On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <kurt@thepaw.org> wrote:

waiting with lights off and motors idling for these heavily-laden slow-moving targets to put in an appearance, drifting quietly into torpedo range THEN launching and immediately hitting the gas, leaving at flank speed under heavy smoke while earnestly praying that no searchlights found them . . .

Many missions were patrol missions around disputed islands and hunting Japanese landing craft and lighters which were then shot up

Then we're talking about the same missions. The approach would be as stealthy as possible. Torpedoes were used when possible, but only usually worked against the biggest boats; the medium to small ones didn't have deep enough drafts. Shooting the targets was the very definitely second choice, since these "targets" could send back quite a heavy volume of return fire.

...or, landing shore parties to collect intelligence and then backing off for a couple hours before moving in to recover the shore parties.

And hopefully no gunplay at all would be involved there.

My father had a lot of stories about his years commanding a PT boat in the South Pacific and one thing he impressed on me was that each time they went out it was rarely boring or a "sit and drift" mission.

90% of war is boring. Even the tension of waiting for the enemy to appear gets boring. There's only so long the body can stay tense.

Torpedoes became so rarely used that they removed two of the four for better performance and replaced them with more machine guns.

The crews were always looking up up-gun their boats. In that way they were actually quite a bit like PCs. I recall reading of one boat which replaced it's fantail smoke generator with an ex-Army 75mm pack howitzer (the writer of the account was deliberately vague as to how the crew acquired the weapon . . .). IIRC they were never able to confirm having scored any hits using it [from the stern of a wildly bouncing/corkscrewing PT boat]. But firing it in action in the vague direction of the incoming fire apparently helped crew morale considerably.

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby

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