“By the time we saw it against the dark background of the land we were inside the torpedo-aiming range and had to go all the way around the other side of it before getting a good shot. “Thinking there were other targets around, I lined up and fired only one torpedo—our first! “It ran hot and straight, and after what seemed like an interminable time made a beautiful hit forward. The whole ship blew up in our faces, scattering pieces of debris all around us and on deck. Just like the movies. “We immediately started to look for other ships but could find none. Neither could we find our British friend, who, it turned out, was temporarily aground, so we just eased around trying to rendezvous. Pretty soon he found us—and promptly fired two fish at us, one of which passed right under our bow and the other under the stern, much to our alarm and his subsequent embarrassment. “About half an hour later, bombers started working over the airfield a couple of miles away, and with the light of the flares we managed to join up with Germaine. “I personally think that ship was aground—the ship we torpedoed—although it certainly made a fine spectacle going up, and one of our officers who was along that night subsequently flew over the area in a plane and reported it sitting nicely on the bottom. “Actually, Germaine had not seen any ships and had mistaken some peculiar rock formations for a group of enemy vessels.” That was not the last mistake of the British Navy. Unused to working with their new Allies, the British boats took one more near-lethal crack at American PTs. Lieut. Dubose, in Lieut. (jg) Eugene S. Clifford’s 212, with Lieut. Richard H. O’Brien in 205, left Bône on the night of May 10th to patrol Cape Bon. On the way home after a dull night, the two boats cut deep into the Gulf of Tunis to keep clear of a British destroyer area. The Gulf of Tunis was supposed to belong to torpedo boats that night, but two British destroyers came roaring out of the night on an opposite course only 900 yards away. The destroyers opened up with machine guns as they passed, so the PTs fired two emergency recognition starshells and ran away behind a smoke screen. Two German E-boats, lurking in the darkness for a crack at the two destroyers, opened up on the PTs instead, and the British took _all_ the torpedo boats under fire, distributing shells and bullets on American and German boats with impartiality.