When the PTs were still 2,500 yards away—too far for a good torpedo shot from a small boat—the destroyers fired a starshell. PT 202 was ready for just that emergency. A sailor standing by with a captured five-star recognition flare fired the correct answering lights and calmed the enemy’s nerves. The PTs moved in under the guise of friends and fired four fish at 1,700 yards. As they ran away they felt a violent underwater explosion, so they claimed a possible hit. On this one wild night of action Commander Allan’s strange little navy had, without damage to itself, sunk five of the formidable F-lighters, four heavily armed flak lighters, and a tug; scored a possible torpedo hit on a destroyer; and pulled a dozen German prisoners from the water. Hearts of the PT sailors were lifted with joy in May 1944, when the Mark XIII torpedoes began to trickle into their bases and the heavy old-fashioned torpedo tubes were replaced with light launching racks that gave the boats badly needed extra bursts of speed. More boats had been arriving, too, and eventually there were three PT squadrons working out of Sardinia and Corsica. As torpedomen installed the new fish and the new launching rigs, a PT skipper rubbed his hands and said: “Wait till we get a good target now. These Mark Thirteens are going to sweep these waters clean.” Lieut. Eugene A. Clifford, in 204, led two other PTs in the first attack with the new torpedoes on the night of May 18th in the Tuscan Archipelago. The PTs had two flak lighters on their radarscopes. Determined to try out the new torpedoes, they bored through the massive barrage from the flak lighters’ antiaircraft guns, firing from 1,000 yards. One of the highly vaunted Mark XIII’s made a typical Mark VIII run and hit the 204 in the stern. Fortunately, when this Mark XIII goofed, it really goofed, so it did not explode, but punched through the PT’s skin and lodged its warhead inside. Its body dangled in the PT’s wake, like a sucker-fish clamped to a shark’s tail. Lewis H. Riggsby, TM2c, went into the lazaret to stuff towels into the vanes of the impeller to keep the torpedo from arming and exploding. The flak lighters chased the PTs and hit 204 with 20-mm fire, but the boat escaped behind smoke, one of the famous Mark XIII torpedoes bobbing and dangling from the stern. Dominating the Tuscan Archipelago, within sight of the Italian mainland, is the island of Elba, first home of Napoleon in exile. The island attracted the Allies, because big guns on the point closest to the mainland could reach the coastal road and also close off the inshore passage to coastal craft. Once Elba was in Allied hands, southbound Axis land traffic might be chased a few miles inland to less-developed mountain roads, and sea traffic would certainly be squeezed into the thirty miles of water between two Allied bases at Elba and Corsica.