The naval war in the coastal waters of Europe was eminently suitable to torpedo-boat operations. The British had been making spectacular use of motor torpedo boats for years—in fact, American PTs had been patterned after British models. The Axis powers also used torpedo boats. German E-boats prowled the English Channel and the Mediterranean. Even the Italian MAS boats made Allied Mediterranean naval commanders nervous, for the torpedo boat had been an Italian specialty since its invention and the officers who manned Italian small craft were the most aggressive and warlike in all the Italian Armed Forces.
American troops went ashore in Northwest Africa on November 8, 1942. (On the other side of the world, the Japanese were just forming the massive relief fleet that was smashed and dispersed definitively a week later in the great three-day sea battle of Guadalcanal.) The United States Navy rushed to put American torpedo boats into the Mediterranean to join the British in harrying Axis shipping.
In New Orleans, in late 1942, Squadron Fifteen was organized. Its commander was Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, destined to become probably the most dashing of all American PT sailors, as the squadron itself was to become the most spectacularly successful PT command in either theatre.
On commissioning day the squadron members didn’t feel elated about their future. Their first assignment was to patrol the warm blue waters off Midway Island, far behind the fighting lines in the Pacific. While the Tulagi PTs fought almost nightly battles with Tanaka’s Tokyo Express, Squadron Fifteen was promised long, lazy afternoons of cribbage, 3,500 miles behind the combat zone. Its assignment gave its members slight headaches every time they thought about it.
Lieut. Commander Barnes assured his squadron mates that somehow, somewhere, he was going to find somebody for them to fight. But nobody believed him—not even he, as he later confessed.
The squadron sailed for the Panama Canal and was well on the way to the gentle duties of Midway when the radioman came running with a dispatch.
Orders to Midway were canceled! “Report to Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet, in Norfolk,” the message read.
At the giant Virginia naval base, Barnes had his conference with the upper echelons of brass and rushed back to his squadron mates with the news that they were indeed going to find somebody somewhere to fight. They were going to the Mediterranean as the first American torpedo-boat squadron on the European scene.
The barman at the Navy Officers’ Club in Norfolk was famous in those days—and may still be—for his Stingers, a most appropriate toast to duty in the Mediterranean mosquito fleet.
The 201 and 204 crossed the Atlantic immediately as deck passengers on the S. S. Enoree, and Lieut. Commander Barnes followed on the S. S. Housatonic, with 205 and 208. The Enoree arrived at Gibraltar first, on April 13th. Boats were in the water the next day, and Lieut. Edwin A. Dubose—also destined to make a name as a brilliant PT sailor—took them to the British torpedo-boat dock, loaded a full cargo of torpedoes, and set sail for Oran in North Africa. Skippers of the other boats followed as fast as longshoremen could swing the PTs into the water.