So Lieut. Commander Barnes and his British counterpart worked out a scheme of joint patrolling, the Americans acting as a scout force and finding targets by radar. The targets once found, the PTs were to guide the British boats in a coordinated attack. From November 1943 until April 1944, joint patrols had fourteen actions, in which skippers claimed 15 F-lighters, two E-boats, a tug and an oil barge sunk; three F-lighters, a destroyer, a trawler, and an E-boat damaged. As winter came on, winds mounted and seas ran high, but the PTs maintained their patrols. On the foul night of November 29th, Lieut. (jg) Eugene A. Clifford took his 204 out with another PT for a patrol near Genoa. Within two hours the wind built up to 35 knots, water smashed over the bow in blinding sheets and drowned out the radar, visibility dropped to less than a hundred yards. The PTs gave up the patrol and turned back toward Bastia. In the stormy night the boats were separated and the 204 plugged along alone, lookouts almost blinded by the spray. Out of the darkness four E-boats appeared within slingshot range, laboring on an opposite course. A fifth E-boat “crossed the T,” but not fast enough, for the PT and the E-boat struck each other a glancing blow with their bows. From a ten-yard range, the two small craft ripped into each other with every gun that would bear. The other four E-boats joined the affray, and for fifteen seconds the 204 was battered from broad-jumping distance by the concentrated fire of five enemy boats. The PT escaped in the darkness and the crew set about counting its wounds. Bullets had torn up torpedo tubes, ventilators, ammunition lockers, gun mounts. The deck and the superstructure were a ruin of splinters. The engine room had a hundred new and undesired ventilation apertures. The skipper polled his crew to prepare the melancholy roll of dead and wounded. Not a man had been nicked! The gas tank was intact. The engines still purred along like electric clocks. The 204, outnumbered five to one, had stood up to a fifteen-second eyeball-to-eyeball Donnybrook and was nevertheless bringing all its sailors home in good health. Two of the squadron’s PTs were detached in January 1944, and went south again for duty in the ill-fated Anzio landing. Lieut. General Mark Clark, commanding the Fifth American Army, wanted the boats for water-taxi duty between the main American lines near Naples and the Anzio beachhead, thirty miles south of Rome. Usually the taxi runs were dull for sailors of the PT temperament, but not always. On the morning of January 28th, General Clark and some of his staff boarded Lieut. (jg) George Patterson’s 201 at the mouth of the Volturno River, and in company with 216 set sail for Anzio, seventy-five miles to the north.