Four torpedo bombers launched their fish at the LCI, but since the torpedoes were set for attack on a deep-draft carrier, they passed harmlessly under the landing craft’s shallow hull—except for one which porpoised and jumped through the LCI’s thin skin, unfortunately killing one sailor. The unexploded warhead came to rest on a starchy bed in the bread locker. The torpedo was still smoking, so the LCI’s skipper, Lieut. (jg) H. W. Frey, ordered “Abandon ship!” Time passed. No explosion. A damage-control party reboarded the LCI and rigged her for a tow back to Torokina. PT 167 raced ahead with the wounded. Rear Admiral T. S. Wilkinson radioed congratulations to Ensign Theodore Berlin, skipper of the PT, for knocking down a plane with his mast. “Fireplug sprinkles dog,” is the way the admiral put it. So ended the First Air Battle of Bougainville. PTs quickly set up a base on Puruata Island, just off the Torokina beachhead, even though the Marine foothold was still feeble. Sea patrols of the torpedo boats were still vexed by poor communications. The night of November 8th, for instance, the destroyers _Hudson_ and _Anthony_ came up to Torokina, sure that there were no friendly PTs in the bay, because higher-ups on the beach had told them so. Naturally, when radar picked up the pips of patrolling PTs 163, 169 and 170, they let fly with everything. The PTs, equally misinformed about what friendlies to expect, took the destroyer broadsides to be a most unfriendly action and maneuvered for a torpedo run. The skipper of the 170 tried to decoy the two American destroyers into a trap. He called the 163 by radio, to warn him that he was leading “three Nip cans” into their torpedo range. PT 163 got off a long shot at the “three” cans, which fortunately missed. There has been much fruitless speculation about that third mysterious can reported by 170. Aboard the 170, the radar screen showed a big target—not one of the two American destroyers—10,000 yards dead ahead. A salvo of shells that “looked like ashcans” passed overhead, coming from the same direction as the radar target. To this day nobody knows who was the assailant with guns big enough to fire ashcan-sized projectiles. The running duel lit up the bay for forty-five minutes. The torpedo boats were just coming around for a new torpedo run when _Anthony_ figured out what was going on. “Humblest apologies,” the _Anthony_ said by radio in a handsome bid to accept all the blame. “We are friendly vessels.” Farther west near Arawe, on New Britain, on Christmas Day 1943, Lieut. Ed Farley’s 190, with Lieut. Commander H. M. S. Swift aboard, and Ensign Rumsey Ewing’s 191 were returning to the Dregar Harbor base in New Guinea, after a dull patrol.