The book was called _They Were Expendable_, and it became a runaway best-seller. It was condensed for _Reader’s Digest_ and featured in _Life_ Magazine, and it made the PT sailor the glamour boy of America’s surface fleet. _They Were Expendable_ makes exciting reading today, but the book’s success spawned a swarm of magazine and newspaper articles about the PT navy, and some of them were distressingly irresponsible. Quite innocently, William White himself added to the PT’s exaggerated reputation for being able to lick all comers, regardless of size. He wrote his book in wartime and so had no way of checking the squadron’s claims of torpedo successes. Naturally, as any generous reporter would have done, he gave full credit to its claims of an amazing bag—two light cruisers, two transports and an oil tanker, besides enemy barges, landing craft and planes. Postwar study of Japanese naval archives shows no evidence that any Japanese ships were torpedoed at the times and places the Squadron Three sailors claim to have hit them. Of course, airplane and PT pilots are notoriously overoptimistic—they have to be optimistic by nature even to get into the cockpits of their frail craft and set out for combat. And yet any realistic person who has worked in government archives hesitates to give full weight to a damage assessment by an office research clerk as opposed to the evidence of combat eyewitnesses. Postwar evaluation specialists would not confirm the sinking of a 5,000-ton armed merchant vessel at Binanga on January 19, 1942, but Army observers on Mount Mariveles watched through 20-power glasses as a ship sank, and they reported even the number and caliber of the guns in its armament. On February 2, 1942, Army lookouts reported that a badly crippled cruiser was run aground (and later cut up for scrap) at the right time and place to be the cruiser claimed by PT 32. Evaluation clerks could not find a record of this ship sinking either, so the PT claim is denied. Unfortunately, the most elaborately detailed claim of all, the sinking of a _Kuma_ class cruiser off Cebu Island by PTs 34 and 41, most certainly is not valid, because the cruiser itself sent a full report of the battle to Japanese Navy headquarters and admitted being struck by one dud torpedo (so much at least of the PT claim is true), but the cruiser, which happened to be the _Kuma_ itself, was undamaged and survived to be sunk by a British submarine late in the war.