Part 7

On the night of April 2nd, the 114 went aground 400 yards off Yarin, on Kairiru Island. The crew jettisoned torpedoes and depth charges and the boat was pulled off the rock by _The Southern Cross_ (144). The propellers were so badly damaged, however, that the 114 was abandoned. Confidential publications, including a code book, were put into a raft, but the crew carelessly let it drift to the Japanese-held beach.

When the boats returned to the tender, the skipper reported the loss of the codes to Lieut. Commander Robert Leeson, who jumped into 129, commanded by his brother Ensign A. D. Leeson, and took off for Yarin. Ensign Edmund F. Wakelin tagged along in 134.

The two PTs hove to off the beach at Yarin, and the officers studied the situation. They could see the raft on the shore, but it was in full view of a Japanese military hut, 600 yards away, and Yarin was the site of a known powerful shore battery.

Commander Leeson wanted those books, though, and he wanted them badly, so he jumped over the side and in full daylight swam the 400 yards across the reef to the beach. While crews of the two boats watched the beach with fingers crossed, dreading the sight of the first puff of flame from the hidden shore battery, Commander Leeson pushed the raft into the water and towed it back to the boat. The secret publications were taken aboard intact.

The Japanese chose that moment—the moment just after their last chance—to wake up and plunk a salvo of shells around the boats.

Commander Leeson, not satisfied with having saved the PT code in one of the most daring exploits of the Pacific war, decided to hang around until after nightfall. After all, the PTs had come all that long way from the tender and had not yet worked any mischief.

After dark the boats slipped in close to the beach and sank two out of three heavily loaded barges. The third barge blew a 14-inch hole in the exhaust stack of the 196, knocked out the starboard engine, and started a fire.

Clarence L. Nelson, MoMM2c, put out the fire, but he and A. F. Hall, MoMM3c, passed out from the fumes. Ensign Richard Holt dropped his battle duties long enough to give the two sailors artificial respiration, and very probably saved Hall’s life. The 129’s engine was definitely dead, however, and nothing would bring it back to life, so Commander Leeson went on fighting with two-thirds power.

After airing out the 129’s engine room, the redoubtable Leeson, with his crippled boat, led a limping charge straight into the mouth of the Japanese cannon. The two boats launched a ripple of twenty-four rockets at close range, and nothing more was heard from the beach.

When the sky turned light in the east, Commander Leeson took his sailors home.

The spearhead of the Allied advance left New Guinea for Morotai Island in September 1944. The landings there were supported by navy planes from six escort carriers. On D-Day plus one, Ensign Harold Allen Thompson took off from the deck of the carrier _Santee_ in his fighter plane to strafe Japanese positions around Wasile Bay on nearby Halmahera. His sortie touched off one of the most heroic adventures of the Pacific war.

According to the report of the carrier division commander: “Success of the landings on Morotai depended upon keeping the Japanese continually on the defensive ... thus making it impossible for them to launch counteroffensives until American forces were established in strength on the smaller island [Morotai].”

Ensign Thompson’s job was to beat up Japanese barges in Wasile Bay. While he was in a steep dive on his fourth strafing run, the Japanese made a direct hit with a heavy shell on Ensign Thompson’s plane.

The carrier division commander reports:

“The next thing he knows he was being blown _upward_ with such force that his emergency gear was even blown out of his pockets. He pulled the ripcord and on the way down he found himself literally looking down the barrels of almost every gun in the Japanese positions about 300 yards away.

“On hitting the water, he discovered that his left hand had been badly torn, presumably by shrapnel. His life jacket had been torn in front and would only half inflate. His main idea was to get away from the beach and out into the bay, but progress was difficult.”

His comrades stayed with the downed pilot and strafed the beach until a PBY patrol plane came, but the rescue Cat could not land. The pilot dropped a life raft instead, and Ensign Thompson climbed aboard. He put a tourniquet on his bleeding hand and then paddled to a pier to hide in the shelter of a camouflaged lugger.

“These pilots heroically covered all the beach area with a devastating attack so that little or no fire could be directed at the pilot in the raft,” says the division report. “The attacks drove the Japanese gunners to shelter, but after the attacks they returned to their guns.”

Ensign Thompson said it was a wonderful show to watch, but it was a tragically expensive show. Ensign William P. Bannister was hit and crashed 150 yards from Ensign Thompson, gallantly giving his life to save his fellow pilot.

Ensign Paul W. Lindskog was also hit, but flew his wobbly plane safely to a crash landing outside the Japanese lines. Almost all the planes were holed, but they continued the strafing runs until Thompson had worked his way behind the armored lugger.

When fuel ran low, another flight of fighters came up to strafe, and the carrier set up a system of shuttle flights to keep the beach under constant attack.

So far, so good. But how to get Ensign Thompson out of Wasile Bay if a Catalina couldn’t land there? After all, the fighters couldn’t cover the wounded pilot till the war was over. Somebody thought about the PT fleet, and so the carrier division commander called the PT tender _Oyster Bay_ and asked if there was anything the PTs could do.

Certainly there was something the PTs could do; they could rescue the pilot.

Lieut. Arthur Murray Preston, commander of Squadron Thirty-Three, picked two all-volunteer crews, and they put to sea in Lieut. Wilfred Tatro’s 489 and Lieut. (jg) Hershel F. Boyd’s 363.

The boat arrived off the mouth of Wasile Bay in the middle of the afternoon. Lieut. Preston knew there was a minefield, backed up by a light shore battery, at the eastern side of the entrance. A powerful and hitherto unsuspected battery opened fire on the western shore, however, and Preston chose the lesser danger of the minefield and the lighter battery.

Shorefire from both beaches was so heavy that the PTs had to fall back. The fighter pilots spotted their difficulty and made strafing runs on the shore batteries. The Japanese guns still fired on the PTs, but at a slower rate, and Lieut. Preston decided to risk a run through the narrow straits.

“Strafing by the planes unquestionably reduced the rate of fire to make a safe passage through the straits possible,” said Lieut. Preston. “Safe” passage, indeed!

The inside was no improvement on the entrance, for the bay was small and ringed with guns, all of which could reach the PTs. The shooting was steadily improving also as Japanese gunners found the range.

Lieut. (jg) George O. Stouffer called from his torpedo bomber to ask Lieut. Preston if he would like to have a little smoke between the PTs and the shore gunners.

Would he like a little smoke? Just all there is. Stouffer flew between the PTs and the beach, laying a dense curtain of smoke to blind the gunners. He dropped one smoke pot squarely over a particularly dangerous gun battery, blanking off its view in all directions. The plane also dropped a smoke float to mark the location of the downed pilot’s raft.

During the approach of the two PTs to the armored lugger, they added their guns to those of the planes lashing the beach, but lookouts kept a nervous watch on the Japanese boat—nobody could be sure that the lugger was not manned by enemy sailors waiting to shoot up the rescue craft at the moment they were most occupied with the downed pilot. The closer the boats came to the lugger, the more the planes concentrated their fire on the nearby beach.

“This strafing was maintained at an almost unbelievable intensity during the entire time the boats were in the vicinity of the downed pilot. This was the ultimate factor in the success of the mission,” reads Lieut. Preston’s report, which makes no mention of another factor—the incredible tenaciousness of the two PT crews.

The first smoke screen was beginning to thin dangerously when the 363 hove to beyond the lugger and raked the beach with its guns.

The 489 went alongside the lugger.

“Immediately and on their own initiative, Lieut. D. F. Seaman and C. D. Day, MoMM1c, dove overboard and towed the pilot in his boat to the stern of 489. The pilot was in no condition to do this for himself and appeared to be only partly conscious of his circumstances and surroundings,” wrote Preston. The rescue took ten minutes.

The PTs were not through fighting yet. Lieut. Heston remembered that the primary mission of PTs in those waters was destruction of Japanese coastal shipping, so he ordered the two PTs to put a few holes in the lugger and set it afire before leaving.

The fighter cover ran low on fuel, and there was a near-disastrous breakdown in the shuttle timetable.

Preston reports what happened:

“While we were hove-to picking up Thompson there was a group of planes giving us the closest possible cover and support. As we left the scene the planes did not remain quite as close to us as they had previously.... It was shortly after this that we learned that the fighters were critically low on fuel and some of them out of ammunition. Nevertheless, they were still answering our calls to quiet one gun or another, sometimes having to dive on the gun positions without firing, because their own magazines were empty.... They were magnificent.”

The PTs zigzagged across the minefield with heavy shells bursting within ten yards on all sides. When they finally broke into the open sea and roared away from the enemy beach, Ensign Thompson had been in the water for seven hours, the PTs had been under continuous close-range fire from weapons of all calibers for two and one-half hours. The boats were peppered with shrapnel, but, miraculously, none of the PT sailors had been scratched.

Dr. Eben Stoddard had a job, though, trying to save the pilot’s left hand, which was so badly mangled by shrapnel that three fingers dangled loosely.

The seven hours of protective strafing had blown up an ammunition dump, destroyed a fuel dump, wrecked stores, silenced four heavy gun positions at least temporarily, and certainly prevented the Japanese from getting to the downed pilot.

Lieut. Preston was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for this action, one of the two Congressional Medals of Honor awarded to PT sailors. (The other was given to Lieut. John Bulkeley for his exploits during the fall of the Philippines.) The two swimmers and the two skippers won the Navy Cross. Every other member of the two crews won a Silver Star.

Ironically, the day after incredible escape of all PT hands without injury, Lieut. Tatro, skipper of the 489, while working on a 20-mm gun, let a wrench slip and a trunnion spring threw the heavy tool into his forehead, injuring him seriously.

By November 1944, there was no more work for the PTs in New Guinea, and the last patrol was made just twenty-three months after the first one, 1,500 miles to the east. The PT navy in New Guinea had grown from one small tender and six boats to eight tenders and 14 squadrons.

Almost nightly action had taken a terrible toll of the Japanese. The shore was littered with the wreckage of _daihatsus_ and the jungle was littered with the skeletons of thousands of Japanese soldiers who had died for lack of supplies.

Major General F. H. Berryman, Commander of the Second Australian Corps, wrote the PT commander:

The following evidence emerging from the recent operations will illustrate the cumulative effect of the activities of your command:

A. The small degree to which the enemy has used artillery indicates a shortage of ammunition.

B. The enemy, in an endeavor to protect his barges, has been forced to dispose his normal field artillery over miles of coast when those guns might well have been used in the coastal sector against our land troops.

C. Many Japanese diary entries describe the shortage of rations and the regular fatigues of foraging parties to collect native food, which is beginning to be increasingly difficult to obtain.

D. A Japanese prisoner of war stated that three days’ rice, augmented by native food, now has to last nine days. This is supported by the absence of food and the presence of native roots on enemy dead.

E. There is definite evidence that the enemy has slaughtered and eaten his pack-carrying animals.

From the above you will see how effective has been the work of your squadrons and how it has contributed to the recent defeat of the enemy.

The war in New Guinea was over, but the Allies were still a long way from Tokyo. Across the water were the Philippine Islands, garrisoned with tens of thousands of Japanese. There was hard fighting ahead for the PTs.

6. The War in Europe: Mediterranean

While Americans and their Allies were fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, on the other side of the world their comrades in arms grappled in a Titanic struggle with the other two Axis powers. Half of the European Axis partnership was halfhearted Italy, but the other half was the martial and determined state of Germany, led by an insane genius at the black arts of killing named Hitler.

The naval war in the coastal waters of Europe was eminently suitable to torpedo-boat operations. The British had been making spectacular use of motor torpedo boats for years—in fact, American PTs had been patterned after British models. The Axis powers also used torpedo boats. German E-boats prowled the English Channel and the Mediterranean. Even the Italian MAS boats made Allied Mediterranean naval commanders nervous, for the torpedo boat had been an Italian specialty since its invention and the officers who manned Italian small craft were the most aggressive and warlike in all the Italian Armed Forces.

American troops went ashore in Northwest Africa on November 8, 1942. (On the other side of the world, the Japanese were just forming the massive relief fleet that was smashed and dispersed definitively a week later in the great three-day sea battle of Guadalcanal.) The United States Navy rushed to put American torpedo boats into the Mediterranean to join the British in harrying Axis shipping.

In New Orleans, in late 1942, Squadron Fifteen was organized. Its commander was Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, destined to become probably the most dashing of all American PT sailors, as the squadron itself was to become the most spectacularly successful PT command in either theatre.

On commissioning day the squadron members didn’t feel elated about their future. Their first assignment was to patrol the warm blue waters off Midway Island, far behind the fighting lines in the Pacific. While the Tulagi PTs fought almost nightly battles with Tanaka’s Tokyo Express, Squadron Fifteen was promised long, lazy afternoons of cribbage, 3,500 miles behind the combat zone. Its assignment gave its members slight headaches every time they thought about it.

Lieut. Commander Barnes assured his squadron mates that somehow, somewhere, he was going to find somebody for them to fight. But nobody believed him—not even he, as he later confessed.

The squadron sailed for the Panama Canal and was well on the way to the gentle duties of Midway when the radioman came running with a dispatch.

Orders to Midway were canceled! “Report to Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet, in Norfolk,” the message read.

At the giant Virginia naval base, Barnes had his conference with the upper echelons of brass and rushed back to his squadron mates with the news that they were indeed going to find somebody somewhere to fight. They were going to the Mediterranean as the first American torpedo-boat squadron on the European scene.

The barman at the Navy Officers’ Club in Norfolk was famous in those days—and may still be—for his Stingers, a most appropriate toast to duty in the Mediterranean mosquito fleet.

The 201 and 204 crossed the Atlantic immediately as deck passengers on the _S. S. Enoree_, and Lieut. Commander Barnes followed on the _S. S. Housatonic_, with 205 and 208. The _Enoree_ arrived at Gibraltar first, on April 13th. Boats were in the water the next day, and Lieut. Edwin A. Dubose—also destined to make a name as a brilliant PT sailor—took them to the British torpedo-boat dock, loaded a full cargo of torpedoes, and set sail for Oran in North Africa. Skippers of the other boats followed as fast as longshoremen could swing the PTs into the water.

Disappointment awaited the crews in Oran, where the high command sent the boats to Cherchel, 300 miles from the nearest action, for an indefinite period of training.

“I decided to take the bull by the horns and bum a ride to Algiers in an Army truck to see Vice Admiral Henry K. Hewitt,” said Lieut. Commander Barnes.

Admiral Hewitt was commander of all U. S. Naval forces in northwest African waters, and Barnes hoped to persuade him that the PTs should be based at Bône, 265 miles farther east and within easy reach of trouble at the front.

“That trip took me several hours and by the time I got there I was chagrined to find that orders had already been issued and Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien, my next in command, had gotten the boats under way and was in Algiers before me. The admiral himself brought me up to date with the information that my boats were already there. Most embarrassing!”

The next day, April 27th, Lieut. Dubose took his boats to the forward base at Bône, and that night they went out on their first patrol in combat waters.

Bône was also the British forward base for motor torpedo boats and gunboats. Like the American PTs, the British MTBs carried torpedoes, but the British had already converted some patrol craft to gunboats, similar to the heavily gunned PTs of New Guinea. The gunboats carried no torpedoes.

The British had been fighting in the Mediterranean for months, so American PTs made most of their early patrols with British officers aboard to tip them off to local conditions.

The North African campaign was drawing to a close. General Erwin Rommel’s crack Afrika Korps was bottled up in Tunisia, and torpedo boats patrolled nightly to prevent escape of Rommel’s soldiers to Sicily, just 90 miles across the strait from Tunisia’s Cape Bon.

Lieut. Commander Barnes, in the 106, joined three British torpedo boats under Lieut. Dennis Germaine, in a patrol down the east side of Cape Bon. At Ras Idda Bay, Lieut. Germaine took one British MTB inside the harbor to investigate a possible target.

Lieut. Commander Barnes continues the story:

“Pretty soon Germaine came up on the radio with the startling statement that there are lots of ships in there, so I took the remaining British boats with me and started in. It was as black as the inside of your pocket, but sure enough, right there in front of me was a ship.

“By the time we saw it against the dark background of the land we were inside the torpedo-aiming range and had to go all the way around the other side of it before getting a good shot.

“Thinking there were other targets around, I lined up and fired only one torpedo—our first!

“It ran hot and straight, and after what seemed like an interminable time made a beautiful hit forward. The whole ship blew up in our faces, scattering pieces of debris all around us and on deck. Just like the movies.

“We immediately started to look for other ships but could find none. Neither could we find our British friend, who, it turned out, was temporarily aground, so we just eased around trying to rendezvous. Pretty soon he found us—and promptly fired two fish at us, one of which passed right under our bow and the other under the stern, much to our alarm and his subsequent embarrassment.

“About half an hour later, bombers started working over the airfield a couple of miles away, and with the light of the flares we managed to join up with Germaine.

“I personally think that ship was aground—the ship we torpedoed—although it certainly made a fine spectacle going up, and one of our officers who was along that night subsequently flew over the area in a plane and reported it sitting nicely on the bottom.

“Actually, Germaine had not seen any ships and had mistaken some peculiar rock formations for a group of enemy vessels.”

That was not the last mistake of the British Navy. Unused to working with their new Allies, the British boats took one more near-lethal crack at American PTs.

Lieut. Dubose, in Lieut. (jg) Eugene S. Clifford’s 212, with Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien in 205, left Bône on the night of May 10th to patrol Cape Bon. On the way home after a dull night, the two boats cut deep into the Gulf of Tunis to keep clear of a British destroyer area.

The Gulf of Tunis was supposed to belong to torpedo boats that night, but two British destroyers came roaring out of the night on an opposite course only 900 yards away. The destroyers opened up with machine guns as they passed, so the PTs fired two emergency recognition starshells and ran away behind a smoke screen.

Two German E-boats, lurking in the darkness for a crack at the two destroyers, opened up on the PTs instead, and the British took _all_ the torpedo boats under fire, distributing shells and bullets on American and German boats with impartiality.

The two PT skippers were given the thorny tactical problem of dodging friendly destroyer fire while simultaneously taking on the German boats. Lieut. Clifford turned back through his own smoke, surprised the E-boats at close range when he burst out of the screen, and raked the enemy with his machine-gun batteries. He ran back into the smoke before they could swing their mounts to bear on him, so he couldn’t report results of his attack, but destroyer sailors saw one of the E-boats burst into flame. The other ran from the fight.

Not so the destroyers. They chased the PTs for an hour, firing starshells and salvos from their main battery. Fortunately their shooting was poor, and the PTs got out of the battle with only a few machine-gun holes.

Days later one of the destroyer skippers called to apologize. “We hadn’t been able to find any action in our assigned patrol area,” he said, “so we decided to have a bit of a look in the PT area.”

The destroyer skipper’s action was dashing and bold, but it was also a fine way to catch a friendly torpedo in his own ship or to kill a dozen or so of his Allies.

Three E-boats had attacked the destroyers at the precise instant that the American PTs arrived on the scene, according to the British officer who had heard a German radio discussion of a plan to attack the destroyers. Naturally the alarmed British began blasting at any torpedo boat in sight. Everybody saw Dubose’s recognition flares, but took them for tracer fire, a common mistake.

A strange aftermath of the running gun battle was the naval occupation of the great port of Bizerte by a lone PT.

The 205 lost the other boat in the night and put into Bizerte for gasoline. The port had just been taken by Allied troops a few hours earlier.

The shore batteries, now in friendly hands, nevertheless fired the “customary few rounds” at the arriving PT boat, but the imperturbable Lieut. O’Brien said: “The shots were wide, so I continued in and tied up at the dock.”

Two hours later a newsreel photographer asked O’Brien to move his PT out of the way so he could photograph some British landing ships just arriving as “the first Allied craft to enter Bizerte.”