The three PT skippers at Stromboli didn’t know about that theory, however, and probably wouldn’t have hesitated about attacking even if they had known how dangerous an F-lighter was. They fired six fish and thought they had blown up two of the F-lighters, but postwar assessment says No. Neither side was badly hurt in this first duel, but more serious fighting was to come.
The next night, July 28th, three boats commanded by Lieut. Arbuckle fired at what the skippers thought were F-lighters, but were really Italian torpedo boats. American torpedoes passed harmlessly under the hulls of the enemy boats; Italian machine-gunners punched sixty holes in PT 218 and seriously wounded three officers, including Lieut. Arbuckle. The boat got back to Palermo with 18 inches of water sloshing about below decks.
The F-lighters were ferrying Axis troops out of Sicily, across the Strait of Messina. The Allied high command had hoped to catch the whole Axis force on Sicily in a gigantic trap, and the Messina ferry had to be broken up.
The Navy tried a combined torpedo boat-destroyer operation against the ferry, but as usual, communications between the American ships were bad and the destroyers opened fire on their own PTs.
The first salvo from the American destroyers splashed water on the PT decks. The PTs were five knots slower than the American cans. (Remember those news stories, in the early days of the war, about the dazzling 70-knot PTs—fast enough to “run rings around any warship afloat”? During the summer of 1943, few of the Squadron Fifteen boats could top 25 to 27 knots.) Because they couldn’t run away from their deadly friends and because they feared American gunnery more than they feared Italian gunnery, the PT boats actually ran for the enemy shore to snuggle under the protection of Italian batteries on Cape Rasocolmo. The enemy guns obligingly fired on the American destroyers and drove them away. The PT sailors went home, enormously grateful to the enemy for his involuntary but effective act of good will.
In August the Axis powers ferried most of their power to the mainland across the three-mile-wide Strait of Messina, in a brilliant escape from the Sicilian trap.
PT skippers knew about the evacuation, but had orders to stay away from the scene. British torpedo boats that tried to break up the evacuation train were badly mauled by shore batteries. One torpedo boat disappeared, with all hands, in the flash of a direct hit from a gigantic nine and one-half-inch shell.
Chafing at the order that kept it out of the action, the PT command dreamed up an operation to relieve the tedium. It decided to mount an invasion of its own to capture an island.
Setting up a jury-rig invasion staff, the officers pored over charts, looking for the ideal enemy island to add to the PT bag. Lieut. Dubose, returning from a fight with German mine sweepers on the night of August 15th, picked up an Italian merchant seaman from a small boat off Lipari Island, in the Aeolian Group, a few miles northwest of the Strait of Messina. The sailor said there were no Germans on Lipari and the islanders would undoubtedly be delighted to be captured by the American Navy.
When the admiral heard the squadron’s proposal he radioed: “Demand the unconditional surrender of the islands, suppress any opposition, bring back as prisoners all who are out of sympathy.”