Also bulging with muscle were Ensign Joseph W. Burk, holding the world’s record as single-sculls champion; Ensign Kenneth D. Molloy, All-American lacrosse player from Syracuse University; Lieut. John B. Williams, Olympic swimmer from Oregon State; and Ensign James F. Foran, swimmer from Princeton.
Commander Bowling was right. PT crews had to be tough for the kind of warfare they were waging. Shallow-draft daihatsus clung to the shore, and the PTs had to come in as close as 100 yards from the beach to find their prey. For 1,200 miles the shoreline was lined with ten of thousands of blockaded Japanese soldiers, every one of them itching to get a crack at the patrol boats that were starving them to death. The Japanese set up shore batteries and baited traps with helpless-looking daihatsus to lure the PT marauders within range. In this deadly cat-and-mouse game, the PT did not always win.
About 2 A.M. on March 7th, PTs 337 and 338 slipped into Hansa Bay, a powerfully garrisoned Japanese base by-passed early in the Allied forward movement. The PTs poked about the enemy harbor and picked up a radar target close to shore. From 400 yards away, the two skippers saw that their radar pip came from two heavily camouflaged luggers moored together, a prime bit of business for PTs. Before they could open fire, however, they discovered that they had been baited into an ambush.
Machine guns opened up on the beach, and the PTs returned the fire, but the best they could do was to strafe the bush at random, because the Japanese gun positions were well concealed.
The machine guns at close range were bad enough, but the PT crews “pulled 20 Gs” when a heavy battery began firing from the mouth of the bay. The PTs, already deep inside the bay, would have to pass close to the heavy guns to escape from the harbor. The worst was that the gunners were obviously crack artillerymen, for the first shell hit so close to the port bow of the 337 that water from the spout sluiced down the decks and shrapnel whizzed overhead.
The sharpshooting gunners of the shore battery put a shell from the next salvo into the tank compartment below the port turret. All engines went dead and the boat burst into flame. The skipper, Ensign Henry W. Cutter, pulled the CO₂ release valve but it was too late—the boat was doomed.
Francis C. Watson, Motor Machinist Mate, Third Class, who had been blown from the port turret by the shell blast, got to his feet and started forward, away from the searing flames, but he turned back into the fire to help William Daley, Jr., who was crawling painfully out of the burning engine room. Daley had been badly wounded in the neck and jaw. Watson pulled Daley from the flames and with Morgan J. Canterbury, Torpedomen’s Mate, Second Class, carried him forward. Ensign Cutter put a life raft into the water on the side away from the big guns, and Daley, dazed but obedient, tried to get into the raft, but slipped overboard. The skipper and Ensign Robert W. Hyde jumped after him and towed him to the raft.
The crew paddled and pushed the raft away from the burning boat and out to sea, but a strong current worked against them and in two hours they made only 700 yards. When their boat exploded, the concussion hurt.
Searchlights swept the bay and guns fired all night at the 338, which had escaped behind smoke and was now trying to get back into the death-trap to find out what had happened to their comrades of the 337. The crack gunners ashore were too good, however, and repeated brackets from heavy salvos kept the 338 outside until the rising sun drove the worried sailors home.
Daley died before sunrise, and—in the formal language of the Navy report—“was committed to the sea.”