Ships
- USS PT-493 (PT-493) In command when she was lost, 25 October 1944
Lieutenant (junior grade) Richard W. Brown, USNR, commanded the motor torpedo boat PT-493 in the fall of 1944. Her crew called her Carole-Baby, after Brown's daughter, born a year before the night the boat was lost. She was an eighty-foot Elco, wooden and fast, with a 40-millimeter gun, torpedoes, machine guns, and three Packard engines. She had lain at Dreger Harbor and at Mios Woendi in New Guinea, and she had seen no action from those bases, before the PT force moved up for the return to the Philippines.
On the night of 24–25 October 1944 the Seventh Fleet sent thirty-nine PT boats through Leyte Gulf and Surigao Strait to watch for a Japanese force coming up from the south. Brown had PT-493 in the middle of the strait, with PT-490 and PT-491, between Panaon and Dinagat and north of other PT sections nearer the entrance. The boats were there to find Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura's column and report it before the American battleships and cruisers farther north came into action. That southern fight became the Battle of Surigao Strait.
PT-493 and the two boats with her picked up ships rounding the southern end of Panaon. A rain squall hid the targets until the section was close aboard, and the shapes resolved into a cruiser and destroyers. Brown tried to launch one torpedo. It hung in the rack, and the return fire drove PT-493 off. He laid smoke for PT-490. As that boat ran in behind the screen, Brown saw a large flash on a destroyer's side, heard an explosion, and watched a second searchlight go out.
Three Japanese shells hit PT-493. One passed through her above the waterline. Another tore through the engineroom, carried away the auxiliary generator, and opened the hull below the waterline. A third struck at the charthouse. Two men were killed. Brown was wounded. Ensign Robert E. Carter, the second officer, was wounded too. Carter got back to the wheel and, with the boat flooding, beached her on Panaon. Motor Machinist's Mate Albert W. Brunelle had already stuffed his life jacket into the hole in the side and kept the damaged engines turning long enough to make that beach. Brown was still her captain.
PT-491 came up the Panaon coast and took the crew off the beach. After daylight the tide lifted PT-493 clear, and she sank in deep water. She was the only PT boat lost in the battle. Thirty of the thirty-nine boats had been under fire, and ten had been hit. Their contact reports reached Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf in time for his destroyers, cruisers, and battleships to meet Nishimura at the northern end of the strait. Brown had been in command when PT-493 was lost on 25 October 1944. He survived his wounds, later retired as a lieutenant commander, and in 2001 published his own account of the patrol.