Invasion chores were not strenuous for the PTs—a little anti-E-boat patrol in the bay and some light courier and taxi service for Army and Navy brass. Dull duty, but the boats had to fly low and slow, because they were almost out of aviation gasoline; their tanker had failed to arrive on schedule.
By October 4th, however, the gasoline was in and the British had taken a splendid harbor at La Maddalena, off northeast Sardinia, so Squadron Fifteen sailed to Sardinia, from where it and the British boats could prey on enemy traffic north of Naples. Almost immediately, part of Squadron Fifteen moved still farther north to Bastia, on Corsica, which the Free French had just taken back from the enemy. These two bases put PTs on the flanks of coastal shipping lanes deep in the heart of enemy waters. Genoa itself, the largest port in Italy, was now within reach of the squadron’s torpedoes. Hunting was especially good in the Tuscan Archipelago, a group of islets and rocks between the PT base and the mainland.
Something had to be done about the PT torpedoes, however, for the squadron was equipped with old Mark VIIIs, built in the 1920’s, crotchety, unreliable, and worst of all, designed to run so far below the surface that they couldn’t touch a shallow-draft F-lighter.
PT torpedomen tinkered with their fish to set them for a shallow run, but the Mark VIII was frisky without eight feet of water to hold it down. The shallow-set Mark VIIIs porpoised, alternately leaping from the water and diving like sportive dolphins. PT skippers set them shallow anyhow, and fired them with the idea that there was a fifty-fifty chance the porpoising torpedo would be on the upswing when it got to the target and might at least punch a hole in the side.
In Italy, as the contending armies fought slowly up the peninsula, the German situation became somewhat like the Japanese situation at that same moment in New Guinea. Powerful Allied air strikes disrupted supply by rail from Genoa and Rome to the front, so the Germans had to rely on waterborne transport to run down the coast at night.
To protect themselves from marauding Allied destroyers, the Germans fenced off a channel close to the shore with a barrier of thousands of underwater mines. At salient points they mounted heavy, radar-directed cannon—some as big as nine and one-half inches in bore—to keep raiding destroyers pushed away from the mine-protected channel.
The mine fields worked. Deep-draft destroyers did not dare chase Axis vessels too close to the beach. The shallow-bottom PTs skimmed over the top of the mine fields, however, so the Germans countered by arming many types of small ships as anti-PT boats. They took over a type of Italian warship called a torpedo boat, but actually a small destroyer, fast and heavily gunned, eminently qualified for PT-elimination work.
Night patrols became lively, with PTs harrying Axis coastal shipping and the Germans hunting them with E-boats and armed minesweepers, torpedo boats and F-lighters.
The first brawl after the PTs set up base on Sardinia and Corsica came on the night between October 22nd and 23rd. Three PTs, under the indefatigable Lieut. Dubose, sneaked up on a cargo ship escorted by four E-boats and minesweepers. The PTs fired a silent spread of four, and the cargo ship disappeared in a violent blast. Lieut. (jg) T. L. Sinclair was lining up his 212 to work a little more destruction, when a wobbly out-of-control Mark VIII torpedo from another PT flashed by under his stern.
“How many have you fired?” Lieut. Dubose asked Lieut. Sinclair by radio.