Disappointment awaited the crews in Oran, where the high command sent the boats to Cherchel, 300 miles from the nearest action, for an indefinite period of training.
“I decided to take the bull by the horns and bum a ride to Algiers in an Army truck to see Vice Admiral Henry K. Hewitt,” said Lieut. Commander Barnes.
Admiral Hewitt was commander of all U. S. Naval forces in northwest African waters, and Barnes hoped to persuade him that the PTs should be based at Bône, 265 miles farther east and within easy reach of trouble at the front.
“That trip took me several hours and by the time I got there I was chagrined to find that orders had already been issued and Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien, my next in command, had gotten the boats under way and was in Algiers before me. The admiral himself brought me up to date with the information that my boats were already there. Most embarrassing!”
The next day, April 27th, Lieut. Dubose took his boats to the forward base at Bône, and that night they went out on their first patrol in combat waters.
Bône was also the British forward base for motor torpedo boats and gunboats. Like the American PTs, the British MTBs carried torpedoes, but the British had already converted some patrol craft to gunboats, similar to the heavily gunned PTs of New Guinea. The gunboats carried no torpedoes.
The British had been fighting in the Mediterranean for months, so American PTs made most of their early patrols with British officers aboard to tip them off to local conditions.
The North African campaign was drawing to a close. General Erwin Rommel’s crack Afrika Korps was bottled up in Tunisia, and torpedo boats patrolled nightly to prevent escape of Rommel’s soldiers to Sicily, just 90 miles across the strait from Tunisia’s Cape Bon.
Lieut. Commander Barnes, in the 106, joined three British torpedo boats under Lieut. Dennis Germaine, in a patrol down the east side of Cape Bon. At Ras Idda Bay, Lieut. Germaine took one British MTB inside the harbor to investigate a possible target.
Lieut. Commander Barnes continues the story: