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.
Three of the PTs were detached to sail for the northwest as an anti-E-boat patrol. Four others took 70 French commandos northwest to land at the Pointe des Deux Frères, in the beautiful Gulf of Napoule that washes the beach at Cannes. (The French commandos ran into a mine field ashore, were strafed by friendly planes, and captured by the Germans.)
The rest of the task unit sailed straight north, as though headed for Genoa, trailing balloons as radar targets, with the hope that the enemy would think a big invasion force was bound for the Italian seaport.
At Genoa, the phony flotilla turned west for the waters off Cannes and Nice, still trailing its radar target balloons. The launches and PTs maneuvered off Antibes, making as much of an uproar as possible, while the British gunboats bombarded the beach.
SARDINIA MADDALENA BASE PT HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS CORSICA BASTIA BASE TUSCAN ARCHIPELAGO LANDING BEACHES ITALY PT DIVRSION SMOKE SCREEN OPERATION GUN PT 206 VS. HUMAN TORPEDOS FRANCE PT FAKE LANDING PTs 202 and 208 SUNK BY MINES PTs FAKE A LANDING PT 555 SUNK HERE BOOBY-TRAPPED DUMMY PARATROOPERS DROPPED HERE SPAIN
The minuscule fleet was delighted to hear from Radio Berlin that a massive Allied landing near Cannes had been pushed into the sea with heavy losses, and that Antibes and Nice had been bombarded by four large battleships.
Captain Henry C. Johnson, commanding the diversion groups, said: “The decoy screen proved effective as in addition to several enemy salvos falling short of or bursting in the air over the gunboats, the PTs and the launches were subjected to a considerable degree of large-caliber fire which passed well over them.”
Happy with the confusion they had sown, the eastern diversion group sailed west to join a western task unit with a similar mission.
Off the Baie de la Ciotat, between Marseilles and the port of Toulon, the eastern group joined company with four more launches, 11 crash boats, and eight PTs of Squadron Twenty-Nine, under the control of the destroyer Endicott. Skipper of the destroyer was a sailor who might be expected to know a bit about a PT’s capabilities. His name was Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley.
The armed motor launches and the destroyer bombarded the beach behind a screen of PTs. The crash boats trailed balloons, laid smoke screens, fired ripples of rockets at the beach, laid delayed-action bombs in shallow water to imitate frogmen at work, and broadcast noises of many landing craft. The crash boats hoped to give the impression of a convoy ten miles long and eight miles wide.
At 4 A.M. troop-carrier planes flew over the town of La Ciotat and dropped 300 booby-trapped dummy paratroopers.
Radio Berlin broadcast an alarm. “The Allies are landing forces west of Toulon and east of Cannes. Thousands of enemy paratroops are being dropped in areas northwest of Toulon.”
With great bitterness, five hours later, Radio Berlin broadcast: “These paratroops were found later to be only dummies which had booby traps attached and which subsequently killed scores of innocent civilians. This deception could only have been conceived in the sinister Anglo-Saxon mind.”
This complaint came from the nation that was the world’s acknowledged master at the nasty and unmanly art of booby-trappery.
Radio Berlin continued: “Large assault forces have attempted to breach defenses west of Toulon, but as the first waves have been wiped out by mine fields, the rest lost heart and withdrew and returned to an area in the east.”
For two more nights the deception forces shelled the beach and made noises like a mighty host.
For two days the Germans announced that the main Allied intention was to take Toulon and Marseilles by direct assault, and talked of driving off an invasion force including five battleships.
Before sailing away after the last phony demonstration, Lieut. Commander Bulkeley broadcast a message, saying that the landings at La Ciotat would be postponed for a few days “because of the furious resistance on the beach,” but that they would definitely come. The Germans reinforced the La Ciotat area with mobile artillery and infantry units, sorely needed elsewhere.
Radio Berlin, after the final demonstration, said: “An additional and futile attempt of the American forces to land large bodies of troops west of Toulon has failed miserably.”
Lord Haw Haw, the English traitor who broadcast for the Axis, said: “The assault convoy was twelve miles long, but for the second time in three nights the Allies have learned of the determined resistance of the Wehrmacht, to their cost.”
The Axis broadcasts had the unexpected result of terrifying crews of German warships ordered out to attack the “invasion fleet.” Prisoners of war later reported that some of the ships would not sail because they had lost heart after listening to their own broadcast alarms.
Some ships did venture out, however, for one of the crash boats, retiring from the demonstration area after the final show, ran into two enemy corvettes—heavily armed escort vessels. The crash boat called loudly for help, and two antique British river gunboats, the Aphis and the Scarab, came running. The British and German ships battled for twenty minutes. Lieut. Commander Bulkeley’s Endicott, already almost out of sight on the southern horizon, steamed back at flank speed and opened fire at seven and one-half-mile range. Fire was slow, however, for the Endicott, trying to imitate a large bombardment force earlier that night, had shot its five-inchers so fast that all but one breech block was fused from the heat. The one remaining gun shifted fire from one corvette to the other.
Two PTs, screening the destroyer, closed the corvettes to 300 yards and fired two fish, but missed. The Endicott also fired torpedoes, and the corvettes turned bow on to comb their tracks, thus masking their own broadside. The Endicott closed to 1,500 yards and raked the corvette decks with 20-mm. and 40-mm. autocannon, driving gunners from their stations.
The British gunboats and the destroyer pounded the now silent corvettes until they sank. The ships and PT boats picked up 211 prisoners from the Nimet Allah, a converted Egyptian yacht, and the Capriolo, a smartly rigged light warship taken from the Italian navy.
In southern waters the PTs had been immune to mines, but off the Mediterranean shores of France they suffered terribly from a new type of underwater menace.
Following standard PT practice of moving the base as close to the fighting front as possible, Lieut. Commander Barnes set up a boat pool in the Baie de Briande, near Saint Tropez, almost as soon as the troops went ashore. The boats were close to the fighting and ready for action, but their gas tanker didn’t show up. By the evening of August 16th the boats were low on fuel, so the skippers puttered about the coast, running down rumors of gas tankers anchored here and there.
Lieut. (jg) Wesley Gallagher in 202, and Lieut. Robert Dearth in 218, set sail together to look for a tanker reported to be in the Gulf of Fréjus, fifteen miles to the northeast, the other side of Saint Tropez. At 11 P.M., as the boats were rounding the point of St. Aygulf to enter the harbor at Fréjus, the bow lookout on 202 sang out that he saw a boxlike object floating 150 yards dead ahead. The skipper turned out to sea to avoid it.
During the turn a mine tore the stern off the boat, blew stunned sailors into the water, and threw a column of water, smoke, and splinters hundreds of feet into the air. Four sailors jumped overboard to rescue their shipmates.
Lieut. Dearth brought the 218 over to pick up the swimming sailors and tried to approach the floating section of the 202 to take off survivors, but the stern of his boat was blown off in the stunning explosion of another mine.
The two skippers abandoned the shattered hulks of their boats. In the life rafts they held a muster. One man was missing and six men were wounded. Amazingly, the engineers of the watch on both boats survived, though they had been stationed right over blasts so powerful that heavy storage batteries had whizzed by them to land on the forecastle.
The sailors paddled shoreward. German planes were raiding the beach at that moment, and shrapnel from the antiaircraft barrage rained down on the rafts.
Shortly after midnight, the sailors landed on a rocky point chosen by the skippers because it looked least likely to be land mined. Lieut. Gallagher picked his way through a barbed-wire barricade along the beach and found a deserted and partly destroyed fisherman’s cottage where the sailors lay low for the rest of the night, not knowing whether they had landed in friendly or enemy territory.
Soon after dawn the skippers made a tentative venture into the open. Half a mile from the cottage they ran into soldiers—American soldiers—who took over the wounded men and guided the other sailors to a Navy beachmaster who gave them a boat ride back to their base.
A week later, on August 24th, task-force commander Rear Admiral L. A. Davidson heard that the Port-de-Bouc in the Gulf of Fos, west of Marseilles and at the mouth of the Rhone Delta, had been captured by the French Underground. He ordered minesweepers to clear the gulf, and he sent Capitaine de Frégate M. J. B. Bataille, French naval liaison officer on his staff, to scout the shore around the harbor. Capt. Bataille rode to the gulf in Lieut. Bayard Walker’s ill-fated PT 555.
The boat passed the minesweepers and came close aboard an American destroyer whose skipper notified Lieut. Walker that coastal shore batteries were still shooting near the mouth of the Gulf of Fos.
Lieut. Bayard reported: “It was decided that we could enter the Gulf of Fos, despite fire from enemy coastal batteries, since we presented such a small target.”
So—as he put it—they “entered the bay cautiously.”
One wonders how you go about entering a mine-filled bay, by an enemy shore battery, “cautiously.”
The crew saw the French flag flying in a dozen places on the beach, and landed at Port-de-Bouc where they were welcomed by a cheering crowd, waving little French flags. Capt. Bataille met a fellow officer, French Navy Lieut. Granry, who had parachuted into the area several weeks before, in civilian clothes, and had organized a resistance cell to prevent demolition of the port when the Germans retreated. After a pleasant half-hour ashore, gathering information (Lieut. Walker spoke excellent French), the party re-embarked, set a two-man watch on the bow, and headed for sea at 29 knots.
“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.
“We had two narrow escapes getting back to the PT boat,” Lieut. Walker said. “I requested the pilot, Ensign Moneglia of the French Navy, to go between two sets of lines I could see, rather than back down and turn around as the majority seemed to wish. It proved to be the safe way between two mines.”
The crew jettisoned all topside weights except one twin 50-caliber mount, so that they would have some protection against air attack.
Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston set out in a rubber boat for the town of Carro, at the eastern entrance of the Gulf of Fos, about five miles away. They were frantic to complete their mission by sending a message to the task-force commander, and they hoped to find an Army message center to relay their report that Port-de-Bouc was in French hands.
Two teams of bucket brigades bailed out the leaking hulk, but the water gained on them steadily. At midnight the sailors jettisoned the radar and brought up confidential publications in a lead-weighted sack, ready to be heaved over if they had to abandon the boat. The off-duty bucket brigade had to share a few blankets, because the night was chilly.
About an hour after sunrise Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston returned from Carro in a fishing boat, followed by another. That brought the little flotilla to two pilot boats, two fishing boats, and a battered piece of a PT. The two message-bearers had been unable to find an Army radio.
Two of the boats passed lines to the PT to tow it ashore, and the other two went ahead with Captain Bataille and Lieut. Livingston in the bows, as lookouts for moored mines. They found so many on the road to Port-de-Bouc that the flotilla turned and headed for Carro, on Cape Couronne, instead.
At the Carro dock, the PT settled to the bottom. An abandoned house beside the dock was turned over to the homeless sailors, and the French Underground trotted up five Italian prisoners to do the dirty work of making the place presentable.
Best news in Carro was that the cruiser Philadelphia had just sent an officer ashore with a radio, to send out some news of possible targets along the shore. Lieut. Walker tracked down his colleague, and after bloody travail, finally sent off his message to the task-force commander that Port-de-Bouc was indeed in friendly hands, but that the harbor waters were still acting in a very unfriendly manner indeed.
Walker threw in a little bonus of the fact that 3,000 enemy troops were only a few kilometers away and that the French Underground fighters were afraid they might escape via Martigues. He relayed the resistance officer’s plea for an air strike to break up the escape attempt long enough for American troops to arrive and sweep up the Germans.
Lieut. Walker adds a touching finale to his report:
“I had asked the pastor of the Catholic church at La Couronne, a village slightly more than a mile from Carro, to say a Mass on Sunday morning for the five men we had lost. A High Mass was celebrated in the church, crowded to the doors, at 10:30.
“The pastor and local people had gone to considerable trouble to decorate the church with French and American flags and flowers. The choir sang, despite the broken organ, and the curé gave a moving sermon in French. Four FFI [Underground] men, gotten up in a uniform of French helmets, blue shirts, and white trousers, stood as a guard of honor before symbolical coffins draped with American flags.
“After Mass our men fell in ranks behind a platoon of FFI, and followed by the whole town, we marched to the World War I monument. There a little ceremony was held and a wreath was placed in honor of the five American sailors.
“We were told that a collection was in the process of being taken up amongst the local people, in order to have a plaque made for the monument planned for their own dead in this war. The plaque will bear the names of the five Americans who gave their lives here for the liberation of France.”
The people of La Couronne did not forget. In that tiny village, on the lonely coast at the mouth of the Rhone River, is a monument with a plaque reading: To Our Allies, Ralph W. Bangert, Thomas F. Devaney, John J. Dunleavy, Harold R. Guest, Victor Sippin.
One of the most brilliant Anglo-American teams was Lieut. R. A. Nagle’s 559 and the British MTB 423, both under command of the dashing British Lieut. A. C. Blomfield.
During the night of August 24th, the marauding pair entered the harbor of Genoa to raise a bit of general hell. Off Pegli, about five miles from Genoa, they sighted what they thought was a destroyer, and put a torpedo into it. The vessel was only a harbor-defense craft, but a fair exchange for the one torpedo it cost.
Two nights later the pair jumped a convoy of three armed barges, and sank two of them. For the next nine nights they tangled almost hourly with F-lighters (four sunk), armed barges (eight sunk), and even a full-grown corvette, the UJ 2216, formerly the French l’Incomprise, which they riddled and sent to the bottom as the top prize of their 11-day spree.
Hunting got progressively meager as winter came on. PTs prowled farther afield and closer inshore in a ferocious search for targets. On November 17th, Lieut. B. W. Creelman’s PT 311 pressed the search too far, hit a mine, and sank. Killed were the skipper and his executive officer and eight of the 13-man crew.
The last big fight of the American PTs with enemy surface craft came two nights later when Lieut. (jg) Charles H. Murphy’s 308 and two British torpedo boats sank a thousand-ton German corvette, the UJ 2207, formerly the French Cap Nord.
The naval war was nearing its end for the Germans, and they turned to strange devices—human torpedoes, remote-control explosive boats, and semisuicide explosive boats. The remote-control craft didn’t work any better for the Germans than they had for Americans in the Normandy landings. So it was, also, with the human torpedo.
Lieut. Edwin Dubose, on PT 206, on September 10th, spotted a human torpedo in the waters off the French-Italian frontier. The PT sank the torpedo and pulled the pilot from the water. With great insouciance, the pilot chatted with his rescuers and treacherously told them where to find and kill a comrade piloting another torpedo.
In those waters that same day, planes, PTs and bigger ships sank ten human torpedoes.
As naval resistance lessened, the Western Naval Task Force, under American Rear Admiral H. K. Hewitt, was broken up and redistributed. Many PTs were assigned to the Flank Force, Mediterranean. Since most of the ships in the force were French, the PTs came under the command of French Contre-Amiral Jaujard.
Because Mark XIIIs were arriving in good numbers—the torpedo targets were getting scarce—the French admiral authorized the PTs in his command to fire their old and unlamented Mark VIIIs into enemy harbors.
On the night of March 21st, PTs 310 and 312 fired four Mark VIIIs, from two miles, into the harbor of Savona, Italy. Three exploded on the beach.
The same boats, on April 4th, fired four at the resort town of San Remo. Two exploded, one of them with such a crash that it jarred the boats far out to sea.
On April 11th, the 313 and the 305 fired four into Vado, touching off one large explosion and four smaller ones.
The last three Mark VIIIs were fired from the 302 and the 305 on April 19th. Lieut. Commander R. J. Dressling, the squadron leader, launched them into Imperia where a single boom was heard.
“During these torpedoings of the harbors,” said Dressling, “Italian partisans were rising against the Germans, and there is little doubt that the explosions of our torpedoes were taken by the enemy as sabotage attempts by the partisans. At no time were we fired on, despite the fact that we were well inside the range of enemy shore batteries.”
Lieut. Commander Dressling thought that “to a small extent the actions assisted the partisans in taking over the Italian ports on April 27th.”
The night after the Italian ports all fell to the Italian Underground, Admiral Jaujard, with a fine Gallic sense of the ceremonial, led his entire Flank Force, including PT Squadron Twenty-two, in a stately sweep of the Riviera coast. It was partly the last combat patrol and partly a victory parade.
Ten days later, on May 8th, the Germans surrendered and the war was over—the war was over in Europe, that is, for on the other side of the world the PTs were involved in the bitterest fighting yet.
PTs had operated in the Mediterranean for two years. The three squadrons lost four boats, five officers and 19 men killed in action, seven officers and 28 men wounded in action. They fired 354 torpedoes and claimed 38 vessels sunk, totaling 23,700 tons, and 49 damaged, totaling 22,600 tons. In joint patrols with the British they claimed 15 vessels sunk and 17 damaged.