The squadron moved up from Bizerte the same day and began patrolling the Tyrrhenian Sea, those waters boxed in by Sicily, Italy, Sardinia and Corsica.
Isolated in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about thirty miles north of Palermo, is the island of Ustica. On the first Tyrrhenian patrol Lieut. Commander Barnes led his boats toward Ustica to see what was going on in those backwaters of the war.
“At dawn we were off Ustica,” the squadron leader reports. “First thing, we saw a fishing boat putt-putting toward Italy. We found a handful of very scared individuals crawling out from under the floor plates, hopefully waving white handkerchiefs. This was the staff of an Italian admiral at Trapani [site of the Italian torpedo-boat base at the western tip of Sicily, bypassed by the fall of Palermo].
“Only reason we didn’t get the admiral was that he was late getting down to the dock and his staff said the hell with him.
“In addition to a few souvenir pistols and binoculars, we captured a whole fruit crate of thousand-lira notes which we reluctantly turned over to Army authorities later. One of the other boats saw a raft with seven Germans on it, feebly paddling out to sea. We picked them up too.”
The next night three PTs of Squadron Fifteen patrolled to the Strait of Messina, right against the toe of the Italian mainland itself, and two nights later, off Cape Vaticano, the same three boats—under Lieut. E. A. Arbuckle—found the 8,800-ton Italian freighter Viminale being towed toward Naples by a tug.
For some reason, the freighter was being towed backward, almost causing the PT skippers to take a lead in the wrong direction, but they sank both ships in the first U.S. Naval victory in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
On the night of July 26th, near the island of Stromboli, three PTs commanded by Lieut. J. B. Mutty ran into their first F-lighters, those powerfully armed German landing craft and general-duty blockade runners that were to become the Number One enemy of PTs in the Mediterranean.
The F-lighters were slow and cumbersome, but they were armored and mounted extremely heavy antiaircraft batteries which could saw a PT into toothpicks. Gun turrets were lined with cement and often mounted the much-feared 88-mm. rifle, thus enormously outgunning the PTs.
Holds of the F-lighters were so well compartmented that they could take terrible punishment without going down. With only four and one-half feet of draft, they usually slid over PT torpedoes, set to run at eight-foot depth. An F-lighter was a serious opponent for a destroyer and much more than a match for a PT—in theory.