The American Navy had learned the hard way that any enemy destroyer could make 35 knots, and many of them could do considerably better—plenty fast enough to run down a PT boat, especially after a few months of action had cut the PT’s speed.
The normal boat crew was three officers and 14 men, though the complement varied widely under combat conditions. The boat carried enough provisions for about five days.
As for that bristling armament the correspondents talked about, a PT boat originally carried four torpedoes and tubes, and two 50-caliber twin machine-gun mounts. In combat PT skippers improvised installation of additional weapons, and by the war’s end all boats had added some combination of 40-mm. autocannon, 37-mm. cannon, 20-mm. antiaircraft autocannon, rocket launchers, and 60-mm. mortars. In some zones they even discarded the torpedoes and added still more automatic weapons, to give themselves heavier broadsides for duels with armed enemy small craft.
Pound for pound, the PT boat was by far the most heavily armed vessel afloat, but that does not mean that a PT flyweight, no matter how tough for its size, was a match for an enemy heavyweight. PT sailors never hesitated to tackle an enemy destroyer, but they knew that a torpedo boat could stand up to an all-out brawl with an alert and aroused destroyer the way a spunky rat terrier can stand up to a hungry wolf. After all, the full and proper name of a destroyer is torpedo-boat destroyer.
The PT’s main tactic was not the hell-roaring dash of the correspondents’ romances, but a sneaky, quiet approach in darkness or fog. The PT was designed to slip slowly and quietly into an enemy formation in bad visibility, to fire torpedoes at the handiest target, and to escape behind a smoke screen with whatever speed the condition of the boat permitted. With luck, the screening destroyers would lose the PT in the smoke, the confusion, and the darkness. Without luck—well, in warfare everybody has to take some chances.
What most annoyed the PT sailors about their lurid press was that the truth made an even better story. After all, they argued, it takes guts to ease along at night in an agonizingly slow approach to an enemy warship that will chew you to bloody splinters if the lookouts ever spot you. And it takes real courage to bore on into slingshot range when you know that the enemy can easily run you down if your torpedoes miss or fail to explode, as they did all too often. Compared to this reality, one of those imaginary 70-knot blitzes would be a breeze.
One disgusted PT sailor wrote: “Publicity has reached the point where glorified stories are not genuinely flattering. Most PT men resent the wild, fanciful tales that tend to belittle their real experience.... There is actually little glamour for a PT. The excitement of battle is tempered by many dull days of inactivity, long nights of fruitless patrol, and dreary hours of foul weather at sea in a small boat.”
He griped that the PT sailor would prefer the tribute of “They were dependable” to “They were expendable.”
Maybe so, but the public just would not have it that way. The dash and audacity of the sailors of those little boats had appealed to the American mind. It was the story of David and Goliath again, and the sailors in the slingshot navy, no matter how they balked, joined the other wild and woolly heroes of legend who go joyously into battle against giants.
This is the story of what the mosquito fleet really did.