PT Boats

Memorial Day 2026

The PT Boat: 690 were made before the end of World War II and they saw duty in every theater of the war. For most people today I suspect there’s a vague recollection that President Kennedy was the captain of a boat (109) that was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer (IJN Amagiri) off Kolombangara, and that his leadership saved the lives of the surviving crew members. But there is much more to the story of the PTs and this is a good weekend to bring it up.

Depending on the variant, they were 78 (Higgins, and Huckins Yacht) or 80 feet long (Elco) and were made of two diagonally layered 1 inch mahogany planks (not plywood). Each hull had several watertight compartments making them remarkably tough for their size, and they were powered by 3 x Packard V-12 engines. These engines originally produced 1200-1250 HP each but later were upgraded to 1500 HP each. According to the US Navy, PTs could make about 41 or 42 knots (47-48 mph), limited to that speed by "overspeed cutouts” that were intended to limit engine RPM if the propellers came out of the water. But, per Dick Keresey, captain of PT105, there was a more or less standard practice among the engineers to “tape down” the cutouts and that would allow the boats to get past 50kts (57mph) in a flat sea.

As for armament, that was all over the map. They all began with torpedoes, normally 4 x Mk-8 torpedoes, and .50 caliber machine guns in a wide range of variations (singles and twins). Some later added 20MM cannon, 37MM cannon, 40MM cannon, mortars, even twin 8-cell pods carrying 5 inch rockets, a small number of depth charges, and in a few cases naval mines. Many others were built and then transferred to the British the Canadians, the Australians and the Soviets.

PT boats were not officially named. Many were given names by their crews but there were instances where named boats were shot up and some crews considered names as unlucky, so it varied from squadron to squadron.

All told, some 531 boats served in combat. 99 PTs were lost during the war, 32 in heavy seas, accidents or friendly fire, 67 by enemy action, to include 8 (including 109) lost to ramming by the enemy. Some 60,000 officers and sailors served in PT boat squadrons during the war. A squadron had up to 12 boats, and each boat had crews of as many as 17 men, and there were maintenance personnel also with the squadrons. Crews were usually slightly smaller than 17, in some cases as few as 12. Of the 60,000 men in these units, it isn't clear how many actually served on boats, and the “process” of manning and moving officers and sailors around once in a squadron was not exactly formal… Of the 60,000 men, perhaps half actually served on the boats in combat. Of that number, there are differing accounts as to exactly how many were lost during the war, but there is a list of roughly 900 names of sailors, and I’ll defer to that list ( https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/CloseQuarters/PT-D.html  ).

PT boats first received notoriety during the war when LT (later VADM) John Bulkeley evacuated Gen. MacArthur and wife and son and several staff members off Corregidor on March 11th, 1942; Bulkeley received the Medal of Honor. What was missed is that that action was perhaps one of the less risky actions of Bulkeley’s career in PT Boats, actions for which he also received a Navy Cross, 2 Distinguished Service Crosses, 2 Silver Stars, a Croix de Guerre with Palm, and multiple Philippine Distinguished Conduct Stars.

But heroics - and great risk - were daily fare for the PTs. Boats were regularly shot up, many who served was wounded, and as mentioned earlier, some 900 were killed.

While the movies show them attacking larger ships - and they did, those attacks were both less successful, and less significant than the nearly nightly actions that took place around Guadalcanal, in the seas between the Solomon Islands (known as “The Slot”) and around New Guinea. Nightly - PT boat actions were overwhelmingly at night - they would go out in search of small Japanese vessels (sometimes referred to as barges, sometimes as lighters, but they were a wide assortment of vessels) that were ferrying supplies, ammunition and troops around the Solomons, New Guinea, and later the Philippines. Initial operations took place with no radars, then a few radars in a squadron, with the radar equipped boats leading and guiding the others, or trying to. But PT boat crew commentary routinely noted that they’d proceed to an area of suspected barge activity then patrol on a single engine, moving slowly to avoid creating a wake, as the wakes could be seen by the enemy. As most didn’t have radar (the Navy had no night vision devices), detection was usually the result of sighting a black silhouette against a dark sky, rather than the much more difficult problem of seeing a ship’s black silhouette against a much darker island; a night at sea with no Moon can be very dark, a night at sea with no Moon looking for the silhouette of a ship against a pitch black island is worse.

PTs also inserted Marine Raiders into various islands to conduct harassment or deception raids, and survey beaches, and inserted Navy UDT (Underwater Demolition Teams - the "grandfathers" of the SEALs) to survey landing areas and clear obstacles. This was also done along the coast of Italy and southern France, and also northern France immediately prior to the D-Day landings. Interestingly, following the loss of PT-109 Kennedy received command of PT-59 and took part in the extraction of a platoon of Marines on Choiseul Island, part of a battalion sized raid conducted on that island as a diversion to landings on Bougainville (45 miles north-west of Choiseul). The raiding battalion was led by LTCOL Victor “Brute” Krulak, later LTGEN Krulak, whose son was later Commandant of the Marine Corps.

This sort of thing was standard, day-to-day operations for the PTs. And, in all of these actions everything took place at close range: torpedoes, to be at all likely of hitting anything, were launched inside 1,000 yards, machine gun and 20MM and 40MM cannon fire, to be accurate and effective on the barges at night, had to be fired at half that distance. The real targets were the barges; Japanese destroyers, escorting the barges, would suffer only minor damage from machine guns or small cannons, and there were only a handful of incidents where the torpedos actually managed to hit a larger ship, fired from only 400 - 500 yards away.

Still, the PTs managed to sink more than 200,000 tons of shipping and were a key element in breaking the Japanese operations in the Solomon. 

It has all mostly faded by now, but I would ask you to take a look at the list at the link above. Like most casualties, they were young. In the case of the PT boats, they were largely athletes and risk-takers. As Gen. Patton observed: “Don’t mourn that such men died. Rather, thank God such men lived.”