PT Boats from My Childhood, Part 1

It's finally over. My life-long quest--a quest for which I would have spent my fortune and gladly betrayed friends and family--has at last been fulfilled.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I have been trying to identify and re-read a particular book I originally read when I was about 11-years old. It was one of two young adult novels involving PT boats during World War II. For years, my search was confused by the fact that I didn't remember that there were indeed two different PT boat novels and I was mixing together plot points when I searched for it.

But finally, I discovered one of them: Torpedo Run in Iron Bottomed Bay, by John Clagett. I'll actually be reviewing that one soon in a second "PT Boats from My Childhood" post.  It was reading Clagett's book that convinced me there was a second young adult PT novel out there, containing the plot points I remembered (the first name of one of the characters and a general memory of several of the battle scenes) which weren't in the Clagett book.

With a vital clue recently provided from Goodreads "What's the Name of That Book" forum, I was finally able to find the other PT boat novel. This is actually the second in a series of six books featuring young sailors Bob Dunbar and Gary Lunt, who end up serving on different types of vessels over the course of the series.

The Hostile Beaches (1964), by Gordon D. Shirreffs, is further proof that I had impeccable taste in reading materials and films when I was a kid. Whether it was a TV series novelization, my first comic book, or a movie that I enjoyed as a child, when I revisit them as an adult decades later, they always turn out to be great.

Bob and Gary start out the novel on a destroyer during the Solomon Islands campaign. After a night action,  in which their ship and two other destroyers attack and sink some Japanese vessels, their ship hits a mine and also sinks.

Circumstances lead to Bob and Gary being reassigned to a PT boat. Bob is a signalman, but also has a lot of experience handling small craft. Gary is known for running off at his mouth when he should shut up and does something incredibly stupid from time to time, but is one of the best Gunner's Mates in the Navy. In fact, he convinces the PT boat's commander that he's worthwhile when he uses one of the boat's twin-barreled .50 caliber machine guns to shoot down a Japanese bomber.

This leads to the action scene I still remembered vividly years later. During the Solomon campaign, the Japanese would use barges to sneak reinforcements and supplies to contested islands at night. PT Boats were often assigned to "barge-bopping," which meant finding and sinking these small craft before they reached their destination. This was made dangerous by the fact that the barges were armor-plated and equipped with cannon and machine guns.

So when the American boat attacks what turns out to be eight barges, they have a fight on their hands. And it is an exciting, suspenseful fight in which the PT boat takes damage and loses a man, but sinks five of the barges and drives the others into the hands of other PTs.

The next job involves sailing into enemy waters, hiding out in a small river on an island during the day and barely avoiding discovery by Japanese troops. They are delivering radio equipment to an Australian coast watcher, but bad luck leaves Bob and Gary stranded on the island with the coast watcher. They begin to help out, taking over the job completely when the coast watcher grows too sick from a bullet wound to keep working. And, since the Japanese are building a large base on the island, getting a steady stream of information out to the Allies is vital--even if this means dodging enemy soldiers & guard dogs, working with an unreliable radio and risking attacks by various poisonous animals that live in the thick jungle. These last few chapters are incredibly tense.

The Hostile Beaches also includes technical accuracy in terms of equipment and weapons, an understanding of realistic military tactics, likable characters and just the right amount of humor seeded throughout the story to make it seem real.

I really did have great taste in stuff as a kid.

Mutiny on a small boat

When I was maybe 11 years old, I found a book about PT boats in the public library. It was a young adult novel whose title I forgot, but years later I could still remember certain key elements about it. I do remember thoroughly enjoying it.

For a long time, I was unable to identify the book again. I didn't remember title, author or enough of the plot to narrow it down.  Also, it turns out, that I had actually read two different young adult novels set aboard a PT boat. In my memory, I was combining elements of both these novels into one non-existent book, making my quest that much harder.

I discovered this a few years ago, when I found a copy of Torpedo Run on Iron Bottomed Bay, by John Clagett. This was definitely one I read as a kid, but it didn't include one of the characters I remembered. It was then I realized I was indeed remembering two separate books. Gee whiz, I thought I had fulfilled my quest but was only half-way there.

Recently, I tried again and found a copy of Torpedo Run, by Robb White (1962). It is not the second PT boat novel from my childhood. But it turned out to be quite good and was well worth reading.

The main character is Peter Brent, the second-in-command of a PT boat nicknamed Slewfoot by the crew. When the book opens, Peter and the crew are burying their captain, who had been killed on the last mission.

He'd been a good captain and Slewfoot had built up an impressive record in attacking Japanese ships and barges trying to sneak reinforcements into New Guinea each night. So the loss of their commander is a serious blow.

The crew, though, is confident that Peter will also be a good commander. The next night, they at first think they might be badly mistaken when Peter seems to be reluctant to attack some Japanese transports. But Peter suspected a trap--guessing that some destroyers were hiding behind the transports, using the bulk of the larger ships to hide both visually and from radar.

He's right and is thus able to maneuver Slewfoot for an attack on the destroyers. These leads to the first of several superbly described action scenes.

But Slewfoot will not remain a happy boat. Peter isn't allowed to permanently take command. A brand-new and completely inexperienced officer named Adrian Archer is given that post.

Archer is a spit-and-polish disciplinarian who quickly alienates the crew. By itself, enforcing strict military discipline is usually a good thing in a military unit, so I was at first curious to see what direction the book took with this. In fact, it had been established that the crew had become a little lax in some of the maintenance needed to keep the boat in prime condition.

But Peter makes an effective argument that a small unit (the crew numbers just a dozen men) in an isolated post has to have a more relaxed manner of doing things and he seems to be right. Archer's leadership style damages morale in a very real way.

But his views on discipline aren't the only thing that makes Archer unpopular. He's also stubborn and unwilling to learn, making several decisions while Slewfoot is at sea that endanger the boat and the crew. Soon, several of the crew are openly considering defying Archer, while others shy away from this. Peter, as an officer, can't openly take the crew's side even when he thinks Archer is wrong. Soon, a crew that worked together so well is about to come apart at the seams.

One dark night, when Archer refuses to open fire on Japanese barge because it hasn't been clearly identified yet, the barge has a chance to shoot first. A crewman is seriously wounded and the Slewfoot's engines are wrecked. Now they are drifting towards the Philippines, which are 2000 miles away and occupied by the Japanese. Archer, though, still makes decisions that tick off the crew and put them in greater danger. Peter finally reaches a point where he feels he has to step forward and take command.

But Archer might have depth to him that the others haven't recognized.

Torpedo Run is a great war story filled with three-dimensional characters. As a young adult novel, the violence is never described in an overtly graphic manner and the characters don't use some of the saltier language that sailors commonly used in real life. But that's fine. Robb White gives us guys we accept as real and who all believably act and react according to their own personalities.

The book never uses its status as a young adult novel to shy away from difficult subjects. Is the crew right to consider mutiny? Is Archer right to enforce strict military discipline, even if he is clearly wrong in his combat decisions? Was a crewman right to fire back at an American bomber that mistook them for Japanese and attacked them?

The last 50 or so pages of the book, with the exhausted crew trying to tow Slewfoot into the path of an island (using a rubber raft and oars) and then dealing with a possible attack from local cannibals, is real edge-of-your-seat stuff.

So I'm glad I read this book. But it's still not the as-yet unidentified PT boat novel from my childhood. BUT--with the help of several people on a Goodreads forum dedicated to just such things--I may have found the this book at last. As of my writing this post (about 5 weeks before it posts), the latest suspect is being shipped to me from a used book store in Oregon. If it is the book I read as a kid, I may do a two-part series on "PT Boats from my Childhood," covering both that book and the John Clagett novel mentioned above. One can never have too many PT Boats in one's life. PT boats are cool.

PT Boats from My Childhood, Part 2

John Clagett knew his PT Boats. He commanded one of the small craft during the War and, when he became a novelist, based much of his fiction on his experiences.

Torpedo Run on Iron Bottomed Bay (1969), is the second of two young adult novels about PT boats I read as a kid. And, like The Hostile Beaches, it is a gripping and exciting story.

The main character is a seventeen-year-old sailor named Larry Cushing, whose experience working on small boats while growing up makes him a good fit for a PT. Larry is in some ways a generic character--pleasant, easy to get along with, and eager to learn. He demonstrates good marksmanship also, which gets him assigned to one of the twin .50 caliber machines guns.

What keeps Larry from being a cipher is Clagett's skill in making him likable and realistically describing emotions like fear and terror. Combat is scary and Larry definitely gets scared.

But he still does his job, demonstrating an intense loyalty to his friends and fellow crew. Larry is meant to be someone the book's target audiences can identify with and in this Clagett succeeds completely. I undoubtedly identified with him when I read the book as an 11-year-old and I still identified him reading the book as an adult.

Clagett does a great job with the action scenes as well. Especially notable is PT 107's first attempt to make a torpedo run against Japanese warships. The PT's engines suddenly conk out and the boat is floating helpless in the water while searchlights sweep around looking for them.

There's also a magnificent section describing the naval battle of Guadalcanal, as seen by the PT crews from an island hilltop---several successive nights of watching capital warships blasting each other apart.

There another plot-line running through the book. One of Larry's crew-mates is a Japanese-American named John Watanabe, with whom Larry develops a close friendship. When John is seen talking with several sick and ragged Japanese soldiers who are still lurking in the jungle surrounding the PT boat base, he's arrested as a traitor. Larry, though, is convinced that whatever John was up to, it was legitimate. Saving his friend from a court-martial means contacting the Japanese stragglers himself--something that could get Larry and another friend killed.

If I had to pick a favorite between Torpedo Run at Iron Bottomed Bay and The Hostile Beaches, I think I would lean towards the latter as being a little more intense and edge-of-your-seat. But it's a close call. Both are excellent war stories stuffed to the gills with authenticity.

But we're not done yet with the World War II fiction of my youth. Finding these two books launched a personal jihad of Googling until I was able to identify the two remaining books from my youth that I had always wanted to re-read. One is another story of naval combat in the Pacific. The other is an anthology of tales dealing mostly with infantry combat. Over the next month or two, we'll visit with each of these.

Climb a Cliff and Fight a Battle

I've been writing about my quest to find a few World War II-themed novels I read as an 11-year-old. I remembered plot points and (in one case) a character's name, but for years did not have quite enough information to zero in on titles and authors. This changed this year and (with the help of a Goodreads forum dedicated to identifying vaguely remembered books), I've found them all.

Two of them involved PT boats--I've written about them HERE and HERE. This next one, though, was trickier to find. It's an anthology and what I remembered was the general plots of two of the stories in it.

Fortunately, I have awesome deductive reasoning skills (and would, in fact, be regularly solving murders if anyone I knew would have the good grace to get murdered or be falsely accused of murder). I found a clue online that helped me identify the book.

It's an anthology published in 1964 as More Combat Stories of World War II and Korea, which was reprinted in 1969 as The Zone of Sudden Death. This was written by William Chamberlain and contained both short stories and novellas that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post during the 1950s and 1960s.

Chamberlain was a great writer and it's a pity he seems to have dropped into obscurity. His stories are historically accurate, realistic and exciting--made even more suspenseful by his habit to abruptly kill off likable characters at any moment. I'm a little surprised that I didn't remember more of these stories--though it's possible that for some reason I didn't originally read them all.

The theme of effective and inspiring leadership runs through nearly every one of his stories. The main protagonist is almost always an officer. They are battalion, regiment or division commanders who are given tough jobs to do, but lead from the front to make sure their men do the job. Chamberlain understood the qualities a leader in real life must have and effectively incorporated this into his fiction. This is not surprising--Chamberlain had been a career army officer, retiring as a general in 1946.

The first of the two stories I remembered is "Reluctant Hero," originally published in the Post in July 1961. The narrator is a battalion commander fighting in the Pacific island-hopping campaign, but the protagonist is a front-line soldier named Tom Minor. Despite a record of drunkenness and going AWOL back in the States, Tom has proved to be a great soldier who exhibits strong leadership skills. We meet him when he plays a key role in stopping a banzai charge.




Tom gets several promotions, eventually becoming an officer and a company commander. But when he's awarded a Silver Star, he refuses it. The reason why gradually unfolds as the story continues.

The other story I remember is a novella titled "Battle Party," set during the Italian campaign. (Originally published in the Post in September 1961.)

Here the main character is a newly-minted one-star general named Dave Mosby. This means Dave will be moved out of the regimental commander position he had, but not before he completes one more job. A big attack is going to be launched in a few days. But in order for that to succeed, the Germans will first have to be pushed off a mountain that overlooks the battlefield. Dave's regiment is given the job.

His plan is to lead one battalion up a steep cliff, hauling mortars and machine guns up behind them on ropes. This should achieve surprise and allow them to hold the mountain top until the rest of the regiment travels up a pass to join them. Then it's a matter of holding out for a few days until the big attack is launched.

In addition to crossing rough terrain, there are a couple of other problems. Dave is still recovering from a wound and the winter weather leaves him susceptible to pneumonia. And, when the bulk of the regiment makes its way up the pass, Dave's overly-cautious executive officer dawdles, taking hours longer on the trip than he should and allowing the Germans to wear down the battalion that's already entrenched on the mountain.

The story is peppered with a great cast of supporting characters and the battle scenes are among the best in the book. It's really no wonder "Battle Party" made such an impression on 11-year-old me. Heck, it made an impression on grown-up me.

We have one more World War II novel to visit, then we'll have finished our journey through my childhood reading experience.