“None yet. I’m too damned busy dodging yours.”
Between Giglio and Elba, in the Tuscan Archipelago, on the night between November 2nd and 3rd, two PTs, under Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien, made a torpedo run on a subchaser and blew a satisfactorily fatal hole in the hull with a solid hit. The stricken vessel went down, all right, but it went down fighting, and one of the last incendiary bullets from the dying ship bored through the gasoline tank of the 207, touching off an explosion that blew off a deck hatch. Flames as high as the radar mast shot through the open hatchway.
A radioman turned on a fire extinguisher, threw it into the flaming compartment, and slammed down the hatch again. Miraculously, the fire went out.
Early in November, Lieut. Commander Barnes, who had been doing some deep thinking about the war against F-lighters, came up with a new tactical idea.
His reasoning was: PTs are radar-equipped, hence better than British boats at finding enemy vessels and maneuvering for attack; British torpedo boats use better torpedoes than American Mark VIIIs, for they are faster and carry heavier explosive charges; British gunboats have heavier firepower than PTs, for they usually carry at least six-pounder cannon and so can take on heavier opponents.
So Lieut. Commander Barnes and his British counterpart worked out a scheme of joint patrolling, the Americans acting as a scout force and finding targets by radar. The targets once found, the PTs were to guide the British boats in a coordinated attack. From November 1943 until April 1944, joint patrols had fourteen actions, in which skippers claimed 15 F-lighters, two E-boats, a tug and an oil barge sunk; three F-lighters, a destroyer, a trawler, and an E-boat damaged.
As winter came on, winds mounted and seas ran high, but the PTs maintained their patrols. On the foul night of November 29th, Lieut. (jg) Eugene A. Clifford took his 204 out with another PT for a patrol near Genoa. Within two hours the wind built up to 35 knots, water smashed over the bow in blinding sheets and drowned out the radar, visibility dropped to less than a hundred yards. The PTs gave up the patrol and turned back toward Bastia. In the stormy night the boats were separated and the 204 plugged along alone, lookouts almost blinded by the spray.
Out of the darkness four E-boats appeared within slingshot range, laboring on an opposite course. A fifth E-boat “crossed the T,” but not fast enough, for the PT and the E-boat struck each other a glancing blow with their bows.
From a ten-yard range, the two small craft ripped into each other with every gun that would bear. The other four E-boats joined the affray, and for fifteen seconds the 204 was battered from broad-jumping distance by the concentrated fire of five enemy boats.
The PT escaped in the darkness and the crew set about counting its wounds. Bullets had torn up torpedo tubes, ventilators, ammunition lockers, gun mounts. The deck and the superstructure were a ruin of splinters. The engine room had a hundred new and undesired ventilation apertures.