Part 2

At the PT base in Tulagi, Lieut. Commander Montgomery was awakened by the din across the way. He knew that no destroyer force could make that kind of uproar. The earth-shaking cannonading meant that the big boys were shooting up Guadalcanal, blithely assuming that the U. S. Navy was not present.

But it was. Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three was on the scene and waiting for just such a target.

Montgomery called in his four young skippers—Lieuts. (jg) Henry S. (Stilly) Taylor of PT 46, Robert C. Wark of PT 48, John M. Searles of PT 60, and his brother Robert Searles of PT 38.

At two o’clock in the morning of October 14th, Commander Montgomery ordered: “Prepare for action. All boats under way immediately.”

It was the first combat order given to PT boats since the debacle in the Philippines.

The PTs left the harbor together but scattered quickly. They had all spotted the Japanese bombardment fleet by the orange flashes of its guns, and they lost each other in the darkness as they deployed to attack.

Somebody on a Japanese cruiser must have been at least mildly nervous, for a searchlight came on, swept the water toward Tulagi, zipped right across Bob Searles in 38, and then went black. Searles stretched his luck; he cut his speed to 10 knots and began a slow stalk of the cruiser that had muffed its chance to sound the alarm.

So cocky were the Japanese that the cruiser was almost dead in the water; even at 10 knots, the 38 closed the range from behind.

Bob Searles greased the 38 along the still waters of the sound, holding his breath and dreading to see the glare of that searchlight again. He could see the target clearly silhouetted in the gun flashes, and it was a brute—a light cruiser, Bob thought, judging from its shape, its size, and the roar of its guns. Searles figured that he would probably be the first and only PT skipper to enjoy the carefully preserved surprise that the PT sailors hoped would bag them a big one—so he had to make his first shot good or waste the chance they had all been hoarding.

A torpedo, like any other weapon that has to be aimed, is more likely to hit the closer you get to your target before you shoot. So Bob went in to 400 yards in stealthy silence. Four hundred yards in a naval battle is the equivalent of arm’s length in an infantry fire fight. At 400 yards, a spread of torpedoes will usually score, but the machine guns and autocannon of a cruiser’s secondary battery, guided by a searchlight, will almost certainly tear up a torpedo boat. Searles, just to be sure of a hit, was doing the same thing as a commando would do if, armed with a high-powered rifle, he crept to within five feet of a sentry armed with a sawed-off shotgun. At any range that rifle is a deadly weapon—like a torpedo—but at close range the shotgun is just as deadly and ten times surer of hitting with the first shot.

At 400 yards Bob fired two fish. He chased along behind them to 200-yard range—almost rock-throwing range—and fired his last two torpedoes. The instant he felt the boat jump from those shots, he poured on the coal and roared past the cruiser, 100 yards astern. As they went by, all hands topside on the PT felt the scorching blast of a double explosion forward of the cruiser’s bridge.

The surprise was over. From here on the whole Japanese task force would be alarmed and shooting back—but that big boy the PT sailors had been after was in the bag. The 38’s crew was sure of it. Searles had the good sense not to hang around the hornet’s nest he had stirred up. His torpedoes were gone anyhow, so he lit out for home, convinced that he had scored the first PT victory of the comeback trail.

The other PTs had scattered, looking for other targets in the dark. There were plenty of targets, for they had penetrated the destroyer screen, without either side knowing it, and were in the heart of the Japanese formation. After the blast from the 38’s torpedo attack on the cruiser, the PTs themselves were as much targets as they were hunters.

Lieut. Commander Montgomery, riding with John Searles on the 60, was stalking a big ship—possibly the same cruiser Bob Searles had already attacked—but the escorting destroyers were roiled up and rallying around.

A searchlight poked about the water, looking for the 60 which had probably been dimly spotted by a lookout. The searchlight never found the 60, but it did silhouette the PT for another destroyer. Japanese shells from the second destroyer screamed over the PT, but Montgomery held steadily to his attack course on the cruiser—or whatever it was—until two of the 60’s fish were off and running.

John Searles spun the rudder over hard left and shoved the throttles up to the stops. Smoke poured from the generator on the stern, to cover their escape, and so the crew of the 60 didn’t see the end of the torpedo run, but it claimed a hit, anyhow, from the sound of a massive explosion.

If it was a torpedo hit and if the hit was on the same cruiser Bob Searles said he hit, that cruiser was in sad shape. Not so the destroyers. They were full of fight and boring in on the 60.

Smoke makes a fine screen for covering escape, but only for a time. After the initial escape is successful, a continuing smoke cloud only marks the course of the fleeing PT boat, just as a tracer’s phosphorescent trail tracks a bullet through the night. So Montgomery shut off the smoke when he thought they were free, but he had waited a moment too long.

Just as the smoke-screen generator hissed to a halt, a destroyer pinned the 60 down in the blue glare of a searchlight and a salvo of Japanese shells, landing 20 feet astern, almost lifted the 60 out of the water.

The Japanese destroyer captain did not know it, probably still doesn’t know it if he is even alive, but when he turned his light on the 60, he simultaneously lost the chance to sink one PT boat by ramming and just possibly saved his own ship from being sunk by still another PT.

Robert Wark’s 48 was sneaking up on the destroyer in a torpedo attack on one side; Henry Taylor’s 46 was roaring across the water, looking for targets on the other side, quite unaware that the destroyer was in its path. When the searchlight glare hit the 60, Taylor saw the Japanese ship dead ahead and put the rudder of the 46 over hard. He barely missed a collision with the can, a collision that would have reduced his little warship to a floating carpet of matchsticks. But, in skimming by the destroyer, Taylor almost rammed Wark’s 48 and spoiled its torpedo attack. Wark lost contact with the destroyer in the wild careering around the sound that followed the double near-collision, and he didn’t get off his torpedoes.

The whole time the Japanese captain was so intent on sinking the 60, pinned down by his searchlight, he apparently missed the near-collisions right under his nose. His shells were creeping up the wake of the fleeting 60 and he doggedly plowed into the stream of 50-caliber bullets from the PT antiaircraft machine-gun battery, willing to take the punishment in exchange for a chance to run the torpedo boat down.

Lieut. Commander Montgomery turned on the smoke generator again and had the inspiration to drop two depth charges into his wake. The charges exploded just ahead of the Japanese destroyer, and the Japanese skipper shied away from the chase, fearful that the closer he got to the PT boat, the more likely he was to be blown in two by a depth charge right under the bridge. The 60 escaped in the smoke, lay close to the beach for the rest of that night, and drifted aground on a coral reef near morning.

Wark, who had picked up his original target again, was still trying to shoot a fish into the destroyer that had abandoned the chase of the 60. Wark did not know it, but he was himself being stalked. From 200 yards away, a Japanese destroyer caught the 48 in a searchlight beam and fired all the guns that would bear.

A searchlight beam is a two-edged tool. It helps the aim of the gunners on the destroyer; at the same time it makes a beautiful mark for the PT’s machine guns. C. E. Todd, the ship’s cook, pumped 50-caliber bullets into the destroyer’s bridge and superstructure until the light was shattered. The destroyer disappeared and nobody knows what damage it suffered, but it is highly improbable that it could be raked by 50-caliber fire from 200 yards away without serious damage and casualties.

The 48’s skipper could say: “He never laid a glove on me.”

Aboard the Japanese flagship, the admiral, apparently alarmed by unexpected naval resistance no matter how puny, ordered a cease fire and a withdrawal. Eighty minutes of shellfire had left Henderson Field in a shambles anyhow. Forever after, Guadalcanal veterans of the night between October 13 and 14, 1942, talked about The Bombardment—not the bombardment of this date or the bombardment of that date. Simply The Bombardment. Everybody knew which one they meant.

What had the PTs accomplished on their first sortie? Bob and John Searles claimed solid hits on a cruiser. Postwar assessment of claims says that there is “no conclusive evidence that any major Japanese ship was sunk” on that night. But the next day a coast watcher reported that natives had seen a large warship sink off the New Georgia coast, to the north on the withdrawal route. Radio Tokyo itself acknowledged the loss of a cruiser that night under the attack of “nineteen torpedo boats of which we destroyed fourteen.”

That last bit—public admission by the Japanese of the loss of a cruiser to a PT—is the most convincing. The Japanese played down their own losses ridiculously. Sometimes they even believed their own propaganda, so much so that they deployed for battle forces which had been destroyed but whose loss they had never admitted, even to themselves.

A curious incident during the almost nightly naval bombardments of Henderson Field shows the Japanese sailor’s fatal desire to believe his own propaganda. Eight Japanese destroyers and a light cruiser bombarded the field the night of October 25, 1942. They sank two small ships, but they called off the shore bombardment after only a feeble effort.

The reason?

A Japanese officer ashore had sent a message: BANZAI. OCCUPIED AIRFIELD AT 2300.

He had done no such thing. Indeed, the very planes spared by that spurious message sank the cruiser the next morning.

Perhaps a more important result of the first PT foray than the hit on a cruiser was the shock to the Japanese nervous system. The Japanese navy had an inordinate horror of torpedo boats—possibly because the Japanese themselves were so diabolically good at surface torpedo attack. The knowledge that American torpedo boats were back on the scene must have been a jolt to their sensitivities.

Nobody can prove that the Japanese admiral called off the bombardment because of the torpedo attacks—after all, he had already shot up Henderson Field for eighty minutes and had expended almost all his special bombardment ammunition—but it is a remarkable coincidence that the shooting stopped almost immediately after the PTs arrived, and the withdrawal followed soon after the torpedoes started swimming around.

Half an hour after their sortie from Tulagi, the PTs saw a vast armada of Japanese ships turn tail and leave the field to them.

The Marines didn’t quibble. They crawled out of their foxholes, those who could, and thanked God for whoever had run off the 14-inchers. Henderson Field had survived, but barely, and the Marines were willing to give anybody credit for running off the battleships, if whoever it was would just keep them off. The PTs were willing to try.

The night between October 14th and 15th was the low point of the Navy’s contribution to the Guadalcanal campaign. Two Japanese cruisers insolently pounded Henderson Field with 752 eight-inch shells, and the Navy could not lift a finger to stop them. The only Navy fighting ships in the area were the four PTs of Squadron Three, but the 60 was still aground on a reef, the 38 had left all of its torpedoes inside a Japanese cruiser the night before, and the other two PTs were escorting two little supply ships across the channel between Tulagi and Guadalcanal. The cruisers had a field day.

The next night two Japanese cruisers fired 1,500 punishing eight-inch shells at Henderson Field.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, in Washington, after studying the battle report, could say only: “Everybody _hopes_ we can hang on.”

Admiral Chester Nimitz was even more grim. “It now appears that we are unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.”

Perhaps the PTs had arrived too late to do any good. Certainly a navy that consisted of three torpedo boats afloat and one on a reef was not going to win the battle for Guadalcanal.

The Japanese, beginning on November 2nd, spent a week running destroyer and cruiser deckloads of soldiers down The Slot—65 destroyer deckloads and two cruiser loads in all.

On November 8th, PTs hit the destroyer _Mochizuki_ but did not sink it.

This kind of reinforcement by dribbles was not fast enough to satisfy the Japanese brass, so they planned to stop sending a boy to do a man’s job. At Truk, they organized a mighty task force of two light carriers, four battleships, 11 cruisers and 36 destroyers to escort 11 fast transports to Guadalcanal on November 14th.

Before risking the transports, jammed with soldiers to be landed at Tassafaronga, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson Field for two straight nights to eliminate once and for all the dangerous Marine airplanes based there.

The climactic sea struggle for Guadalcanal began on the night of November 12, 1942.

American scouting planes and Allied coast watchers sent word that a frighteningly powerful bombardment force was on its way down The Slot, and the most optimistic defenders of Guadalcanal wondered if this was going to be the end. Two Japanese battleships, the _Hiei_ and the _Kirishima_, a cruiser, and fourteen destroyers were in the Japanese fleet. (The Japanese had learned to fear the PT boats of Tulagi; the fleet commander had posted two destroyers on one advanced flank and three destroyers on the other, as a torpedo-boat screen. In addition, he had assigned three other destroyers, not counted among the 14 under his direct command, to rove ahead on an anti-PT patrol.)

In a swirling, half-hour action on Friday, November 13th—the opening of the three-day naval Battle of Guadalcanal—the United States Navy lost the cruiser _Atlanta_, the destroyers _Barton_, _Cushing_, _Laffey_, and _Monssen_, and suffered severe damage to the cruisers _Portland_, _San Francisco_, _Helena_, _Juneau_, and to three destroyers. Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan was killed.

Limping home after the battle, the cruiser _Juneau_ was torpedoed by the submarine I-26 (whose skipper admits that he was aiming at another ship entirely). The _Juneau_ disappeared in a blast of smoke and flame. In one of the most tragic and inexplicable misadventures of the war, the survivors of the _Juneau_, floating within easy reach of the PTs at Tulagi, were abandoned, and no attempt was made to rescue them until all but a handful had died of exposure.

It is possible that the PTs—excellent rescue craft manned by sailors eager to help stricken shipmates—were so new to the theatre that the top brass didn’t even know of their presence, or at least weren’t in the habit of thinking about them. At any rate, the PTs were tied up at Tulagi while American sailors drowned almost within sight of the harbor.

On the night between November 13th and 14th, two Japanese heavy cruisers, screened by a light cruiser and four destroyers, steamed toward Guadalcanal with another load of bombardment shells.

The situation on Guadalcanal was grave. The base was crammed with the sick and weary survivors of the naval battle. The veteran defenders knew another punishing flotilla was on its way with possibly the final, fatal load of fragmentation shells aboard—and there were no big American ships near enough to say them nay.

The United States Navy had almost shot its bolt, at least temporarily. Almost but not quite.

Two PTs were still in the fight.

One, commanded by Stilly Taylor, and another, commanded by John Searles, had been screening the heavy cruiser _Portland_, which had been badly damaged in the previous night’s battle and was being towed to Tulagi.

Stilly Taylor tells what happened in one of the most momentously important torpedo-boat adventures of the Pacific War:

“The Japs began to shell Henderson Field, first putting a very bright flare in the vicinity of the field, and so naturally both of us [the two PTs] started in on them independently....

“As soon as the Japs opened fire it was obvious to us that there was at least one fairly heavy ship. We thought it was probably a battleship.... We could tell it was definitely a heavy ship because of the long orange flash from its gunfire rather than the short white flash which we knew from experience was the smaller fire of the destroyers....

“Due to the light put up by the Nip flares, I was able to use my director for the first time. I set the target’s speed at about 20 knots, and I think he was doing slightly more than this. I kept him in the director for approximately seven of his salvos and really had a beautiful line on him. [PT boats usually were forced, by bad visibility at night and in bad weather, to shoot from the hip. A chance to use a director for visually aimed fire was an unaccustomed luxury well worth gloating over in an action report.]

“After closing to about 1,000 yards, I decided that if we went in any farther we would get tangled up in the destroyer screen which I knew would be surrounding him at about 500 to 700 yards.

“I therefore fired three fish. The fourth misfired and never left the tube. The three fish landed beautifully and made no flash as we fired them.

“We immediately turned around and started back for the base, but we had the torpedoes running hot and straight toward the target.

“I am positive that at least one of them found its mark.

“_Certainly the Nips ceased fire immediately and apparently turned right around and limped home._”

Nobody knows what damage these two PTs did that night. Planes the next day found a badly damaged cruiser leaving the scene, and that could well have been Taylor’s victim. At any rate, the material damage inflicted by these two brave seamen and their crews is comparatively unimportant.

What is important is the almost incredible but quite possible fact that the two cockleshells ran off a horribly dangerous Japanese surface fleet prepared to give Henderson Field what might well have been its death blow. As soon as the torpedo boats attacked, the Japanese stopped shooting and ran.

It is not hard to understand why. The American fleet had been badly battered during the previous night’s battle, but so had the Japanese fleet, and Japanese nerves were probably raw and jumpy.

The two PTs achieved complete surprise, and a surprise attack in restricted waters is always unsettling to naval officers, even the most cocksure and well rested. The Japanese could not be sure exactly who was attacking and in what force. They could have had only a dim idea of what damage they had done to the American Navy the night before, and, for all they knew, the torpedo tracks they saw came from a dangerous destroyer flotilla, backed up by who knows how many mighty ships of the line.

With their nerves shaken by the suddenness of the torpedo attack and with no knowledge of what was prowling around out there in the dark, it apparently seemed best to the Japanese commanders to abandon the bombardment quickly and save their ships for another day.

The two glorified cabin cruisers had driven off the Japanese task force when only three planes had been destroyed and 17 damaged (all the damaged planes were in the air before the end of the next day), and Henderson Field was still in action. The next day, November 14th, a smoothly functioning Henderson Field was host not only to the Marine planes permanently based there but also to Navy planes from the carrier _Enterprise_ which landed at Henderson for refueling during shuttle trips to attack 11 fast Japanese transports coming down The Slot.

All-day attacks on November 14th, by the Marine, Navy, and Army planes, saved from destruction by the two PT boats, sank seven of the transports and worked a hideous massacre among the Japanese soldiers on their decks and in their holds. Four of the transports and 11 destroyers survived and at sunset were sailing for the Japanese beach-head of Tassafaronga Point. The destroyers carried deckloads of survivors from the sunken transports.

The destroyer commander was Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, perhaps the most brilliant combat officer of the Japanese navy. He repeatedly showed a fantastic devotion to duty that enabled him to carry out his missions in spite of seemingly impossible difficulties. Tanaka _was_ the Tokyo Express.

To give Tanaka a little help with the disembarkation of the troops at Guadalcanal, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson during the landings as a diversion—and just possibly as a _coup de grâce_ to further American air resistance. They sent a battleship, two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and nine destroyers to do the job. This time the light cruisers and destroyers were deployed in a formidable anti-torpedo-boat screen to prevent a recurrence of the previous night’s spooking from a measly two-boat PT raid.

The Japanese had lost their chance, however, for much more American naval power than a brace of torpedo boats stood between the Japanese and Henderson Field. Admiral W. A. Lee, on the battleship _Washington_, had arrived from the south, accompanied by the battleship _South Dakota_ and four destroyers. He sailed north to meet the Japanese across Iron Bottom Bay (so called because the bottom was littered with the hulks of Japanese and American ships sunk in earlier battles. There were so many hulls on the ocean’s floor that quartermasters reported to their skippers that magnetic compasses were deflected by the scrap iron).

The American admiral—known to his intimates as “Ching” Lee—had a bad moment when he overheard two PTs gossiping about his battleships over the voice radio.

“There go two big ones, but I don’t know whose they are,” said one PT skipper.

Admiral Lee grabbed the microphone and quickly identified himself to shore headquarters before the PTs could get off a nervous shot.

“Refer your big boss about Ching Lee; Chinese, catchee? Call off your boys.”

The PT skippers answered, with good humor, that they were well acquainted with old “Ching” and promised not to go after him.

The PT crews watched Admiral Lee sail into the decisive last action of the three-day Battle of Guadalcanal. That night his ships sank the Japanese battleship and routed the Japanese bombardment fleet. But the mixed transport and destroyer reinforcement flotilla was taken, nevertheless, by the stubborn and wily Admiral Tanaka, around the action and to the beach at Tassafaronga where he carried out his reinforcement mission almost literally “come hell or high water.”

The Japanese had made a mighty effort, but American fliers, sailors, and PT boatmen had spoiled the assault. The only profit to the Japanese from the bloody three days was the landing of 2,000 badly shaken soldiers, 260 cases of ammunition, and 1,500 bags of rice.