Heya Everyone!

Can anyone recommend some good books, reference and biography types, regarding the day to day for small fast attack boats during WW2?

I'm have read very little regarding naval operations, but I'm very interested in these types of boats. I'm looking for everything from mundane operations to the tactics or battles they were involved in.

For reference, I was already a little interested from playing War Thunder, then watching "The Fat Electrician's" video about them made we want to know more.



Thank you in advance!

At Close Quarter: PT Boats in the US Navy

They Were Expendable by W. L. White

I about wore out a copy of William Breur’s Devil Boats in high school.

Not much for the day-to-day, though a pretty fair overview of operations in the Pacific.  The bit about John Bulkeley’s kidnapping of the Philippine president for extraction to Australia was a particular favorite.

John Lambert's Allied Coastal Forces Vol. I & II.  All the rest of the technical books are pale shadows and Lambert's books setst he watermark by which others are judged.

Also:

Victor Chun's American PT Boats in WW II, Vol. I & II. Another worthy addition to the shelf and they concentrate on American boats (so Chun > Lambert in that respect).

In the third book of his triology, We Will Stand By You, Theodore Mason had uncomplimentary things to say about US PT boats.  Mason was a radio operator on the Ocean Salvage Tug, USS Pawnee, when they were almost torpedoed by a PT boat.  He felt their skippers were affluent New England yachters who were commissioned and skippered the small craft and on the whole, highly overrated.  Since it's mostly about service aboard a tug, you could get it via inter-library loan.

If you want a first hand account but from a British perspective, Night Action by Peter Dickens (descendant of the writer).

PT 105 was decent

They Were Expendable, as mentioned above.

And for another interesting take on that, The Expendable.
It is NOT the same book.

The E-Boat Threat & E-Boat Alert.  Both are about the Kriegsmarine's schnell-bootes.  Unlike British and American boats that had a planing hull that skims the surface, the E-boat had a displacement hull that plowed through the water and could take rough weather better.

There are books on the overlooked MAS Italian torpedo boats (small craft not to be confused with the destroyer escort/frigate/sloop size torpedo boats of the Kriegsmarine or Regia Marina), Japanese boats and the Soviet Navy torpedo boats.

German E-boats were also Diesel driven & considered to be the finest small attack craft of WWII  (from Wiki)

E-boat was the Western Allies' designation for the fast attack craft (German: Schnellboot, or S-Boot, meaning "fast boat"; plural Schnellboote) of the Kriegsmarine during World War II; E-boat could refer to a patrol craft from an armed motorboat to a large Torpedoboot. The name of E-boats was a British designation using the letter E for Enemy.

The main wartime production boats, from S26 onwards (but often designated the S100 class), were very seaworthy, heavily armed and capable of sustaining 43.5 knots (80.6 km/h; 50.1 mph), briefly accelerating to 48 knots (89 km/h; 55 mph). These were armed with torpedoes and Flak guns; commonly one 37 mm at the stern, one 20 mm at the bow with a twin mount amidships, plus machine guns. Armament varied and some S26 class boats substituted a 40mm Bofors or, less commonly, a 20mm flakvierling (quadruple mount) for the aft 37mm cannon.

The S26 class boats - which provided the bulk of the wartime deliveries - were 34.94 m (114 ft 8 in) long and 5.38 m (17 ft 8 in) in beam. Their diesel engines provided a range of 700 to 750 nmi (810–860 mi; 1,300–1,390 km), substantially greater than the gasoline-fueled American PT boats and British motor torpedo boats (MTBs).

As a result of early war experience of combat against the fast and powerful S-boats, the Royal Navy created its MGB force and later developed better-matched MTBs, using the Fairmile 'D' hull design.

History & Development

This design was chosen because the theatre of operations of such boats was expected to be the North Sea, English Channel and the Western Approaches. The requirement for good performance in rough seas dictated the use of a round-bottomed displacement hull rather than the flat-bottomed planing hull that was more usual for small, high-speed boats. The shipbuilding company Lürssen at Vegesack, Bremen, overcame many of the disadvantages of such a hull and, with the private motor yacht Oheka II in 1926, produced a craft that was fast, strong and seaworthy. It was also extremely seaworthy and very light, being constructed of wooden planking over alloy frames. This attracted the interest of the Reichsmarine, which in November 1929 ordered a similar boat but fitted with two torpedo tubes. This became the S1, and was the basis for all subsequent E-boats.

After experimenting with the S1, the Germans made several improvements to the design. Small rudders added on either side of the main rudder could be angled outboard to 30 degrees, creating at high speed what is known as the Lürssen Effect. This drew in an "air pocket slightly behind the three propellers, increasing their efficiency, reducing the stern wave and keeping the boat at a nearly horizontal attitude". This was an important innovation as the horizontal attitude lifted the stern, allowing even greater speed, and the reduced stern wave made E-boats harder to see, especially at night.

At night, the wake from a US PT Boat on plane (at any speed above crawling) was one of the easiest ways they were spotted, along with the bio-luminescence that occurs in the tropical Pacific that would leave a glowing trail that enemy aircraft often used to hunt PT Boats.  

Unlike the Movies - most US PT Boats often didn't roar in at full throttles hellbent for leather to attack the enemy, but would instead attempt to pre-position themselves in areas of likely Japanese ship traffic and wait at near stationary at idle in ambush, only using their speed to escape after firing their torpedoes.

Bigger_Hammer