Early in the morning of New Year’s Day, 1945, bombers came over the base again. One fragmentation bomb killed 11 men and seriously wounded ten others, most of them survivors of the Orestes.
The kamikazes were not through with the Mindoro shipping. On the afternoon of January 4th, PTs 78 and 81 set fire to one of four enemy fighters that flew over the bay. Trailing smoke and flame, the plane glided into the side of the ammunition ship Lewis Dyche, anchored a quarter mile from the two PTs.
The ship exploded with a roar, taking her 71 merchant sailors to the bottom with her and lifting the PTs out of the water. The concussion badly damaged the boat hulls; two PT sailors were killed and ten men wounded by the blast and falling debris. It was the last visit of the kamikazes to Mindoro, but a spectacular one.
As Commander Jannotta said in his report: “This new weapon employed by the enemy—the suicide diver or human torpedo—constitutes a serious threat to naval forces and to shipping.”
The Mindoro PTs won a Navy Unit Commendation which read:
As the only naval force present after retirement of the invasion convoy, this task unit served as the major obstruction to enemy counterlandings from nearby Luzon, Panay, and Palawan, and bore the brunt of concentrated hostile air attacks through a five-day period, providing the only antiaircraft protection available for persons ashore. The gallant officers and men ... maintained a vigilant watch by night and stood out into the open waters close to base by day to fight off repeated Japanese bombing, strafing, and suicide attacks, expending in three days the ammunition which had been expected to last approximately three weeks in the destruction or damaging of a large percentage of attacking planes.
When fighter planes began to fly in Mindoro, Americans went ashore on Luzon. Some hard fighting remained, but the war was nearing the end.
The last two PTs lost in the war were, sadly enough, victims of their own mates.
During the landings at Nasugbu, in western Luzon, on the night of January 31st, ships of the screen were attacked by twenty or more Japanese midget submarines. One of the little craft sank the PC 1129. Immediately afterward the destroyer escort Lough attacked a swarm of thirty or more kamikaze explosive boats. Naturally the screen vessels were nervous about small vessels in those waters.
On the following night, Lieut. John H. Stillman set out to hunt the suicide flotillas with PTs 77 and 79. (The 77 had already been treated roughly by friendlies; it was the boat damaged by American Army bombers during the repulse of Admiral Kimura’s bombardment flotilla.)