So Far From Home

Under a curving shimmering blue fish bowl of the sky the small Patrol Torpedo boat cruises over the gentle summer swells in the distant Pacific under summer skies torn apart by brutal bitter total war. Small PT boats crewed by fifteen men ranging far and wide hunting for fat Japanese merchant ships. Boom! Go the torpedoes when a nice juicy target is found and a quick getaway to fight another day.

If the Jap’s capture the American boat and her crew alive it will be torture and a slow death for Nippon’s enemies. They don’t intend to get caught, would rather go down to the ocean bottom if their small deadly craft is hit by enemy gunfire.

Built of spruce and ash for excellent strength but good sea keeping the PT boat has the firepower of a destroyer and the agility of a fighter. A wicked peril of the sea out looking for trouble armed with two or four torpedoes, fifty cal machine guns and twenty milli cannon.

A real kick ass little ship, a boat, hunting the huge open ocean sinking Nip ships giving our boys ashore some respite from enemy bullets. Don’t you know after this war no one will remember the small PT boats that battled a superior enemy bravely in no holds barred combat?

Only faded photos survive, the odd crewman who spends his retirement dreaming of the huge open Pacific where the sky was always blue, forgetting the bitter engagements when a sinking Tokyo Maru shed burning oil from her ruptured tanks onto her crew in the blazing deep water. Even now he remembers their screams, more than playing cards with his own shipmates’ on their R and R three hundred miles from the nearest port.

Only one small PT boat survives, testament to the small powerful craft that fought bravely and bitterly in a war no one cares to remember but the few who were there, old men dying now...