The Mosquito Fleet

They were wooden boats barely longer than a city bus, armed with torpedoes that sometimes failed and engines that coughed smoke into the night. Yet against the vast armada of Japanese warships cruising the Pacific, PT boats became something the enemy learned to fear: a swarm of irritants, a mosquito fleet that refused to be swatted. Bern Keating, a Navy communications officer who served among them, draws on action reports, squadron records, and the raw memoirs of the men who crewed these frail craft to deliver an account that feels less like military history and more like oral testimony from the edge of oblivion. The PT boats ran in darkness, hunted by destroyers, mauled by storms, often outgunned and always outnumbered. They sank ships, rescued downed airmen, and conducted covert operations that larger vessels could never attempt. But this is not a glorification. Keating captures the terror too: the nights when engines failed and men floated helpless toward Japanese lines, the brutal mathematics of survival on the water. For anyone who wants to understand how a handful of teenagers in wooden boats helped turn the tide of a war, this remains the definitive account.