How far was Leyte Gulf from New Amsterdam?
Oh, it was a couple of days. So you were a couple of days on the water. Yeah, and then we were to meet the fleet up there at the Leyte Gulf and our job was to go around the fleet and lay smoke screens because the most effective weapon at that time of the whole war was those kamikaze divers because they’d pick out a ship and dive in and sink it. But our job was to lay a smoke screen all over in Leyte Gulf so that the Japanese couldn’t see our ships and some of them were hit and they would leave our PT boats alone because they were so small and they were hard to see. Well, we could always out maneuver the air craft anyway. If they’d dive at us, we could turn and get away from them. Okay Byrne, let’s go back about this young man that was shot in the neck and tell us as much detail as you can about that episode. Okay, we were out of New Amsterdam and we were out on patrol one evening and we got we’d go about 100 miles or so and all of a sudden, we had a lot of shore batteries started firin
