PT 109

by William Doyle

  The monotonous food largely came out of cans containing Spam, Vienna sausage, powdered eggs, and baked beans. In a letter to his family, William Barrett Jr., skipper of the PT 107, described the “quite poor” food situation: “We eat entirely out of cans, mostly corned willie [beef], cheese and stew. We also eat Aircraft Emergency rations in between times. They are rich, but quite good. Coffee and cigarettes are the main staples (and our only luxuries). Aspirin gets quite a play, and we take vitamin A pills all the time, as they are supposed to improve our night vision, which latter is extremely important, in fact is almost everything.”

  On the PT 109, seaman Edman Edgar Mauer was deputized by Kennedy to act as the cook, though he had little culinary experience; his repertoire revolved largely around variations on Spam. Whenever he could, Lieutenant Kennedy scrounged, begged, and traded with cargo boats or Army PX stations in the region for delicacies like Oh Henry! candy bars, real eggs, powdered ice cream that could be reconstituted with ice in the boat’s small refrigerator, and bread and cheese for his treasured cheese sandwiches.

  If life aboard a PT boat could be miserable, conditions at the PT bases onshore were equally squalid. Fresh water to drink and bathe in was scarce, and insomnia, bad nutrition, and weight loss sapped the health of many sailors. At least one sailor resorted to stripping naked and soaping up at the first drop of rain, hoping the shower would last long enough for him to rinse off. “PT sailors thought of themselves as having rugged duty,” wrote Robert Bulkley. “And so they had. When patrols were not dangerous, they were tedious. Officers and men alike had few comforts, and besides the obvious enemy, they had to contend with such hazards and discomforts as heat, rains, uncharted reefs, dysentery, malaria, and a variety of tropical skin diseases known collectively as ‘the crud.’”

  As for the strategic outlook for Allied forces in the region, victory was far from preordained. At this point in the conflict, U.S. war planners had every reason to expect that pushing Japanese forces out of the Solomons and back toward the Japanese home islands would be a long, intensely bloody business, costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of American lives. The Guadalcanal campaign alone took longer than six months to complete, and sacrificed more than seven thousand American lives by the time it was over in February 1943. Torpedo boats like Kennedy’s PT 109 were intended to supplement Allied air and naval power by harassing Japanese supply ships, serving as patrol and rescue boats, and, it was hoped, sinking Japanese capital ships including destroyers.

  PT boats docked at Tulagi. (PT Boats, Inc.)

  In the spring of 1943, Japanese aircraft flying out of Rabaul, Vila, and Bougainville were attacking Allied targets on a regular basis, probing for fuel depots and engineering shacks, the loss of which could then shut down a base. After a week of such terrifying bombing, one PT boat crewman was shipped off in what his skipper called a “catatonic trance.”

  In the Solomons, Lieutenant Kennedy and his comrades were subjected to frequent sudden air attacks by Japanese planes. One day, at a temporary posting at M’Banika Island, Kennedy and several colleagues were lounging in their quarters, a tin-roofed plantation house. The skipper of the PT 47, George S. Wright, recalled that Kennedy was in his bunk, reading, his favorite pastime, surrounded by mosquito netting. “A Jap plane came out of nowhere,” remembered Wright, “and started dropping bombs near us. Suddenly there was a terrifying rain of shrapnel on that tin roof.” While his colleagues dived into a slit trench outside, Kennedy, in haste to escape his bunk, got snared in netting. “He had a hell of a time,” according to Wright, “then he finally broke loose and dived in with us.”

  In the unlikely event that any of the Americans stationed at Tulagi managed to forget why they were there, a large sign posted on the hillside gave them a stark reminder. Placed there on the order of Admiral William E. “Bull” Halsey, the notice declared, “KILL JAPS. KILL JAPS. KILL MORE JAPS. You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well.” Years later, Kennedy described the visceral impact of seeing the sign: “it went right through you.”

  In the weeks between April 25 and July 20, 1943, the final crew of the PT 109 took shape. Kennedy’s executive officer and second-in-command aboard the PT 109 was a former football star from Sandusky, Ohio, named Ensign Leonard Jay Thom, a strapping blond who resembled a Viking. In a letter to his parents, Kennedy quipped, “Have my own boat now, and have an executive officer, a 220-pound tackle from Ohio State—so when the next big drive comes—will be protected.” Thom was a holdover from the previous skipper and had been a former student of Kennedy at the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center in the Melville, Rhode Island, training facility. “Lennie wrote me that he really liked Jack the minute they met,” recalled his wife. “Their personalities meshed immediately. He would write me jokes about Jack’s money. Jack never had any cash, it seemed. He was always borrowing money from Lennie at the PX.” Kennedy, in turn, was highly impressed by Thom and quickly formed a close working partnership with him.

  On April 25, the day Kennedy became commander of the PT 109, Gunner’s Mate Second Class Charles Albert “Bucky” Harris also reported for duty. He was twenty years old and a former tire factory worker from Watertown, Massachusetts. On May 1, a quiet, friendly twenty-five-year-old from Georgia named Andrew Jackson Kirksey joined the crew as torpedoman second class. He was married, with a three-year-old son named Jack and a five-year-old stepson named Hoyt. “He was a very strong and nice guy,” recalled Hoyt in an interview more than seventy years later. “I used to go down to the ice plant and watch him make ice. Even though I was his stepson, he took great pride in introducing me to his coworkers as his son.” Early on, Kennedy grew fond of Kirksey, and enjoyed looking at his family pictures as Kirksey told him stories about his sons.

  On May 5, John Edward Maguire, twenty-six, joined the PT 109 crew as radioman second class. A native of Dobbs Ferry, New York, he grew up skinny-dipping in the waters of the Hudson River along the New York Central railroad tracks; he quit his factory job to follow his brother into the South Pacific PT service. When he first met a khaki-clad Kennedy on the dock at Tulagi, Maguire confided to a friend, “Geez, I don’t know if I want to go out with this guy. He looks fifteen.”

  In the following weeks, other crewmen arrived, including twenty-year-old Seaman First Class Raymond Albert of Akron, Ohio, and four motor machinist’s mates: six-year Navy veteran Gerard Emil Zinser from Illinois; Patrick H. McMahon; Harold William Marney, nineteen, from Massachusetts; and thirty-three year-old former truck driver and Scottish-born William Johnston, also from Massachusetts. As “motormacs,” these four had the tough job of working down in the hot engine room, tending to the PT 109’s loud, temperamental engines. Edman Edgar Mauer, of St. Louis, served as boat’s quartermaster and cook.

  Motormac “Pappy” or “Pop” McMahon, the PT 109’s oldest crew member and a California native, enlisted in the Navy because his stepson was serving on a submarine. Kennedy developed a special affection for McMahon, about whom he wrote at length in an unpublished 1946 narrative: “He was forty-one [actually thirty-seven] years old with a wife and son and before the war he taught at a small public school near Pasadena. At the time of Pearl Harbor his son joined the Navy and volunteered for submarine service. McMahon continued to teach for a few restless months and then one day told his wife that he was going to join the Navy, too. He enlisted in the Navy, was assigned to boot camp, and in one of those queer inexplicable acts, the United States Navy assigned him to the motor torpedo boat school at Melville, Rhode Island, for PT boat duty, although he was well over the age limit for these hard-riding boats. After completing his course, he was assigned to an engineering staff for shore duty and some months later proceeded to the Solomon Islands to work around the base. His age prevented him, it was thought, from sea duty.” But, Kennedy explained, as the casualties mounted during the long Solomon Islands campaign, the need for trained engineers increased, and so McMahon was assigned to PT 109.

  Torpedo
man Second Class Raymond L. Starkey of Garden Grove, California, was a stocky twenty-nine-year-old with a wife and child. He transferred to the PT 109 because he was fed up with his previous skipper, who was, in his words, an “Ivy League snob.” Kennedy, despite his Harvard pedigree, struck Starkey as “all business, but with a sense of humor and modest and considerate of enlisted men.” Other crewmen would rotate in and out due to injuries and routine manpower shuffles. But these twelve members of the PT 109 crew—Kennedy, Thom, McMahon, Starkey, Albert, Johnston, Zinser, Kirksey, Maguire, Mauer, Harris, and Marney—formed its core. They would soon be forever bonded together.

  Kennedy in the armor-plated cockpit of the PT 109. When he first met Kennedy, one crewman said to a friend, “Geez, I don’t know if I want to go out with this guy. He looks fifteen.” (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

  From their first days together, many of the PT 109’s crewmen felt a strong affection for their skipper, who impressed them as fair, humble, approachable, and relaxed, yet also confident, highly capable, and willing to dirty his hands and pitch in when the boat needed painting or other manual labor. “The name Kennedy didn’t mean anything to me,” recalled Pat McMahon. “He didn’t throw his weight around. He was always hungry. He never carried any money on him. I remember one night Kennedy said he didn’t know why the enlisted men didn’t have beer like the officers. That kind of made me feel good for Kennedy. That he’d stick up for his men.” One PT 109 crewman, Maurice Kowal, who transferred off the boat due to injury, recalled, “He was terrific, he was a good man. He took care of us all the time. He would go over to Guadalcanal and bum supplies, particularly ice cream. He was crazy for ice cream.”

  A few of his fellow naval officers later claimed they sensed even during the war that a great political career awaited Kennedy. “He was amiable, always the first to laugh at someone else’s joke, and a pleasure to be around,” recalled Dick Keresey, skipper of the PT 105. “He was a man of courage, the kind of captain I wanted to see off my side on patrol. He’d stick with you all the way down to death.” Kennedy’s tent mate Johnny Iles recalled to naval historians Joan and Clay Blair, “His boat was shipshape and his crew was well organized, orderly. He was twenty-five—he was an old man—the rest of us were a bunch of kids.” He added, “It was written all over the sky that he was going to be something big. He just had that charisma. You could tell just by his nature, by the way people would stop by and visit with him, and the fact that he was writing to important people, he was writing to very powerful people. It was obvious that politics was in his blood.”

  William C. Battle was commanding officer of another PT boat, a tent mate of Kennedy, and later became the U.S. ambassador to Australia. He recalled, “Jack Kennedy impressed me as almost being right out of central casting for a job as skipper of a PT boat. He was exciting. He was smart, quick, great sense of humor. He could laugh at himself. Just a wonderful companion.” Battle added, “He was a young, lanky officer, bright, active, highly idealist, obviously intent on making the greatest possible contribution that he could. Always concerned about the welfare of his crew, this was one of his outstanding traits.”

  When Kennedy entered the combat zone, as author of a bestselling book and the son of the superwealthy former ambassador to England, he was already a minor celebrity, at least among some in the officer corps, though many enlisted men either didn’t know of Kennedy’s prior notoriety or, with a war going on around them, couldn’t have cared less. The previous skipper of the PT 109, Bryant L. Larson, who handed the boat off to Kennedy in a brief transition period, recalled, “He was not the average guy. He was the millionaire son of Ambassador Kennedy, most of us knew that, and for that reason he had a mark on his forehead. It was a handicap, I thought. It meant he would be subjected to the most critical kind of review. But he bore the handicap well. I found him to be not only personable, a really fine man, but thoroughly competent and sincere in what he was doing.”

  From May through July 1943, Kennedy wrote a series of upbeat letters to his friends and family, revealing flashes of wry humor and island color as he painted a vivid picture of his life at the front lines. To his parents, he wrote, “Going out every other night for patrol. On good nights it’s beautiful, the water is amazingly phosphorescent, flying fishes which shine like lights are zooming around and you usually get two or three porpoises who lodge right under the bow and no matter how fast the boat goes keep just about six inches ahead of the boat.” To a friend, he wrote of an officers’ club on the base that served a makeshift concoction of alcohol: “Every night about 7:30 the tent bulges, about five men come crashing out, blow their lunch and stagger off to bed.”

  Like many American servicemen, Kennedy was equally fascinated and wary of the local residents of the Solomon Islands, around whom titillating rumors swirled regarding their sexual freedom and alleged cannibalism: “Have a lot of natives around and am getting hold of some grass skirts, war clubs, etc. We had one in today who told us about the last man he ate. ‘Him Jap him are good.’ All they seem to want is a pipe and will give you canes, pineapples, anything, including a wife.” To his sister, he wrote of the stark reality of island life: “That bubble I had about lying on a cool Pacific island with a warm Pacific maiden hunting bananas for me is definitely a bubble that has burst. You can’t even swim, there’s some sort of fungus in the water that grows out of your ears, which will be all I need, with pimples on my back, hair on my chest and fungus in my ears I ought to be a natural for the old sailors home in Chelsea, Mass.”

  In May 1943, Kennedy’s squadron commander gave him a perfect 4.0 fitness report rating in ship handling, and a 3.9 in “ability to command,” writing that Kennedy “met all situations with proficiency and daring that make him a credit to the naval service.” In his spare time, Kennedy managed to continue his intellectual passions, by devouring as many books and periodicals he could lay hands on, and by holding informal discussion groups on politics and current affairs in his tent. He also had a portable Victrola record player, on which he spun his favorite pop and show tunes, like “That Old Black Magic,” “Blue Skies,” and Frank Sinatra’s “All or Nothing at All.” The song he played over and over was “My Ship,” from the 1941 Kurt Weill Broadway show Lady in the Dark. The lyrics, penned by Ira Gershwin, seemed written for a daydreaming sailor: “My ship has sails that are made of silk, / The decks are trimmed with gold, / And of jam and spice, / There’s a paradise in the hold. / My ship’s aglow with a million pearls, / And rubies fill each bin, / The sun sits high in a sapphire sky, / When my ship comes in.”

  Despite the exotic locale, Kennedy continued attending Sunday mass in the Russell Islands, recalled Joseph Brannan, a crewman then stationed on the PT 59. “There was an old Catholic missionary church a few miles down a jungle road from the base,” remembered Brannan in a 2014 interview. “Every Sunday, we Catholics would pile into a jeep and head over. When Kennedy was at the wheel, you knew your life was in danger. He drove as fast as all hell, making hairpin twists and turns that scared the pants off me. He was a nice guy but a wild driver.”

  One day, while racing the PT 109 back to base after a mission, Kennedy crashed into the dock and shattered a tool shed, knocking men off the dock and throwing some of his men on the deck of the boat. The botched stunt enraged the men ashore, who screamed and cursed at Kennedy. The PT 109 slipped away and the incident blew over, but the boat’s skipper had earned a new nickname: “Crash Kennedy.”

  On May 30, one day after his twenty-sixth birthday, Kennedy’s craft and others were sent north to the Russell Islands to replace PT boats that were moving out to support a bloody new stage of the Solomon Islands campaign, the American assault on New Georgia.

  As Allied forces prepared to take the offensive in the region, PT boats were used on coastal patrols aimed at harassing the Japanese efforts to resupply their outposts in the Solomons. The boats also would be used as search-and-rescue craft to assist downed Allied pilots or survivors of sunken ships. PT ski
pper William Liebenow explained: “PT boats were night operators; it was rare that they moved in daylight anywhere near enemy areas. The blacker the night the better! You quickly learned to love the blanket of blackness that hid you from enemy planes and made it possible for you to slip in close to the enemy ships. There was the disadvantage of not being able to see your own forces, however.”

  The most lethal enemy for the PT boats were Japanese floatplanes. At night, they hunted for the boats’ phosphorescent wakes. PT boat officer Al Cluster stressed the danger the PT crews faced from these wakes, whose bright glow resulted from microscopic marine life being churned up and excited as their boats raced through the water. Japanese floatplanes would spot the long V-shaped wake of the PT boats in the phosphorescent waters, follow the tip of the V and bomb the boat, which alerted other Japanese air and surface craft to attack the Americans. In a letter to his parents, Kennedy explained how a typical floatplane attack unfolded: “They usually drop a flare of terrific brilliance, everything stands out for what seems like miles around, you wait then as you can’t see a thing up in the air, the next minute there’s a hell of a craaack, they have dropped one or two [bombs].” Another skipper described the PT boat’s bright phosphorescent wake as “a long, shining arrow pointed right up our ass.”