The two PT skippers were given the thorny tactical problem of dodging friendly destroyer fire while simultaneously taking on the German boats. Lieut. Clifford turned back through his own smoke, surprised the E-boats at close range when he burst out of the screen, and raked the enemy with his machine-gun batteries. He ran back into the smoke before they could swing their mounts to bear on him, so he couldn’t report results of his attack, but destroyer sailors saw one of the E-boats burst into flame. The other ran from the fight. Not so the destroyers. They chased the PTs for an hour, firing starshells and salvos from their main battery. Fortunately their shooting was poor, and the PTs got out of the battle with only a few machine-gun holes. Days later one of the destroyer skippers called to apologize. “We hadn’t been able to find any action in our assigned patrol area,” he said, “so we decided to have a bit of a look in the PT area.” The destroyer skipper’s action was dashing and bold, but it was also a fine way to catch a friendly torpedo in his own ship or to kill a dozen or so of his Allies. Three E-boats had attacked the destroyers at the precise instant that the American PTs arrived on the scene, according to the British officer who had heard a German radio discussion of a plan to attack the destroyers. Naturally the alarmed British began blasting at any torpedo boat in sight. Everybody saw Dubose’s recognition flares, but took them for tracer fire, a common mistake. A strange aftermath of the running gun battle was the naval occupation of the great port of Bizerte by a lone PT. The 205 lost the other boat in the night and put into Bizerte for gasoline. The port had just been taken by Allied troops a few hours earlier. The shore batteries, now in friendly hands, nevertheless fired the “customary few rounds” at the arriving PT boat, but the imperturbable Lieut. O’Brien said: “The shots were wide, so I continued in and tied up at the dock.” Two hours later a newsreel photographer asked O’Brien to move his PT out of the way so he could photograph some British landing ships just arriving as “the first Allied craft to enter Bizerte.” Lieut. O’Brien wondered what his own boat was if not an Allied craft, and he had been in Bizerte long enough to be bored with the place, but he patiently moved aside. The brush-off from the newsreel man was only the beginning of the stepchild treatment the PTs suffered at Bizerte. Squadron Fifteen cleaned up a hangar and scrounged spare parts and machinery from all over the city. When the big boys came into the harbor, their skippers were delighted with the tidy PT base and ruthlessly pushed the little boys out the door. “We cleaned up half the buildings in Bizerte,” said one veteran of Squadron Fifteen. “As fast as we made a place presentable, we were kicked out. We ended up with only a fraction of our original space, and we had to fight tooth and nail for that.”