While he was in the hospital, the bodies of three of his shipmates washed ashore on Jersey. The British Red Cross took over the bodies and buried them with military honors.
Page was regularly annoyed by Gestapo men, but he said: “I found that being very correct and stressing the fact that my government didn’t permit me to answer was very effective. They tried a few times and finally let me alone.”
Page was liberated on May 8, 1945.
The Channel Island battles were vicious and inconclusive, in a sense, but the German gadflies stayed more and more in port—became more and more timid when they did patrol. Nightly sweeps of the PT-destroyer escort teams bottled up the German boats and cleared the Channel waters for the heavy traffic serving the voracious appetite of the armies on the continent.
8.
The War in Europe:
Azure Coast
After Allied troops had chopped out a good firm foothold on the northwestern coast of France, the Allied Command found that the Channel ports were not enough to handle the immense reserve of men and materials waiting in America to be thrown into the European battle. Another port was needed, preferably one on the German flank in order to give the enemy another problem to fret about.
Marseilles was the choice, with the naval base at Toulon to be taken in the same operation. The Allies set H-hour for 8 A.M. on August 15, 1944, and assembled their Mediterranean naval power in Italian ports. Among the destroyers assigned to the shore fire-support flotilla were ships of the Free Polish and Free Greek fleets.
Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, when he heard about these new comrades in arms, paraded his PTs past the Greek destroyer in daylight so that the Hellenic sailors could see what an American torpedo boat looked like. With a strong sense of history, Barnes remembered the Battle of Salamis, and he didn’t want the Greeks to mistake his boats for Persians.
As it turned out, the first duty for the PTs was to be mistaken for what they were not.
With two British gunboats, a fighter director ship and three slow, heavily armed motor launches, PTs of Squadron Twenty-Two sailed from Corsica on August 14th, bound for the coast of France. This task unit was under the command of Lieut. Commander Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the American movie star.