Torpedo-boats; World War, 1939-1945 -- Naval operations, American
One wonders how you go about entering a mine-filled bay, by an enemy
shore battery, “cautiously.”
The crew saw the French flag flying in a dozen places on the beach, and
landed at Port-de-Bouc where they were welcomed by a cheering crowd,
waving little French flags. Capt. Bataille met a fellow officer, French
Navy Lieut. Granry, who had parachuted into the area several weeks
before, in civilian clothes, and had organized a resistance cell to
prevent demolition of the port when the Germans retreated. After a
pleasant half-hour ashore, gathering information (Lieut. Walker spoke
excellent French), the party re-embarked, set a two-man watch on the
bow, and headed for sea at 29 knots.
“A few minutes later,” said Lieut. Walker, “a terrific blast exploded
beneath our stern, carrying away the 40-mm. gun and the gun crew and
almost everything else up to the forward bulkhead of the engine room....
The four torpedoes were immediately jettisoned and we anchored with two
anchors from separate lines.”
Volunteers manned the life rafts to pick up the men in the water. They
returned with a body, one uninjured sailor, and a man with a broken leg.
Four other sailors were never found.
One of the rafts could not return to the boat because of strong
currents, so Lieut. Stanley Livingston, a powerful swimmer, swam the 300
yards, towing the bitter end of a line patched together of all available
manila, electric cable, halyards, and odds and ends, buoyed at intervals
with life jackets. Sailors on the boat then pulled the raft alongside.
A French pilot boat and a fisherman in an open boat came out from the
beach to help. Overhead, fighter planes, attracted by the explosion,
took in the situation and set up an impromptu umbrella.
The sailor with the broken leg needed help. Lieut. Walker put him and
the dead sailor’s body into the fisherman’s boat with the pharmacist’s
mate, and climbed in himself, as interpreter. They shoved off for
Port-de-Bouc.
One hundred yards from the PT boat, Walker saw in the water a green line
with green floats spaced every foot. He yelled a warning at the
fisherman, but too late. A violent explosion lifted the boat in the air
and threw the four men into the water.
Lieut. Walker came up under the boat and had to fight himself free of
the sinking craft. He took stock. The dead sailor had disappeared
forever. The pharmacist’s mate, about sixty feet away, was shouting that
he couldn’t swim, so Walker went to the rescue. The injured man was
hauled up to the bottom of the overturned boat where, in Walker’s words,
“He appeared to be comfortable.”
The ordinary non-PT man might consider a perch on the bottom of an
overturned and sinking fishing boat as being somewhat short of
“comfortable” for a man with an unset broken leg.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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