Part 5

Lieut. Brantingham, naturally, had chosen a radar-equipped boat for his flagship, and so was the first to pick up the Tokyo Express, just after midnight on August 2nd. Brantingham, for some reason, thought his radar pips were from landing craft, and closed for a strafing run, but 4.7-inch shells from the destroyers persuaded him that his targets were fair torpedo game. He and Lieut. (jg) William F. Liebnow, Jr., in 157, fired six torpedoes. No hits. The two boats escaped behind puffs of smoke.

Worse than the six misses was the lack of communication. The other PTs, most of them without radar, didn’t even know the destroyers had arrived on the scene, much less that they had been alerted by the torpedo runs of 157 and 159.

Next to pick up the cans was the radar-equipped 171, carrying the division commander, Lieut. Arthur H. Berndtson. The boat’s skipper, Ensign William Cullen Battle, closed at a slinking ten knots to 1,500 yards, where Lieut. Berndtson fired a full salvo of fish. All four tubes blazed up in a grease fire that was as helpful to the destroyer gunners as a spotlighted bull’s-eye. Shellbursts splashed water aboard the 171 as the boat ripped out to sea.

Again the attacking PT which had missed its target failed to report by radio to the other PT skippers, who were straining their eyes in the darkness looking for ships they didn’t know were already on the scene.

A third radar boat, Lieut. George E. Cookman’s 107, picked up the cans on the radar set and missed with four fish. Three other PTs, aroused by the flash of destroyer gunfire, came running from the southeast. A Japanese float plane strafed them, and destroyer salvos straddled the boats, but they got off all their torpedoes—12 of them—and all 12 missed.

The Tokyo Express went through the strait and unloaded 900 soldiers and supplies.

So bad were communications between the PTs that most of the 15 skippers who had started the patrol still didn’t know that the destroyers had arrived and been unsuccessfully attacked, much less that they had already discharged their cargoes and were going home. And that meant the destroyers were coming up on the PT lookouts from behind.

At the wheel of the 109 was Lieut. John F. Kennedy. The boat was idling along on one engine to save fuel and to cruise as silently as possible—good PT doctrine for night patrol.

A lookout on the destroyer _Amagiri_ saw the 109 at about the same instant a lookout on the PT saw the destroyer. Making a split-second decision, Japanese Commander Hanami ordered the helmsman to spin the wheel to starboard and ram.

The _Amagiri_ crashed into the starboard side of the 109 and killed the lookout on the spot. The boat was cut in two; the rear section sank; burning gasoline covered the sea. The _Amagiri_ sailed on, but at a reduced speed, because the 109, in its death agony, had bent vanes on the _Amagiri’s_ starboard propeller, causing violent vibration at high speeds.

PT 169 fired torpedoes at the _Amagiri_, but at too close a range for them to arm and explode. PT 157 fired two that missed. Thirty torpedoes were fired that night, and the only damage inflicted on the destroyers was by the quite involuntary and fatal body block of the 109. It was not the greatest night of the war for the PT navy.

Eleven survivors of the 109 searched surrounding waters for two missing shipmates, but never found them. They spent the night and the next morning on the still-floating bow section. By midafternoon they decided that no rescue was on the way. Since they felt naked and exposed to Japanese plane and ship patrols, they set out to swim three and a half miles to a desert island, the skipper towing a badly burned shipmate for four hours by a life-jacket tie-tie gripped between his teeth.

After harrowing nights spent on several desert islands—nights during which the skipper showed most extraordinary stamina, resourcefulness, and courage—the ship-wrecked sailors were found by native scouts. They took the heroic skipper by canoe to a coast-watcher station, and there he boarded a rescue PT and returned for his marooned companions.

The skipper of the 109 was, of course, the same John F. Kennedy who on January 20, 1961, became the thirty-fifth President of the United States.

After Munda fell and with it all of New Georgia, American strategists studied the map and decided that island-by-island reduction of Japanese strength was too tedious. They decided to start by-passing some of the bases, cutting off the by-passed garrisons and starving them behind an American sea blockade. More night work for the PTs.

Up the line a bit was the island of Vella Lavella, only lightly held by the Japanese. American strategists chose a beach called Barakoma as a possible landing spot and ordered a reconnaissance.

Four PTs, on the night between August 12th and 13th, carried a scouting party of 45 men to the beach at Barakoma. A Japanese plane nagged the boats with strafing and bombing runs for two hours. A near miss tore up the planking on the 168 and wounded four sailors, so the 168 had to drop out of the operation, but the other three boats put their passengers ashore safely. Scouts reported that the only Japanese around that part of the island were ship-wrecked survivors of an earlier sea battle, so thirty-six hours later four more PTs landed reinforcements.

Japanese snooper planes spotted the PT passenger runs, but apparently the Japanese high command couldn’t think of torpedo boats as invasion craft, so the scout landings were made without interference.

The main force followed, and by October 1st all of Vella Lavella was in American hands.

The Japanese began shrinking their Solomon Islands perimeter, falling back to the islands on the near side of the new American base at Vella Lavella. American destroyers, out to smash the evacuation bargeline, met a Japanese destroyer screen for the _daihatsus_ on the night between October 6th and 7th. As usual, Japanese torpedoes were deadly. One American destroyer went down and two others were sorely damaged. More important, the Japanese supply and evacuation train ran its errands without molestation from the American cans.

The American destroyers did sink the Japanese _Yugumo_, and American PTs were sent to pick up 78 survivors. Aboard the 163, an American sailor offered a cup of coffee to one of the captive Japanese, who killed the Good Samaritan (and of course died himself at the hands of the murdered sailor’s shipmates). PT sailors felt less uneasy about the massacre of the shipwrecked Japanese at the Bismarck Sea after the treacherous murder of their comrade by a rescued Japanese.

Having successfully leapfrogged once, American strategists looked at the map again. The whole point to the island-hopping campaign was to put American fighter planes close enough to Rabaul so that they could screen bombers over that base and keep the Japanese pinned down there under constant bombardment. The best site for a fighter base was Bougainville Island, so American planners put their fingers on the map and said: “This is the place for the next one.”

Accordingly, Marines landed at Cape Torokina, on Bougainville, on November 1st. Their mission was to capture enough of the island to build and protect a fighter strip. The rest of the island could be left to the 15,000 Japanese soldiers who defended it. Nobody cared about them. Rabaul was the real target.

The Japanese high command at Rabaul sent down a cruiser-destroyer force with the mission of getting among the American transports in Empress Augusta Bay, off Torokina, and tearing up the helpless train ships like a pack of wolves in a herd of sheep.

An American cruiser-destroyer force met them just after midnight on November 2nd, and sank one Japanese cruiser and a destroyer. More important, the American flotilla ran off the Japanese marauders before they reached the transports.

American reconnaissance planes, however, spotted a massive concentration of heavy cruisers and destroyers building up in Rabaul Harbor, a concentration too great for American naval forces then in the South Pacific to handle, because most American capital ships of the Pacific Fleet had been pulled back toward Hawaii to support an operation in the Gilbert Islands.

Admiral Halsey scratched together a carrier task force, and even though a carrier raid near a land-based airfield was then against doctrine, he sent the carrier’s planes into the harbor. They damaged the cruisers badly enough to relieve the immediate threat to the Torokina landings. The carrier raids stirred up a hornet’s nest around Rabaul.

Eighteen Japanese torpedo bombers took off to smash the brazen carrier task force. Just before total dark they found American ships and attacked. Radio Tokyo broadcast, with jubilation, that the score in this “First Air Battle of Bougainville” was “one large carrier blown up and sunk, one medium carrier set ablaze and later sunk, and two heavy cruisers and one cruiser and destroyer sunk.” Rabaul’s torpedo bombers won a group commendation.

An American staff officer, hearing the account of this First Air Battle of Bougainville as reported by Japanese pilots, could only hold his head in his hands and hope his own pilots were not feeding him the same kind of foolishness.

Here is what really happened in the First Air Battle of Bougainville.

A landing craft, the LCI 70, and the PT 167, were lumbering back from a landing party on the Torokina beachhead. Just after sunset the Japanese bombers struck in low-level torpedo runs. The PT brought down the leader by the novel method of snagging him with its mast. The plane’s torpedo punched clean through the PT’s nose, leaving its tail assembly, appropriately enough, in the crew’s head.

The torpedo boat’s 20-mm. cannon shot down a second torpedo bomber so close to the ship that the sailors on the fantail were soaked.

Four torpedo bombers launched their fish at the LCI, but since the torpedoes were set for attack on a deep-draft carrier, they passed harmlessly under the landing craft’s shallow hull—except for one which porpoised and jumped through the LCI’s thin skin, unfortunately killing one sailor. The unexploded warhead came to rest on a starchy bed in the bread locker. The torpedo was still smoking, so the LCI’s skipper, Lieut. (jg) H. W. Frey, ordered “Abandon ship!”

Time passed. No explosion. A damage-control party reboarded the LCI and rigged her for a tow back to Torokina. PT 167 raced ahead with the wounded.

Rear Admiral T. S. Wilkinson radioed congratulations to Ensign Theodore Berlin, skipper of the PT, for knocking down a plane with his mast. “Fireplug sprinkles dog,” is the way the admiral put it.

So ended the First Air Battle of Bougainville.

PTs quickly set up a base on Puruata Island, just off the Torokina beachhead, even though the Marine foothold was still feeble. Sea patrols of the torpedo boats were still vexed by poor communications. The night of November 8th, for instance, the destroyers _Hudson_ and _Anthony_ came up to Torokina, sure that there were no friendly PTs in the bay, because higher-ups on the beach had told them so. Naturally, when radar picked up the pips of patrolling PTs 163, 169 and 170, they let fly with everything.

The PTs, equally misinformed about what friendlies to expect, took the destroyer broadsides to be a most unfriendly action and maneuvered for a torpedo run. The skipper of the 170 tried to decoy the two American destroyers into a trap. He called the 163 by radio, to warn him that he was leading “three Nip cans” into their torpedo range. PT 163 got off a long shot at the “three” cans, which fortunately missed.

There has been much fruitless speculation about that third mysterious can reported by 170. Aboard the 170, the radar screen showed a big target—not one of the two American destroyers—10,000 yards dead ahead. A salvo of shells that “looked like ashcans” passed overhead, coming from the same direction as the radar target. To this day nobody knows who was the assailant with guns big enough to fire ashcan-sized projectiles.

The running duel lit up the bay for forty-five minutes. The torpedo boats were just coming around for a new torpedo run when _Anthony_ figured out what was going on.

“Humblest apologies,” the _Anthony_ said by radio in a handsome bid to accept all the blame. “We are friendly vessels.”

Farther west near Arawe, on New Britain, on Christmas Day 1943, Lieut. Ed Farley’s 190, with Lieut. Commander H. M. S. Swift aboard, and Ensign Rumsey Ewing’s 191 were returning to the Dregar Harbor base in New Guinea, after a dull patrol.

Between 30 and 38 Japanese dive bombers and fighters came down from the north and bombed and strafed the boats in groups of three and four. The two little PTs were in a jam, for the force attacking them was large enough to take on a carrier task force, screen destroyers and all. The boats separated, went to top speed, and zigzagged toward a bank of low clouds twelve miles away.

Japanese planes often made one pass at PTs and then dropped the job if they did not score, but this overwhelming big flight of planes returned for repeated attacks. PT skippers clamored for fighter cover from the beach.

Aboard the 191, the skipper was hit in the lungs and Ensign Fred Calhoun took command. A machine-gun bullet pierced his thigh, but he hung on to the wheel to play a deadly game of tag with the attackers. He held a steady course, his eye fixed to the bomb racks of the attacking plane, until the bomb was away and committed to its course. Then he whipped over the wheel to put the boat where the bomb wasn’t when it landed.

Nevertheless, fragments from a near miss knocked out a 20-mm. gun and severely wounded the gunner, Chief Motor Machinist Mate Thomas Dean, and the loader, Motor Machinist Mate Second Class August Sciutto. Another near miss punched an 18-inch hole in the portside and peppered the superstructure with steel splinters.

Japanese strafers hit the port and starboard engines and punctured the water jackets, which spurted jets of boiling water into the engine room. Engineer of the Watch Victor Bloom waded into the streams of scalding water to tape and stuff leaks so that the engines would not overheat and fuse into a solid mass.

Fearing that the gas fumes from punctured lines might explode, he closed off the fuel-tank compartment and pulled a release valve to smother it with carbon dioxide. When he had tidied up his engine room, Bloom gave first aid to the wounded. (Not surprisingly, Victor Bloom won a Navy Cross for this action.)

By this time the two PTs had knocked four planes into the sea near the boats.

“Toward the end of the attack,” said Lieut. Farley, “the enemy became more and more inaccurate and less willing to close us. It is possible that we may have knocked down the squadron leader as the planes milled about in considerable confusion, as if lacking leadership.”

Forty minutes after they were called, P 47 fighter planes from Finschhafen arrived to drive off the shaken Japanese apparently startled by the two floating buzz saws.

One of the P 47s was hit and made a belly landing about half a mile from the 190. The pilot, though badly wounded in the head and arm, freed himself and escaped from the cockpit before his plane went down. The 190 went to the rescue of its rescuer, and Lieut. Commander Swift and Seaman First Class Joe Cope jumped overboard to tow the groggy pilot to the undamaged PT.

Authorities were as astonished as the Japanese attackers had been by the savage and effective response of the two PTs to the massive attack which should have wiped them out, according to all the rules. Smaller and less determined air attacks had sunk cruisers and destroyers in other waters.

Commander Mumma, with justifiable pride in his two boats, said of the action: “It has shown that the automatic weapon armament is most effective. It has demonstrated that ably handled PTs can, in daylight, withstand heavy air attack.”

On the same Christmas Day 1943, the Bougainville bomber strip went into business, and the fighter strips were so well established that American forces could afford to settle down behind the barbed wire of The Perimeter, content with what they already held. From here on out, they could afford to ignore as much as possible the 15,000 Japanese still on the island. From that day Rabaul was doomed to comparative impotence under a merciless shower of bombs.

Not that Rabaul was a feeble outpost. One hundred thousand Japanese soldiers, behind powerful fortifications and with immense supplies, made Rabaul a formidable fortress—too tough for a direct frontal assault—until the end of the war. Without air power, however, the Japanese there could do nothing to hold back the Allied advance except to glower at the task forces passing by just out of gun range on their way to new island bases farther up the line.

The Japanese gate was unhinged at both ends and the Allies poured through the gap.

American strategists decided to jump over Rabaul, leaving its defenders to shrivel away behind a sea blockade. Some of the PTs leapfrogged with the rest of the Allied forces and readied for more night patrol in the waters farther along the sea lanes to Tokyo; some of them stayed behind to make life as miserable as possible for the bypassed Japanese on Bougainville and the other islands cut off from home.

PTs played a big part in the last jump that isolated Rabaul. The landings in the Admiralty Islands were on Leap Year Day, February 29, 1944, by units of the First Cavalry Division. The Admiralty Islands are a ring of long, thin islands enclosing a magnificent anchorage called Seeadler Harbor. The fine anchorage and the airstrips planned for the islands would give the Allies the last brick in the wall around Rabaul.

Faulty reconnaissance from the air had shown that the islands were free of Japanese. Actually there were 4,000 Japanese in the islands, and their commander was insulted that the Americans landed a force only a fraction the size of his. He counterattacked violently. The only Navy fire support available was from destroyers and small craft.

Among the small craft were MTB Squadron Twenty-One, commanded by Lieutenant Paul Rennell, and Squadron Eighteen, commanded by the same Lieut. Commander H. M. S. Swift who had surprised the Japanese air command by the vicious antiaircraft fire of his two torpedo boats near Arawe on Christmas Day.

The PTs went to work for the cavalry as a kind of sea cavalry, running errands, carrying wounded, towing stranded boats off the beach, handling the leadline to measure a poorly charted harbor bottom, and even carrying cavalry generals on scouting missions.

From inside Seeadler Harbor they gave the cavalry close fire support with machine guns and mortars. A keen-eyed sailor on 363 knocked a sniper out of a tree with a short burst, for instance, and the crew of the 323 demolished, with 50 calibers, a Japanese radio and observation platform in another tree.

The island of Manus fell quickly, and Major General I. P. Swift, commanding general of the First Cavalry Division, in a generous tribute to a sister service, said: “The bald statement, ‘The naval forces supported this action’ ... is indeed a masterpiece of understatement.... Without the Navy there would not have been any action.”

5. Along the Turkey’s Back

From the time that American planes stopped the Japanese onrush at the Coral Sea and at Midway, it was a two-year job for the Allies to batter down the Japanese gate at Rabaul and at the Huon Gulf. Once the gate was down, it took MacArthur’s forces only four months to make the 1,200-mile trip down the turkey’s back to a perch on the turkey’s head, just across from the East Indies and the Philippines.

The swift trip was made possible, however, by a leap-frogging technique that left behind a monumental job for the PT navy. General MacArthur made almost all of his New Guinea landings where the Japanese weren’t, by-passing tens of thousands of tough jungle fighters and leaving the job of starving them out to the blockading navy. Except for the brief loan of ships from the battle-line for special missions, the blockading navy was the PT fleet.

The New Guinea PT force was beefed up for the blockade by many new boats and officers. MacArthur had been deeply impressed by the torpedo boats during his escape from Corregidor and used all his influence—which was considerable in those days—to impress every PT possible into his force.

The PTs in New Guinea lost almost all use for their torpedoes, except when they chanced to catch a blockade-running supply submarine on the surface. The boat skippers wanted more guns, more auto-cannon and machine guns for shooting up the Number One blockade-runner, the armored _daihatsu_—and they got them.

Early in November 1943, Squadron Twenty-One arrived at Morobe base armed with 40-mm. auto-cannon, a tremendously effective weapon for all-around mischief. It was the first New Guinea squadron armed with the newer and deadlier weapon.

More than the size of the new cannon, however, the size of the new officers astonished the veteran PT sailors. Commander Selman S. Bowling, who had replaced Commander Mumma as chief of PTs in the Southwest Pacific, had voluntarily ridden on the Tulagi boats before his new assignment, and he had decided then that PT officers should be tough and athletic. When he went to the States to organize new squadrons, he had recruited the biggest, toughest athletes he could find.

Among the newcomers were Ensign Ernest W. Pannell, All-American tackle from Texas A. and M. and professional football player for the Green Bay Packers; Ensign Alex Schibanoff of Franklin and Marshall College and the Detroit Lions; Ensign Steven L. Levanitis of Boston College and the Philadelphia Eagles; Ensign Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American from Notre Dame; Lieut. (jg) Paul B. Lillis, captain of the Notre Dame team; Ensign Louis E. Smith, University of California halfback; Ensign Kermit W. Montz, Franklin and Marshall; Ensign John M. Eastham, Jr., Texas A. and M.; Ensign Stuart A. Lewis, University of California; Ensign Cedric J. Janien, Harvard; and Ensign William P. Hall, Wabash.

Also bulging with muscle were Ensign Joseph W. Burk, holding the world’s record as single-sculls champion; Ensign Kenneth D. Molloy, All-American lacrosse player from Syracuse University; Lieut. John B. Williams, Olympic swimmer from Oregon State; and Ensign James F. Foran, swimmer from Princeton.

Commander Bowling was right. PT crews had to be tough for the kind of warfare they were waging. Shallow-draft _daihatsus_ clung to the shore, and the PTs had to come in as close as 100 yards from the beach to find their prey. For 1,200 miles the shoreline was lined with ten of thousands of blockaded Japanese soldiers, every one of them itching to get a crack at the patrol boats that were starving them to death. The Japanese set up shore batteries and baited traps with helpless-looking _daihatsus_ to lure the PT marauders within range. In this deadly cat-and-mouse game, the PT did not always win.

About 2 A.M. on March 7th, PTs 337 and 338 slipped into Hansa Bay, a powerfully garrisoned Japanese base by-passed early in the Allied forward movement. The PTs poked about the enemy harbor and picked up a radar target close to shore. From 400 yards away, the two skippers saw that their radar pip came from two heavily camouflaged luggers moored together, a prime bit of business for PTs. Before they could open fire, however, they discovered that they had been baited into an ambush.

Machine guns opened up on the beach, and the PTs returned the fire, but the best they could do was to strafe the bush at random, because the Japanese gun positions were well concealed.