A few weeks after the meeting at the Plaza, John Bulkeley and his deputy Lieutenant John Harllee were at Northwestern University, looking for PT officer candidates. Bulkeley was at the zenith of his popularity—a bestselling book had been written about him, They Were Expendable. Bulkeley dazzled Ensign John Kennedy and hundreds of his classmates with a rip-roaring speech about the PT boat’s alleged exploits. “The PT boat is a great weapon,” declared Bulkeley. “The enemy has not yet won a brush with one. Our little half squadron sank one Jap cruiser, one plane tender and one loaded transport, badly damaged another cruiser, set a tanker on fire and shot down four planes.” After the war, when Japanese naval loss records were examined by U.S. Naval Intelligence experts, it was learned that these claims were inaccurate and exaggerated.
“Those of you who want to come back after the war and raise families need not apply,” Bulkeley declared. “PT boat skippers are not coming back!” The audience loved it. Alvin Cluster, who later became Kennedy’s squadron commander, remembered, “America desperately needed heroes after Pearl Harbor, and they would seize on any exploit or any battle to show how great we were. The only reason PT boats ever got the attention they did was that we had nothing else! They really didn’t do a lot of damage. But Roosevelt had to point to somebody, and that’s why Bulkeley and PT boats got all that attention.” With his superstardom and barnstorming tour of parades and motivational speeches, John Bulkeley was, claimed Cluster, “a joke to a lot of officers.”
Years later, Bulkeley’s assistant Lieutenant Harllee recalled encountering the young John F. Kennedy on their visit to Northwestern: “He was selling himself hard and expressed a great desire to get in close combat with the enemy as soon as possible. This was one of the main reasons why both John Bulkeley and I voted to select him. The other reasons were that he was an intercollegiate sailing champion, had graduated from Harvard cum laude and made a favorable impression with relation to his appearance and personality. He did not have to take a physical for PTs.” Also in Kennedy’s favor were the stellar marks he had earned at naval officer-training school.
Even if he hadn’t been the son of powerful man, Kennedy appeared to be an excellent candidate to command a PT boat, given his intellect and experience piloting small craft. What almost no one else knew was that by now Kennedy’s back troubles were so severe he had spent almost two months earlier that year in hospitals. His doctors recommended corrective surgery. He was sleeping on top of a hard plywood board to try to relieve the pain. Bulkeley later said he had “no idea Kennedy had any trouble with his back. And if I had known, it wouldn’t probably have made a blind bit of difference, ’cause I had no idea what a dislocation of the spine was. I was looking for men who would fight!”
In keeping with his promise to Joe Kennedy, an impressed Bulkeley endorsed John F. Kennedy’s application to be a PT boat officer, and recommended him for the eight-week PT training course at the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center (MTBSTC) at Melville, Rhode Island, which was close to the Kennedy family summer home at Hyannis Port. On entering the school, JFK was promoted from ensign to lieutenant, junior grade, or “jg.” He performed well at Melville in subjects like boat handling and maintenance, communications, attack tactics, and torpedo firing—so well that when the course ended in November 1942, Lieutenant Harllee, who was the senior instructor at the facility, assigned Kennedy to stay on as a training instructor, rather than immediately ship out for an overseas post. On December 7, 1942, Kennedy earned his first assignment to command a boat of his own, the PT 101, a 78-foot training boat built by the Huckins Yacht Corporation.
A rare photo of John F. Kennedy (center) at the U.S. Navy PT boat training facility at Melville, Rhode Island. (Frank J. Andruss Sr.)
JFK’s Navy ID card, c. 1943.
(Frank J. Andruss Sr.)
Once more, Kennedy was thwarted in his quest to enter combat. Weeks later he was bitterly disappointed to learn he was going to be sent with PT Squadron 14 to Jacksonville, Florida, and then on to Central America to help guard the Panama Canal. He complained “I got shafted!” so often to his colleagues that they took to calling him “Shafty.”
Then abruptly, on February 20, 1943, Lieutenant Kennedy’s formal change-of-assignment request seeking to be “reassigned to a Motor Torpedo Squadron now operating in the South Pacific” was approved by the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel in Washington.
Lieutenant Harllee was surprised to hear Kennedy was being sent to the combat zone, and assumed powerful strings had been pulled. “This suspicion was later confirmed when I had occasion to review his record in the Bureau of Naval Personnel in 1947,” remembered Harllee years later. He uncovered a paper trail revealing that “tremendous effort had been brought to get him into the combat zone.” Spotting a “smoking gun” letter signed by Kennedy family crony and U.S. senator from Massachusetts David I. Walsh, chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee and the most powerful member of Congress on naval affairs, Harllee realized an invisible hand had indeed been at work.
In fact, John F. Kennedy had bypassed his own father and instead contacted Walsh through his maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, former mayor of Boston. Having later learned of Kennedy’s debilitating health problems, Harllee remembered, “Jack Kennedy’s pulling strings to get into combat, was, of course, one of the most vivid examples of his stubborn, indomitable courage. But the military’s standards of physical fitness for men going into combat are set not so much for the sake of the man himself as for others who might depend on his physical capabilities in a tight situation. It could be said, then, that he was also reckless and irresponsible and somewhat selfish in this act. It must also be said that he was not alone in taking such an action, and that that sort of action was generally admired in that war.”
On March 15, 1943, Kennedy shipped off from San Francisco aboard the transport ship USS Rochambeau bound for the South Pacific, to take up assignment as a replacement officer for Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 2, based in the Solomon Islands.
3
INTO THE LABYRINTH
OFF THE COAST OF GUADALCANAL
APRIL 7, 1943, 3:10 P.M.
Lieutenant John F. Kennedy looked to the sky from the deck of the American landing ship LST 449, and watched the terrifying spectacle of the largest Japanese air attack since Pearl Harbor.
More than 250 Japanese and Allied aircraft were pitted in aerial combat, with sixty-seven Aichi D3A2 “Val” dive bombers screened by 110 Zero fighters pitted against a pack of seventy-six American fighter planes, including P-38s, Corsairs, Wildcats, P-40 Warhawks, and P-39 Airacobras.
Nine Japanese planes were focused keenly on Kennedy’s ship, the 4,000-ton “Landing Ship, Tank, 449,” gliding and diving toward it and the nearby destroyer USS Aaron Ward (DD-483), which was trying to protect the LST as it zigzagged frantically to evade Japanese bombing runs. One 500-pound bomb exploded close enough to the LST 449 that it threw the ship’s captain across the bridge, fracturing his neck. Two more bombs detonated near the starboard bow, soaking the deck with geysers of salt water. One massive blast pushed the ship’s stern out of the ocean and forced it into a 20-degree list. These were Kennedy’s first moments in combat: “a hell of an attack,” he later remembered.
“I happened to be looking back at Kennedy’s ship while four dive bombers were attacking it,” recalled a sailor on a nearby American ship. “There were so many exploding bombs along with the resulting water spouts that I could not see the LST.” The ship was loaded with fuel oil and ammunition, and a direct hit would have almost certainly destroyed the vessel in an immense fireball.
The twenty-five-year-old Kennedy was at the end of a month-long sea journey from the United States to Guadalcanal to take up his first command in the southern Pacific Theater, as skipper of an as-yet-to-be-assigned PT boat. Kennedy was transfixed by the spectacle of scores of warplanes locked in dogfights overhead, and although he was only a passenger aboard the LST, along with nearly two hundred oth
er servicemen, he scrambled to join the fight.
The battle was unfolding over “Ironbottom Sound,” the name given by Allied sailors to the Savo Sound because of the many ships and aircraft sunk there during the long Battle of Guadalcanal, before the Allies fully captured the island in January 1943. While Japanese forces still occupied many South Pacific islands to the north and west, the Savo Sound—off the Solomon Islands of Guadalcanal, Savo Island, and Florida Island—was now dominated by ships of the U.S. fleet. “A gallant sight at that hour,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison of the American combat squadron steaming into Savo Sound that summer, “the cruisers so proud and handsome with their curling bow waves and frothy wakes, the destroyers thrusting and turning, now golden with the sun, now dark shadows against the sea; and this is a gorgeous afternoon, with bright cumulus clouds under a thin layer of cirrus and Ironbottom Sound blue as the Gulf of Maine.”
Earlier that day, April 7, 650 miles northwest of Kennedy’s ship, at the Lakunai airdrome at the huge Japanese naval and air base at Rabaul, Admiral of the Fleet Isoroku Yamamoto stood in his gold-braided, snow-white dress uniform and waved at his warplanes taking off for battle, into a sunrise so beautiful it seemed an omen of victory. The diminutive sixty-year-old Yamamoto was the visionary and charismatic star admiral of the Japanese fleet, architect of the stunning Pearl Harbor attack; he was among the first naval strategists to realize how the new age of airpower was eclipsing the role of battleships.
Although he was suffering from fatigue and beriberi exacerbated by jungle heat, on this day he insisted on personally meeting and saluting his pilots. Yamamoto was directly overseeing the multipronged series of air attacks on Kennedy’s vessel and other American targets around Guadalcanal, the Solomon Islands, and New Guinea in a counteroffensive dubbed I-Go Sakusen, or Operation A, which lasted from April 1 to April 16, 1943. The attacks were a desperate attempt to blunt Allied forces from island-hopping north and west from Guadalcanal to capture Japanese-held territory in the Solomon Islands and beyond and extending the reach of Allied airpower. Days earlier, Yamamoto stood atop a platform, bowed to a portrait of Japanese emperor Hirohito, and spoke to his fliers. “Now we are approaching the difficult battle,” he announced. “However difficult a time we are having, the enemy also has to be suffering. Now we must attack his precious carriers with Rabaul’s great air strength, and cut them down so they cannot escape. Our hopes go with you. Do your best.”
As the LST 449 was being strafed and bombarded by Yamamoto’s planes, Kennedy pitched into the fight by passing shells to the ship’s 40 mm antiaircraft gun station. “I was only sixteen years old and scared to death,” recalled a nearby sailor from the hills of South Carolina named Ted Guthrie; “our ship had just been straddled by bombs and our gun tub [antiaircraft station] was knee deep in water. I wanted to run, but gained strength from the courage shown by Mr. Kennedy.” Earlier on the voyage of the LST, Guthrie had heard Kennedy was “a rich man’s son,” and dismissed him as “a sissy.” But as Guthrie later wrote to Kennedy, “When you stood there and helped pass those shells to our tub, I gained a new perspective in life.”
In a letter to a friend in the United States, Kennedy described how a Japanese pilot parachuted into the water and the LST 449 went to rescue him as he bobbed in the water. At first, Kennedy was struck by how young the pilot looked, with his powerful build and close-cropped, jet-black hair. But Kennedy was stunned by what happened next. When the LST got to within twenty yards, the pilot abruptly pulled out a revolver and opened fire at the bridge of the American craft. “I had been praising the Lord and passing the ammunition right alongside,” Kennedy later explained, “but that slowed me a bit, the thought of him sitting in the water battling an entire ship.” The Americans replied with so much gunfire it seemed to Kennedy the water was boiling with bullets, but everyone was too surprised to shoot straight. “Finally an old soldier standing next to me picked up his rifle, fired once, and blew the top of his head off,” recalled Kennedy. “He threw his arms up, plunged forward and sank, and we hauled our ass out of there.”
As the attack ended, Kennedy was hit with a powerful realization: it was going to take a very long time to finish the war. Fearing further attacks from Japanese aircraft over Guadalcanal, Kennedy’s ship retreated three hundred miles southeast back to its port of embarkation, the island of Espiritu Santo.
A United States Marine Corps map of the Solomon Islands theater as it stood when Kennedy arrived.
Admiral Yamamoto was delighted to hear his returning pilots’ reports of overwhelming successes, claims that were so exaggerated they led him to end the air assault operation on April 18 believing he’d achieved victory. Emperor Hirohito cabled his congratulations. But in fact, Allied losses were relatively light. In the April 7 attack, twenty Allied personnel were killed, seven more listed as missing, and three ships were sunk: the destroyer USS Aaron Ward, the oil tanker USS Kanawha, and the Royal New Zealand Navy minesweeper corvette HMNZS Moa. More than twenty Japanese planes were shot down, while the Allies lost only seven. As tragic as the losses were, Operation A had little effect on Allied strength.
Eleven days after Kennedy’s first combat experience aboard the LST 449, on April 18, 1943, American P-38 Lightning aircraft, acting on intelligence gained by decoded Japanese military transmissions, ambushed and shot down a transport plane carrying Admiral Yamamoto over the island of Bougainville. He had been on his way to congratulate aircrews who took part in Operation A.
One of the pilots who was credited with firing into Yamamoto’s plane, Captain Thomas G. Lanphier, did a victory roll as he returned to Henderson Airfield on Guadalcanal. Among the Americans who witnessed the P-38’s salute was John F. Kennedy, who on April 13 had joined his assigned PT boat unit, Squadron 2, at its base on the tiny island of Tulagi, the U.S. Navy’s regional PT boat headquarters located on the north end of Iron Bottom Sound, directly across from Guadalcanal. He had arrived at the front lines of the Solomon Islands campaign, a turning point in the greatest armed conflict the world had ever seen. Not for the last time, Kennedy’s life and world events seemed to turn on the same axis.
Later that month, on April 25, 1943, Kennedy took command of Motor Torpedo Boat 109, or “PT 109.”
4
THE FRONT LINE
U.S. NAVY PT BOAT BASE
TULAGI, THE SOLOMON ISLANDS
APRIL 25, 1943
I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.
JAMES MICHENER, Tales of the South Pacific
John F. Kennedy’s boat, the PT 109, was an 80-foot long, 56-ton, giant weaponized speedboat that was built by the Electric Boat Company (or “Elco”) factory in Bayonne, New Jersey, in June 1942. It was sturdy and maneuverable, constructed on a framework of one-inch planks of mahogany. Its three 12-cylinder Packard 4M-2500 engines guzzled 3,000 gallons of aviation gasoline and could generate 1,350 horsepower each, achieving a top speed of more than 40 knots.
The PT 109 was designed for a crew of nine or ten enlisted crewmen and two or three officers. PT boats typically included a radio operator, quartermaster, torpedoman’s mates, gunner’s mates, motor machinist’s mates (or “motormacs,” also called engineers), and a cook. Each man on a PT boat was cross-trained for many of these duties, in order to pitch in when injury or crisis struck a specialist.
The PT 109 carried a 20 mm Oerlikon antiaircraft gun mounted on the rear of the boat, two twin .50-caliber machine gun turrets, four 21-inch torpedo tubes, an assortment of small arms, a voice radio with a maximum 75-mile range, a blinker light for communication, and a smoke generator at the rear of the boat. Under two previous skippers, as part of
Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 2, the PT 109 had conducted twenty-two combat patrols in and around Ironbottom Sound between November 1942 and February 1943, clashing with Japanese forces on six occasions.
“We learned that a PT boat had three engines, each operating its own screw,” explained Kennedy’s friend Dick Keresey Jr., then the skipper of the PT 105. “This was most important in maneuverability. It meant that we could have one or two engines going forward and one going astern or vice-versa, giving the ability to turn on a dime.” Keresey recalled being intrigued by the craft’s “graceful, almost delicate profile” as it skimmed across the top of the water at speeds over 40 knots under ideal conditions. “Dead in the water, a PT is squat and beamy,” wrote Navy Captain Robert J. Bulkley. “It was designed for speed, and in speed lies its beauty. As a PT gains momentum, its bow lifts clear of the water and it planes gracefully over the surface, throwing out a great wave from the chine on either side and a rooster tail of white water astern. The men who rode PTs cursed them for their pounding and discomfort, but loved them for the beauty that is born of their speed.”
John Kennedy soon discovered for himself that life aboard a PT boat in the combat zone of the South Pacific could be a wretched existence. The mountainous Solomon Islands, while scenically beautiful, were rich with cockroaches, rats, lizards, sand crabs, black flies, mosquitos, malaria, dengue, dysentery, trench foot, tropical fever, elephantiasis, and periods of unrelenting rainfall. Crews often slept aboard the boats, where clothes and mattresses were drenched in sweat and stink from the stifling tropical heat and humidity. As naval historian Charles W. Koburger wrote, “Even before one ripe corpse rotted in the jungle, the Solomons stank. The miasma they gave off was a queasy mixture of too lush vegetation, swift to rot, growing on a bed of primeval slime humming with malarial mosquitos, black with flies, and breeding nameless bacteria. They were hot. They were rich only in mud and coconuts. They were wet from May to October, rainy from November to April, and humid all the time.” Amid the misery, PT boat crews occasionally savored flashes of tropical beauty: a sandy cove flanked by lush vegetation, a sun-drenched vision of deep, crystal-clear water, a passing breeze with a honeysuckle scent.
PT 109 Page 4