“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 theirFuehrerand 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 destroyerOrdronaux. 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 destroyersSwansonandRoe, 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.
TYRRHENIAN SEA
TYRRHENIAN SEA
Just as the destroyer unit commander was about to open fire at 1,500 yards, Roe rammed Swanson at the forward stack.Roe’sbow folded up and both ships went dead in the water. TheSwanson’sforward 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 freighterViminalebeing 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 11A.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 minesweeperSwaypatrolled 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 theSwaywere partly blinded by the glare of the sun, just rising behind the 201.
Sway’sguns opened fire. Lieut. Patterson fired an emergency recognition flare, but it burst directly in the face of the sun, and theSway’sbridge 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.
The next shot hit the boat in the charthouse, wounding Lieut. Patterson and his executive officer, Ensign Paul B. Benson, and killing an officer passenger and a sailor.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” suggested General Clark.
Ensign Benson, though wounded, took the wheel from the sagging skipper and zigzagged the boat away at high speed back toward Naples, until he was out of range of theSway’sbatteries. A few miles down the coast the crew of 201 transferred dead and wounded to a British minesweeper.
TheSwaystill stood between the boat and Anzio, but General Clark wanted to go to the Anzio beach, so the 201 crept back at a peaceful-looking speed and spoke up from long distance with a bigger light. The sun was higher,Sway’ssignalmen read the message, and the skipper waved them by.
Lieut. Commander Barnes still restlessly experimented with armaments and tactics, looking for a combination of weapons and methods that would counter the dangerous weapons of the F-lighters. Rocket launchers were being mounted on landing craft, and the small vessels were delivering devastating ripples on enemy beaches. Their firepower was all out of proportion to the size of the craft. A few PTs were playing around with rocket launchers in the Pacific. It’s worth at least a try, thought Lieut. Commander Barnes.
On the night of February 18th, 1944, Barnes went out in Lieut. (jg) Page H. Tullock’s 211, with Lieut. Robert B. Reader’s 203 and Lieut. (jg) Robert D. McLeod’s 202.
As Lieut. Commander Barnes tells the story:
“I saw a small radar target come out from behind the peninsula and head over toward one of the small islands south of Giglio. Thinking it might be an F-lighter, I ordered rocket racks loaded.
“He must have seen us, because whatever it was—probably an E-boat—speeded up and ducked into the island before we could make contact. That presented the first difficulty of a rocket installation. There we were with the racks all loaded and the safety pins out. The weather had picked up a little, and getting those pins back in the rockets and the racks unloaded was going to be a touchy job in the pitch dark on wet, tossing decks. I decided to leave them there for a while to see what would happen.
“About midnight it started to kick up a good deal more. I had just about decided that whatever it was we were looking for wasn’t going to show up, and I was getting pretty worried about the rockets heaving out of the racks and rolling around in a semiarmed condition on deck. I decided to take one last turn around our patrol area and head for the barn.
“On our last southerly leg we picked up a target coming north at about eight knots, and I closed right away, thinking to spend all our rockets on whatever it was. As we got closer, it appeared to be two small targets in column—a conclusion which I later used as an outstanding example of ‘Don’t trust your interpretation of radar too blindly.’
“Just about the time we got to the 1,000-yard firing range the lookouts started reporting vessels everywhere, all the way from our port back around to our starboard bow. I had arranged the other two boats on either side in line abreast and ordered them to stand by to fire on my order over the radio. I gave the order and we all let go together.
“During the eleven seconds the rockets were in flight nobody fired a shot, but a couple of seconds after the rockets landed what seemed like a dozen enemy craft opened up. The formation was probably three or four F-lighters escorted by two groups of E-boats. We had passed through the two groups of escorts on our way to our firing position.
“Now it was time to turn away, and as my boat turned to the right we found that the 202 was steaming right into the convoy. To avoid collision we had to turn back and parallel the 202.
“Just at that time the engines on my boat started to labor and unbelievably coughed and died—all three of them. We were smack dab in the center of the whole outfit, with the enemy shooting from all sides.... The volume was terrific.
“The 203 had lost all electric power, including the radar and compass lights. She saw the two of us off our original course and came back to join us, making a wide circle at high speed and laying smoke. It is impossible to say exactly what happened; the melee was too terrific.
“The 202 had a jammed rudder which they were able to clear. She eventually got out by ducking around several vessels, passing as close as 100 yards. The 203 likewise got out by ducking in and out of the enemy formation, but we on the 211 just sat there helpless, watching the whole show.
“This business lasted for at least four or five minutes and even the shore batteries came into illuminate with starshells. Fortunately, there was enough smoke in the air to keep the issue confused. That confusion was the only thing that saved us.
“None of our boats was using guns at all, and it was obvious that the enemy was frightfully confused with us weaving through the formation. They were hard at work shooting each other up. I am sure they sank at least one of the E-boats, because several minutes later they started firing again off to the north, and there was a large gasoline fire in the channel which burned for a long time.
“We got clear by the simple process of just sitting still and letting the enemy pass around us and continue north.
“I finally got one engine engaged and went to our rendezvous which was only a couple of miles away, but by the time I got there I could just see the other two boats, on the radar screen, leaving. I tried to call them back, but I couldn’t get a soul and waited around for some time thinking they would come back. They didn’t, however, and went on back individually, for which they got a little private hell from me later.
“I had no alternative but to go back myself. I expected to find the other two boats pretty well shot up, as it was a miracle that we weren’t lost ourselves. Strangely enough, I found that they were not damaged, and except for the fantastic coincidence of all three of us being more or less disabled simultaneously, we were OK.”
Apparently, the rockets did no damage, and further installation of rocket racks on his PTs was firmly rejected by Lieut. Commander Barnes.
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:
“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. Torpedoes will, if possible, be fired at even shallower settings. Meanwhile, if they cannot achieve destruction, coastal forces will harry the enemy and endeavour to cause him the utmost possible alarm, damage, and casualties.”
Officers at La Maddalena gave longer thought to the problem and came up with an idea called Operation Gun.
Lieut. Commander Barnes’ combined operation—the plan to use American radar for scouting and conning heavier-armed British boats to targets—had been a promising beginning, but even the MBG gunboats were not a real match for the F-lighters.
Commander Robert A. Allan, British Commandant of the Sardinia base, cut three landing craft out of the British amphibious fleet and armed them with 4.7 naval guns and 40-mm. autocannon. The landing craft were big, flat-bottomed tubs, wonderful platforms for the hard-hitting 4.7 inchers. To man the guns, he assigned crack gunners of the Royal Marine Artillery.
Commander Allan organized an interesting task force around the three landing-craft gunboats (designated LCGs) as his main battle line. They were screened against E-boat attack by British torpedo boats, and controlled by the radar-equipped American PT scouting force.
Commander Allan himself went out on the first sweep of his beefed-up inshore patrol on the night of March 27th. He rode Lieut. (jg) Thaddeus Grundy’s PT 218, so that he could use American radar to assign targets to his gunboats and give them opening salvo ranges and bearings by remote control.
When the gunboat battle line arrived off San Vicenzo, south of Leghorn, a scouting group of two PTs, under Lieut. Dubose, went off on a fast sweep, looking for targets. At 10P.M.the PTs had found six F-lighters going south, and Commander Allan brought his main battle force up quickly to intercept them.
At 11P.M.Lieut. Dubose sharply warned the main force that two destroyers were escorting the lighters on the seaward side. “I am preparing to attack the destroyers,” he added.
Commander Allan continues the story: “Until he carried out this attack, it was not possible for us to engage the convoy, as our starshells being fired inshore over the target [to illuminate the F-lighters for the gunboats] would illuminate us for the escorting destroyers which were even farther to seaward than we were. Fire was therefore withheld during several anxious minutes.”
During this ten-minute wait for the PT scouts to take on the destroyers, both the German forces, escort and convoy, came on Commander Allan’s radar screen.
The PT scouts crept to within 400 yards before firing torpedoes, and ran away behind heavy smoke. Nevertheless, the destroyers laid down such a heavy fire that they hit 214, even in the smoke screen, wounding the engineer of the watch, Joseph F. Grossman, MoMM2c, and damaging the center engine. Grossman ignored his wounds and tended the stricken engine until it was running well again, staying below with his engines until the boat was out of danger.
The skippers of the scouting PTs heard the usual large explosions on one of the destroyers and hoped they had scored but couldn’t be sure. Hit or no hit, the destroyers reversed course and ran up the coast, abandoning their convoy—an unthinkable act of cowardice for Allied escorts.
Sunk or run off, it was all the same to Commander Allan, who wanted only a free hand with the F-lighters. When the destroyers were gone, he passed radar ranges and bearings to the gunboats, and the Royal Marines lit up the night over the convoy with a perfect spread of starshells.
Startled gunners on the F-lighters, unused to this kind of treatment in waters where vessels with 4.7-inch guns had never dared venture before, took the lights for plane flares and fired wildly into the clouds.
The Royal Marine gunners took their time for careful aim under the bright glare of the slowly sinking magnesium lights. At the first salvo, one of the F-lighters blew up with a tremendous explosion. Within ten minutes three F-lighters were burning briskly. The gunboats spread out and pinned the surviving boats against the beach while the Marine artillerymen methodically pounded them to scrap.
“Of the six F-lighters destroyed,” says Commander Allan, “two, judging by the impressive explosions, were carrying petrol, two ammunition, and one a mixed cargo of both.”
With what sounds like a note of wistful disappointment, Commander Allan added: “The sixth sank without exploding.”
The Operation Gun Task Force sortied again on the night of April 24th. The coastal waters around the Tuscan Archipelago were swarming with traffic that night. Early in the evening the gunboats blew two F-lighters out of the water. Burning debris, cascading from the sky after the explosions, set fires on the beach.
Shortly afterward the Marine sharpshooters picked off a tug and three more F-lighters.
Radar picked up still another group and star-shell from the gunboats showed that they were three flak lighters—medium-size craft powerfully armed as antiaircraft escorts for daylight convoys. The Royal Marine gunners smacked their first salvos into two of the flak lighters, which burned in a fury of exploding ammunition.
The third lighter poured an astonishing volume of fire at the unarmored gunboats, and Commander Allan, in PT 218, made a fast run at the enemy to draw fire away from his gunboats. The Marines put a shell into the flak lighter, and it ran off behind smoke, but the 209 led a charge through the smoke, fired off its fish, caught the flak ship squarely amidships, and blew it in two.
Lieut. Dubose’s scouting torpedo boats found a convoy escorted by a flak lighter, but at that moment the gunboats were engaged in another fight, so rather than break up the show of the main battle line, the PTs attacked the enemy themselves. At least one of three fish connected, for the flak lighter blew up in a jarring explosion.
Ashore, fifty miles away at Bastia, squadron mates sat outdoors to watch the flash and glare of the all-night battle against the eastern sky. Things were just threatening to get dull after midnight when shore radio at Bastia called Commander Allan with a radar-contact report of an Axis convoy between the gunboats and Corsica. The PTs got there first and found two destroyers and an E-boat in column.
When the PTs were still 2,500 yards away—too far for a good torpedo shot from a small boat—the destroyers fired a starshell. PT 202 was ready for just that emergency. A sailor standing by with a captured five-star recognition flare fired the correct answering lights and calmed the enemy’s nerves.
The PTs moved in under the guise of friends and fired four fish at 1,700 yards. As they ran away they felt a violent underwater explosion, so they claimed a possible hit.
On this one wild night of action Commander Allan’s strange little navy had, without damage to itself, sunk five of the formidable F-lighters, four heavily armed flak lighters, and a tug; scored a possible torpedo hit on a destroyer; and pulled a dozen German prisoners from the water.
Hearts of the PT sailors were lifted with joy in May 1944, when the Mark XIII torpedoes began to trickle into their bases and the heavy old-fashioned torpedo tubes were replaced with light launching racks that gave the boats badly needed extra bursts of speed. More boats had been arriving, too, and eventually there were three PT squadrons working out of Sardinia and Corsica.
As torpedomen installed the new fish and the new launching rigs, a PT skipper rubbed his hands and said: “Wait till we get a good target now. These Mark Thirteens are going to sweep these waters clean.”
Lieut. Eugene A. Clifford, in 204, led two other PTs in the first attack with the new torpedoes on the night of May 18th in the Tuscan Archipelago. The PTs had two flak lighters on their radarscopes. Determined to try out the new torpedoes, they bored through the massive barrage from the flak lighters’ antiaircraft guns, firing from 1,000 yards.
One of the highly vaunted Mark XIII’s made a typical Mark VIII run and hit the 204 in the stern. Fortunately, when this Mark XIII goofed, it really goofed, so it did not explode, but punched through the PT’s skin and lodged its warhead inside. Its body dangled in the PT’s wake, like a sucker-fish clamped to a shark’s tail.
Lewis H. Riggsby, TM2c, went into the lazaret to stuff towels into the vanes of the impeller to keep the torpedo from arming and exploding.
The flak lighters chased the PTs and hit 204 with 20-mm fire, but the boat escaped behind smoke, one of the famous Mark XIII torpedoes bobbing and dangling from the stern.
Dominating the Tuscan Archipelago, within sight of the Italian mainland, is the island of Elba, first home of Napoleon in exile. The island attracted the Allies, because big guns on the point closest to the mainland could reach the coastal road and also close off the inshore passage to coastal craft. Once Elba was in Allied hands, southbound Axis land traffic might be chased a few miles inland to less-developed mountain roads, and sea traffic would certainly be squeezed into the thirty miles of water between two Allied bases at Elba and Corsica.
One problem annoyed the planners of the Elba landings. What to do for naval support? The waters around Elba were probably the most heavily mined on the Italian Coast, and deep-draft ships could not be risked there. But then, hadn’t PTs been scooting about the coast of Elba for nine months?
On the night between June 16th and 17th thirty-seven PTs joined other shallow-draft vessels of the Coastal Force to support landings of Senegalese troops of the French Ninth Colonial Division, plus mixed elements from other Allied forces.
Five PTs approached the northern coast at midnight, and about a half mile from shore put 87 French raiders in the water in rubber rafts. The five PTs joined another quintet at the farthest northeast point of Elba, the point closest to the mainland.
At 2A.M.three of the ten PTs went roaring along the northern coast, smoke generators wide open and smoke pots dropping over the side in a steady stream. When the shoreline was sealed off behind a 16,000-yard curtain of smoke, four more PTs moved down the seaward side, with loudspeakers blaring the sounds of a great fleet of landing craft. The PTs launched occasional ripples of rockets at the beach to imitate a preinvasion shore bombardment.
The three remaining PT skippers carried on a lively radio exchange, straining their imaginations to invent a torrent of orders for an imaginary invasion armada.
Searchlights from the beach swept the water, looking for a hole in the screen. Land guns on the shore and in the mountains to the west poured shells into the smoke screen, thus pinpointing themselves nicely for an Allied air strike that slipped in just before dawn.
At the true landing beach on the south coast, Lieut. (jg) Eads Poitevent, Jr., captain of the 211, was posted as radar picket to guide landing craft ashore. He was alarmed when he saw a radar target creep out of the harbor at Marina de Campo. He could not attack without alerting the beach, and yet the oncoming enemy vessel had to be kept away from the landing flotilla at any cost.
Poitevent boldly sailed close to the target—an E-boat—and made friendly looking signals on a blinker light. He eased off in a direction away from the convoy, luring the patrol into harmless waters. It took him fifteen minutes to tease the E-boat off the scene and return to his duties.