U.S. Navy Brass Banned Gamble’s “Shoreline Trap”—1 Torpedo Sank Teruzuki at 300 Yards, 0 Dead

Описание: Moonlight paints thin silver lines across Ironbottom Sound, off Guadalcanal, December 1942. Three U.S. PT boats sit dead in the water—engines cut, hulls pressed against the black shoreline—because one wrong ripple means instant death.

But the “Tokyo Express” has owned the night for months. Senior officers and doctrine insist PT boats strike from open water, fire early, and run—because a plywood boat that gets caught close is simply erased by a destroyer’s guns.

Lester Gamble does the one thing they call suicide. He drifts in silence where no one is supposed to be—so close the enemy’s wake glows beside him—then holds fire until the range is a brutal 300 yards, betting everything on torpedoes that have failed too many crews before.

The result is chaos: 1 Japanese destroyer—Teruzuki—is hit, burns, and drops out, forcing the formation to break contact. And somehow, the PT boats escape into the dark with 0 U.S. casualties—proof that the night war can be rewritten by patience, geography, and nerve.

Because Guadalcanal isn’t decided only by battles—it’s decided by supplies, by exhaustion, by who controls the darkness. If one small boat can make the Tokyo Express flinch… how many assumptions can collapse in a single silent minute?

⚠️ HISTORICAL NOTE: This action is described as a close-range PT ambush off Guadalcanal and is treated as a matter of operational record in wartime reporting and later analysis of the Solomon Islands night campaign.
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