PTs 127 and 331 entered the bay while the other two boats patrolled the islands outside. In the light of a tropical moon, the skippers inside saw a subchaser and crept to within 800 yards before the Japanese opened fire. The two boats launched eight torpedoes and a ripple of rockets (enough explosive to tear a battleship in two, much less a little patrol craft). The retiring PT skippers reported the usual loud explosion, indicating a torpedo hit, which virtually all retiring torpedo-boat captains always reported. This time, however, they were right. The Japanese themselves later admitted the loss of the subchaser SC 53. The two retiring boats, all their torpedoes spent, met the 128 and 191 at the entrance to the bay, and Lieut. Hallowell “transferred his flag” to the 128 to lead the two still-armed boats in a second attack. All four boats went in, the two boats with spent tubes planning to give gunfire support to the armed duo. All hands searched for the original target, but could not find it—for the good reason that it was on the bottom. Lieut. Hallowell saw what he thought was a freighter tied to a dock, so the two skippers, ignoring fire from the beach, launched all torpedoes. Ten days later, when the Army had landed at Ormoc and taken over the harbor, the PTs promptly moved in and discovered that Lieut. Hallowell’s “freighter” was the Japanese PC 105, clearly visible at the dock, sitting on the bottom with a fatal gash in her side. Lieut. Melvin W. Haines, early on the morning of December 12th, led PTs 492 and 490 in a classic attack on a convoy in Ormoc Bay. The PTs stalked silently to close range, launched torpedoes, and retired zigzagging behind smoke in a maneuver right out of the PT textbook. They were rewarded by a great stab of light behind them. One of the boats, or perhaps both, had hit the destroyer _Uzuki_, which went up in a great column of orange flame. This kind of night warfare was only too tediously familiar to PT sailors, but right then the war took a nasty new turn for them—indeed for the whole Pacific Fleet. Desperate because of the swift deterioration of their position, the Japanese switched from all reasonable kinds of warfare—if there are such—and developed the suicidal _kamikaze_ tactic. Through the war, Japanese fliers—and Americans, too, for that matter—already hit and doomed, often tried to crash-land on ships under attack, to take the enemy down to death with them. During the Leyte surface-air battles, however, many of the Japanese were dedicated, with great ceremony, to making deliberate suicide dives into American ships, as a kind of human bomb. The toll was already frightening to American naval men, and threatened to get worse. In mid-December two _kamikaze_ planes crashed into the 323 in Surigao Strait, and destroyed it utterly so that the PTs crews were served notice that they were not too small a prize to merit attention from the sinister new air fleet.