The skipper polled his crew to prepare the melancholy roll of dead and wounded. Not a man had been nicked! The gas tank was intact. The engines still purred along like electric clocks. The 204, outnumbered five to one, had stood up to a fifteen-second eyeball-to-eyeball Donnybrook and was nevertheless bringing all its sailors home in good health.
Two of the squadron’s PTs were detached in January 1944, and went south again for duty in the ill-fated Anzio landing. Lieut. General Mark Clark, commanding the Fifth American Army, wanted the boats for water-taxi duty between the main American lines near Naples and the Anzio beachhead, thirty miles south of Rome. Usually the taxi runs were dull for sailors of the PT temperament, but not always.
On the morning of January 28th, General Clark and some of his staff boarded Lieut. (jg) George Patterson’s 201 at the mouth of the Volturno River, and in company with 216 set sail for Anzio, seventy-five miles to the north.
Twenty-five miles south of Anzio, the minesweeper Sway patrolled the southern approaches to the beachhead. The captain had just been warned that enemy airplanes were attacking Anzio, and he knew that the Germans often coordinated air and E-boat strikes, so when he saw two small boats ripping along at high speed and coming down the sun’s track, he challenged them by blinker light.
Without reducing speed, Lieut. Patterson answered with a six-inch light, too small a light for that distance in the daylight. Besides, the signalmen on the Sway were partly blinded by the glare of the sun, just rising behind the 201.
Sway’s guns opened fire. Lieut. Patterson fired an emergency recognition flare, but it burst directly in the face of the sun, and the Sway’s bridge crew missed the second friendly signal from the torpedo boat. The 201 even reduced speed as a further friendly gesture, but the slower speed only made the boat a better target.
The next shot hit the boat in the charthouse, wounding Lieut. Patterson and his executive officer, Ensign Paul B. Benson, and killing an officer passenger and a sailor.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” suggested General Clark.
Ensign Benson, though wounded, took the wheel from the sagging skipper and zigzagged the boat away at high speed back toward Naples, until he was out of range of the Sway’s batteries. A few miles down the coast the crew of 201 transferred dead and wounded to a British minesweeper.
The Sway still stood between the boat and Anzio, but General Clark wanted to go to the Anzio beach, so the 201 crept back at a peaceful-looking speed and spoke up from long distance with a bigger light. The sun was higher, Sway’s signalmen read the message, and the skipper waved them by.