1. The First PTs: Facts and Fictions In March 17, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur arrived safely in Australia after a flight from his doomed army in the Philippine Islands. The people of America, staggering from three months of unrelieved disaster, felt a tremendous lift of spirits. America needed a lift of spirits. Three months before, without the formality of declaring war, Japan had sneaked a fleet of planes from a carrier force into the main American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and in one Sunday morning’s work the planes had smashed America’s Pacific battle line under a shower of bombs and torpedoes. Without a fighting fleet, America had been helpless to stop the swift spread of the Japanese around the far shores and islands of the Pacific basin. Guam and Wake Island had been overrun; Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, the East Indies, had been gobbled up. Our fighting sailors, until the disaster of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, had been boasting around the navy clubs that the American fleet could sail up one side of the Japanese homeland and down the other side, shooting holes in the islands and watching them sink from sight. Now they ground their teeth in humiliation and rage, unable to get at the Japanese because the Pacific Fleet battle line lay in the ooze on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s navy was steaming, virtually unopposed, wherever its infuriatingly cocky admirals willed. When a combined Dutch-American flotilla had tried to block the Japanese landings on Java, the Allied navies had promptly lost 13 of their pitifully few remaining destroyers and cruisers—and the tragic sacrifice had not even held up the Japanese advance for more than a few hours. The naval officers of the Allies had had to make a painful change in their opinion of the Japanese sailor’s ability; he had turned out to be a formidable fighting man. On land, the Japanese army was even more spectacularly competent. Years of secret training in island-hopping and jungle warfare had paid off for the Japanese. With frightening ease, they had brushed aside opposition everywhere—everywhere, that is, except in the Philippine Islands, where General MacArthur’s outnumbered and underequipped Filipino and American fighters had improvised a savage resistance; had patched together a kind of Hooligan’s Army, fleshing out the thin ranks of the defenders with headquarters clerks and ship’s cooks, with electrician’s mates and chaplain’s assistants, with boatless boatswain’s mates and planeless pilots.