The PT scouts crept to within 400 yards before firing torpedoes, and ran away behind heavy smoke. Nevertheless, the destroyers laid down such a heavy fire that they hit 214, even in the smoke screen, wounding the engineer of the watch, Joseph F. Grossman, MoMM2c, and damaging the center engine. Grossman ignored his wounds and tended the stricken engine until it was running well again, staying below with his engines until the boat was out of danger.
The skippers of the scouting PTs heard the usual large explosions on one of the destroyers and hoped they had scored but couldn’t be sure. Hit or no hit, the destroyers reversed course and ran up the coast, abandoning their convoy—an unthinkable act of cowardice for Allied escorts.
Sunk or run off, it was all the same to Commander Allan, who wanted only a free hand with the F-lighters. When the destroyers were gone, he passed radar ranges and bearings to the gunboats, and the Royal Marines lit up the night over the convoy with a perfect spread of starshells.
Startled gunners on the F-lighters, unused to this kind of treatment in waters where vessels with 4.7-inch guns had never dared venture before, took the lights for plane flares and fired wildly into the clouds.
The Royal Marine gunners took their time for careful aim under the bright glare of the slowly sinking magnesium lights. At the first salvo, one of the F-lighters blew up with a tremendous explosion. Within ten minutes three F-lighters were burning briskly. The gunboats spread out and pinned the surviving boats against the beach while the Marine artillerymen methodically pounded them to scrap.
“Of the six F-lighters destroyed,” says Commander Allan, “two, judging by the impressive explosions, were carrying petrol, two ammunition, and one a mixed cargo of both.”
With what sounds like a note of wistful disappointment, Commander Allan added: “The sixth sank without exploding.”
The Operation Gun Task Force sortied again on the night of April 24th. The coastal waters around the Tuscan Archipelago were swarming with traffic that night. Early in the evening the gunboats blew two F-lighters out of the water. Burning debris, cascading from the sky after the explosions, set fires on the beach.
Shortly afterward the Marine sharpshooters picked off a tug and three more F-lighters.
Radar picked up still another group and star-shell from the gunboats showed that they were three flak lighters—medium-size craft powerfully armed as antiaircraft escorts for daylight convoys. The Royal Marine gunners smacked their first salvos into two of the flak lighters, which burned in a fury of exploding ammunition.