“A few minutes later,” said Lieut. Walker, “a terrific blast exploded beneath our stern, carrying away the 40-mm. gun and the gun crew and almost everything else up to the forward bulkhead of the engine room.... The four torpedoes were immediately jettisoned and we anchored with two anchors from separate lines.”
Volunteers manned the life rafts to pick up the men in the water. They returned with a body, one uninjured sailor, and a man with a broken leg. Four other sailors were never found.
One of the rafts could not return to the boat because of strong currents, so Lieut. Stanley Livingston, a powerful swimmer, swam the 300 yards, towing the bitter end of a line patched together of all available manila, electric cable, halyards, and odds and ends, buoyed at intervals with life jackets. Sailors on the boat then pulled the raft alongside.
A French pilot boat and a fisherman in an open boat came out from the beach to help. Overhead, fighter planes, attracted by the explosion, took in the situation and set up an impromptu umbrella.
The sailor with the broken leg needed help. Lieut. Walker put him and the dead sailor’s body into the fisherman’s boat with the pharmacist’s mate, and climbed in himself, as interpreter. They shoved off for Port-de-Bouc.
One hundred yards from the PT boat, Walker saw in the water a green line with green floats spaced every foot. He yelled a warning at the fisherman, but too late. A violent explosion lifted the boat in the air and threw the four men into the water.
Lieut. Walker came up under the boat and had to fight himself free of the sinking craft. He took stock. The dead sailor had disappeared forever. The pharmacist’s mate, about sixty feet away, was shouting that he couldn’t swim, so Walker went to the rescue. The injured man was hauled up to the bottom of the overturned boat where, in Walker’s words, “He appeared to be comfortable.”
The ordinary non-PT man might consider a perch on the bottom of an overturned and sinking fishing boat as being somewhat short of “comfortable” for a man with an unset broken leg.
“The situation seemed so good,” continued Lieut. Walker in the same happy vein, “that I decided not to take off my pistol and belt.... The French pilot boat came to our rescue, and the injured man was put aboard without further harm. The fishermen’s boat upended and sank as the last man let go.”
Walker confessed to a tiny twinge of disappointment at this point in his narrative. A scouting float plane from the cruiser Philadelphia had landed near the shattered boat, and the PT officers had hoped to get off their message to the task-force commander, but the pilot took fright when the second mine went off under the fishing boat, and he left for home.