All the Italian navy saboteurs were put under armed guard for transport to American prisons in Sicily, but a pregnant woman burst into sobs, pleading that one of the men was her husband, a fisherman who had never spent a night away from Stromboli in his life. Six other women joined their wails to the chorus. The local priest assured Lieut. Dubose that their stories were true, so Dubose granted the prisoners a reprieve. The boats returned to Lipari, picked up fifty merry military prisoners there, and departed for Palermo to the cheers of the entire town. Messina fell that same day, and the Sicilian campaign was over. Three weeks after the fall of Sicily, on the morning of September 9th, Allied troops went ashore in force on the mainland around the magnificent Bay of Salerno, just across a headland from Naples, second port of Italy. Invasion chores were not strenuous for the PTs—a little anti-E-boat patrol in the bay and some light courier and taxi service for Army and Navy brass. Dull duty, but the boats had to fly low and slow, because they were almost out of aviation gasoline; their tanker had failed to arrive on schedule. By October 4th, however, the gasoline was in and the British had taken a splendid harbor at La Maddalena, off northeast Sardinia, so Squadron Fifteen sailed to Sardinia, from where it and the British boats could prey on enemy traffic north of Naples. Almost immediately, part of Squadron Fifteen moved still farther north to Bastia, on Corsica, which the Free French had just taken back from the enemy. These two bases put PTs on the flanks of coastal shipping lanes deep in the heart of enemy waters. Genoa itself, the largest port in Italy, was now within reach of the squadron’s torpedoes. Hunting was especially good in the Tuscan Archipelago, a group of islets and rocks between the PT base and the mainland. Something had to be done about the PT torpedoes, however, for the squadron was equipped with old Mark VIIIs, built in the 1920’s, crotchety, unreliable, and worst of all, designed to run so far below the surface that they couldn’t touch a shallow-draft F-lighter. PT torpedomen tinkered with their fish to set them for a shallow run, but the Mark VIII was frisky without eight feet of water to hold it down. The shallow-set Mark VIIIs porpoised, alternately leaping from the water and diving like sportive dolphins. PT skippers set them shallow anyhow, and fired them with the idea that there was a fifty-fifty chance the porpoising torpedo would be on the upswing when it got to the target and might at least punch a hole in the side. In Italy, as the contending armies fought slowly up the peninsula, the German situation became somewhat like the Japanese situation at that same moment in New Guinea. Powerful Allied air strikes disrupted supply by rail from Genoa and Rome to the front, so the Germans had to rely on waterborne transport to run down the coast at night.