Being on a PT Boat During WW2 Sucked

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]The Navy called PTBboats the Greyhounds of the Sea. That was the official designation in the motor torpedo boat squadron's own training materials and it was the phrase that appeared in the press releases and the promotional literature that the Bureau of Naval Personnel used when describing the PTBO program to a public that needed heroes in 1942 and found them in small, fast boats darting through the darkness.

[00:00:24]Greyhound suggested speed, elegance, qualities that fit the image the Navy was building around the men who drove these boats, young officers mostly, educated, aggressive, operating with the kind of tactical independence that larger ships in larger formations could not exercise. The PT boat was freedom on the water. The PT boat skipper was the last incarnation of the naval tradition that put a capable man alone with a capable weapon and told him to go find the enemy in the dark. What the Bureau of Naval Personnel promotional literature did not include was the casualty rate that documented what the Greyhounds actually encountered when they found the enemy in the dark.

[00:01:04]Between August 1942 and August 1945, motor torpedo boat squadrons in the Pacific lost 69 boats to enemy action, grounding, and operational accidents. Of the 531 boats that served, roughly one in eight was destroyed before the war ended. But that aggregate figure conceals the concentration of loss in specific theaters and specific periods that shaped the experience of the men inside those losses with a precision the summary statistic cannot convey. In the Solomon Islands between August 1942 and February 1943, 6 months the duration of the Guadal Canal campaign, PT boats operating from the base at Tulagi lost men at a rate that the motor torpedo boat squadrons South Pacific Commander operational reports document in numbers that the training commands casualty assumptions had not anticipated. These were not losses incurred in the kind of war the promotional materials had described.

[00:02:02]They were losses incurred in a war where a 78- ft boat made of plywood and powered by three aircraft engines was routinely sent into darkness against Japanese destroyers whose guns fired shells weighing 50 lb where the doctrine governing torpedo attack assumed conditions that the slots's geography and the Japanese Navy's tactical competence consistently failed to provide and where a crew of 12 men in a hole less than an inch thick was the instrument through which the United States Navy attempted to stop the Tokyo Express. The Greyhounds were fast. Fast was not always enough. Start with the machine because the Elco 80oot PT boat's specific physical character defined everything about what it meant to be inside one in combat. And because its character was both its greatest tactical asset and the source of the specific dangers that the promotional materials had chosen not to emphasize. The Elco 80oot design, the most common PT boat type in Pacific service, measured exactly 80 feet from bow to stern and 20 ft, 8 in at the beam. Her hull was plked in two layers of diagonal mahogany over a framework of spruce and white oak. a marine plywood construction that was lighter than steel, faster in calm water, and that stopped a Japanese 25mm anti-aircraft shell with the same mechanical effect as a screen door stops a thrown rock. Her threepackard four M2500 marine engines, each developing 1,350 horsepower at full throttle, sat in the engine room amid ships in an installation that occupied much of the boat's interior volume and that generated at full combat power a combined 4,50 horsepower driving the hull to speeds exceeding 40 knots in calm water. The noise those engines produced at full throttle has been described in postwar accounts by PT boat veterans with a consistency that suggests it was one of the defining physical experiences of the service. Not loud. The word loud does not capture a sound that transmits through the thin plywood hole and the crews boots and the aluminum equipment mounts and the very air of the engine room at a volume that rendered verbal communication impossible and that accumulated in the ears of men who stood near the engines for hours at a time into a permanent ringing that most of them carried home and most of them called the price of fast. The engines could be heard across the water at distances that compromised the tactical surprise the night attack doctrine depended on. The Japanese learned to listen for PT boats. The PT boats could not reduce the sound without reducing the speed that was their primary defense. The tactical problem this created had no solution that the available engineering could provide. The crew of 12 to 13 men who operated an Elco PT boat in the Pacific lived and worked in a space that the boat's design had allocated to weapons and engines first and human accommodation as an afterthought that the afterthought's physical reality made obvious. The crew quarters were forward below the main deck in a bow compartment approximately 12 ft long and 8 ft wide that contained four bunks stacked in pairs against each bulkhead. four bunks for 12 men. The calculation that the squadron medical officers reports described as producing sleep conditions that no reasonable standard of human welfare would consider adequate. Most of the crew slept in rotation on whatever surface was available when the boat was in a port.

[00:05:36]When the boat was operating, which in the slot during the Guadal Canal campaign was most nights and many days, sleeping was something that happened in whatever space was momentarily unoccupied by a man performing an active function. The galley, located aft of the crew quarters, was a single burner alcohol stove in a space barely large enough for one man to stand in. The food the motor torpedo boat squadrons provisioned their boats with was a function of what could be stored in a vessel with almost no storage volume that was not occupied by fuel, ammunition or weapons. Canned food primarily sea rations when the supply boats reached the forward bases. Fresh food when port calls and supply deliveries aligned, which during the Guadal Canal campaign was considerably less often than the men would have preferred. The specific constraint that the PT boat's fuel and ammunition load imposed on provisioning was this. A boat that left Tulagi for a patrol in the slot carried 3,000 gallons of 100 octane aviation gasoline in tanks that ran the length of the hull on both sides. The food storage adjacent to this fuel was limited in volume by the hull's available space and limited in its contents by what the crews could make last. without refrigeration in Solomon Island's ambient temperatures of 85 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The fuel itself was the defining safety problem that the promotional materials had not addressed.

[00:07:04]3,000 g of 100 octane aviation gasoline in a wooden hull is not a peacetime storage arrangement. It is a combat arrangement accepted because the mission required the range and the speed that only 100 octane could produce. and the alternative, a slower, shorter range boat, was tactically useless in the waters where the PT boat was needed. The fuel tanks were self-sealing, which reduced but did not eliminate the fire risk from combat damage. A Japanese 25mm round penetrating the hole near the tanks was not a minor problem. The 25mm anti-aircraft shell carried a self-destructing incendiary round that produced a burst of burning material at the point of penetration. Burning material in proximity to aviation as fuel in a wooden hole produced results that the action reports from the Guadal Canal campaign document with the clinical brevity of documents written by people who understood that extended description would serve no purpose that the facts did not already serve adequately. PT boats burned. They burned quickly. The men inside them knew this.

[00:08:12]The numbers that define what PT boat service in the Solomon Islands actually demanded require their specific concentrated accounting here because they establish the gap between the Greyhound narrative and the operational reality with a precision that description alone cannot match. The standard PT boat patrol in the slot during the Guadal Canal campaign launched from Tulagi at approximately 2,000 hours after dark because darkness was the primary tactical protection. a 78 foot wooden boat possessed in waters where Japanese destroyers were operating and returned before dawn, typically around 0500. The patrol covered the waters between Guadal Canal and the surrounding islands, searching for the Tokyo Express destroyer runs that were bringing Japanese troops and supplies to the island at night. The patrol duration was 9 to 10 hours. The crew was at action stations for most of that period because the slot in 1942 was not a patrol area where action stations could be secured based on the absence of immediate threat. It was a patrol area where the absence of immediately visible threat was the normal condition right up to the moment the visible threat appeared at which point the window between appearance and impact was measured in seconds. The psychological demand of 9 to 10 hours at action stations in total darkness in a boat that the men knew could be seen and heard across the water, waiting for the appearance of a Japanese destroyer at a range that gave the PT boat almost no margin to act before the destroyer's guns were already firing. This demand was not addressed in any formal doctrine the motor torpedo boat squadrons operated under because the doctrine had been written for a conception of PTBbo operations that the slots's geography and the Japanese Navy's tactics had substantially revised. The pre-war PTBbo doctrine envisioned surprise torpedo attacks against enemy warships at ranges that gave the torpedoes time to run to the target and time for the PTBO to disengage before the enemy could respond. In the slot, darkness, radar limitations, and the confined geography produced engagements at ranges where the torpedo running time to the target was measured in seconds, not minutes, and where the Japanese destroyer's reaction was simultaneous with the torpedoes launch rather than sequential to it.

[00:10:34]This meant that the attack and the counterattack were not temporally separated events in which the PT boat struck and then evaded. They were simultaneous events in which the PT boat was already in the destroyer's gun range at the moment of torpedo release. This was not what the doctrine had described.

[00:10:51]It was what the slot produced. The Mark 8 torpedo that PT boats carried through much of the Guadal Canal campaign ran at 36 knots to a maximum range of 16,000 yards. Specifications that described a weapon optimized for the pre-war doctrine's vision of attacks at range.

[00:11:08]In the slots's actual engagement geometries, with Japanese destroyers detected at ranges between 1,000 and 3,000 yd and closing at combined speeds of 50 to 60 knots, the torpedo's range specification was irrelevant. What mattered was whether the weapon ran straight, armed properly, and detonated on contact. Qualities that the Mark 8's operational reliability record in 1942 did not consistently deliver. The torpedo that failed to arm, the torpedo that ran erratically, the torpedo that was a dud on impact. These were not training range problems in the slot.

[00:11:46]They were the operational reality that the crew had to absorb after making the attack run in the moment when the Japanese destroyer's guns were already responding and the boat needed to be running at full throttle to have any prospect of surviving. The specific incident that reaches into the center of what PT boat service in the slot actually meant is not PT 109. That story has been told exhaustively and its fame has in some ways displaced the clearer accounting that other engagements provide. It is the engagement of the night of November 13th, 1942 during the naval battle of Guadal Canal when a group of PT boats from Tulagi encountered Japanese naval forces in conditions that the doctrine governing their use had not prepared them for and that the men themselves had to manage with what they had. On that night, PT boats from motor torpedo boat squadron 3, PT48, PT60, PT61, and PT 10009 among others were operating in the waters north of Guadal Canal when the major surface engagement between American cruisers and destroyers and Japanese forces produced a situation that the PTO boats night patrol doctrine had no specific procedure for. A sea full of burning ships, survivors in the water, Japanese and American ships maneuvering at high speed in the same confined waters, and no reliable means of distinguishing between targets that should be engaged and ships and men that should not be. The boats operated in these conditions for hours. They made torpedo attacks against targets that the darkness and the confusion made difficult to positively identify. They recovered survivors from the water. They maneuvered at high speed through waters where burning oil on the surface was a specific fire hazard for a boat whose hole and superructure were wood and whose tanks held 3,000 gallons of aviation fuel. The action reports from that night reflect the confusion in their own structure. Contradictory contact reports, overlapping tracks, targets engaged that subsequent analysis suggested were not what the attacking boats believed them to be. What the action reports do not reflect, because action reports are not written to reflect it, is what those hours felt like for the crews of those boats. 12 men in a wooden hole, at full throttle in darkness, in waters where burning ships provided the only light, and the light was intermittent and disorienting, making tactical decisions under time pressure that the engagement geometry made even shorter than normal. with torpedoes that might or might not function, aware that the boats themselves were targets for anyone who saw them and made a similar assessment error in the opposite direction. Three PT boats were sunk during the Guadal Canal campaign by Japanese destroyers in direct engagements. More were damaged.

[00:14:37]The crews of the boats that were lost in the slot went into the water of the Solomon Islands at night in waters that the tropical Pacific provides at approximately 82° F. warm enough to prevent rapid hypothermia. Not warm enough to provide any comfort to a man wounded by Japanese shellfire or burned by aviation fuel. Trying to maintain position until rescue arrived or did not arrive. The rescue doctrine for PT boat crews in the slot was what the tactical situation permitted, which was sometimes immediate and sometimes hours later and sometimes not at all, depending on whether the surviving boats could return to the position of loss before daylight made surface operations suicidal and whether the men in the water had survived long enough to be found. the physical conditions aboard PT boats during the Guadal Canal campaign, before the tactical evolution that the 37 millimeter cannon installation represented, before the operational experience had refined the attack doctrine to something closer to what the engagement geometry actually required, were shaped by a specific combination of material and environmental factors that the tropical Pacific imposed on a wooden boat with minimal accommodation and maximum weapons load. The heat in the engine room of a PT boat running at full throttle in tropical water was not the background condition it was on larger ships with a better insulated machinery spaces. The three Packard engines together generated approximately 4,50 horsepower of waste heat in addition to their propulsive output in an engine room that measured approximately 14 ft long, 8 ft wide, and just over 6 ft high. The machinist mate who stood watch in that space during a full power night patrol was standing in an enclosed volume with three engines running at maximum output that raised the ambient temperature to levels between 110 and 130° F and that required hearing protection when it was available that the tactical requirement for verbal communication frequently made impossible to use effectively. The Packard 4M2500 was a superb engine. It was developed from the Merlin class high-performance aircraft power plant lineage and it delivered its rated power reliably under the conditions its design parameters covered. The design parameters did not cover sustained tropical marine operation with maintenance intervals compressed by combat tempo and spare parts availability constrained by the supply chain realities of the South Pacific in 1942.

[00:17:13]Saltwater intrusion into electrical systems. The machinist mates on PT boats were not a large group. Each boat carried two, sometimes three men with engineering responsibility. In extended combat operations during the Guadal Canal campaign, when boats ran patrols on consecutive nights with maintenance windows between them, that the operational tempo compressed to whatever time was available between return from one patrol and departure for the next.

[00:17:41]The engineering department's burden was managed by men who were simultaneously sleepdeprived, operating in extreme heat, and responsible for maintaining three aircraft derived engines in a saltwater marine environment that the engines designers had not specified them for. Saltwater corrosion of fuel system fittings, tropical heat degradation of rubber components in oil and fuel lines.

[00:18:05]The machinist mates who maintained the Packard engines at Tulagi improvised, cannibalized, and fabricated solutions to maintenance problems that the engine's technical manual had not anticipated. And when improvisation reached its limit, they operated engines that were not in optimal condition because the mission required the boats to run regardless of whether the engines were optimal. An engine casualty during a high-speed night action in the slot was not a maintenance problem. It was a tactical emergency that reduced the boat's primary defensive characteristic, speed, at the moment when speed was most required. A boat running on two of three engines at full throttle could make approximately 30 to 33 knots. A Japanese destroyer could make 35. These assessments were made under conditions that the machinist mates reports reflected and that the operational tempo frequently made it impossible to fully resolve. The motor officer who told the skipper the engines were ready when ready meant ready within the constraints of what was achievable with available resources rather than ready in the technical manual sense was making a judgment call that the skipper's tactical decisions would depend on and that the crew's survival might depend on in conditions that the motor officer had made on similar data the previous night and the night before that. The arithmetic of that deficit in waters where the destroyer had already detected the PT boat and was closing required no elaboration for the crew experiencing it. The motor officer, the officer responsible for the engineering department, typically an enen or lieutenant junior grade, occupied a position aboard a PT boat that the promotional materials portrait of PT boat service as glamorous individual combat did not capture. The motor officer was the man who told the skipper whether the engines would deliver full power, whether the fuel supply was adequate for the planned patrol, and whether the mechanical anomalies detected during the pre- patrol inspection were within the tolerance that the mission's requirements could accommodate. The PTBO's radar in the early Guadal Canal campaign was the SG surface search radar when it was installed and operational or no radar at all on boats that had not yet received the equipment or whose radar had failed.

[00:20:19]The tactical value of radar for a boat whose primary hunting method was night attack at close range was not the long range detection capability that radar provided on larger ships. It was the ability to detect a Japanese destroyer at ranges that gave the PTB boat time to orient and attack before the destroyer's own lookouts had located the PT boat by sound or bow wave. When the radar was working, this margin was meaningful.

[00:20:44]When it was not working, the crew relied on eyesight and hearing and the specific knowledge of the slots's geography that experienced crew members had accumulated through repeated patrols. Knowledge of where Japanese ships tended to run, where the current set, where the darkness was deepest, and where it was lightest against the sky. This accumulated knowledge lived in the men.

[00:21:05]When the men were killed or transferred, the knowledge was partially lost.

[00:21:09]Replacing an experienced PT boat crew member with a replacement from the training command introduced a man who had the technical training but not the accumulated situational knowledge that was not in any training manual because it was the specific product of having been in this specific water on these specific nights and having noticed what that experience produced. By mid1 1943, as the Solomon Islands campaign moved north from Guadal Canal and the tactical environment evolved with it, the PT boat force's operational character had been substantially revised by everything the previous year had taught. The 37 millimeter cannon installation, the improvised field modification that motor torpedo boat squadron 3's crews had developed by salvaging 37 millime M4 cannons from wrecked P39 fighters at Henderson Field and mounting them on makeshift pedestals had transformed the boat's capability against the shallow draft Japanese barges that were the primary supply vehicle for island garrisons the destroyers could no longer reliably reach. The attack doctrine had been refined through the specific feedback that comes from a year of combat results. The crews that had survived the Guadal Canal campaign had developed a level of tactical competence that the training command could not produce and that the attrition of that first year had paid for in ways the training command's casualty assumptions had not projected. The men who operated PT boats through the remainder of the Pacific campaign through New Georgia, Buganville, New Guinea, the Philippines, Okinawa were operating in a tactical framework that had been built from the ground up through the experiences of the men who had done it first in the slot in 1942 before the doctrine had been revised to match what the slot actually produced.

[00:23:00]What those men brought home when they came home was shaped by 3 years of high-speed night operations in a wooden boat with 3,000 gall of aviation fuel in a war where the enemy had adapted to find and engage them specifically.

[00:23:15]Hearing loss was near universal among men who had served as motor officers or machinist mates in PTBOT engine rooms.

[00:23:22]The three Packard engines at full throttle produce sustained noise levels at the engine room positions between 115 and 125 dB above the threshold for permanent damage at any sustained exposure. Approaching the threshold for immediate permanent damage at the upper end of high-speed operation. The hearing protection available was minimal, and the tactical requirement for communication made even minimal protection difficult to use consistently. The men came home with the specific auditory legacy of three engines at full throttle in a confined space. A legacy that expressed itself in the same ringing that most of them had already learned to ignore before the war ended. The psychological weight of the night patrol, the specific experience of 9 hours in darkness in a boat the crew knew could be heard and seen approaching its target. Waiting for the contact that would produce a tactical situation resolving itself in seconds was not something the VA's 1946 diagnostic categories were designed to address with any precision. The men processed it in the ways men process such things. Some directly, some obliquely, some not at all. for decades and then all at once when something specific triggered what had been stored rather than resolved.

[00:24:39]One of those men was motor machinists mate secondass Raymond Coyle of Buffalo, New York. Coyle was 20 years old when he reported to motor torpedo boat squadron three at Tulagi in October 1942.

[00:24:53]Assigned as a machinist mate on PT59, he served through the Guadal Canal campaign and the subsequent operations in the central Solomons, maintaining the Packard engines through the full operational period from October 1942 to March 1944, 17 months, approximately 200 patrols, and the specific experience of being in the engine room of PT59 on the night of December 9th, 1942 when the boat took 225 millimeter hits through the starboard engine room bulkhead while withdrawing from a torpedo attack on Japanese destroyers in the slot. The first round entered the engine room at bulkhead frame 22 and passed through the auxiliary fuel line junction without igniting the fuel. A near miss in the most precise sense, the rounds incendiary element failing to function on this particular occasion. a mechanical failure of the Japanese ammunition that the subsequent investigation attributed to a defective fuse lot that the Japanese supply system had distributed to the destroyer force that night. The second round hit the number three engine's exhaust manifold and punched through the thin aluminum casing, damaging the manifold gasket and producing an exhaust leak that filled the engine room with carbon monoxide and hot gas that coil managed by shutting down number three and continuing on the remaining two engines at full throttle for the 40minute withdrawal to Tulagi.

[00:26:19]He was in the engine room for those 40 minutes, the exhaust gas and the carbon monoxide, the two remaining engines at full throttle in a space that the damaged manifold was partly filling with exhaust products. He later told the squadron medical officer that he had been sick for most of the return journey and had not realized until the doctor examined him the following morning that the carbon monoxide exposure had been significant enough to register in his blood. He was given a day off and resumed duty the following night. After the war, Coyle returned to Buffalo and worked for 39 years as a mechanic at a Chevrolet dealership on Delaware Avenue.

[00:26:56]He retired in 1984. His daughter, in an account she wrote for a family history project in 1998, described asking her father once whether he had ever been afraid on the boats. He said he had been afraid every night. He said being afraid was not the same as being unable to function. And that the difference between those two states was the thing he had spent most of the war figuring out. He said by the end of it he had gotten pretty good at the difference, which he acknowledged was not the kind of thing that sounded like much when you said it out loud. He said the engines helped. He said when the engines were running right, you knew exactly what the situation was. And when they were running wrong, you knew what needed fixing. And either way, there was something specific to do. He said he had spent a lot of his life afterward looking for that quality, the quality of having something specific to do, and that working on cars came close enough that it had kept him occupied. He died in 2001 at the age of 79. His family found in his workshop after he died a small framed photograph of PT59 at speed in the slot. The boat is making perhaps 35 knots in the photograph. You can tell from the bow wake and the angle of the hull. The water behind her is white and violent looking. The sky above is the particular gray of a Solomon Islands morning, not quite dawn. On the back in Coil's handwriting, October 1942 to March 1944.

[00:28:23]All three ran.