In August 1943, a Japanese army barge was moving silently through a narrow channel between two heavily forested islands in the Solomon Islands. Shortly after midnight, the flat-bottomed landing craft, about 50 feet long, was packed to capacity with rice, ammunition, medical supplies, and dozens of soldiers heading for a garrison on a nearby island. During daylight hours it had hidden in a bay under a cover of cut branches, away from the eyes of patrol aircraft. Now, in the darkness, it continued its journey.
This was how the Japanese army kept its Solomon Islands garrisons supplied by the summer of 1943. Large ships had stopped coming. The destroyers of the so-called “Tokyo Express,” which once fed Japanese forces on Guadalcanal, had paid a heavy price to American air attacks and night surface battles. Cargo ships were being sunk faster than the Japanese could replace them.
So the army turned to small craft — hundreds of barges that moved only at night, hugged the coastlines, and hid by day. They were slow, but hard to spot and hard to hit. Their shallow draft let them sail near shore over coral reefs no warship would follow, and they were small enough that destroyer torpedoes passed harmlessly beneath them. The captain had made this run before.
He knew the rocky headlands, the reefs, and the bays. He knew American aircraft could not see him at night and that American destroyers would not come this close to shore. The first thing he heard was a low rumble in the water — several deep, powerful engines idling somewhere out in the darkness to seaward. Then a flare burst overhead, turning the channel brilliant white.
Out of the darkness came a boat not much larger than his own, fast, low in the water, throwing up a large wake and bristling with guns. He had been told the Americans could not reach him here. No one had told him about the PT boats. To understand the battle that followed, you have to understand why the Japanese army was using barges to move supplies in the first place.
The Solomon Islands are a chain of jungle-covered islands stretching southeast from New Guinea, and through 1942 and 1943 they were among the most bitterly fought-over places in the Pacific. After the long struggle for Guadalcanal ended with a Japanese withdrawal in early 1943, the campaign moved northward through the chain to New Georgia, Kolombangara, Vella Lavella, and Bougainville. The Japanese held garrisons on many of these islands, some of them large, and every one of them needed supplies: food, ammunition, medicine, and replacement troops. But the waters around the Solomons had become deadly to Japanese shipping.
American aircraft based on Guadalcanal and other islands attacked any ship found in daylight, and American destroyers and cruisers controlled the waterways at night. Freighters and destroyers were sinking in numbers the Japanese could not sustain. The answer was the landing barge — a family of small, shallow-draft vessels the Japanese army had developed before the war for amphibious operations in China. They were rugged, simple, and seaworthy enough for coastal work.
Some had armor around the engine and crew positions, and many carried machine guns, sometimes heavy ones, for defense. Their great advantage was concealment. By day, they hid in bays and river mouths under camouflage, making them nearly impossible to spot from the air. By night, they crept along the coastline, close to shore, over reefs and in shallow water, moving from island to island through a chain of hidden staging points.
They were slow and individually carried little, but there were hundreds of them. It was a supply system built on stealth, and it worked for a while. The barge crews themselves deserve recognition. They hauled supplies at night along hostile coasts in open boats, knowing that aircraft, destroyers, and later PT boats were hunting them, and knowing that the men waiting on the islands were starving without them.
Many were army engineers and sailors who took enormous risks night after night. Whatever one thinks of the cause they served, the courage the job demanded was real. For soldiers on the islands, the barges were everything. A barge that arrived meant rice, ammunition, and medicine for another week.
A barge that did not arrive meant tightening belts that were already tight. The American answer to the barge was a boat built for an entirely different purpose: the PT boat. Officially a torpedo boat, it was a small, fast craft with a wooden hull about 80 feet long, built in large numbers by American shipyards including Elco in New Jersey and Higgins in New Orleans. Powered by three large gasoline engines derived from aircraft engines, it could make nearly 40 knots in favorable conditions.
Its crew usually numbered around a dozen men, often very young, led by an officer in his early twenties. It had been designed as a torpedo boat: the theory was that squadrons of fast, cheap boats could slip in at night, launch torpedoes at large enemy ships, and escape before the enemy could react. In the early Solomons battles, PT boats did exactly that against Japanese destroyers running supplies to Guadalcanal. The results were mixed at best.
American torpedoes of that period suffered serious reliability problems, and hitting a fast-moving destroyer at night from a small, rocking boat was extremely difficult. PT boats made attacks, took losses, and achieved far fewer hits than their crews claimed at the time. Against barges, the torpedo was almost useless: a barge sat so shallow in the water that a torpedo set to hit a warship would pass underneath without doing damage. The torpedo was also far too expensive to waste on a wooden boat full of rice.
So PT crews in the Solomons did something that became a hallmark of the entire American war effort: they changed what the boat itself was. The boats were built of wood, ran on high-octane aviation fuel, and carried thousands of gallons in their tanks, entering close-range combat against enemies firing incendiary ammunition. The crews were fully aware of what that meant. A single hit in the wrong place could turn a PT boat into a fireball in seconds.
The bases they operated from were primitive even by Pacific war standards. A PT base in the Solomons was usually a jungle bay with a few huts or tents on the beach, a floating dock or anchored support ship, fuel drums, a small workshop, and millions of mosquitoes. Malaria and other tropical diseases took as many men out of service as the enemy did. The crews slept by day, when they could sleep in the heat, and went out at dusk for all-night patrols.
Their boats were in constant repair. Wooden hulls were damaged by coral reefs, floating debris, gunfire, and the pounding of high-speed running in open water. Engines ran hard every night and needed constant maintenance. Base mechanics, carpenters, and engine specialists kept the boats running with whatever spare parts they could find, often stripping damaged boats to keep others operational.
Over the course of 1943, PT boats in the Solomons were converted — largely by their own crews and base workshops — from torpedo boats into gunboats. They mounted more guns. Heavy machine guns were standard, but the crews wanted more. They added 20mm cannon.
They added 37mm guns, some salvaged from wrecked aircraft. Eventually, they began mounting 40mm Bofors guns on the stern, a weapon designed as an anti-aircraft gun that proved devastating against small craft at close range. Some boats removed their torpedo tubes entirely to save weight and make room for more guns. Others kept a pair of torpedoes in case a large target appeared.
The result, by late 1943, was a small wooden boat with the firepower of a much larger ship, and the speed to close with any barge in seconds. They also gained eyes. Some PT boats were fitted with small radar sets that, even in their primitive early forms, could detect a barge or a coastline in the dark at useful range. And they worked in coordination with aircraft.
American patrol planes — seaplanes painted black for night work, known as “Black Cats” — prowled the channels after dark. When they spotted barge movement, they directed PT boats to it or dropped flares to illuminate the target. These tactics became routine. PT boats left their forward bases at dusk — places like Rendova and Lever Harbor, primitive camps in jungle bays — and went out in pairs or small groups to patrol the channels and coastlines used by the barges.
They ran slowly, close to shore in the dark, engines muffled, listening and watching. When they found a barge, they charged at speed and opened fire with everything they had. It was brutal, close-quarters night fighting, often at ranges of only a few dozen yards. The barges were not defenseless.
Many carried heavy machine guns and returned fire, and the Japanese sometimes placed guns on shore overlooking barge routes to ambush PT boats that came too close. PT boats were holed, burned, and sunk, and their crews killed or wounded in the darkness. The Japanese adapted too, and the barge war became a struggle of moves and countermoves. Barges were given heavier armor around their engines and crew positions, so that the machine-gun fire that once disabled them now bounced off.
They were armed with heavier guns, in some cases larger-caliber weapons, so that a PT boat closing in for the kill could find itself facing superior firepower. Barges began moving in groups for mutual protection, and in some cases were escorted by armed vessels specifically intended to fight PT boats. The shore guns were the most dangerous of all. Knowing PT boat patrol routes, the Japanese placed guns on headlands and islands overlooking barge lanes, so that a boat chasing a barge near shore could suddenly find itself under fire from land.
More than one PT boat was lost this way. Every Japanese adaptation was met with another American one: heavier American guns to defeat thicker armor, radar to find barges at longer range, air cooperation to locate and illuminate targets, and tactics that kept PT boats out of range of known shore guns or neutralized them. It was a small war fought by small boats that never made headlines, but it went on night after night for months. During 1943, PT boats, together with American aircraft and destroyers and the steady advance of American ground forces, tore apart the Japanese barge system.
Hundreds of barges were destroyed in the Solomons and along the coast of New Guinea, where PT boats fought an almost identical campaign. The men who crewed those boats were mostly very young, working at night in wooden boats full of high-octane fuel at very close range to an enemy firing back. They are rarely remembered except through one famous name. That one name belongs to a boat that was part of this story — not because it was typical, but because it illustrates what these boats faced.
On the night of August 1–2, 1943, in Blackett Strait in the central Solomons, a group of PT boats was sent to intercept Japanese destroyers carrying supplies and troops. In pitch darkness, a Japanese destroyer collided with one of the boats, PT 109, slicing it in half. Two crewmen were killed. The survivors, led by their young commander, swam for hours to a small island, and after days of ordeal were rescued with the help of local Solomon Islanders who carried a message, written on a coconut shell, to Allied forces.
The commander was a lieutenant named John F. Kennedy, who would later become President of the United States. The story is famous because of him, but its details were ordinary for PT crews in the Solomons: a small wooden boat in a dark channel, an enemy that could appear from nowhere, constant danger from fire, collision, and close-range gunfire, and the vital role of the islanders — Solomon Islanders who scouted, carried messages, and guided downed pilots and stranded sailors, and whose knowledge of their waters was essential to the Allied war effort, a role rarely acknowledged. Now look at the barge war from the Japanese side, because its impact was far greater than the number of boats sunk.
By 1943, barges were the only practical way to supply many Japanese garrisons in the Solomons. When that supply line was cut, the garrisons began to starve. Japanese soldiers on those islands left diaries — some captured, translated, and preserved — describing the consequences: rations cut and cut again, men forced to forage in the jungle, malaria, dysentery, and other diseases spreading unchecked as medical supplies ran out, and units that had arrived at full strength reduced to a fraction of that by sickness and hunger before ever facing an American attack. American commanders understood this perfectly.
As the campaign advanced through the Solomons, the Allies increasingly adopted a strategy of bypassing strong Japanese garrisons rather than assaulting them directly, landing instead on lightly defended islands, building airstrips there, and leaving the large garrisons isolated behind the front. That strategy depended entirely on the Japanese inability to supply or evacuate the bypassed garrisons. One of the harshest facts of the Pacific war is that on many of those bypassed islands, far more Japanese soldiers died of starvation and disease than of American bullets. The barge war was fought by small boats at night, but its real casualties were counted in jungle camps where men who never saw an American simply ran out of food.
The PT boats, along with aircraft and destroyers, made that possible. A garrison of thousands of men that cannot be fed or reinforced is a garrison that can be left to wither. The verdict on the PT boats is that they became decisive when they stopped being what they were designed to be. As torpedo boats, their record in the Pacific was disappointing: their torpedoes were unreliable, their attacks on warships rarely succeeded, and the claims made at the time were found, when checked against records after the war, to be greatly exaggerated.
As gunboats hunting barges, they were among the most effective weapons in the Solomons. What made the difference was the willingness of crews and bases to take a boat built for one mission and rebuild it for another: more guns salvaged from wherever they could be found, radar as it became available, cooperation with aircraft, and a new set of tactics invented in dark waterways by men in their early twenties. That pattern — improvisation from the bottom up, backed by an industrial system that could supply guns, radar, fuel, and replacement boats — runs through the American war effort from start to finish. The Japanese side of the story follows a pattern too.
The barges were a clever, resourceful answer to a hopeless supply situation, run by brave men who took enormous risks night after night. The barges worked until the Americans adapted. Once the Americans adapted, the garrisons that depended on them were left to starve on islands the war had passed by.
The collapse of heavy Japanese shipping in the Solomons, the shift to barge supply, the barges’ shallow draft and armament, the conversion of PT boats into heavily armed gunboats, the cooperation with Black Cat patrol aircraft, the night fighting along the coastlines, the loss of PT 109 and the rescue of its crew with the help of Solomon Islanders, and the starving of bypassed garrisons — all of these are documented, as is the disappointing record of PT torpedo attacks against warships.