Posted on 03/10/2016 7:35:16 AM PST by Charles Martel
They burned high-octane gas, not oil. And with all three engines running you could only go 6 hours. Typically only one engine would be run to preserve fuel and decrease the racket of the 3 V-12 engines. The night of the sinking they were idling one engine and in position with at least two other boats spread over several miles.
Based only on the dollar cost, you could build ten or eleven PT boats for that money, back when the Bureau of Ships signed contracts with Higgins and Elco. Looks like the original per-unit cost was between $250K and $300K.
One possibility for the oil fire is that PT boats had smoke generators on many of the hulls to provide a screen for quick withdrawal. A boat could be out of fuel and still have oil in the drums.
PT-109, PT-162, and PT-169 were ordered to continue patrolling the area in case the enemy ships returned.[11] Around 2:00 a.m. on 2 August 1943, on a moonless night, Kennedy's boat was idling on one engine to avoid detection of her wake by Japanese aircraft when[12] the crew realized they were in the path of the Japanese destroyer Amagiri, which was returning to Rabaul from Vila, Kolombangara, after offloading supplies and 900 soldiers.[13] Amagiri was traveling at a relatively high speed of between 23 and 40 knots (43 and 74 km/h; 26 and 46 mph) in order to reach harbor by dawn, when Allied air patrols were likely to appear.
That’s a nice little flotilla then, isn’t it?
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