up eleven American pilots, who had been rescued and sheltered by the guerrillas, and brought them back to Mindoro.

Some of the Japanese High Command wanted to write Mindoro off as already lost; others wanted to make a massive counterlanding on the north beaches to fight it out at the perimeter defense and push the American airfield off the island. The two groups compromised, and as often happens in a compromise, they sent a boy to do a man’s job.

Admiral Kimura left Indo-China with a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser, and four destroyers, on a mission of bombarding the Mindoro beachhead. It wasn’t much of a naval task force to send into those waters, but as it happens, every American capital ship in the area was at Leyte, too far off to help. The only naval forces handy were the PTs.

The PTs had been up against this very problem before. Twice, at Guadalcanal, they had tangled alone with a bombardment force and a far mightier bombardment force than the one approaching from Indo-China.

“Recall all patrols to assist in the defense of Mindoro,” Lieut. Admiral Kincaid ordered Lieut. Commander Davis.

A patrol line of the nine most seaworthy boats was strung out three miles off the beach. Two more boats, under Lieut. P. A. Swart, had already left to call on the Mindoro guerrillas, but Davis called them back, vectoring them toward the approaching Japanese, with instructions to attack on contact.

Army bombers attacked the Japanese bombardment flotilla all night long (and attacked the patrolling PTs, too, seriously damaging 77 with a near miss and wounding every member of the crew—which was more than the _kamikazes_ had been able to do in days of ferocious attack).

Admiral Kimura bombarded the beach for about thirty minutes. It was a most desultory job, did almost no damage, and caused not a single casualty. He fired three poorly aimed salvos at the PTs and left.

Halfway up the western coast of Mindoro, Admiral Kimura ran into Lieut. Swart’s two PTs, hustling back to get into the scrap. Just after midnight the two boat skippers and the Japanese discovered each other simultaneously. The Japanese illuminated 220 with a searchlight and fired dangerously accurate salvos—the first good shooting that force had done that night.

Lieut. (jg) Harry Griffin, Jr., closed his 223 to 4,000 yards and fired both his starboard fish. Three minutes later a long lance of flame shot up from the ship’s side and she went under the waves.

The next afternoon PTs picked up five Japanese sailors from the water. They were survivors of the brand new destroyer _Kiyoshimo_, victim of Lieut. Griffin’s steady eye.

The worst ordeal of the Mindoro landings was prepared on December 27th, when a resupply convoy shaped up near Dulag on Leyte Island. The convoy led off with 25 LSTs in five columns of five ships; next came three Liberty ships, one Navy tanker, six Army tankers, two aviation gasoline tankers and the PT tender _Orestes_ in five columns at the center of the convoy; last came 23 LCIs in five columns. Nine destroyers formed an outer screen; 29 PTs formed an inner screen on each flank.

Aboard the _Orestes_ was Captain G. F. Mentz, commander of the Diversionary Attack Group of LCIs and PTs which was being moved to Mindoro for mounting amphibious landings behind the Japanese lines.

A Japanese night snooper spotted the convoy about 4 A.M. on December 28th, and at the same time the convoy commander learned that the weather was so bad over Leyte airfields that he could expect no air cover until noon the next day. Unfortunately the weather was fine over the convoy—perfect weather for the _kamikazes_ to draw a bead on the slow ships of the supply train.

In midmorning three planes attacked. The first tried to crash-dive the LCIs and was shot down by LCI 1076. Another overshot the aviation gasoline tanker _Porcupine_, and splashed.

The third _kamikaze_ made perhaps the most spectacular suicide crash of the war. It hit the _John Burke_, a merchant ship loaded with ammunition, and pilot, plane, ship, cargo, and crew disappeared in a blinding flash. A small Army freighter went down with the _John Burke_. The LCI flagship, LCI 624, ran to the rescue, but only two heads bobbed in the water, both survivors of the Army ship, and one of those died almost immediately. All sixty-eight merchant sailors had been vaporized in the explosion.

Another _kamikaze_ hit the merchant ship _William Ahearne_ on the bridge, setting it on fire. The ship was towed back to Leyte. Loss of this ship was a sad blow to the forces ashore at Mindoro, for included in her cargo was a large stock of beer.

Friendly air cover arrived and ran off that particular flight of planes, but the convoy was under almost constant attack that night. In the moonlight, about 7 P.M., a torpedo bomber put a fatal fish into LST 750.

Three LCIs each shot down a plane. Sailors on the LCI flagship had the harrowing experience of hearing a torpedo scrape along the ship’s flat bottom from stem to stem without exploding. Some of the LCIs had surgical units aboard, and many of the wounded were run over to these handy, impromptu hospital ships.

Air attack was incessant, in daylight and dark, and too monotonously similar to recount in detail unless there was scoring.

During the morning of December 30th, three planes were shot down, one by a PT that knocked down its victim as the _kamikaze_ was diving on an escorting destroyer.

The last attack of the morning came just as the convoy was entering the harbor at San Jose. The landing-craft flagship shot down a _kamikaze_ with a short burst of 40 mm.

Inside Mangarin Bay the ships hurried with the stevedoring, because the sailors were eager to leave this unfriendly land. No planes appeared until almost 4 P.M.

Five Japanese dive-bombers pierced the friendly fighter cover and whistled down from 14,000 feet in their suicide dives. One hit the destroyer _Pringle_ and did only light damage. Another hit the aviation gasoline tanker _Porcupine_ with such an impact that its engine went clear through the decks and out the bottom, tearing a large hole in the hull. Seven men were killed and eight wounded. The stern burst into flames, a dangerous development on a ship carrying a tankful of aviation gasoline forward.

The fourth plane dove on the destroyer _Gansevoort_ and crashed it amidships. The main deck was peeled back like the lid of an empty sardine can. The impact cut power lines and set fires, but caused surprisingly light casualties.

The destroyer _Wilson_ came alongside and exercised the fire-fighting crew by putting them aboard the Gansevoort to fight the flames.

The _Gansevoort_ was towed to the PT base. There she was given the bizarre task of torpedoing the burning _Porcupine_ to knock off the blazing stern before the fire reached the gasoline tanks forward. The trick didn’t work, for the blast just spread burning gasoline on the water, endangering the _Gansevoort_ herself and setting new fires, so she had to be towed to a new anchorage. There she was abandoned, but a volunteer crew of a nearby PT boarded the destroyer and put out the fires. _Porcupine_ burned to the waterline.

The most grievous blow of the _kamikaze_ attack, however, was struck at the PT navy.

The fifth Japanese dive bomber dove on the PT tender _Orestes_, was hit by tracers from PTs and LCIs, hit the water and bounced upward into the starboard side of the tender. The plane’s bombs punched through the side and exploded within, blowing many officers and men into the bay. The ship burst into violent flame, and fire mains were ruptured by the blast. Fifty-nine men were killed and 106 seriously wounded.

The waters around the _Orestes_ were teeming with swimming sailors, and PTs bustled about, pulling in the stunned survivors of the blast.

The LCI 624 went alongside and Commander A. V. Jannotta, the LCI flotilla commander, led a volunteer fire-fighting and rescue party aboard the ship, which had become a hell of exploding ammunition and burning aviation gasoline.

Commander Jannotta was awarded a Navy Cross for his heroic salvage work of that afternoon. Captain Mentz had been severely wounded in the _kamikaze_ blast, and his chief of staff, Commander John Kremer, Jr., had been killed, so Commander Jannotta took over as commander of the whole task group. He was given a Silver Star for his performance in that capacity.

Led by Lieut. Commander Davis, many PT sailors went aboard the burning _Orestes_ to pull wounded shipmates out of the fire.

By 9:45 P.M., flames were out on the _Orestes_ and Commander Jannotta lashed an LCI to either side and pushed it up on the beach.

At dusk, PTs and LCIs scattered and hugged the shoreline, to make the worst possible targets for night marauders. The small craft had good reason to be shaken. The five _kamikazes_ had made 100 per cent hits, and any weapon that is 100 per cent effective is a fearsome weapon.

That same night four PTs shot down a plane as they left the bay on patrol.

Early in the morning of New Year’s Day, 1945, bombers came over the base again. One fragmentation bomb killed 11 men and seriously wounded ten others, most of them survivors of the _Orestes_.

The _kamikazes_ were not through with the Mindoro shipping. On the afternoon of January 4th, PTs 78 and 81 set fire to one of four enemy fighters that flew over the bay. Trailing smoke and flame, the plane glided into the side of the ammunition ship _Lewis Dyche_, anchored a quarter mile from the two PTs.

The ship exploded with a roar, taking her 71 merchant sailors to the bottom with her and lifting the PTs out of the water. The concussion badly damaged the boat hulls; two PT sailors were killed and ten men wounded by the blast and falling debris. It was the last visit of the _kamikazes_ to Mindoro, but a spectacular one.

As Commander Jannotta said in his report: “This new weapon employed by the enemy—the suicide diver or human torpedo—constitutes a serious threat to naval forces and to shipping.”

The Mindoro PTs won a Navy Unit Commendation which read:

As the only naval force present after retirement of the invasion convoy, this task unit served as the major obstruction to enemy counterlandings from nearby Luzon, Panay, and Palawan, and bore the brunt of concentrated hostile air attacks through a five-day period, providing the only antiaircraft protection available for persons ashore. The gallant officers and men ... maintained a vigilant watch by night and stood out into the open waters close to base by day to fight off repeated Japanese bombing, strafing, and suicide attacks, expending in three days the ammunition which had been expected to last approximately three weeks in the destruction or damaging of a large percentage of attacking planes.

When fighter planes began to fly in Mindoro, Americans went ashore on Luzon. Some hard fighting remained, but the war was nearing the end.

The last two PTs lost in the war were, sadly enough, victims of their own mates.

During the landings at Nasugbu, in western Luzon, on the night of January 31st, ships of the screen were attacked by twenty or more Japanese midget submarines. One of the little craft sank the PC 1129. Immediately afterward the destroyer escort _Lough_ attacked a swarm of thirty or more _kamikaze_ explosive boats. Naturally the screen vessels were nervous about small vessels in those waters.

On the following night, Lieut. John H. Stillman set out to hunt the suicide flotillas with PTs 77 and 79. (The 77 had already been treated roughly by friendlies; it was the boat damaged by American Army bombers during the repulse of Admiral Kimura’s bombardment flotilla.)

Lieut. Stillman’s orders were to stay south of Talim Point, because the American destroyers were patrolling north of there. While the PTs were still three miles south of Talim Point—well within their assigned area—they ran into the destroyer escort _Lough_, the same ship that had shot up the explosive boats the night before, and the destroyer _Conyngham_.

The _Lough_ fired starshells and the PTs fled south at high speed, trying to identify themselves by radio and signal light. The destroyers meanwhile were trying to raise the boats by radio but failed. They did not see the PT light signals.

The PTs still might have escaped, but hard luck 77 picked that evil moment to run aground. A shell from _Lough_ hit her, blowing the crew into the water. The _Lough_ shifted fire to 79, and hit her on the portside. The boat exploded and sank, carrying down with her the skipper, Lieut. (jg) Michael A. Haughian, Joseph E. Klesh, MoMM1c, and Vincent A. Berra, QM3c.

The 30 survivors of the two boats, swimming in the light of the burning 77, assembled and held a muster. Besides the three dead on the 79, Lieut. Stillman was missing. He was never seen again.

The shipwrecked sailors swam together to an enemy-held shore two miles away. Guerrillas sheltered them until February 3rd, when they were picked up by PTs 227 and 230.

On March 2, 1945, just two weeks short of three years after he left the Rock on Lieut. Bulkeley’s PT, General MacArthur landed on recaptured Corregidor. Finally, he had returned. And he returned the same way he had left—by PT 373.

In the last days of the war, the PTs fought the familiar kind of mop-up action against bypassed pockets of Japanese troops that they had been fighting for three years in the Pacific. Nightly patrols fought minor actions, but targets became harder and harder to find. When the war ended on August 14, 1945, the Japanese came out of the woods and the PTs learned for the first time the tremendous enemy power they had kept bottled up far from the fighting front.

At Halmahera, for instance, six PTs picked up Lieut. General Ishii, Commanding General of the army forces there, and Captain Fujita, Naval Commander, and took them to 93rd Division headquarters on Morotai, where they surrendered 37,000 troops, 4,000 Japanese civilians, 19,000 rifles, 900 cannon, 600 machine guns, and a mountain of miscellaneous supplies.

For almost a year the PTs of Morotai—down to two understaffed squadrons at the end—had held at bay a Japanese force powerful enough, in the days of Japanese glory, to conquer whole nations and to hold vast stretches of conquered lands in iron control.

The Japanese themselves paid the top tribute to the PT fleet. “The enemy has used PT boats aggressively,” one of their tactical publications read, “On their account our naval ships have had many a bitter pill to swallow.”

So much for the past of the torpedo boat. What about its future?