On commissioning day the squadron members didn’t feel elated about their future. Their first assignment was to patrol the warm blue waters off Midway Island, far behind the fighting lines in the Pacific. While the Tulagi PTs fought almost nightly battles with Tanaka’s Tokyo Express, Squadron Fifteen was promised long, lazy afternoons of cribbage, 3,500 miles behind the combat zone. Its assignment gave its members slight headaches every time they thought about it.
Lieut. Commander Barnes assured his squadron mates that somehow, somewhere, he was going to find somebody for them to fight. But nobody believed him—not even he, as he later confessed.
The squadron sailed for the Panama Canal and was well on the way to the gentle duties of Midway when the radioman came running with a dispatch.
Orders to Midway were canceled! “Report to Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet, in Norfolk,” the message read.
At the giant Virginia naval base, Barnes had his conference with the upper echelons of brass and rushed back to his squadron mates with the news that they were indeed going to find somebody somewhere to fight. They were going to the Mediterranean as the first American torpedo-boat squadron on the European scene.
The barman at the Navy Officers’ Club in Norfolk was famous in those days—and may still be—for his Stingers, a most appropriate toast to duty in the Mediterranean mosquito fleet.
The 201 and 204 crossed the Atlantic immediately as deck passengers on the _S. S. Enoree_, and Lieut. Commander Barnes followed on the _S. S. Housatonic_, with 205 and 208. The _Enoree_ arrived at Gibraltar first, on April 13th. Boats were in the water the next day, and Lieut. Edwin A. Dubose—also destined to make a name as a brilliant PT sailor—took them to the British torpedo-boat dock, loaded a full cargo of torpedoes, and set sail for Oran in North Africa. Skippers of the other boats followed as fast as longshoremen could swing the PTs into the water.
Disappointment awaited the crews in Oran, where the high command sent the boats to Cherchel, 300 miles from the nearest action, for an indefinite period of training.
“I decided to take the bull by the horns and bum a ride to Algiers in an Army truck to see Vice Admiral Henry K. Hewitt,” said Lieut. Commander Barnes.