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.