“The Japs began to shell Henderson Field, first putting a very bright flare in the vicinity of the field, and so naturally both of us [the two PTs] started in on them independently....
“As soon as the Japs opened fire it was obvious to us that there was at least one fairly heavy ship. We thought it was probably a battleship.... We could tell it was definitely a heavy ship because of the long orange flash from its gunfire rather than the short white flash which we knew from experience was the smaller fire of the destroyers....
“Due to the light put up by the Nip flares, I was able to use my director for the first time. I set the target’s speed at about 20 knots, and I think he was doing slightly more than this. I kept him in the director for approximately seven of his salvos and really had a beautiful line on him. [PT boats usually were forced, by bad visibility at night and in bad weather, to shoot from the hip. A chance to use a director for visually aimed fire was an unaccustomed luxury well worth gloating over in an action report.]
“After closing to about 1,000 yards, I decided that if we went in any farther we would get tangled up in the destroyer screen which I knew would be surrounding him at about 500 to 700 yards.
“I therefore fired three fish. The fourth misfired and never left the tube. The three fish landed beautifully and made no flash as we fired them.
“We immediately turned around and started back for the base, but we had the torpedoes running hot and straight toward the target.
“I am positive that at least one of them found its mark.
“Certainly the Nips ceased fire immediately and apparently turned right around and limped home.”
Nobody knows what damage these two PTs did that night. Planes the next day found a badly damaged cruiser leaving the scene, and that could well have been Taylor’s victim. At any rate, the material damage inflicted by these two brave seamen and their crews is comparatively unimportant.
What is important is the almost incredible but quite possible fact that the two cockleshells ran off a horribly dangerous Japanese surface fleet prepared to give Henderson Field what might well have been its death blow. As soon as the torpedo boats attacked, the Japanese stopped shooting and ran.
It is not hard to understand why. The American fleet had been badly battered during the previous night’s battle, but so had the Japanese fleet, and Japanese nerves were probably raw and jumpy.
The two PTs achieved complete surprise, and a surprise attack in restricted waters is always unsettling to naval officers, even the most cocksure and well rested. The Japanese could not be sure exactly who was attacking and in what force. They could have had only a dim idea of what damage they had done to the American Navy the night before, and, for all they knew, the torpedo tracks they saw came from a dangerous destroyer flotilla, backed up by who knows how many mighty ships of the line.
With their nerves shaken by the suddenness of the torpedo attack and with no knowledge of what was prowling around out there in the dark, it apparently seemed best to the Japanese commanders to abandon the bombardment quickly and save their ships for another day.
The two glorified cabin cruisers had driven off the Japanese task force when only three planes had been destroyed and 17 damaged (all the damaged planes were in the air before the end of the next day), and Henderson Field was still in action. The next day, November 14th, a smoothly functioning Henderson Field was host not only to the Marine planes permanently based there but also to Navy planes from the carrierEnterprisewhich landed at Henderson for refueling during shuttle trips to attack 11 fast Japanese transports coming down The Slot.
All-day attacks on November 14th, by the Marine, Navy, and Army planes, saved from destruction by the two PT boats, sank seven of the transports and worked a hideous massacre among the Japanese soldiers on their decks and in their holds. Four of the transports and 11 destroyers survived and at sunset were sailing for the Japanese beach-head of Tassafaronga Point. The destroyers carried deckloads of survivors from the sunken transports.
The destroyer commander was Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, perhaps the most brilliant combat officer of the Japanese navy. He repeatedly showed a fantastic devotion to duty that enabled him to carry out his missions in spite of seemingly impossible difficulties. Tanakawasthe Tokyo Express.
To give Tanaka a little help with the disembarkation of the troops at Guadalcanal, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson during the landings as a diversion—and just possibly as acoup de grâceto further American air resistance. They sent a battleship, two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and nine destroyers to do the job. This time the light cruisers and destroyers were deployed in a formidable anti-torpedo-boat screen to prevent a recurrence of the previous night’s spooking from a measly two-boat PT raid.
The Japanese had lost their chance, however, for much more American naval power than a brace of torpedo boats stood between the Japanese and Henderson Field. Admiral W. A. Lee, on the battleshipWashington, had arrived from the south, accompanied by the battleshipSouth Dakotaand four destroyers. He sailed north to meet the Japanese across Iron Bottom Bay (so called because the bottom was littered with the hulks of Japanese and American ships sunk in earlier battles. There were so many hulls on the ocean’s floor that quartermasters reported to their skippers that magnetic compasses were deflected by the scrap iron).
The American admiral—known to his intimates as “Ching” Lee—had a bad moment when he overheard two PTs gossiping about his battleships over the voice radio.
“There go two big ones, but I don’t know whose they are,” said one PT skipper.
Admiral Lee grabbed the microphone and quickly identified himself to shore headquarters before the PTs could get off a nervous shot.
“Refer your big boss about Ching Lee; Chinese, catchee? Call off your boys.”
The PT skippers answered, with good humor, that they were well acquainted with old “Ching” and promised not to go after him.
The PT crews watched Admiral Lee sail into the decisive last action of the three-day Battle of Guadalcanal. That night his ships sank the Japanese battleship and routed the Japanese bombardment fleet. But the mixed transport and destroyer reinforcement flotilla was taken, nevertheless, by the stubborn and wily Admiral Tanaka, around the action and to the beach at Tassafaronga where he carried out his reinforcement mission almost literally “come hell or high water.”
The Japanese had made a mighty effort, but American fliers, sailors, and PT boatmen had spoiled the assault. The only profit to the Japanese from the bloody three days was the landing of 2,000 badly shaken soldiers, 260 cases of ammunition, and 1,500 bags of rice.
But the Japanese were not totally discouraged. They had the redoubtable Tanaka on their side, and so they went back to supply by the Tokyo Express. The idea was for Tanaka’s fast destroyers to run down The Slot by night to Tassafaronga Point, where sailors would push overboard drums of supplies. Troops ashore would then round up the floating drums in small boats. In that way, Tanaka’s fast destroyers would not have to stop moving and would make a less tempting target for the Tulagi PTs than a transport at anchor.
On November 30, 1942, Admiral Tanaka shoved off from Bougainville Island with eight destroyers loaded with 1,100 drums of supplies. At the same moment an American task force of five cruisers and six destroyers—a most formidable task force indeed, especially for a night action—left the American base at Espiritu Santo to break up just the kind of supply run Tanaka was undertaking.
The two forces converged on Tassafaronga Point from opposite directions. The American force enormously outgunned Tanaka’s destroyers and also had the tremendous advantage of being, to some extent, equipped with radar, then a brand-new and little-understood gadget. Thus the American force could expect to enjoy an additional superiority of surprise.
And that is just the way it worked out. At 11:06P.M., American radar picked up Tanaka’s ships. Admiral Tanaka’s comparatively feeble flotilla was blindly sailing into a trap.
American destroyers fired twenty torpedoes at the still unsuspecting Japanese, who did not wake up to their danger until the cruisers opened fire with main battery guns at five-mile range.
The Japanese lashed back with a reflex almost as automatic for Tanaka’s well-drilled destroyer sailors as jerking a finger back from a red-hot stove. They instantly filled the water with torpedoes.
No American torpedoes scored. Six Japanese torpedoes hit four American cruisers, sinkingNorthampton, and damagingPensacola,Minneapolis, andNew Orleansso seriously that they were unfit for action for almost a year. Cruiser gunfire sank one Japanese destroyer, but the rest of Admiral Tanaka’s ships, besides giving the vastly superior American force a stunning defeat, even managed to push overboard many of the drums they had been sent down to deliver.
Tanaka had once more carried out his mission and had won a great naval victory, almost as a sideline to the main business.
On the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1942, Admiral Tanaka came down again with eleven destroyers.
This time it was not a mighty cruiser-destroyer force waiting for him, but only eight PTs from Tulagi. They were manned, however, by some of the most aggressive officers and men in the American Navy. The boats were deployed around Cape Esperance and Savo Island, on the approaches to Tassafaronga.
Two patrolling torpedo boats spotted Tanaka’s destroyers and attacked, but one broke down and the other came to his rescue, so no shots were fired. Nevertheless, the Admiral was spooked by the abortive attack of two diminutive PTs, and retreated. He recovered his courage in a few minutes and tried again.
This time four PTs jumped him and fired twelve torpedoes. When their tubes were empty, the PTs roared by the destroyers, strafing with their machine guns—and being strafed. Jack Searles, in 59, passed down theOyashio’sside less than a hundred yards away, raking the destroyer’s superstructure and gun crews with 50-caliber fire. The 59 itself was also riddled, of course, but stayed afloat.
Admiral Tanaka, who had run around the blazing duel of battlewagons at the Battle of Guadalcanal to deliver his reinforcements, who had bored through massive day-long air attacks, who had gutted a mighty cruiser force to deliver his cargo to Tassafaronga, turned back before the threat of four PTs, abandoned the mission, and fled back to Bougainville.
The PT navy at Tulagi (and the Marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal) had good cause to celebrate a clear-cut victory on this first anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
Times were too hard for the PTs to get any rest. Jack Searles patched up his bullet-torn 59, and, with another boat, put out two nights later, on December 9th, to machine-gun a Japanese landing barge sighted near Cape Esperance. During the barge-PT duel, one of Searles’ lookouts spotted a submarine on the surface, oozing along at about two knots. Jack whipped off two quick shots and blew a 2,000-ton blockade-running submarine (I-3) into very small pieces. There is no way to deny the submarine to Jack Searles’ bag, because a Japanese naval officer, the sole survivor, swam ashore and told the story of the I-3’s last moments.
On the night of December 11th Admiral Tanaka began another run of the Tokyo Express with ten destroyers. Dive bombers attacked during daylight, but made no hits. The job of stopping Tanaka’s Tokyo Express was passed to the PTs. They zipped out of the harbor at Tulagi and deployed along the beach between Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance.
The night was bright and clear, and shortly after midnight three PTs, commanded by Lieut. (jg) Lester H. Gamble, saw the destroyer column and attacked. The other two boats were skippered by Stilly Taylor and Lieut. (jg) William E. Kreiner III.
The Japanese destroyers turned on searchlights and let go with main batteries and machine guns, but the three torpedo boats got off their torpedoes and popped two solid hits into the destroyerTeruzuki. The Japanese ship blazed up, and for the second time Tanaka had had enough of torpedo boats. He went home.
The PTs had not yet had enough of Tanaka, however, for Lieut. Frank Freeland’s 44 heard the combat talk of his squadron mates on the voice radio, and came running. He roared past the burningTeruzuki, chasing the retreating destroyers. Two things were working against him; Lieut. Freeland did not know it, but one of the destroyers had stayed behind with theTeruzuki, and the flames from the burning ship were lighting the PT boat beautifully for the hidden Japanese gunners.
Aboard the 44 was Lieut. (jg) Charles M. Melhorn, who reports his version of what happened:
“We were throwing up quite a wake, and with the burning cargo ship [he probably mistook the burningTeruzukifor a cargo ship] lighting up the whole area I thought we would soon be easy pickings and I told the skipper so. Before he could reply, Crowe, the quartermaster who was at the wheel, pointed and yelled out ‘Destroyer on the starboard bow. There’s your target, Captain.’
“Through the glasses I could make out a destroyer two points on our starboard bow, distant about 8,000 yards, course south-southwest. We came right and started our run. We had no sooner steadied on our new course than I picked up two more destroyers through my glasses. They were in column thirty degrees on our port bow, target course 270, coming up fast.
“The skipper and I both saw at once that continuing our present course would pin us against the beach and lay us wide open to broadsides from at least three Jap cans. The Skipper shifted targets to the two destroyers, still about 4,000 yards off, and we started in again.
“By this time we were directly between the blazing ship and the two destroyers. As we started the run I kept looking for the can that had fired.... I picked him up behind and to the left of our targets. He was swinging, apparently to form up in column astern of the other two. The trap was sprung, and as I pointed out this fourth destroyer the lead ship in the column opened fire.”
The 44 escaped from the destroyer ambush behind a smoke screen, but once clear, turned about for a second attack. The burningTeruzukiilluminated the 44, andTeruzuki’sguardian destroyer, lurking in the dark, drew a bead on the ambushed PT.
“We had just come out of our turn when we were fired on.... I saw the blast, yelled ‘That’s for us.’ and jumped down on the portside by the cockpit. We were hit aft in the engine room.
“I don’t remember much. For a few seconds nothing registered at all. I looked back and saw a gaping hole in what was once the engine-room canopy. The perimeter of the hole was ringed by little tongues of flame. I looked down into the water and saw we had lost way.
“Someone on the bow said ‘Shall we abandon ship?’ Freeland gave the order to go ahead and abandon ship.
“I stayed at the cockpit ... glancing over where the shell came from. He let go again.
“I dove ... I dove deep and was still under when the salvo struck. The concussion jarred me badly, but I kept swimming underwater. There was a tremendous explosion, paralyzing me from the waist down. The water around me went red.
“The life jacket took control and pulled me to the surface. I came up in a sea of fire, the flaming embers of the boat cascading all about me. I tried to get free of the life jacket but couldn’t. I started swimming feebly. I thought the game was up, but the water which had shot sky high in the explosion rained down and put out the fires around me....
“I took a few strokes away from the gasoline fire, which was raging about fifteen yards behind me, and as I turned back I saw two heads, one still helmeted, between me and the flames. I called to the two men and told them that I expected the Japs to be over in short order to machine-gun us, and to get their life jackets ready to slip. I told them to get clear of the reflection of the fire as quickly as possible, and proceeded to do so myself.
“I struck out for Savo, whose skyline ridge I could see dimly, and gradually made headway toward shore. Every two or three minutes I stopped to look back for other survivors or an approaching destroyer, but saw nothing save the boat which was burning steadily, and beyond it the [Teruzuki] which burned and exploded all night long.
“Sometime shortly before dawn a PT boat cruised up and down off Savo and passed about twenty-five yards ahead of me. I was all set to hail him when I looked over my shoulder and saw a Jap can bearing down on his starboard quarter.
“I didn’t know whether the PT was maneuvering to get a shot at him or not, so I kept my mouth shut. I let him go by, slipped my life jacket, and waited for the fireworks.
“The Jap can lay motionless for some minutes, and I finally made it out as nothing more than a destroyer-shaped shadow formed by the fires and smoke.
“I judge that I finally got ashore on Savo about 0730 or 0800. Lieutenant Stilly Taylor picked me up off the beach about an hour later.”
Lieut. Melhorn was in the water between five and six hours. Only one other sailor survived the explosion of the 44’s gas tank. Two officers and seven enlisted men died.
Flames on theTeruzuki—the same flames that lit the way to its fiery death for the 44—finally ate their way into the depth-charge magazine, and just before dawn the Japanese destroyer went up with a jarring crash.
More important to the fighters on Guadalcanal than the sinking of theTeruzukiwas the astonishing and gratifying fact that Admiral Tanaka, the destroyer tiger, had been turned back one more time by a handful of wooden cockleshells, without landing his supplies. The big brass of the cruiser fleet that had been unable to stop Tanaka at the Battle of Tassafaronga must have been bewildered.
After the clash between Tanaka and the torpedo boats on December 11th, no runs of the Tokyo Express were attempted for three weeks. The long lull meant dull duty for the PTs, but was a proof of their effectiveness in derailing the Tokyo Express. Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal were down to eating roots and leaves—and sometimes even other Japanese, according to persistent reports among the Japanese themselves—before their navy worked up enough nerve to try another run of the Tokyo Express.
On January 2nd, ten destroyers came down The Slot. One was damaged by a dive bomber’s near miss, and another was detached to escort the cripple, but the other eight sailed on.
That night, eleven PTs attacked Tanaka’s destroyers with eighteen torpedoes, but had no luck. Tanaka unloaded his drums and was gone before dawn.
No matter. As soon as the sun came up, the PTs puttered about Iron Bottom Bay, enjoying a bit of target practice on the drums pushed off the destroyers’ decks. One way or the other, the torpedo boats of Tulagi snatched food from the mouths of the starving Japanese garrison.
A week later a coast watcher up the line called in word that Tanaka was running eight destroyers down The Slot. Rouse out the PTs again!
Just after midnight on January 13th, Lieut. Rollin Westholm, in PT 112, saw four destroyers and called for a coordinated attack with Lieut. (jg) Charles E. Tilden’s 43.
“Make ’em good,” Lieut. Westholm said, so Lieut. Tilden took his 43 into 400-yard range before firing two. Both missed. To add to his disastrous bad luck, the port tube flashed a bright red light, a blazing giveaway of the 43’s position.
The destroyer hit the 43 with the second salvo, and all hands went over the side, diving deep to escape machine-gun strafing. The destroyer passed close enough so that the swimming sailors could hear the Japanese chattering on the deck.
Lieut. Clark W. Faulkner, in 40, drew a bead on the second destroyer in column and fired four. His heart was made glad by what he thought was a juicy hit, so he took his empty tubes back home.
Lieut. Westholm, in 112, took on the third destroyer and was equally certain he had put one into his target, but two of the destroyers had zeroed in during his approach run, and two shells blew his boat open at the waterline. Lieut. Westholm and his eleven shipmates watched the rest of the battle from a life raft. The other PTs fired twelve fish, but didn’t even claim any hits.
Either Lieut. Westholm or Lieut. Faulkner had scored, however, for theHatsukazehad caught a torpedo under the wardroom. The Japanese skipper at first despaired of saving his ship, but damage-control parties plugged the hole well enough so that he was able to escape before daylight.
When the sun rose, the PTs still afloat picked up survivors of the two lost torpedo boats and then went through the morning routine of sinking the 250 floating drums of supplies the destroyers had jettisoned. The starving Japanese watching from the beach must have wished all torpedo boats in hell that morning.
The Japanese did come out to tow in the wreckage of the PT 43, but a New Zealand warship stepped in with a few well-placed broadsides and reduced the already splintered torpedo boat to a mess of matchwood before the Japanese could study it.
Nobody but the Japanese High Command knew it at this point, but the plane and PT blockade of the Tokyo Express had won; the island garrison had been starved out.
During the night between February 1st and 2nd, coast watchers reported 20 Japanese destroyers coming down The Slot. The American Navy had no way of knowing it, but the Tokyo Express was running in reverse. The decks of those destroyers were clear—they were being kept clear to make room for a deckload of the starved-out Japanese on Guadalcanal. Japan was finally calling it quits and pulling out of the island.
Whatever the mission of the Japanese ships, the mission of the American Navy was clear—to keep the Japanese from doing whatever it was they were doing and to sink some ships in the process.
Three American mine-layers sprinkled 300 mines north of Guadalcanal, near Savo Island, in the waters where the destroyers might be expected to pass. Eleven PTs waiting in ambush attacked the destroyers as they steamed by the minefield. The PTs rejoiced at a good, solid hit on a destroyer by somebody—nobody was sure whom—and the destroyerMakigumoadmittedly acquired an enormous hole in the hull at that very moment, but the Japanese skipper said that he hit a mine. He said he never saw any PTs attacking him.
Postwar assessment officers say that he probably hit a mine while maneuvering to avoid a PT torpedo. Avoid a torpedo attack he never even saw? Someone is confused. Some of the PT sailors who were sure of hits on theMakigumohave a tendency to get sulky when this minefield business is mentioned, and nobody can blame them. TheMakigumo, at any rate, had to be scuttled.
Regardless of what damage they did to the Japanese, the PTs themselves suffered terribly in this battle.
Lieut. (jg) J. H. Claggett’s 111 was hit by a shell and set afire. The crew swam until morning, fighting off sharks and holding up the wounded. Two torpedo boatmen were killed.
Ensign James J. Kelly’s 37 caught a shell on the gas tank and disappeared in a puff of orange flame. One badly wounded man survived.
Ensign Ralph L. Richards’ 123 had stalked to within 500 yards of a destroyer target when a Japanese glide bomber slid in from nowhere, dropped a single bomb, and made possibly the most fantastically lucky hit of the war. The bomb landed square on the tiny fantail of the racing PT boat. The boat went up in a blur of flames and splinters. Four men were killed.
In spite of the fierce attacks of the PT flotilla, Tanaka’s sailors managed to take the destroyers in to the beach, load a shipment of evacuees, and slip out again for the quick run home.
This was the last and by far the bloodiest action of the PTs in the Guadalcanal campaign. The PTs had lost three boats and seventeen men in the battle and had not scored themselves—unless you count the destroyerMakigumo, which PT sailors stubbornly insist is theirs.
An over-all summary of their contribution to the campaign for Guadalcanal, however, gives them a whopping score:
A submarine and a destroyer sunk [not countingMakigumo]Two destroyers badly damagedTons of Japanese supply drums riddled and sunkDozens of disaster victims pulled from the waterTwo massive bombardments just possibly scared offAnd—by far the most important credit—the Tokyo Express of Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka ambushed and definitely turned back twice after a powerful cruiser force had failed at the job.
A submarine and a destroyer sunk [not countingMakigumo]
Two destroyers badly damaged
Tons of Japanese supply drums riddled and sunk
Dozens of disaster victims pulled from the water
Two massive bombardments just possibly scared off
And—by far the most important credit—the Tokyo Express of Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka ambushed and definitely turned back twice after a powerful cruiser force had failed at the job.
Even after the postwar assessment teams cut down PT sinking credits to a fraction of PT claims, there is still plenty of credit left for a force ten times the size of the Tulagi fleet.
Toward the end of 1942, as the Japanese defense of Guadalcanal was crumbling, American forces began to inch forward elsewhere in the Pacific, most notably on the island of New Guinea, almost 600 miles to the west of Guadalcanal.
New Guinea is the second largest island in the world (only Greenland is larger). Dropped over the United States, the island would reach from New York City to Houston, Texas; it is big enough to cover all of New England, plus New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and all of Tennessee, except for Memphis and its suburbs. Even today, vast inland areas are unexplored and possibly some tribes in the mountains have never even heard about the white man—or about the Japanese either, for that matter. The island is shaped like a turkey, with its head and wattles pointed east.
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
Early in the war, right after the fall of the Philippines and of the East Indies, the Japanese had landed on the turkey’s back. The Australians held the turkey’s belly. The Japanese had tried to cross the grim Owen Stanley Mountains, to get at the turkey’s underside, but tough Australian troops had slugged it out with them and pushed them back. The fight in the mountains was so miserable for both sides that everybody had tacitly agreed that the battle for New Guinea would be decided along the beaches.
Splitting the very tip of the turkey’s tail is Milne Bay, a magnificent anchorage. Whoever held Milne Bay could prevent the other side from spreading farther along the coast. Australians and Americans, under the command of General MacArthur, moved first, seized Milne Bay in June of 1942, and successfully fought off a Japanese landing force.
A curious example of the misery the homefolks can deal out to front-line fighters is the mix-up caused by the code name for Milne Bay. For some obscure reason, the Gili Gili base, at Milne Bay, was called “Fall River.” Naturally, according to the inexorable workings of Murphy’s Law (if anythingcango wrong, itwill) many of the supplies for Milne Bay were delivered to bewildered supply officers at Fall River, Massachusetts.
Despite this foul-up, by the end of October, 1942, Milne Bay was safely in the hands of the Allies and ready to support an advance along the bird’s back. All movement had to be by sea, for there were no roads through New Guinea’s jungles, and the waters around the turkey’s tail were the most poorly charted in the world. Navigators of deep-draft ships were horrified to have to sail through reef- and rock-filled waters, depending on charts with disquieting notes like “Reef possibly seen here by Entrecasteaux in 1791.” No naval commander in his right mind would commit deep-draft ships to such uncharted and dangerous waters for nighttime duty. Which means that the times and the coastal waters of eastern New Guinea were made for PT boats, or vice versa.
On December 17, 1942, less than a week after the PTs of Tulagi had fought the last big battle with theincomingTokyo Express, the PT tenderHilotowed two torpedo boats into Milne Bay and set up for business. Other PTs followed. For seven more months motor torpedo boats were to be the entire surface striking force of the U. S. Navy in the Solomon Sea around the tail of the New Guinea turkey.
By the time theHilohad arrived at Milne Bay, the fight for the turkey’s back had moved 200 miles up the coast to a trio of villages called Buna, Gona, and Sanananda. Two hundred miles is too long a haul for PT boats, so theHilostayed at Milne Bay as a kind of rear base, the main striking force of PTs moving closer to the fighting. They set up camp at Tufi, in the jungles around Oro Bay, almost within sight of the Buna battlefield, and began the nightly coastal patrols that were to stretch on for almost two weary years before all of New Guinea was back in Allied hands.
First blood was drawn on Christmas Eve. Ensign Robert F. Lynch celebrated the holiday by taking out the PT 122 for a routine patrol, looking for small Japanese coasters or submarines running supplies and reinforcements into Buna. The night was dark and rainy, and the PT chugged along without much hope of finding any action. 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. He fired two torpedoes and kept on closing the range to 500 yards, where he fired two more. The submarine went up in a geyser of water, scrap iron, and flame.
Ensign Lynch thought he saw a dim shape beyond his victim and was alert when another surfaced I-boat shot four torpedoes at him. He slipped between the torpedo tracks, but could do nothing about retaliating, because he had emptied his tubes. He had to let the second I-boat go. Postwar assessment gives Ensign Lynch a definite kill on this submarine.
The same Christmas Eve, two other PTs from the Oro Bay base sank two barges full of troops.
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 thedaihatsu, 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 singledaihatsucould be a dangerous target for a PT. A fleet ofdaihatsus, 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 betweendaihatsuand 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 adaihatsu’sarmor. 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, theRoaring 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 transportOigawa 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 theOigawa Marujumped 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 twodaihatsusthat 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.