A strange aftermath of the running gun battle was the naval occupation of the great port of Bizerte by a lone PT.
The 205 lost the other boat in the night and put into Bizerte for gasoline. The port had just been taken by Allied troops a few hours earlier.
The shore batteries, now in friendly hands, nevertheless fired the “customary few rounds” at the arriving PT boat, but the imperturbable Lieut. O’Brien said: “The shots were wide, so I continued in and tied up at the dock.”
Two hours later a newsreel photographer asked O’Brien to move his PT out of the way so he could photograph some British landing ships just arriving as “the first Allied craft to enter Bizerte.”
Lieut. O’Brien wondered what his own boat was if not an Allied craft, and he had been in Bizerte long enough to be bored with the place, but he patiently moved aside.
The brush-off from the newsreel man was only the beginning of the stepchild treatment the PTs suffered at Bizerte.
Squadron Fifteen cleaned up a hangar and scrounged spare parts and machinery from all over the city. When the big boys came into the harbor, their skippers were delighted with the tidy PT base and ruthlessly pushed the little boys out the door.
“We cleaned up half the buildings in Bizerte,” said one veteran of Squadron Fifteen. “As fast as we made a place presentable, we were kicked out. We ended up with only a fraction of our original space, and we had to fight tooth and nail for that.”
Late in May the squadron was filled out to full strength and the newly arrived boats were fitted with radar. The British boats did not have it, so the two torpedo-boat fleets began to experiment with a system of radio signals to vector British boats to American radar targets in coordinated simultaneous attacks.
After the collapse of the Afrika Korps in Tunisia in mid-May 1943, all of North Africa was in Allied hands and Allied attention turned toward Europe, across the narrow sea.