Bern Keating

“ In a series of night dashes from island to island through Japanese-infested seas, the little flotilla carried the escaping brass to the island of Mindanao, where the generals and admirals caught a B 17 Flying Fortress bomber flight for Australia.
The fantastic and undeniably exaggerated claims of sinkings are regrettable, but in no way detract from the bravery of the sailors of Squadron Three. They were merely the victims of the nation’s desperate need for victories. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At 400 yards, a spread of torpedoes will usually score, but the machine guns and autocannon of a cruiser’s secondary battery, guided by a searchlight, will almost certainly tear up a torpedo boat. Searles, just to be sure of a hit, was doing the same thing as a commando would do if, armed with a high-powered rifle, he crept to within five feet of a sentry armed with a sawed-off shotgun. At any range that rifle is a deadly weapon—like a torpedo—but at close range the shotgun is just as deadly and ten times surer of hitting with the first shot. ”

“ Pound for pound, the PT boat was by far the most heavily armed vessel afloat, but that does not mean that a PT flyweight, no matter how tough for its size, was a match for an enemy heavyweight. PT sailors never hesitated to tackle an enemy destroyer, but they knew that a torpedo boat could stand up to an all-out brawl with an alert and aroused destroyer the way a spunky rat terrier can stand up to a hungry wolf. After all, the full and proper name of a destroyer is torpedo-boat destroyer. ”

“ The crash boats trailed balloons, laid smoke screens, fired ripples of rockets at the beach, laid delayed-action bombs in shallow water to imitate frogmen at work, and broadcast noises of many landing craft. The crash boats hoped to give the impression of a convoy ten miles long and eight miles wide.
At 4 A.M. troop-carrier planes flew over the town of La Ciotat and dropped 300 booby-trapped dummy paratroopers.
Radio Berlin broadcast an alarm. “The Allies are landing forces west of Toulon and east of Cannes. Thousands of enemy paratroops are being dropped in areas northwest of Toulon.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ PTs had no radar in those days, and a visual lookout was not very effective in a New Guinea downpour.
Even in New Guinea, however, the rain cannot go on forever. When the rain clouds parted, a bright moon lit up the sea and a lookout snapped to attention.
“Submarine,” he hissed. “Dead ahead, a submarine.”
Hove to on the surface was a Japanese I-boat, probably waiting for Japanese small craft to come from the beach for supplies, or else recharging its batteries, or probably both. Ensign Lynch began his silent stalk and closed to 1,000 yards without alarming the submarine’s crew. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A torpedo, like any other weapon that has to be aimed, is more likely to hit the closer you get to your target before you shoot. So Bob went in to 400 yards in stealthy silence. Four hundred yards in a naval battle is the equivalent of arm’s length in an infantry fire fight. ”

“ The PT was designed to slip slowly and quietly into an enemy formation in bad visibility, to fire torpedoes at the handiest target, and to escape behind a smoke screen with whatever speed the condition of the boat permitted. With luck, the screening destroyers would lose the PT in the smoke, the confusion, and the darkness. Without luck—well, in warfare everybody has to take some chances.
What most annoyed the PT sailors about their lurid press was that the truth made an even better story. ”

“ Pullen tried to reach Admiral Oldendorf by radio, but failed, so he led the PTs 152, 130 and 131, in a torpedo approach.
The radar pips broke into five separate targets, and when a light haze lifted, the skippers clearly saw what they thought were two battleships, two cruisers and a destroyer. The enemy opened fire at three-mile range, with his biggest batteries. Starshells burst overhead and the PTs tore away through a ghastly glare that made them feel naked under the rain of high explosive. ”

“ The night runs of the Tokyo Express were wearing down the Marines. As they became more and more dirty and tired they became more and more irritated to find that the Japanese they killed were dressed in spruce new uniforms—sure sign that they were newcomers to the island.
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Even worse was the sleep-robbing uproar of the night naval bombardments that pounded planes and installations at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, the only American base where friendly fighters and bombers could find a home. The American hold on the island was in danger from sheer physical fatigue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most PT men resent the wild, fanciful tales that tend to belittle their real experience.... There is actually little glamour for a PT. The excitement of battle is tempered by many dull days of inactivity, long nights of fruitless patrol, and dreary hours of foul weather at sea in a small boat. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Naturally, as any generous reporter would have done, he gave full credit to its claims of an amazing bag—two light cruisers, two transports and an oil tanker, besides enemy barges, landing craft and planes.
Postwar study of Japanese naval archives shows no evidence that any Japanese ships were torpedoed at the times and places the Squadron Three sailors claim to have hit them. Of course, airplane and PT pilots are notoriously overoptimistic—they have to be optimistic by nature even to get into the cockpits of their frail craft and set out for combat. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For almost an hour and a half, Marines, soldiers and Seabees lay in foxholes and suffered while the Cyclopean 14-inchers tore holes in the field, riddled planes with shell fragments, started fires and filled the air with shards from exploding shell casings—shards that could slice a man in two without even changing the pitch of his screams. ”

“ Two Japanese trained a brace of machine guns on the Americans, but held their fire. The shivering sailors looked down the muzzles of those two machine guns until four o’clock in the morning, when a squall with six-foot waves drove the patrol craft back to the beach. ”

“ For days America had been told that on the shrinking Luzon beachhead no airstrips remained in American hands. Where had MacArthur gone to find a friendly airfield, and how had he gone there through the swarming patrols of the Japanese naval blockade? ”

“ Commander Alan R. Montgomery, the PT squadron commander at Tulagi, heard that only destroyers were coming, he begged off from the fight—on the extraordinary grounds that he preferred waiting for bigger game.
Montgomery’s decision is not as cocky as it first sounds. The Japanese presumably did not know about the arrival of the PTs on the scene, and if ever a PT was going to shoot a torpedo into a big one—a cruiser or a battleship—it was going to be by surprise. No use tipping off the enemy until the big chance came. ”

“ The Japanese ammunition load would have been a disaster for the task force if it had run into armored opposition—cruisers or battleships of the American Navy—but the Japanese knew as well as we did that there was little likelihood our badly mauled fleet, manned by exhausted sailors, would be anywhere near the scene. The Japanese sailed down The Slot with one hand voluntarily tied behind them, in a sense, supremely confident that they could pound Henderson Field Without interference. ”

“ Twenty-five miles short of the patrol area, the radar man found a target five miles off the beach. The two skippers were jubilant; here was a target made to order—too far out to sea to run for the beach, out of the range of protecting shore batteries, in water deep enough for a high-speed strafing run by the PTs, with no chance of hitting a rock. The boats went to general quarters and closed the target.
Lieut. Jones took the unnecessary precaution of warning his gunners. “Look alive, now—open fire the instant the flare goes off.” ”

“ Too late. A heavy explosion stopped the Rich dead in the water. A second explosion tore away fifty feet of the stern. A third mine exploded forward. The destroyer-escort was a shambles, its keel broken and folded in a V. The superstructure was festooned with a grisly drapery of bodies and parts of bodies.
PTs rallied around the Rich to take survivors from the deck or from the mine-filled waters around the shattered vessel. Crewmen on the 508 saw a sailor bobbing by in the sea, and the bowman picked up a heaving line to throw to his rescue. The man in the water calmly refused assistance. ”

“ Four fat carriers, prime targets for the aggressive Halsey, were screened by eight destroyers and one light cruiser. Mission of the force was suicidal. Without enough planes to make a serious fight, Admiral Ozawa nevertheless hoped to lure Halsey’s powerful Third Fleet away from the landing beach, thus exposing American transports to attack by two powerful Japanese surface striking forces that were to sneak into Leyte Gulf through the back door, or rather two back doors at San Bernardino and Surigao Straits, north and south of Leyte Island. ”

“ The American PT commander was not the only one concerned about the heavy ordnance of the F-lighters. Captain J. F. Stevens of the British Navy’s Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean said:
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“While coastal forces are the most suitable forces to operate in mined areas, the enemy has so strengthened his escorts and armed his shipping that our coastal craft find themselves up against considerably heavier metal. Furthermore, the enemy’s use of F-lighters of shallow draft does not provide good torpedo targets. Everything that can be done to improve our chances of successful attack is being done. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Next morning all the PTs were in Mangarin Bay at Mindoro, site of the landings, and the LST 605, destined to be their base ship, was unloading on the beach. PTs 230 and 300 were entering from the night’s patrol, when a single plane glided out of the sun and strafed the 230, without hitting it. The kamikaze circled and started his dive on the LST 605. The landing ship and all the PTs opened fire and shot off the plane’s tail. The kamikaze crashed on the beach fifty yards from the LST, killing five men and wounding 11. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For once, an American command staff had fallen into the chronic error of the Japanese. Admiral Halsey apparently believed the exaggerated claims of his pilots and thought that the Central Striking Force had been decimated and the remnants driven off. The Japanese had actually lost only three cruisers to submarines and a battleship to aircraft. After a short retreat, Admiral Kurita reconsidered and turned back during the night to resume the transit of San Bernardino Strait. His powerful fleet was steaming toward the transport area at 20 knots. ”

“ With the main battleline of the Japanese fleet driven from the scene, the PTs were right back where they had been in New Guinea and Guadalcanal—busting barges and derailing the Tokyo Express.
On the far side of Leyte Island the waters are reef filled, the channels shallow and tortuous. The Japanese were using the dangerous waters of the Camotes Sea and Ormoc Bay to land supplies at night behind their lines. A familiar enough situation for the PT sailors, so the skippers took their shallow-draft torpedo boats into Ormoc Bay, looking for trouble. ”