After Allied troops had chopped out a good firm foothold on the northwestern coast of France, the Allied Command found that the Channel ports were not enough to handle the immense reserve of men and materials waiting in America to be thrown into the European battle. Another port was needed, preferably one on the German flank in order to give the enemy another problem to fret about. Marseilles was the choice, with the naval base at Toulon to be taken in the same operation. The Allies set H-hour for 8 A.M. on August 15, 1944, and assembled their Mediterranean naval power in Italian ports. Among the destroyers assigned to the shore fire-support flotilla were ships of the Free Polish and Free Greek fleets. Lieut. Commander Stanley Barnes, when he heard about these new comrades in arms, paraded his PTs past the Greek destroyer in daylight so that the Hellenic sailors could see what an American torpedo boat looked like. With a strong sense of history, Barnes remembered the Battle of Salamis, and he didn’t want the Greeks to mistake his boats for Persians. As it turned out, the first duty for the PTs was to be mistaken for what they were not. With two British gunboats, a fighter director ship and three slow, heavily armed motor launches, PTs of Squadron Twenty-Two sailed from Corsica on August 14th, bound for the coast of France. This task unit was under the command of Lieut. Commander Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the American movie star. Three of the PTs were detached to sail for the northwest as an anti-E-boat patrol. Four others took 70 French commandos northwest to land at the Pointe des Deux Frères, in the beautiful Gulf of Napoule that washes the beach at Cannes. (The French commandos ran into a mine field ashore, were strafed by friendly planes, and captured by the Germans.) The rest of the task unit sailed straight north, as though headed for Genoa, trailing balloons as radar targets, with the hope that the enemy would think a big invasion force was bound for the Italian seaport. At Genoa, the phony flotilla turned west for the waters off Cannes and Nice, still trailing its radar target balloons. The launches and PTs maneuvered off Antibes, making as much of an uproar as possible, while the British gunboats bombarded the beach. [Illustration: AZURE COAST] SARDINIA MADDALENA BASE PT HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS CORSICA BASTIA BASE TUSCAN ARCHIPELAGO LANDING BEACHES ITALY PT DIVRSION SMOKE SCREEN OPERATION GUN PT 206 VS. HUMAN TORPEDOS FRANCE PT FAKE LANDING PTs 202 and 208 SUNK BY MINES PTs FAKE A LANDING PT 555 SUNK HERE BOOBY-TRAPPED DUMMY PARATROOPERS DROPPED HERE SPAIN The minuscule fleet was delighted to hear from Radio Berlin that a massive Allied landing near Cannes had been pushed into the sea with heavy losses, and that Antibes and Nice had been bombarded by four large battleships.