Philippine Motor Torpedo Boat 110, Off Mariveles, Bataan, Friday, 16 September 1949
Capitaine de Corvette Couturier had accepted with alacrity the invitation to visit the boatyard of Senator Don Enrique Barretto at Mariveles to inspect the facilities as well as the testing of the most recent group of motor torpedo boats under construction for the Philippine Navy. That he found himself in the company of Kapitein-luitenant ter Zee Buis, his Dutch counterpart, was very much a surprise; Buis had, so it seemed, received a similar invitation.
The Barretto boatyard was completing work on the latest three of the Type 1949 boats that it had contracted for; others were built elsewhere in the archipelago. Today trials were going to be run before the boats were delivered to the Government, and Couturier was permitted to go aboard the MTB 110, while Buis boarded MTB 112.
He admired the fine lines of the small warship; her master advised him that in a pinch she could exceed her contract speed of forty-four knots, powered by a quartet of marine diesel engines of German design he discovered. Besides four torpedo tubes, two on either quarter, she carried a twin 25mm cannon on her foredeck and a similar weapon aft. In company with MTB 111 and MTB 112 the MTB 110 slowly made her way away from the piers of the boatyard and out into the open waters of the China Sea; there her master signaled the trials crew to open the engines for a speed run.
The diesel engines spun the boat’s propellers to their maximum revolutions, churning the boat’s wake to a mass of white froth as the MTB 110 surged ahead. Couturier stood in the boat’s cockpit, where the RPM indicator pegged at maximum and the boats speed over water inched up towards her contract mark. After twenty minutes they had achieved it, and speed was cut back to a more modest twenty-five knots for the trip back to Mariveles.