On 7/21/2015 8:50 PM, Richard Aiken
wrote:
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.
He hated torpedo runs because they were usually against something
that was large enough to be a stable gun platform that mounted
something that would be a one shot kill if it hit...and they had to
go in a straight line to line up for the launch.
...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.
Hopefully. But they did get some rather interesting training
according to my dad and IIRC his quartermaster.
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.
LOL! True. By the end of the war my dad's boat had been modified
to lose the two aft torpedoes, the forward tubes had been swapped
for roll off cradles, and the weapons (from bow to stern) were a
37mm, two single 20mm, a pair of 8 shot rocket launchers, M-1919
LMGs on each side of the navigation bridge, a twin .50cal, a 20mm on
the deckhouse, and a 40mm Bofors in the stern. The two torpedo
tubes that were removed were usually replaced with a pair of roll
off depth charges (used mostly for fishing or sending a destructive
monkey to the hereafter). The crew had a variety of arms ranging
from SMGs to BARs; his rule was if you had to take your hands off
the trigger and stock to do anything other than reload it, it wasn't
allowed on the boat.
Looking back, I truly believe that he was a PC during the war.