Part 8

Lieut. O’Brien wondered what his own boat was if not an Allied craft, and he had been in Bizerte long enough to be bored with the place, but he patiently moved aside.

The brush-off from the newsreel man was only the beginning of the stepchild treatment the PTs suffered at Bizerte.

Squadron Fifteen cleaned up a hangar and scrounged spare parts and machinery from all over the city. When the big boys came into the harbor, their skippers were delighted with the tidy PT base and ruthlessly pushed the little boys out the door.

“We cleaned up half the buildings in Bizerte,” said one veteran of Squadron Fifteen. “As fast as we made a place presentable, we were kicked out. We ended up with only a fraction of our original space, and we had to fight tooth and nail for that.”

Late in May the squadron was filled out to full strength and the newly arrived boats were fitted with radar. The British boats did not have it, so the two torpedo-boat fleets began to experiment with a system of radio signals to vector British boats to American radar targets in coordinated simultaneous attacks.

After the collapse of the Afrika Korps in Tunisia in mid-May 1943, all of North Africa was in Allied hands and Allied attention turned toward Europe, across the narrow sea.

To mislead the enemy about the spot chosen by the Allies for the next landing, British secret agents of the Royal Navy elaborated a fantastic hoax worthy of the cheapest dime novel. The amazing thing is that it worked.

The British dressed the corpse of a man who had died of pneumonia in the uniform of a major in the Royal Marines. They stuffed his pockets with forged credentials as a Major William Martin, and they planted forged letters on the body to make him look like a courier between the highest Allied commands. The letters “revealed” that the Allies would next land in Sardinia and Greece. The body was pushed overboard from a submarine off the coast of Spain. It washed up on the beach as an apparent victim of a plane crash and was frisked by an Axis agent, just as the British had hoped.

Hitler was taken in by the hoax and gave priority to reinforcing Sardinia and Greece, widely separated, not only from each other, but also from Sicily, where the Allies were actually going to land.

To help along the confusion of Axis officers (most of whom were of a less romantic nature than their _Fuehrer_ and were not taken in by the Major William Martin fraud), the Allies mounted another hoax almost as childishly imaginative as the planted cadaver trick.

On D-Day, July 10, 1943, Commander Hunter R. Robinson in PT 213 led a flotilla of ten Air Force crash boats to Cape Granitola, at the far western tip of Sicily, as far as it could get from the true landing beaches around both sides of the southeastern horn of the triangular island.

The crash boats and the PT were supposed to charge about offshore during the early hours of D-Day, sending out phony radio messages, firing rockets, playing phonograph records of rattling anchor chains and the clanking and chuffing of landing-craft engines. The demonstration didn’t seem to fool anybody ashore, but the little craft tried.

Most of Squadron Fifteen was busy elsewhere on the morning of D-Day and narrowly missed being butchered in one of those ghastly attacks from friendly forces that were so dangerous to PT boats.

One force of American soldiers was going ashore at Licata. Twenty-four miles west, at Port Empedocle, was a flotilla of Italian torpedo boats which so worried the high command that Empedocle had been ruled out as a possible landing beach. To keep the Italian boats off the back of the main naval force, a special screen was thrown between Port Empedocle and the transport fleet, a screen of seventeen of Lieut. Commander Barnes’ PTs and the destroyer _Ordronaux_. After the war, historians discovered that the much-feared Italian torpedo boats at Empedocle had accidentally bumped into the invasion fleet the night before the landings, and had fled in panic to a new base at Trapani at the farthest western tip of the island.

Another one of those terrible blind battles between friendly forces was prepared when nobody told the westernmost destroyers of the main landing force that PTs would be operating nearby. The skippers of the destroyers _Swanson_ and _Roe_, nervous anyway because of the Italian torpedo-boat nest at Empedocle, charged into the PT patrol area when they saw radar pips on their screens. Lieut. Commander Barnes flashed a recognition signal, but the destroyer signal crews ignored it.

TUNISIA PT 205 "CAPTURES" BIZERTE SICILY PT FAKE LANDINGS U.S. LANDING FORCS LANDING FORCES ITALIAN PATROL BASE PT BASE AELIAN ISLES CAPTURED BY PTS AXIS FERRY ITALY SWAY SHOOTS UP GEN. MARK CLARK IN PT 201 ANZIO LANDINGS SARDINIA PT BASE

Just as the destroyer unit commander was about to open fire at 1,500 yards, Roe rammed Swanson at the forward stack. _Roe’s_ bow folded up and both ships went dead in the water. The _Swanson’s_ forward fireroom was partly flooded. Both ships had to be sent to the rear for repairs, carrying with them, of course, their five-inch cannon which were sorely missed by the assault troops of that morning’s landings.

Two nights later, on July 12th, Lieut. Commander Barnes split his PTs into two forces to escort twelve crash boats for another fraudulent demonstration of strength at Cape Granitola. The two forces ran parallel to the beach behind smoke, and noisily imitated the din of a force a thousand times their true size.

Searchlights blazed out from the shore, and the second salvo from shore batteries landed so close to the boats that the skippers hauled out to sea.

“The shore batteries were completely alerted,” said Lieut. Commander Barnes. “Apparently the enemy was convinced that a landing was about to take place when it detected the ‘large number’ of boats in our group approaching the beach, for they opened a heavy and accurate fire with radar control.... I immediately reversed course and opened the range. One shell damaged the rudder of a crash boat and another fell ten yards astern of a PT.

“The demonstration was called a success and we withdrew.”

The next day enemy newspapers reported that an attempted landing on the southwest coast of Sicily had been bloodily repulsed.

Soldiers of the American and British landing forces swarmed over Sicily, taking Italian prisoners by the hundreds. Some Americans were amused, some depressed by the standard joke of many surrendering Italian soldiers: “Don’t be sorry for me. I’m going to America and you’re staying in Sicily.”

Palermo, major city on the northwestern coast, fell to the Allies on July 22nd, and the jaunty boats of Squadron Fifteen were the first Allied naval power to show the flag in the harbor. They picked their way through the sunken hulks of fifty ships. The dockside was a shambles. In a word, Palermo was a typical PT advanced base.

The squadron moved up from Bizerte the same day and began patrolling the Tyrrhenian Sea, those waters boxed in by Sicily, Italy, Sardinia and Corsica.

Isolated in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about thirty miles north of Palermo, is the island of Ustica. On the first Tyrrhenian patrol Lieut. Commander Barnes led his boats toward Ustica to see what was going on in those backwaters of the war.

“At dawn we were off Ustica,” the squadron leader reports. “First thing, we saw a fishing boat putt-putting toward Italy. We found a handful of very scared individuals crawling out from under the floor plates, hopefully waving white handkerchiefs. This was the staff of an Italian admiral at Trapani [site of the Italian torpedo-boat base at the western tip of Sicily, bypassed by the fall of Palermo].

“Only reason we didn’t get the admiral was that he was late getting down to the dock and his staff said the hell with him.

“In addition to a few souvenir pistols and binoculars, we captured a whole fruit crate of thousand-lira notes which we reluctantly turned over to Army authorities later. One of the other boats saw a raft with seven Germans on it, feebly paddling out to sea. We picked them up too.”

The next night three PTs of Squadron Fifteen patrolled to the Strait of Messina, right against the toe of the Italian mainland itself, and two nights later, off Cape Vaticano, the same three boats—under Lieut. E. A. Arbuckle—found the 8,800-ton Italian freighter _Viminale_ being towed toward Naples by a tug.

For some reason, the freighter was being towed backward, almost causing the PT skippers to take a lead in the wrong direction, but they sank both ships in the first U.S. Naval victory in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

On the night of July 26th, near the island of Stromboli, three PTs commanded by Lieut. J. B. Mutty ran into their first F-lighters, those powerfully armed German landing craft and general-duty blockade runners that were to become the Number One enemy of PTs in the Mediterranean.

The F-lighters were slow and cumbersome, but they were armored and mounted extremely heavy antiaircraft batteries which could saw a PT into toothpicks. Gun turrets were lined with cement and often mounted the much-feared 88-mm. rifle, thus enormously outgunning the PTs.

Holds of the F-lighters were so well compartmented that they could take terrible punishment without going down. With only four and one-half feet of draft, they usually slid over PT torpedoes, set to run at eight-foot depth. An F-lighter was a serious opponent for a destroyer and much more than a match for a PT—in theory.

The three PT skippers at Stromboli didn’t know about that theory, however, and probably wouldn’t have hesitated about attacking even if they had known how dangerous an F-lighter was. They fired six fish and thought they had blown up two of the F-lighters, but postwar assessment says No. Neither side was badly hurt in this first duel, but more serious fighting was to come.

The next night, July 28th, three boats commanded by Lieut. Arbuckle fired at what the skippers thought were F-lighters, but were really Italian torpedo boats. American torpedoes passed harmlessly under the hulls of the enemy boats; Italian machine-gunners punched sixty holes in PT 218 and seriously wounded three officers, including Lieut. Arbuckle. The boat got back to Palermo with 18 inches of water sloshing about below decks.

The F-lighters were ferrying Axis troops out of Sicily, across the Strait of Messina. The Allied high command had hoped to catch the whole Axis force on Sicily in a gigantic trap, and the Messina ferry had to be broken up.

The Navy tried a combined torpedo boat-destroyer operation against the ferry, but as usual, communications between the American ships were bad and the destroyers opened fire on their own PTs.

The first salvo from the American destroyers splashed water on the PT decks. The PTs were five knots slower than the American cans. (Remember those news stories, in the early days of the war, about the dazzling 70-knot PTs—fast enough to “run rings around any warship afloat”? During the summer of 1943, few of the Squadron Fifteen boats could top 25 to 27 knots.) Because they couldn’t run away from their deadly friends and because they feared American gunnery more than they feared Italian gunnery, the PT boats actually ran for the enemy shore to snuggle under the protection of Italian batteries on Cape Rasocolmo. The enemy guns obligingly fired on the American destroyers and drove them away. The PT sailors went home, enormously grateful to the enemy for his involuntary but effective act of good will.

In August the Axis powers ferried most of their power to the mainland across the three-mile-wide Strait of Messina, in a brilliant escape from the Sicilian trap.

PT skippers knew about the evacuation, but had orders to stay away from the scene. British torpedo boats that tried to break up the evacuation train were badly mauled by shore batteries. One torpedo boat disappeared, with all hands, in the flash of a direct hit from a gigantic nine and one-half-inch shell.

Chafing at the order that kept it out of the action, the PT command dreamed up an operation to relieve the tedium. It decided to mount an invasion of its own to capture an island.

Setting up a jury-rig invasion staff, the officers pored over charts, looking for the ideal enemy island to add to the PT bag. Lieut. Dubose, returning from a fight with German mine sweepers on the night of August 15th, picked up an Italian merchant seaman from a small boat off Lipari Island, in the Aeolian Group, a few miles northwest of the Strait of Messina. The sailor said there were no Germans on Lipari and the islanders would undoubtedly be delighted to be captured by the American Navy.

When the admiral heard the squadron’s proposal he radioed: “Demand the unconditional surrender of the islands, suppress any opposition, bring back as prisoners all who are out of sympathy.”

Three PTs, their crews beefed up by 17 extra sailors, six soldiers and a military government man—with a destroyer following behind as main fire support—sailed into Lipari Harbor at 11 A.M. on August 17th, guns manned and trained on the beach. At precisely the critical moment, the destroyer hove into view around a headland, giving the impression of a mighty fleet backing up the puny invaders.

The commandant of the Italian naval garrison came down to the dock himself to handle mooring lines for his captors.

The American Military Government man stepped gracefully ashore in the first assault wave and set up a government on the spot. PT men rounded up military prisoners, hauled down the Italian and hoisted the American flag.

The Italian commodore slipped off in the excitement and tried to burn his papers, but a sailor persuaded him to stop by pressing the muzzle of a 45 automatic to his brow.

Sailors confiscated the documents and collected souvenirs, while the commandant radioed the other islands in the group and the PT skippers accepted their surrender by long distance. Only Stromboli resisted, so the PTs chugged over to find out what was holding up the breaking out of peace on that volcanic pimple.

They found an Italian chief petty officer and a 30-man detail, blowing up their radio equipment. The American sailors indignantly halted the sabotage—then destroyed the stuff themselves.

All the Italian navy saboteurs were put under armed guard for transport to American prisons in Sicily, but a pregnant woman burst into sobs, pleading that one of the men was her husband, a fisherman who had never spent a night away from Stromboli in his life. Six other women joined their wails to the chorus. The local priest assured Lieut. Dubose that their stories were true, so Dubose granted the prisoners a reprieve.

The boats returned to Lipari, picked up fifty merry military prisoners there, and departed for Palermo to the cheers of the entire town.

Messina fell that same day, and the Sicilian campaign was over.

Three weeks after the fall of Sicily, on the morning of September 9th, Allied troops went ashore in force on the mainland around the magnificent Bay of Salerno, just across a headland from Naples, second port of Italy.

Invasion chores were not strenuous for the PTs—a little anti-E-boat patrol in the bay and some light courier and taxi service for Army and Navy brass. Dull duty, but the boats had to fly low and slow, because they were almost out of aviation gasoline; their tanker had failed to arrive on schedule.

By October 4th, however, the gasoline was in and the British had taken a splendid harbor at La Maddalena, off northeast Sardinia, so Squadron Fifteen sailed to Sardinia, from where it and the British boats could prey on enemy traffic north of Naples. Almost immediately, part of Squadron Fifteen moved still farther north to Bastia, on Corsica, which the Free French had just taken back from the enemy. These two bases put PTs on the flanks of coastal shipping lanes deep in the heart of enemy waters. Genoa itself, the largest port in Italy, was now within reach of the squadron’s torpedoes. Hunting was especially good in the Tuscan Archipelago, a group of islets and rocks between the PT base and the mainland.

Something had to be done about the PT torpedoes, however, for the squadron was equipped with old Mark VIIIs, built in the 1920’s, crotchety, unreliable, and worst of all, designed to run so far below the surface that they couldn’t touch a shallow-draft F-lighter.

PT torpedomen tinkered with their fish to set them for a shallow run, but the Mark VIII was frisky without eight feet of water to hold it down. The shallow-set Mark VIIIs porpoised, alternately leaping from the water and diving like sportive dolphins. PT skippers set them shallow anyhow, and fired them with the idea that there was a fifty-fifty chance the porpoising torpedo would be on the upswing when it got to the target and might at least punch a hole in the side.

In Italy, as the contending armies fought slowly up the peninsula, the German situation became somewhat like the Japanese situation at that same moment in New Guinea. Powerful Allied air strikes disrupted supply by rail from Genoa and Rome to the front, so the Germans had to rely on waterborne transport to run down the coast at night.

To protect themselves from marauding Allied destroyers, the Germans fenced off a channel close to the shore with a barrier of thousands of underwater mines. At salient points they mounted heavy, radar-directed cannon—some as big as nine and one-half inches in bore—to keep raiding destroyers pushed away from the mine-protected channel.

The mine fields worked. Deep-draft destroyers did not dare chase Axis vessels too close to the beach. The shallow-bottom PTs skimmed over the top of the mine fields, however, so the Germans countered by arming many types of small ships as anti-PT boats. They took over a type of Italian warship called a torpedo boat, but actually a small destroyer, fast and heavily gunned, eminently qualified for PT-elimination work.

Night patrols became lively, with PTs harrying Axis coastal shipping and the Germans hunting them with E-boats and armed minesweepers, torpedo boats and F-lighters.

The first brawl after the PTs set up base on Sardinia and Corsica came on the night between October 22nd and 23rd. Three PTs, under the indefatigable Lieut. Dubose, sneaked up on a cargo ship escorted by four E-boats and minesweepers. The PTs fired a silent spread of four, and the cargo ship disappeared in a violent blast. Lieut. (jg) T. L. Sinclair was lining up his 212 to work a little more destruction, when a wobbly out-of-control Mark VIII torpedo from another PT flashed by under his stern.

“How many have you fired?” Lieut. Dubose asked Lieut. Sinclair by radio.

“None yet. I’m too damned busy dodging yours.”

Between Giglio and Elba, in the Tuscan Archipelago, on the night between November 2nd and 3rd, two PTs, under Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien, made a torpedo run on a subchaser and blew a satisfactorily fatal hole in the hull with a solid hit. The stricken vessel went down, all right, but it went down fighting, and one of the last incendiary bullets from the dying ship bored through the gasoline tank of the 207, touching off an explosion that blew off a deck hatch. Flames as high as the radar mast shot through the open hatchway.

A radioman turned on a fire extinguisher, threw it into the flaming compartment, and slammed down the hatch again. Miraculously, the fire went out.

Early in November, Lieut. Commander Barnes, who had been doing some deep thinking about the war against F-lighters, came up with a new tactical idea.

His reasoning was: PTs are radar-equipped, hence better than British boats at finding enemy vessels and maneuvering for attack; British torpedo boats use better torpedoes than American Mark VIIIs, for they are faster and carry heavier explosive charges; British gunboats have heavier firepower than PTs, for they usually carry at least six-pounder cannon and so can take on heavier opponents.

So Lieut. Commander Barnes and his British counterpart worked out a scheme of joint patrolling, the Americans acting as a scout force and finding targets by radar. The targets once found, the PTs were to guide the British boats in a coordinated attack. From November 1943 until April 1944, joint patrols had fourteen actions, in which skippers claimed 15 F-lighters, two E-boats, a tug and an oil barge sunk; three F-lighters, a destroyer, a trawler, and an E-boat damaged.

As winter came on, winds mounted and seas ran high, but the PTs maintained their patrols. On the foul night of November 29th, Lieut. (jg) Eugene A. Clifford took his 204 out with another PT for a patrol near Genoa. Within two hours the wind built up to 35 knots, water smashed over the bow in blinding sheets and drowned out the radar, visibility dropped to less than a hundred yards. The PTs gave up the patrol and turned back toward Bastia. In the stormy night the boats were separated and the 204 plugged along alone, lookouts almost blinded by the spray.

Out of the darkness four E-boats appeared within slingshot range, laboring on an opposite course. A fifth E-boat “crossed the T,” but not fast enough, for the PT and the E-boat struck each other a glancing blow with their bows.

From a ten-yard range, the two small craft ripped into each other with every gun that would bear. The other four E-boats joined the affray, and for fifteen seconds the 204 was battered from broad-jumping distance by the concentrated fire of five enemy boats.

The PT escaped in the darkness and the crew set about counting its wounds. Bullets had torn up torpedo tubes, ventilators, ammunition lockers, gun mounts. The deck and the superstructure were a ruin of splinters. The engine room had a hundred new and undesired ventilation apertures.

The skipper polled his crew to prepare the melancholy roll of dead and wounded. Not a man had been nicked! The gas tank was intact. The engines still purred along like electric clocks. The 204, outnumbered five to one, had stood up to a fifteen-second eyeball-to-eyeball Donnybrook and was nevertheless bringing all its sailors home in good health.

Two of the squadron’s PTs were detached in January 1944, and went south again for duty in the ill-fated Anzio landing. Lieut. General Mark Clark, commanding the Fifth American Army, wanted the boats for water-taxi duty between the main American lines near Naples and the Anzio beachhead, thirty miles south of Rome. Usually the taxi runs were dull for sailors of the PT temperament, but not always.

On the morning of January 28th, General Clark and some of his staff boarded Lieut. (jg) George Patterson’s 201 at the mouth of the Volturno River, and in company with 216 set sail for Anzio, seventy-five miles to the north.

Twenty-five miles south of Anzio, the minesweeper _Sway_ patrolled the southern approaches to the beachhead. The captain had just been warned that enemy airplanes were attacking Anzio, and he knew that the Germans often coordinated air and E-boat strikes, so when he saw two small boats ripping along at high speed and coming down the sun’s track, he challenged them by blinker light.

Without reducing speed, Lieut. Patterson answered with a six-inch light, too small a light for that distance in the daylight. Besides, the signalmen on the _Sway_ were partly blinded by the glare of the sun, just rising behind the 201.

_Sway’s_ guns opened fire. Lieut. Patterson fired an emergency recognition flare, but it burst directly in the face of the sun, and the _Sway’s_ bridge crew missed the second friendly signal from the torpedo boat. The 201 even reduced speed as a further friendly gesture, but the slower speed only made the boat a better target.