Lieut. (jg) Wesley Gallagher in 202, and Lieut. Robert Dearth in 218, set sail together to look for a tanker reported to be in the Gulf of Fréjus, fifteen miles to the northeast, the other side of Saint Tropez. At 11 P.M., as the boats were rounding the point of St. Aygulf to enter the harbor at Fréjus, the bow lookout on 202 sang out that he saw a boxlike object floating 150 yards dead ahead. The skipper turned out to sea to avoid it. During the turn a mine tore the stern off the boat, blew stunned sailors into the water, and threw a column of water, smoke, and splinters hundreds of feet into the air. Four sailors jumped overboard to rescue their shipmates. Lieut. Dearth brought the 218 over to pick up the swimming sailors and tried to approach the floating section of the 202 to take off survivors, but the stern of his boat was blown off in the stunning explosion of another mine. The two skippers abandoned the shattered hulks of their boats. In the life rafts they held a muster. One man was missing and six men were wounded. Amazingly, the engineers of the watch on both boats survived, though they had been stationed right over blasts so powerful that heavy storage batteries had whizzed by them to land on the forecastle. The sailors paddled shoreward. German planes were raiding the beach at that moment, and shrapnel from the antiaircraft barrage rained down on the rafts. Shortly after midnight, the sailors landed on a rocky point chosen by the skippers because it looked least likely to be land mined. Lieut. Gallagher picked his way through a barbed-wire barricade along the beach and found a deserted and partly destroyed fisherman’s cottage where the sailors lay low for the rest of the night, not knowing whether they had landed in friendly or enemy territory. Soon after dawn the skippers made a tentative venture into the open. Half a mile from the cottage they ran into soldiers—American soldiers—who took over the wounded men and guided the other sailors to a Navy beachmaster who gave them a boat ride back to their base. A week later, on August 24th, task-force commander Rear Admiral L. A. Davidson heard that the Port-de-Bouc in the Gulf of Fos, west of Marseilles and at the mouth of the Rhone Delta, had been captured by the French Underground. He ordered minesweepers to clear the gulf, and he sent Capitaine de Frégate M. J. B. Bataille, French naval liaison officer on his staff, to scout the shore around the harbor. Capt. Bataille rode to the gulf in Lieut. Bayard Walker’s ill-fated PT 555. The boat passed the minesweepers and came close aboard an American destroyer whose skipper notified Lieut. Walker that coastal shore batteries were still shooting near the mouth of the Gulf of Fos. Lieut. Bayard reported: “It was decided that we could enter the Gulf of Fos, despite fire from enemy coastal batteries, since we presented such a small target.” So—as he put it—they “entered the bay cautiously.”