The F-lighters were slow and cumbersome, but they were armored and mounted extremely heavy antiaircraft batteries which could saw a PT into toothpicks. Gun turrets were lined with cement and often mounted the much-feared 88-mm. rifle, thus enormously outgunning the PTs. Holds of the F-lighters were so well compartmented that they could take terrible punishment without going down. With only four and one-half feet of draft, they usually slid over PT torpedoes, set to run at eight-foot depth. An F-lighter was a serious opponent for a destroyer and much more than a match for a PT—in theory. The three PT skippers at Stromboli didn’t know about that theory, however, and probably wouldn’t have hesitated about attacking even if they had known how dangerous an F-lighter was. They fired six fish and thought they had blown up two of the F-lighters, but postwar assessment says No. Neither side was badly hurt in this first duel, but more serious fighting was to come. The next night, July 28th, three boats commanded by Lieut. Arbuckle fired at what the skippers thought were F-lighters, but were really Italian torpedo boats. American torpedoes passed harmlessly under the hulls of the enemy boats; Italian machine-gunners punched sixty holes in PT 218 and seriously wounded three officers, including Lieut. Arbuckle. The boat got back to Palermo with 18 inches of water sloshing about below decks. The F-lighters were ferrying Axis troops out of Sicily, across the Strait of Messina. The Allied high command had hoped to catch the whole Axis force on Sicily in a gigantic trap, and the Messina ferry had to be broken up. The Navy tried a combined torpedo boat-destroyer operation against the ferry, but as usual, communications between the American ships were bad and the destroyers opened fire on their own PTs. The first salvo from the American destroyers splashed water on the PT decks. The PTs were five knots slower than the American cans. (Remember those news stories, in the early days of the war, about the dazzling 70-knot PTs—fast enough to “run rings around any warship afloat”? During the summer of 1943, few of the Squadron Fifteen boats could top 25 to 27 knots.) Because they couldn’t run away from their deadly friends and because they feared American gunnery more than they feared Italian gunnery, the PT boats actually ran for the enemy shore to snuggle under the protection of Italian batteries on Cape Rasocolmo. The enemy guns obligingly fired on the American destroyers and drove them away. The PT sailors went home, enormously grateful to the enemy for his involuntary but effective act of good will. In August the Axis powers ferried most of their power to the mainland across the three-mile-wide Strait of Messina, in a brilliant escape from the Sicilian trap.