“Two members of our engine-room crew, who were topside as gun loaders during battle, were sent to the engine room to take over the chief engineer’s duties, for I was sure he was dead or wounded. However, he had been working on the engines throughout the battle and had already found the trouble. We immediately got under way. “We found out, however, that our rudder was jammed in a dead-ahead position, but by great good fortune we were headed directly away from the enemy, so I dropped a couple of smoke pots over the side and we moved off. The enemy shifted its fire to the smoke pots, and we lay to and started repairs. “Much to our surprise, we found that none of us had even been wounded, but the boat had absorbed a great deal of punishment. A burst of 20 mm. had zipped through the charthouse, torn the chart table to bits, knocked out the lighting system, and de-tuned and scarred the radio and radar. Another burst had gone through the engine room, damaged control panels, torn the hull. All hits, however, were above the waterline. Turrets, turret lockers, ventilators, and the deck were holed. “We called the 209 alongside, and sent off a radio report to the flagship on the action and the direction in which the ships retired.” Lieut. Nugent learned from the skipper of the 209 that his boat had been hit only twice, but one of the shells had scored a direct hit on a 40-mm. gun loader and killed him instantly. The tall, black warriors from French Senegal swept over the island in two days of brisk fighting and Elba was Allied. The sea roads to the south were blocked, and PT action shifted to the north, to the Ligurian Sea, the Gulf of Genoa, and the lovely blue waters off the Côte d’Azur. 7. The War in Europe: English Channel In England, as May 1944 turned into June, it didn’t take a genius to know that something big was afoot. Military traffic choked the roads leading to the Channel seacoast and the coastal villages. Troops were in battle dress, officers were grim faced, all hands hustled about on the thousands of mysterious errands that presage an offensive. Everybody knew it was the Big Landing—the assault on Fortress Europe—but where? Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Two, under Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley (with only three boats this was the smallest squadron ever organized), had helped to make the decision where to land. Assigned to the Office of Strategic Services—America’s cloak-and-dagger outfit for all kinds of secret business—Squadron Two had run a ferry service between England and the enemy-occupied continent to deliver secret agents, saboteurs, spies, resistance officers, and couriers for the governments in exile. The sailors of Squadron Two carried out their orders, of course, but on some of their errands they could mutter the old Navy adage: “I may have to take it, but I don’t have to like it.”