[Sailor Steve]

I can see it now: "No, sir. Sorry, sir, but I've forgotten how to do that...but I learned how to do this instead..."

I had not heard about fleet boats having trouble keeping diesels running, but I've read that the PT boats in the Solomons were so isolated that they were always having breakdowns in their gasoline aircraft engines. Forty knots was a pipe dream for them; hence the song:

Some PTs do seventy-five and some do sixty-nine;
If we get ours to run at all, we think we're doing fine.