The next day enemy newspapers reported that an attempted landing on the southwest coast of Sicily had been bloodily repulsed. Soldiers of the American and British landing forces swarmed over Sicily, taking Italian prisoners by the hundreds. Some Americans were amused, some depressed by the standard joke of many surrendering Italian soldiers: “Don’t be sorry for me. I’m going to America and you’re staying in Sicily.” Palermo, major city on the northwestern coast, fell to the Allies on July 22nd, and the jaunty boats of Squadron Fifteen were the first Allied naval power to show the flag in the harbor. They picked their way through the sunken hulks of fifty ships. The dockside was a shambles. In a word, Palermo was a typical PT advanced base. The squadron moved up from Bizerte the same day and began patrolling the Tyrrhenian Sea, those waters boxed in by Sicily, Italy, Sardinia and Corsica. Isolated in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about thirty miles north of Palermo, is the island of Ustica. On the first Tyrrhenian patrol Lieut. Commander Barnes led his boats toward Ustica to see what was going on in those backwaters of the war. “At dawn we were off Ustica,” the squadron leader reports. “First thing, we saw a fishing boat putt-putting toward Italy. We found a handful of very scared individuals crawling out from under the floor plates, hopefully waving white handkerchiefs. This was the staff of an Italian admiral at Trapani [site of the Italian torpedo-boat base at the western tip of Sicily, bypassed by the fall of Palermo]. “Only reason we didn’t get the admiral was that he was late getting down to the dock and his staff said the hell with him. “In addition to a few souvenir pistols and binoculars, we captured a whole fruit crate of thousand-lira notes which we reluctantly turned over to Army authorities later. One of the other boats saw a raft with seven Germans on it, feebly paddling out to sea. We picked them up too.” The next night three PTs of Squadron Fifteen patrolled to the Strait of Messina, right against the toe of the Italian mainland itself, and two nights later, off Cape Vaticano, the same three boats—under Lieut. E. A. Arbuckle—found the 8,800-ton Italian freighter _Viminale_ being towed toward Naples by a tug. For some reason, the freighter was being towed backward, almost causing the PT skippers to take a lead in the wrong direction, but they sank both ships in the first U.S. Naval victory in the Tyrrhenian Sea. On the night of July 26th, near the island of Stromboli, three PTs commanded by Lieut. J. B. Mutty ran into their first F-lighters, those powerfully armed German landing craft and general-duty blockade runners that were to become the Number One enemy of PTs in the Mediterranean.