On a second Plywood Derby, the Elcos raced against the destroyer _Wilkes_. Seas were running eight feet high—in one stretch the destroyer skipper reported 15-foot waves—and the little cockleshells took a terrible beating. Most of the time they were out of sight in the trough of the seas or hidden by flying spray. The destroyer won the race, but the Navy board had been impressed by the seaworthiness of the tough little boats, and the Navy decided to go ahead with a torpedo-boat program. The board standardized on the 80-foot Elco and the 78-foot Higgins designs, and the boatyards fell to work. The boats were built of layers of plywood. Draft to the tips of the propellers was held to a shallow five feet six inches, so that the PT could sneak close to an enemy beach on occasion as a kind of seagoing cavalry, to do dirty work literally at the crossroads. Three Packard V-12 engines gave a 4,500-shaft horsepower and drove the boats, under ideal conditions, as fast as 45 knots—but conditions were seldom ideal. A PT in the battle zone was almost never in top racing form. In action the PT was usually overloaded, was often running on jury-rig repairs and spare parts held together with adhesive tape and ingenuity. In tropic waters the hull was soon sporting a long, green beard of water plants that could cut the PT’s speed in half. Many of the PTs that fought the bloody battles that follow in these pages were doing well to hit 29 or even 27 knots. The American Navy had learned the hard way that any enemy destroyer could make 35 knots, and many of them could do considerably better—plenty fast enough to run down a PT boat, especially after a few months of action had cut the PT’s speed. The normal boat crew was three officers and 14 men, though the complement varied widely under combat conditions. The boat carried enough provisions for about five days. As for that bristling armament the correspondents talked about, a PT boat originally carried four torpedoes and tubes, and two 50-caliber twin machine-gun mounts. In combat PT skippers improvised installation of additional weapons, and by the war’s end all boats had added some combination of 40-mm. autocannon, 37-mm. cannon, 20-mm. antiaircraft autocannon, rocket launchers, and 60-mm. mortars. In some zones they even discarded the torpedoes and added still more automatic weapons, to give themselves heavier broadsides for duels with armed enemy small craft. Pound for pound, the PT boat was by far the most heavily armed vessel afloat, but that does not mean that a PT flyweight, no matter how tough for its size, was a match for an enemy heavyweight. PT sailors never hesitated to tackle an enemy destroyer, but they knew that a torpedo boat could stand up to an all-out brawl with an alert and aroused destroyer the way a spunky rat terrier can stand up to a hungry wolf. After all, the full and proper name of a destroyer is _torpedo-boat_ destroyer.