Chapter II: Part 2

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 burning _Teruzuki_ for 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 burning _Teruzuki_ illuminated the 44, and _Teruzuki’s_ guardian 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 the _Teruzuki_—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 the _Teruzuki_ was 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 the _Hatsukaze_ had 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 destroyer _Makigumo_ admittedly 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 the _Makigumo_ have a tendency to get sulky when this minefield business is mentioned, and nobody can blame them. The _Makigumo_, 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 destroyer _Makigumo_, 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 counting _Makigumo_]

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.

3.
Battering Down the Gate:
the Western Hinge

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.

Mindanao
Palau Is.
Celebes
Timor
Arafura Sea
Guam
Caroline Islands
Micronesia
New Guinea
Hansa Bay
Nassau Bay

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 anything _can_ go wrong, it _will_) 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 the _incoming_ Tokyo Express, the PT tender _Hilo_ towed 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 the _Hilo_ had 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 the _Hilo_ stayed 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 the _daihatsu_, 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 single _daihatsu_ could be a dangerous target for a PT. A fleet of _daihatsus_, 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 between _daihatsu_ and 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 a _daihatsu’s_ armor. 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, the _Roaring 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 transport _Oigawa 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 the _Oigawa Maru_ jumped 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 two _daihatsus_ that 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.

The 114, once free from the two _daihatsus_, turned back into the inlet with guns roaring. The 129 came running, and the two PTs mopped up the rest of the six-barge convoy.

The Australian army had taken on the job of throwing the Japanese out of the three Huon Gulf villages that formed the western hinge of the Japanese gate. They were doing as well as could be expected with the nasty job of fighting in the filthy jungles of New Guinea, but they were having supply problems almost as serious as those of the blockaded Japanese. The Allies had no beachhead near the Australians, and supplies, in miserly quantities, had to be flown to a jungle airstrip and packed to the troops by native bearers.

The PT fleet in New Guinea had become so sophisticated by this time that it had acquired a formal organization and an over-all commander, a former submarine skipper named Morton Mumma. Aboard one of his PTs, Commander Mumma had gone poking about the little-known shoreline around the Huon Gulf (Mort Bay was named for him, because he first explored it), and he had found a fine landing beach at Nassau Bay. The beach was right under the nose of the Japanese garrison at Salamaua, it’s true, but it was also temptingly handy to the Australian lines.

On the last day of June, 1943, three PTs packed a company of riflemen on their deck. With 36 small Army landing boats, the PTs sortied into a foul sea, lashed by high winds and rain. Total naval escort for the amphibious armada was PT 168, which presumably was in better fighting trim than the others, because it carried no seasick passengers. PT 168 promptly lost its convoy in the storm.

_The Flying Shamrock_ (PT 142) missed the landing beach at Nassau Bay and did a countermarch. In the rain and darkness, the _Shamrock_ beat the astronomical odds against such an accident by ramming the tiny PT 143, to the alarm of the miserable foot soldiers on both boats.

The Army landing craft scattered in the storm, and the two PTs had to round them up and guide them to the beach, where several broached in the high surf and were abandoned. Short of landing craft to put their own sea-weary passengers ashore, the PTs had to carry them back to the staging area.

Despite the less than 100 per cent efficiency of the operation, the few American soldiers who had reached the beach threw the Japanese garrison into a panic. A lucky bomb hit had killed their able commander, and without his support the 300 Japanese assigned to guard Nassau Bay broke and fled before the insignificant Allied invasion force.

Puny as they were, the landings at Nassau Bay threw the Japanese high command into a flap. They saw clearly, possibly even more clearly than the Allies, that the Nassau Bay beachhead was going to unhinge the whole Japanese gate across the Allied path. The landings also paid an unexpected bonus far to the east, where American soldiers were landing on Rendova Island, as part of the island-hopping advance up the central Solomons toward the eastern hinge of the Japanese gate. 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.

Just before the end at Finschhafen, when the Japanese were getting ready to give up the Huon Gulf, barge traffic increased. It was the same story as the earlier abandonment of Buna, Gona, and Sanananda. The Japanese were slipping out by night.

On the night between August 28th and 29th, two PTs patrolled off Finschhafen. Ensign Herbert P. Knight was skipper of the 152; Lieut. (jg) John L. Carey was skipper of _The Flying Shamrock_ (PT 142). Riding the _Shamrock_, in command of the operation, was a most distinguished PT sailor, Lieut. John Bulkeley, rescuer of MacArthur, back from his tour in the United States as the number one naval hero of the Philippines campaign.

Lookouts spotted three barges, and one went down under the first attack by the two PT boats, but the other two were still afloat after the third firing run. Ensign Knight dropped depth charges alongside, but the barges rode out the blast and were still afloat when the geysers of sea water settled. Lieut. Carey made a depth-charge run and blew one of the barges apart, but the other still survived.

Aboard the _Shamrock_, Bulkeley decided to finish the job in the old-fashioned way—by hand.

For the first time in this century, with a cry of “Boarders away,” a U. S. Navy boarding party, weapons in hand, swarmed aboard an enemy craft. One Japanese made a move in the darkness, and Lieut. Bulkeley blew him down with a 45 automatic. The other passengers, twelve fully equipped soldiers, were already dead.

The boarders picked up what documents and equipment they thought would be interesting to Intelligence, and reboarded their PT. The 152 pumped 37-mm shells into the barge until it slid under the water.

Ashore, Intelligence captured the diary of a Japanese officer named Kobayashi. Under the date of August 29, 1943, was the entry:

Last night with the utmost precaution we were without incident
transported safely by barge between Sio and Finschhafen. _So far,
there has not been a time during such trips when barges have not been
attacked by enemy torpedo boats._ However, it was reported that the
barge unit which transported us was attacked and sunk on the return
trip last night and the barge commander and his men were all lost.

The PT blockade at sea and the Australian drive ashore pinched the Japanese hard, and on September 16th Australian infantrymen walked into a deserted Finschhafen. The western hinge of the gate had been broken.

4.
Battering Down the Gate:
the Eastern Hinge

The western end of the Japanese gate was nailed to the great land mass of New Guinea, and its unhinging was a natural job for the Army. The eastern hinge was at Rabaul, in the tangle of islands and reef-strewn sea channels that make up the Solomon and Bismarck archipelagos. Reduction of Rabaul was naturally a Navy job, to be carried on simultaneously with the Army effort in New Guinea.

After the fall of Guadalcanal in February, 1943, the master plan in the South Pacific, under Admiral William Halsey, was to hop from island to island through the central Solomons, reducing one by one the Japanese bases arranged like steppingstones between Guadalcanal and Rabaul.

PTs were moved up as fast as new bases were established, because they were short of range and useless if they fell too far behind the front.

The night the Army went ashore at Rendova (June 30, 1943), three PTs sailed up Blanche Channel, on the approaches to the Rendova landing beach. Coming down the same channel was the American landing flotilla, transports, supply ships, and escorting destroyers. The destroyer _McCawley_, damaged by one of the few Japanese air attacks that opposed the Rendova landings, was being towed to Tulagi, but was riding lower and lower in the water and its survival was doubtful. Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner (riding _McCawley_ as flagship of the Rendova invasion force) was debating whether or not to give the stricken ship euthanasia by friendly torpedo when his mind was made up for him by two mysterious fish which came out of the night and blew _McCawley_ out of the water.

The deadly PTs had struck again! But, alas, under the illusion that they were hitting an enemy transport. Explanation of the snafu? The usual lack of communications between PTs and other commands. The PTs had been told there would be no friendlies in Blanche Channel that night—and the only friendlies they encountered just happened to be the entire Rendova landing fleet.

American soldiers quickly captured Rendova Island, and the PT navy set up a base there. Across Blanche Channel, on New Georgia Island, Marines and soldiers were fighting a heartbreaking jungle action to capture the Japanese airfield at Munda, but they had taken over enough of New Georgia for another PT base on The Slot side of the island.

Business was slow at first for the PTs. The big-ship admirals, who were fighting repeated destroyer-cruiser night actions in those waters—and who were possibly nervous about the PTs since the _McCawley_ incident—ordered the PTs to stay in when the big ships went out.

Concern of the admirals over poor communications between PTs and other units was justified. Early on the morning of July 20th, three torpedo boats were returning to Rendova Base through Fergusson Passage. Three B 25s—the same kind of aircraft that had performed such terrible execution of the Japanese in the Bismarck Sea—spotted the patrol craft and came down to the deck for a strafing run.

Aboard PT 168, Lieut. Edward Macauley III held his gunners in tight check while they suffered under the murderous fire of the friendly planes. Repeatedly the gunners of the 168 held their breath as the B 25s raked them with bullets—but they held their own fire in a superb display of discipline. Not so the other two boats. Gunners were unable to stand being shot at without shooting back, and the first PT burst of counterfire brought down a bomber in flames.

Somehow the other bombers came to their senses and the strafing runs stopped, but all the boats had already been riddled and two were burning. The 166 was past saving. Sound crew members helped the wounded over the side into life rafts and paddled frantically away from the burning craft. They made it out of danger just as the gas tanks went up in a blast of searing orange flame.

Lieut. Macauley and his brave crew—the only group to come out of the ghastly affair with unblemished credit—took their still burning 168 alongside the stricken bomber to rescue survivors before the plane went down. Three of the bomber crew were dead; the three survivors were wounded. One bomber and one PT were lost in the sad affair. One officer and ten men of the torpedo-boat patrol were wounded.

Reason for the tragic mistake? Same as for the _McCawley_ sinking. The bomber pilots had been told that there would be no friendly vessels in those waters at that time.

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.

The plan worked like a fifty-dollar clock. The noisy, rambunctious PT lured down a float plane—OK so far—and the PT’s skipper conned the escorting night fighter in to the counterattack.

The first word from the night fighter, however, was a disconcerting, “I’m being attacked by the float plane.”

“Bring him down to two feet,” said the PT skipper, “and _we’ll_ get on his tail.”

Nobody was hurt.

PTs fought some lively barge actions on July 23rd and 27th, but the big battle—the naval battle which has earned what is surely the most exaggerated fame of all time for its importance—the battle of the 109, took place the night between August 1st and 2nd.

On the afternoon of August 1st, search planes saw four Japanese destroyers coming down The Slot. They were loaded with 900 soldiers and supplies for the embattled defenders of the Munda airfield. It was a typical run of the Tokyo Express and a prime target for PTs.

During the afternoon, when the Japanese destroyers were still far from Rendova, the Japanese showed their deep respect for motor torpedo boats by socking the Rendova base with bombs from 25 planes.

Two PTs were sunk by a bomber which crashed into their nest. One of the PTs destroyed was 164, which had survived the tragic strafing by B25s just eleven days before.

At sunset 15 PTs—four of them equipped with the new-fangled gadget called radar—sortied from the base under the command of Lieut. Henry I. Brantingham aboard 159. Brantingham was another veteran of the MacArthur rescue run in the Philippines. The PTs were deployed around the approaches to the Japanese landing beach for resupplying Munda airfield.

Lieut. Brantingham, naturally, had chosen a radar-equipped boat for his flagship, and so was the first to pick up the Tokyo Express, just after midnight on August 2nd. Brantingham, for some reason, thought his radar pips were from landing craft, and closed for a strafing run, but 4.7-inch shells from the destroyers persuaded him that his targets were fair torpedo game. He and Lieut. (jg) William F. Liebnow, Jr., in 157, fired six torpedoes. No hits. The two boats escaped behind puffs of smoke.

Worse than the six misses was the lack of communication. The other PTs, most of them without radar, didn’t even know the destroyers had arrived on the scene, much less that they had been alerted by the torpedo runs of 157 and 159.

Next to pick up the cans was the radar-equipped 171, carrying the division commander, Lieut. Arthur H. Berndtson. The boat’s skipper, Ensign William Cullen Battle, closed at a slinking ten knots to 1,500 yards, where Lieut. Berndtson fired a full salvo of fish. All four tubes blazed up in a grease fire that was as helpful to the destroyer gunners as a spotlighted bull’s-eye. Shellbursts splashed water aboard the 171 as the boat ripped out to sea.

Again the attacking PT which had missed its target failed to report by radio to the other PT skippers, who were straining their eyes in the darkness looking for ships they didn’t know were already on the scene.

A third radar boat, Lieut. George E. Cookman’s 107, picked up the cans on the radar set and missed with four fish. Three other PTs, aroused by the flash of destroyer gunfire, came running from the southeast. A Japanese float plane strafed them, and destroyer salvos straddled the boats, but they got off all their torpedoes—12 of them—and all 12 missed.

The Tokyo Express went through the strait and unloaded 900 soldiers and supplies.

So bad were communications between the PTs that most of the 15 skippers who had started the patrol still didn’t know that the destroyers had arrived and been unsuccessfully attacked, much less that they had already discharged their cargoes and were going home. And that meant the destroyers were coming up on the PT lookouts from behind.

At the wheel of the 109 was Lieut. John F. Kennedy. The boat was idling along on one engine to save fuel and to cruise as silently as possible—good PT doctrine for night patrol.

A lookout on the destroyer _Amagiri_ saw the 109 at about the same instant a lookout on the PT saw the destroyer. Making a split-second decision, Japanese Commander Hanami ordered the helmsman to spin the wheel to starboard and ram.

The _Amagiri_ crashed into the starboard side of the 109 and killed the lookout on the spot. The boat was cut in two; the rear section sank; burning gasoline covered the sea. The _Amagiri_ sailed on, but at a reduced speed, because the 109, in its death agony, had bent vanes on the _Amagiri’s_ starboard propeller, causing violent vibration at high speeds.

PT 169 fired torpedoes at the _Amagiri_, but at too close a range for them to arm and explode. PT 157 fired two that missed. Thirty torpedoes were fired that night, and the only damage inflicted on the destroyers was by the quite involuntary and fatal body block of the 109. It was not the greatest night of the war for the PT navy.

Eleven survivors of the 109 searched surrounding waters for two missing shipmates, but never found them. They spent the night and the next morning on the still-floating bow section. By midafternoon they decided that no rescue was on the way. Since they felt naked and exposed to Japanese plane and ship patrols, they set out to swim three and a half miles to a desert island, the skipper towing a badly burned shipmate for four hours by a life-jacket tie-tie gripped between his teeth.

After harrowing nights spent on several desert islands—nights during which the skipper showed most extraordinary stamina, resourcefulness, and courage—the ship-wrecked sailors were found by native scouts. They took the heroic skipper by canoe to a coast-watcher station, and there he boarded a rescue PT and returned for his marooned companions.

The skipper of the 109 was, of course, the same John F. Kennedy who on January 20, 1961, became the thirty-fifth President of the United States.

After Munda fell and with it all of New Georgia, American strategists studied the map and decided that island-by-island reduction of Japanese strength was too tedious. They decided to start by-passing some of the bases, cutting off the by-passed garrisons and starving them behind an American sea blockade. More night work for the PTs.

Up the line a bit was the island of Vella Lavella, only lightly held by the Japanese. American strategists chose a beach called Barakoma as a possible landing spot and ordered a reconnaissance.

Four PTs, on the night between August 12th and 13th, carried a scouting party of 45 men to the beach at Barakoma. A Japanese plane nagged the boats with strafing and bombing runs for two hours. A near miss tore up the planking on the 168 and wounded four sailors, so the 168 had to drop out of the operation, but the other three boats put their passengers ashore safely. Scouts reported that the only Japanese around that part of the island were ship-wrecked survivors of an earlier sea battle, so thirty-six hours later four more PTs landed reinforcements.

Japanese snooper planes spotted the PT passenger runs, but apparently the Japanese high command couldn’t think of torpedo boats as invasion craft, so the scout landings were made without interference.

The main force followed, and by October 1st all of Vella Lavella was in American hands.

The Japanese began shrinking their Solomon Islands perimeter, falling back to the islands on the near side of the new American base at Vella Lavella. American destroyers, out to smash the evacuation bargeline, met a Japanese destroyer screen for the _daihatsus_ on the night between October 6th and 7th. As usual, Japanese torpedoes were deadly. One American destroyer went down and two others were sorely damaged. More important, the Japanese supply and evacuation train ran its errands without molestation from the American cans.

The American destroyers did sink the Japanese _Yugumo_, and American PTs were sent to pick up 78 survivors. Aboard the 163, an American sailor offered a cup of coffee to one of the captive Japanese, who killed the Good Samaritan (and of course died himself at the hands of the murdered sailor’s shipmates). PT sailors felt less uneasy about the massacre of the shipwrecked Japanese at the Bismarck Sea after the treacherous murder of their comrade by a rescued Japanese.

Having successfully leapfrogged once, American strategists looked at the map again. The whole point to the island-hopping campaign was to put American fighter planes close enough to Rabaul so that they could screen bombers over that base and keep the Japanese pinned down there under constant bombardment. The best site for a fighter base was Bougainville Island, so American planners put their fingers on the map and said: “This is the place for the next one.”

Accordingly, Marines landed at Cape Torokina, on Bougainville, on November 1st. Their mission was to capture enough of the island to build and protect a fighter strip. The rest of the island could be left to the 15,000 Japanese soldiers who defended it. Nobody cared about them. Rabaul was the real target.

The Japanese high command at Rabaul sent down a cruiser-destroyer force with the mission of getting among the American transports in Empress Augusta Bay, off Torokina, and tearing up the helpless train ships like a pack of wolves in a herd of sheep.

An American cruiser-destroyer force met them just after midnight on November 2nd, and sank one Japanese cruiser and a destroyer. More important, the American flotilla ran off the Japanese marauders before they reached the transports.

American reconnaissance planes, however, spotted a massive concentration of heavy cruisers and destroyers building up in Rabaul Harbor, a concentration too great for American naval forces then in the South Pacific to handle, because most American capital ships of the Pacific Fleet had been pulled back toward Hawaii to support an operation in the Gilbert Islands.

Admiral Halsey scratched together a carrier task force, and even though a carrier raid near a land-based airfield was then against doctrine, he sent the carrier’s planes into the harbor. They damaged the cruisers badly enough to relieve the immediate threat to the Torokina landings. The carrier raids stirred up a hornet’s nest around Rabaul.

Eighteen Japanese torpedo bombers took off to smash the brazen carrier task force. Just before total dark they found American ships and attacked. Radio Tokyo broadcast, with jubilation, that the score in this “First Air Battle of Bougainville” was “one large carrier blown up and sunk, one medium carrier set ablaze and later sunk, and two heavy cruisers and one cruiser and destroyer sunk.” Rabaul’s torpedo bombers won a group commendation.

An American staff officer, hearing the account of this First Air Battle of Bougainville as reported by Japanese pilots, could only hold his head in his hands and hope his own pilots were not feeding him the same kind of foolishness.

Here is what really happened in the First Air Battle of Bougainville.

A landing craft, the LCI 70, and the PT 167, were lumbering back from a landing party on the Torokina beachhead. Just after sunset the Japanese bombers struck in low-level torpedo runs. The PT brought down the leader by the novel method of snagging him with its mast. The plane’s torpedo punched clean through the PT’s nose, leaving its tail assembly, appropriately enough, in the crew’s head.

The torpedo boat’s 20-mm. cannon shot down a second torpedo bomber so close to the ship that the sailors on the fantail were soaked.

Four torpedo bombers launched their fish at the LCI, but since the torpedoes were set for attack on a deep-draft carrier, they passed harmlessly under the landing craft’s shallow hull—except for one which porpoised and jumped through the LCI’s thin skin, unfortunately killing one sailor. The unexploded warhead came to rest on a starchy bed in the bread locker. The torpedo was still smoking, so the LCI’s skipper, Lieut. (jg) H. W. Frey, ordered “Abandon ship!”

Time passed. No explosion. A damage-control party reboarded the LCI and rigged her for a tow back to Torokina. PT 167 raced ahead with the wounded.