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Exceptionally experienced in the hard business of aerial warfare I may have been, but I had a lot of catching up to do in other directions. —Hugh Dundas With Operation Dragoon successfully completed and Gen. Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army moving north, the war in the Mediterranean began winding down and the Allies started closing bases and transferring ships and resources to the Pacific theater. Substantial numbers of warships and landing craft remained in the Mediterranean, however, for a variety of missions. High on the priority list of missions in the fall of 1944 was providing naval gunfire support to Gen. Robert Frederick’s First Airborne Task Force as it pursued German forces withdrawing eastward. While the First Special Service Force’s First Regiment advanced near the coast, Third Regiment pursued the Germans across the Var River, making contact with the enemy in the mountains at l’Escarène. When the Second Regiment relieved the 509th Parachute Battalion on the coast just west of Monaco on September 4, the troops came within range of Rear Adm. Morton Deyo’s Right Flank Force. According to First Special Service Force’s historian Lt. Col. Robert Burhans, “Shore fire control parties with communication to the fleet gunnery officer stayed with the Second Regiment several weeks.”1 From the first week in September until the Second Regiment took Menton, the majority of calls for naval gunfire came from First Airborne Task Force units in the region of Monaco. Woolsey, Edison, and Leygues took station off the principality on September 2 to answer those requests, which came in thick and fast. In fact, when Ludlow arrived at 1147 that morning to relieve Edison, she was ordered to remain on staCHAPTER 19 MOPPING UP IN THE MED x-Tomblin 19.qx2 6/30/04 1:22 PM Page 447 tion to help answer the numerous calls for gunfire. The following day reports of five thousand Germans concentrating in the area beyond the destroyers’ range prompted an urgent request. Could a cruiser be brought in to provide the needed naval gunfire? The veteran campaigner Philadelphia responded immediately and assisted the “tin cans” throughout the day, hampered only by minefields reported to lie off Monaco. German batteries on Mount Agel lobbed sixty rounds at the fire support ships on September 4, but it was the Germans’ last hurrah as they pulled out of the principality into the hills of the Maritime Alps that rise precipitously behind Monaco. The navy then switched operations to Menton, where Ludlow and Le Malin spent the day firing on three guns located at the jetty.2 Robert N. “Bob” Ekland’s minesweeper Incredible (AM-249) was also active off Menton during early September. “We had been ordered to clear a fire support channel for the cruisers. As we moved nearer Menton [we] were met by heavy bombardment from shore batteries and one of our ships, a YMS, was damaged,” he recalled. Rumors circulating among the ships of the support force that the Germans might use human torpedoes were confirmed on September 5 when, according to Incredible’s skipper, Bob Ekland, “Twelve human torpedoes attempted to pass through our formation, presumably on their way to the cruisers because none hit any of the mine-sweepers. They cruised with the torpedo under water and with just the head of the pilot in a glass dome above water. We all fired at them and I’m sure my ship hit at least two of them.” The French destroyer leader Le Malin spotted one suspicious object in the water at 0812, and moments later Ludlow zoomed in and dropped depth charges on the target, flushing the pilot of the human torpedo to the surface. A spirited hunt then developed as the Perspex domes of the human torpedoes began appearing on all sides of the destroyers. At 0836 Le Malin fired on one; Ludlow got another one at 0853, and Le Malin rescued its pilot. Minutes later Ludlow sank a third torpedo. The rescued German pilots were eager to talk. They revealed that their weapons, which were really propulsion torpedoes mounted atop missile torpedoes, had an endurance of eight hours at eight to ten knots. The young German pilots also told the captors that these “wonder weapons” operated out of Menton. The most talkative youngster, who had joined the German navy a year previously following in the footsteps of his two brothers, told his captors that he had left at 0600 that morning with his torpedo from a...

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