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.