Part 4

Ensign Lynch’s torpedoing of the submarine—the first combat victory of the PT fleet in New Guinea waters—was a spectacular triumph, but the sinking of two barges was much more typical of the action to come.

The terrible attrition of ships in the Guadalcanal fight had left the Japanese short of sea transport. Besides, Allied airmen made the sea approaches to New Guinea a dangerous place for surface craft in daylight. Nevertheless, the Japanese had to find some way to supply their New Guinea beachheads by sea or give them up, so they began a crash program of barge construction.

The barges were of many types, but the most formidable was the _daihatsu_, a steel or wooden barge, diesel powered, armored, heavily armed with machine guns or even with automatic light cannon. They could not be torpedoed, because their draft was so shallow that a torpedo would pass harmlessly under their hulls. They could soak up enormous amounts of machine-gun fire and could strike back with their own automatic weapons and the weapons of soldier passengers. A single _daihatsu_ could be a dangerous target for a PT. A fleet of _daihatsus_, giving each other mutual fire support, could well be too much to handle even for a brace of coordinated PTs.

The naval war around New Guinea became a nightly brawl between _daihatsu_ and PT, and the torpedo function of the PT shriveled. Eventually many of the boats abandoned their torpedo tubes entirely and placed them with 37-mm. and 40-mm. cannon and extra 50-caliber machine guns, fine weapons for punching through a _daihatsu’s_ armor. The PT in New Guinea gradually changed its main armament from the torpedo—a sledge-hammer type of weapon for battering heavy warships—to the multiple autocannon—a buzz-saw type of weapon for slicing up small craft.

At the Buna-Gona-Sanananda battlefield, the Japanese were dying of starvation. It was the story of Guadalcanal again—with supply from the sea cut off by aggressive American patrols, the emperor’s infantry—no matter how desperately brave—could not stand up to a long campaign.

The night between January 17th and 18th, the _Roaring Twenty_ (PT 120) caught three barges trying to slip out of Sanananda. The PT recklessly took on all three in a machine-gun duel, sank two of them, and set the third afire. PT sailors were the first to know that the end had come for the Japanese ashore, because the barges were loaded with Japanese officers trying to slip away from their doomed men. Next day Sanananda fell to the Australians.

When both the base at Sanananda, on the turkey’s tail, and Guadalcanal fell to the Allies in the first months of 1943, the Japanese tried to slam an impenetrable gate across the path of the Allied advance. The eastern hinge of the gate was to be the mighty naval base and airfield complex at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain. The western hinge was planned for the place where the turkey’s tail joins the turkey’s back, an indentation of the New Guinea coastline called Huon Gulf.

To build up the western hinge of the gate, the Japanese landed at the ports of Lae, Salamaua, and Finschhafen, on the Huon Gulf. The Japanese wanted Huon Gulf so badly that they even dared send a fleet of surface transports to ferry 6,900 reinforcements across the Bismarck Sea to New Guinea. The convoy run was daring, because it would be within reach of land-based Allied bombers almost the whole way.

Escorting the eight transports were eight destroyers, veterans of the Tokyo Express. Tanaka, however, was no longer with them. He had been relieved of his command for telling the high navy brass in Tokyo some unpleasant truths. He spent the rest of the war on the beach as a penalty for speaking up about mistakes made at Guadalcanal.

The Japanese convoy sailed from Rabaul, at the eastern hinge of the gate, on March 1st, under cover of a terrible storm which the ships’ captains hoped would ground Allied bombers. On March 3rd the storm lifted unexpectedly. The seasick soldiers felt slightly less miserable.

In Japan March 3rd is Doll’s Day, a sentimental family holiday when little Japanese girls dress up their dolls and parade them about the streets under the fond eyes of admiring fathers. Many of the soldiers were depressed at being on such a martial mission on Doll’s Day, so their officers passed out candy as a little touch of holiday. The officers did not tell the soldiers that the lifting of the storm had been a disaster, that an Allied snooper had already spotted the convoy, and that Allied bombers were almost surely on the way.

Worse was on the way than ordinary bombers.

Back in Australia, the American bomber force had been working on a new dirty trick, and bomber pilots were eager to try it on the transports crowded with candy-munching soldiers.

Mechanics had torn out all the bombardier equipment from the nose of B 25 attack bombers and had mounted eight 50-caliber machine guns. Under each B 25 they had slung two 500-pound bombs armed with five-second delay fuses. The idea was to make a low-level bombing run, so as to skip the bombs across the water like flat stones. The delayed-action fuses were to keep the bombs from detonating until they had slammed into the ships’ sides. When the snooper reported the convoy, it sounded to Allied bomber pilots like the perfect target for testing the new weapon.

While fighters and high-level bombers kept the Japanese convoy occupied, the converted B 25s came at the Japanese so low that the blast of their propellers churned the sea. The Japanese skippers thought they were torpedo bombers—which they were, in a sense—and turned into the attack, to present the narrowest possible target, a wise maneuver ordinarily, but this also made the ships the best possible targets for the long, thin pattern of the machine-gun ripsaws mounted in the bombers’ noses. The ships were ripped from stem to gudgeon by the strafing runs. Then, when the pilots were sure the antiaircraft gun crews had been sawed to shreds, the low-flying B 25s charged at the ships broadside and released the skip bombs, which caved in hull plates at the waterlines and let in fatal doses of sea water. It was almost impossible to miss with a skip bomb. By nightfall the Bismarck Sea was dotted with rafts, lifeboats, and swimmers clinging to the debris of sunken ships. Only darkness stopped the slaughter from the air.

After that sunset, however, the slaughter from the sea became more grisly than ever. Eight PTs from New Guinea, under Lieut. Commander Barry K. Atkins, fought their way to the battle zone through the heavy seas in the wake of the storm which had so treacherously deserted the Japanese convoy.

Just before midnight they spotted the burning transport _Oigawa Maru_. PT 143 and PT 150 each fired a torpedo and blew the transport out of the water. The PT sailors searched all night but could find no other targets—largely because almost all of them were already on the floor of the Bismarck Sea.

When the sun came up they had targets enough, but of a most distasteful kind. The sea was swarming with Japanese survivors, and it was the unhappy duty of the PTs to try to kill them to the last man, so that they could not get ashore on nearby New Guinea.

On March 5th the same two PTs that had sunk the _Oigawa Maru_ jumped a Japanese submarine picking up survivors from three boats. The PTs charged, firing torpedoes, but they missed the crash-diving submarine. Then they were presented with the hideous problem of what to do with the 100 helpless soldiers who watched fearfully from the three boats. The Japanese would not surrender, and they could not be allowed to escape.

The two PTs turned on the machine guns and set about the grim butchery of the unhappy Japanese. When the execution was over, they sank the three blood-drenched boats with a shallow pattern of depth charges.

Scout planes conned other PTs to lifeboats and rafts crammed with Japanese. More than 3,000 soldiers died, but so thick were the survivors that several hundred managed to swim ashore despite the best vigilance of the small-craft navy. The natives of New Guinea, who had long chafed against the Australian law forbidding head-hunting, were unleashed by the authorities and had a field day tracking down the few Japanese who made it to the beach.

Eighteen Japanese made an astonishing 400-mile voyage through PT-patrolled waters to a tiny island in the Trobriand group. They were captured by the crew of PT 114 in a pioneer landing party operation of the PT fleet.

The skip bombers of the American Air Force had sunk four destroyers and eight transports, killed 3,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors, and shot down 30 planes. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was a smashing blow to the Japanese, and they never again risked a surface transport near eastern New Guinea (except for a one-night run of four destroyers in a feeble and abortive attempt to set up a spurline of the Tokyo Express.)

The American Navy had an official torpedo-boat doctrine, of course, and PT officers were well drilled in the proper manner of delivering torpedoes in combat before they left the States, but this night-prowling business against torpedo-proof barges called for new torpedo-boat tactics.

Lieuts. (jg) Skipper Dean in PT 114, and Francis H. McAdoo, Jr., in PT 129, tried the still-hunt methods of Mississippi, where sportsmen hide themselves beside a known game trail and let the stag walk right up to his death. On the night between March 15th and 16th, the two PTs set up an ambush in a known barge rendezvous. They slipped into Mai-Ama Bay, a tiny inlet on the Huon Gulf shoreline, which they suspected was a Japanese barge terminal, and there they cut their engines and waited. As usual, it was raining and visibility was virtually zero.

The current persisted in setting the boats toward the gulf, so the 114 dropped anchor. Lieut. McAdoo found that he was too restless for a still hunt, so he oozed the 129 back into the gulf on one engine, to see if any barges were unloading south of the entrance to the bay.

The PT sailors didn’t know it, but six Japanese barges had arrived before them and were unloading all around in the darkness. Two of the drifting barges, already unloaded and idling about the bay until time to form up for the return trip, bumped into the side of the 114. To the PT sailors it was as though a clammy hand had touched them in a haunted house. They were galvanized.

Silence and stealth were second nature to them, however, so they moved quietly to battle stations. The Japanese on the barges, happily assuming that the PT was another Japanese ship, chattered amiably among themselves.

Machine-gunners on the PT strained to depress their 50-caliber mounts, but the barges were too close. Sailors quietly cocked submachine guns instead.

At the skipper’s signal, with blazing Tommy guns, the crew hosed down the decks of the two _daihatsus_ that were holding the PT in their embarrassingly close embrace. The PT anchor was snagged to the bottom, so a sailor parted the line with an ax, and the PT tried to put a little distance between itself and the Japanese.

The aft 50 calibers sank one barge, but the other caught under the bow of the PT and plugged its escape route. Skipper Dean solved the problem by shoving the throttles up to the stops and riding over the barge, which swamped and sank under the PT’s weight.

The 114, once free from the two _daihatsus_, turned back into the inlet with guns roaring. The 129 came running, and the two PTs mopped up the rest of the six-barge convoy.

The Australian army had taken on the job of throwing the Japanese out of the three Huon Gulf villages that formed the western hinge of the Japanese gate. They were doing as well as could be expected with the nasty job of fighting in the filthy jungles of New Guinea, but they were having supply problems almost as serious as those of the blockaded Japanese. The Allies had no beachhead near the Australians, and supplies, in miserly quantities, had to be flown to a jungle airstrip and packed to the troops by native bearers.

The PT fleet in New Guinea had become so sophisticated by this time that it had acquired a formal organization and an over-all commander, a former submarine skipper named Morton Mumma. Aboard one of his PTs, Commander Mumma had gone poking about the little-known shoreline around the Huon Gulf (Mort Bay was named for him, because he first explored it), and he had found a fine landing beach at Nassau Bay. The beach was right under the nose of the Japanese garrison at Salamaua, it’s true, but it was also temptingly handy to the Australian lines.

On the last day of June, 1943, three PTs packed a company of riflemen on their deck. With 36 small Army landing boats, the PTs sortied into a foul sea, lashed by high winds and rain. Total naval escort for the amphibious armada was PT 168, which presumably was in better fighting trim than the others, because it carried no seasick passengers. PT 168 promptly lost its convoy in the storm.

_The Flying Shamrock_ (PT 142) missed the landing beach at Nassau Bay and did a countermarch. In the rain and darkness, the _Shamrock_ beat the astronomical odds against such an accident by ramming the tiny PT 143, to the alarm of the miserable foot soldiers on both boats.

The Army landing craft scattered in the storm, and the two PTs had to round them up and guide them to the beach, where several broached in the high surf and were abandoned. Short of landing craft to put their own sea-weary passengers ashore, the PTs had to carry them back to the staging area.

Despite the less than 100 per cent efficiency of the operation, the few American soldiers who had reached the beach threw the Japanese garrison into a panic. A lucky bomb hit had killed their able commander, and without his support the 300 Japanese assigned to guard Nassau Bay broke and fled before the insignificant Allied invasion force.

Puny as they were, the landings at Nassau Bay threw the Japanese high command into a flap. They saw clearly, possibly even more clearly than the Allies, that the Nassau Bay beachhead was going to unhinge the whole Japanese gate across the Allied path. The landings also paid an unexpected bonus far to the east, where American soldiers were landing on Rendova Island, as part of the island-hopping advance up the central Solomons toward the eastern hinge of the Japanese gate. The Japanese at Rabaul were so alarmed by the minuscule PT operation at Nassau Bay that they jammed their own radio circuits with alarms and outcries. The Japanese at Rendova couldn’t get anybody to listen to their anguished cries for help, and the American troops went ashore with almost no air opposition.

Ashore on Huon Gulf, the Australians still had the uncomfortable job of convincing the stubborn Japanese foot soldiers that they were doomed, and previously the only way to convince them had been to kill them by bullets or starvation. The PTs tightened the blockade by night.

Just before the end at Finschhafen, when the Japanese were getting ready to give up the Huon Gulf, barge traffic increased. It was the same story as the earlier abandonment of Buna, Gona, and Sanananda. The Japanese were slipping out by night.

On the night between August 28th and 29th, two PTs patrolled off Finschhafen. Ensign Herbert P. Knight was skipper of the 152; Lieut. (jg) John L. Carey was skipper of _The Flying Shamrock_ (PT 142). Riding the _Shamrock_, in command of the operation, was a most distinguished PT sailor, Lieut. John Bulkeley, rescuer of MacArthur, back from his tour in the United States as the number one naval hero of the Philippines campaign.

Lookouts spotted three barges, and one went down under the first attack by the two PT boats, but the other two were still afloat after the third firing run. Ensign Knight dropped depth charges alongside, but the barges rode out the blast and were still afloat when the geysers of sea water settled. Lieut. Carey made a depth-charge run and blew one of the barges apart, but the other still survived.

Aboard the _Shamrock_, Bulkeley decided to finish the job in the old-fashioned way—by hand.

For the first time in this century, with a cry of “Boarders away,” a U. S. Navy boarding party, weapons in hand, swarmed aboard an enemy craft. One Japanese made a move in the darkness, and Lieut. Bulkeley blew him down with a 45 automatic. The other passengers, twelve fully equipped soldiers, were already dead.

The boarders picked up what documents and equipment they thought would be interesting to Intelligence, and reboarded their PT. The 152 pumped 37-mm shells into the barge until it slid under the water.

Ashore, Intelligence captured the diary of a Japanese officer named Kobayashi. Under the date of August 29, 1943, was the entry:

Last night with the utmost precaution we were without incident transported safely by barge between Sio and Finschhafen. _So far, there has not been a time during such trips when barges have not been attacked by enemy torpedo boats._ However, it was reported that the barge unit which transported us was attacked and sunk on the return trip last night and the barge commander and his men were all lost.

The PT blockade at sea and the Australian drive ashore pinched the Japanese hard, and on September 16th Australian infantrymen walked into a deserted Finschhafen. The western hinge of the gate had been broken.

4. Battering Down the Gate: the Eastern Hinge

The western end of the Japanese gate was nailed to the great land mass of New Guinea, and its unhinging was a natural job for the Army. The eastern hinge was at Rabaul, in the tangle of islands and reef-strewn sea channels that make up the Solomon and Bismarck archipelagos. Reduction of Rabaul was naturally a Navy job, to be carried on simultaneously with the Army effort in New Guinea.

After the fall of Guadalcanal in February, 1943, the master plan in the South Pacific, under Admiral William Halsey, was to hop from island to island through the central Solomons, reducing one by one the Japanese bases arranged like steppingstones between Guadalcanal and Rabaul.

PTs were moved up as fast as new bases were established, because they were short of range and useless if they fell too far behind the front.

The night the Army went ashore at Rendova (June 30, 1943), three PTs sailed up Blanche Channel, on the approaches to the Rendova landing beach. Coming down the same channel was the American landing flotilla, transports, supply ships, and escorting destroyers. The destroyer _McCawley_, damaged by one of the few Japanese air attacks that opposed the Rendova landings, was being towed to Tulagi, but was riding lower and lower in the water and its survival was doubtful. Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner (riding _McCawley_ as flagship of the Rendova invasion force) was debating whether or not to give the stricken ship euthanasia by friendly torpedo when his mind was made up for him by two mysterious fish which came out of the night and blew _McCawley_ out of the water.

The deadly PTs had struck again! But, alas, under the illusion that they were hitting an enemy transport. Explanation of the snafu? The usual lack of communications between PTs and other commands. The PTs had been told there would be no friendlies in Blanche Channel that night—and the only friendlies they encountered just happened to be the entire Rendova landing fleet.

American soldiers quickly captured Rendova Island, and the PT navy set up a base there. Across Blanche Channel, on New Georgia Island, Marines and soldiers were fighting a heartbreaking jungle action to capture the Japanese airfield at Munda, but they had taken over enough of New Georgia for another PT base on The Slot side of the island.

Business was slow at first for the PTs. The big-ship admirals, who were fighting repeated destroyer-cruiser night actions in those waters—and who were possibly nervous about the PTs since the _McCawley_ incident—ordered the PTs to stay in when the big ships went out.

Concern of the admirals over poor communications between PTs and other units was justified. Early on the morning of July 20th, three torpedo boats were returning to Rendova Base through Fergusson Passage. Three B 25s—the same kind of aircraft that had performed such terrible execution of the Japanese in the Bismarck Sea—spotted the patrol craft and came down to the deck for a strafing run.

Aboard PT 168, Lieut. Edward Macauley III held his gunners in tight check while they suffered under the murderous fire of the friendly planes. Repeatedly the gunners of the 168 held their breath as the B 25s raked them with bullets—but they held their own fire in a superb display of discipline. Not so the other two boats. Gunners were unable to stand being shot at without shooting back, and the first PT burst of counterfire brought down a bomber in flames.

Somehow the other bombers came to their senses and the strafing runs stopped, but all the boats had already been riddled and two were burning. The 166 was past saving. Sound crew members helped the wounded over the side into life rafts and paddled frantically away from the burning craft. They made it out of danger just as the gas tanks went up in a blast of searing orange flame.

Lieut. Macauley and his brave crew—the only group to come out of the ghastly affair with unblemished credit—took their still burning 168 alongside the stricken bomber to rescue survivors before the plane went down. Three of the bomber crew were dead; the three survivors were wounded. One bomber and one PT were lost in the sad affair. One officer and ten men of the torpedo-boat patrol were wounded.

Reason for the tragic mistake? Same as for the _McCawley_ sinking. The bomber pilots had been told that there would be no friendly vessels in those waters at that time.

PTs were harassed, during the night patrols, by Japanese seaplanes escorting the Japanese barge convoys, so one PT skipper and a night fighter plane rigged an ambush. An American night fighter was to perch aloft, the PT was to charge about, throwing up a glittering rooster’s tail of a wake to attract a float plane, and the night fighter was to jump on the float plane’s back.

The plan worked like a fifty-dollar clock. The noisy, rambunctious PT lured down a float plane—OK so far—and the PT’s skipper conned the escorting night fighter in to the counterattack.

The first word from the night fighter, however, was a disconcerting, “I’m being attacked by the float plane.”

“Bring him down to two feet,” said the PT skipper, “and _we’ll_ get on his tail.”

Nobody was hurt.

PTs fought some lively barge actions on July 23rd and 27th, but the big battle—the naval battle which has earned what is surely the most exaggerated fame of all time for its importance—the battle of the 109, took place the night between August 1st and 2nd.

On the afternoon of August 1st, search planes saw four Japanese destroyers coming down The Slot. They were loaded with 900 soldiers and supplies for the embattled defenders of the Munda airfield. It was a typical run of the Tokyo Express and a prime target for PTs.

During the afternoon, when the Japanese destroyers were still far from Rendova, the Japanese showed their deep respect for motor torpedo boats by socking the Rendova base with bombs from 25 planes.

Two PTs were sunk by a bomber which crashed into their nest. One of the PTs destroyed was 164, which had survived the tragic strafing by B25s just eleven days before.

At sunset 15 PTs—four of them equipped with the new-fangled gadget called radar—sortied from the base under the command of Lieut. Henry I. Brantingham aboard 159. Brantingham was another veteran of the MacArthur rescue run in the Philippines. The PTs were deployed around the approaches to the Japanese landing beach for resupplying Munda airfield.