The first quartet of P 40s, the planes that had chatted with Lieut. Hall, rushed back to the scene when they heard the radio traffic between the attacking fighters and suspected what was happening. They dropped a life raft to the swimming survivors and radioed headquarters the story of the disaster. Two PTs were dispatched to the rescue. Four officers and four enlisted men were killed, four officers and eight enlisted men were wounded, two PT boats were lost to the deadly fire of the friendly fighters—all because one slipshod clerk had put a piece of paper in a wrong file basket. Even worse was coming. The combat zone in the Pacific was divided into the Southwest and the South Pacific commands. Communication between the two commands at the junior officer level was almost nonexistent. Everybody was supposed to stay in his own backyard and not cross the dividing line. On the night of April 28th, Lieut. (jg) Robert J. Williams’ 347 was patrolling with Lieut. (jg) Stanley L. Manning’s 350. The 347 went hard aground on a reef at Cape Pomas, only five miles from the dividing line between the south and southwest zones. Lieut. Manning passed a line to the stranded boat, and the two crews set about the all-too-familiar job of freeing a PT from an uncharted rock. At 7 A.M. two Marine Corps Corsairs from the South Pacific zone, through faulty navigation, crossed the dividing line without knowing it. Naturally they had no word of these PTs patrolling in their area, because they weren’t in their area. They attacked. The PTs did not recognize the Corsairs as friendly, and shot one of them down. (This is an extraordinary mistake, also, for the gull-winged Corsair was probably the easiest of all warplanes on both sides to identify, especially from the head-on view presented during a strafing run.) Three men were killed in the first attack on the 350, and both boats were badly damaged. The skippers called for help. The tender _Hilo_, at Talasea, asked for air cover from Cape Gloucester (in the Southwest Pacific zone and hence out of communications with the South Pacific base of the Corsair pilots). The tender sent Lieut. (jg) James B. Burk to the rescue in PT 346. The pilot of the surviving Corsair reported to his base at Green Island, in the South Pacific zone, that he had attacked two Japanese gunboats 125 feet long in Lassul Bay. (The PTs were slightly more than half that long. Lassul Bay was actually 20 miles from Cape Pomas, the true scene of the attack, and hence fifteen miles inside the South Pacific zone and not in the Southwest Pacific zone.) Green Island scrambled four Corsairs, six Avengers, four Hellcats, and eight Dauntless dive bombers to finish off the stricken PTs. The powerful striking force, enough air-power to take on a cruiser division, found no boats in Lassul Bay, but they, too, wandered across the dividing line and found the PTs at Cape Pomas.