At some point soon after his first exposure to combat in the South Pacific, Kennedy experienced a spiritual crisis, and he bluntly confessed to a friend that he had “lost his religion.” Through his life, Kennedy seemed to be a fairly perfunctory churchgoer who adhered to the family traditions and Irish rituals of Roman Catholicism. He periodically discussed spiritual themes, especially as they related to the ideals of the American republic and its founding, but he did not appear to spend much time grappling with spirituality and the finer points of theology. Until now, outside of his troubled health history, Kennedy had led a charmed life. But here, in the war zone, with the threat of violent death all around him, and with friends and acquaintances suddenly vanishing into the abyss, his faith evidently had been badly shaken.
In Kennedy’s first months in the combat zone, the American PT boats in the Solomon Islands operated under a hidden curse.
Their torpedoes didn’t work.
Incredibly, almost no one, except perhaps the Japanese, fully absorbed how bad the American World War I–vintage Mark VIII torpedoes were, but their stunning ineffectiveness meant that the PT boats fired many hundreds of the underwater missiles at Japanese targets and only very rarely hit anything.
At 27 knots, the 3,150-pound Mark VIIIs were so slow it took great luck or skill to have a chance of hitting a Japanese destroyer barreling along at 30-plus knots. In later Navy experiments, more than 50 percent of the warheads failed to detonate. If the torpedo wasn’t launched “on an even keel” relative to the surface, the guidance gyroscope would tumble and fail. They were not very accurate at long ranges of a few thousand yards, and the weapons had a habit of either running deeper than set, or higher, when they would “porpoise,” or break the water’s surface.
Sometimes, on firing, the torpedoes’ black powder charge would ignite the launch tube’s interior lubrication coating of oil and grease, triggering a bright “flare-up” in the nighttime darkness that alerted the enemy to the boat’s position. On other occasions, the torpedo would fail to launch and its motor would keep running inside the tube until it burned out and exploded, blowing potentially lethal fragments around the PT’s deck unless the crew could shut it down first. The firing mechanism was so unreliable that, as one highly experienced PT boat skipper, William Liebenow, explained in 2015, “Nine times out of ten, when we pushed the button in the cockpit to fire the torpedoes, nothing happened. The torpedoman had to hit the firing pins with a hammer.” Saddled with such inaccurate and unreliable torpedoes, the lightly armored PT boats had to sneak dangerously close to a target before attacking, to a range of two miles or less. This placed them directly in the kill zone of the enemy destroyer’s large-caliber guns. After firing their torpedoes, the PT crew had to race away under cover of a smoke screen expelled by a smoke generator mounted on the back of the boat, in a desperate effort to escape before enemy gunfire detonated the 100-octane aviation-grade gasoline in the boat’s fuel tank.
For many tragic months, Navy bureaucrats back in the United States stubbornly believed that the fault with the Mark VIII torpedoes wasn’t their design or manufacturing but the ineptness of the firing crews. The Japanese, on the other hand, fielded the behemoth Type 93 destroyer torpedo, later dubbed the “Long Lance,” which cruised up to 45 knots at a range of over 20,000 yards, and boasted more than 1,000 pounds of high explosive. It was significantly faster, more powerful, and more accurate than the U.S. Navy’s Mark VIII, and unlike those on the Mark VIII, the detonators on the Type 93s usually worked.
As bad as the Mark VIII torpedoes turned out to be, equally baffling in John Kennedy’s mind was the Navy’s reluctance to train PT crews sufficiently in torpedo warfare, a problem that evidenced, in Kennedy’s words, the “super-human ability of the navy to screw up everything they touch.” Another liability was the fact that Kennedy’s boat was not equipped with radar in mid-1943. Before JFK took command, the PT 109 had been outfitted with an experimental radar set as part of tests by the Navy, but the equipment proved unreliable and the sets were removed.
The PT boats were fighting an exceedingly frustrating form of combat in the Solomons, where the Japanese were moving troops and supplies around on small armored personnel barges they called Daihatsus, or cargo trucks. As barge hunters, the PT boats were mostly a failure. The nimble Japanese barges had shallow drafts that made it nearly impossible to hit them with a torpedo shot, and they rode so low in the water they were hard to spot in the first place. The PT’s .50-caliber gunfire ricocheted helplessly off the barges’ steel hulls.
One PT boat squadron commander recommended that bigger U.S. ships take over barge-hunting duties from the PTs. Admiral William Halsey agreed, concluding, “The use of PT boats as barge destroyers leaves much to be desired.” In fact, PT boats carried a stigma described by Kennedy’s squadron commander, Al Cluster: “The old hide-bound battleship navy had no use for PT boats at all. We were thrown loosely into that term the ‘hooligan navy.’” In an interview thirty years after the war, former PT boat skipper Leonard Nikoloric explained: “Let me be honest. Motor torpedo boats were no good. You couldn’t get close to anything without being spotted. I suppose we attacked capital ships maybe forty times. I think we hit a bunch of them, but whether we sank anything is questionable. I got credit for sinking a destroyer, but I don’t think she sank. The PT brass were the greatest con artists of all times. They got everything they wanted, the cream of everything, especially personnel. But the only thing PT’s were really effective at was raising War Bonds.”
For Japanese military forces in the Solomons, the greatest danger came not from the threat of motor torpedo boats like Kennedy’s PT 109, but instead from the air, as American air superiority was forcing upon the Japanese an “inflection point” from which they would never recover. U.S. fighter aircraft roamed through the region, sinking Japanese troop and supply ships and shredding Japanese airfields, ships, and planes. The number of Japanese aircraft in the region plunged from a peak of over 200 serviceable planes in mid-1943 to only ten by the end of the year. Because of these high losses, the lack of a pilot rotation system, and the Japanese abandonment of Guadalcanal, the morale of the Japanese pilots plummeted rapidly after February 1943, according to records in the National Archives of Japan and military archives.
Captain Takashi Miyazaki, commanding officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Fourth Air Squadron at Rabaul from September 1942 to April 1943, recalled the impact of American air attacks in a postwar interview with American military interrogators: “The loss of shipping was the most serious loss in our operations. We were dependent upon shipping for all of our supplies, except aircraft. Without fuel, ammunition and replacement of technical personnel our aircraft were useless.” He added, “We also lost most of our best naval pilots in this period. Beginning in 1943 we were unable to replace these losses with equally trained pilots. This loss became most serious in our later naval operations. During the campaign our aircraft and pilot losses became too great to make it practical to continue to hold the Solomons.”
According to the postwar interrogation report of Imperial Japanese Navy Commander Ryosuke Nomura, who was posted at the 11th Air Fleet at Rabaul from November 1942 to July 1943, “The naval land-based aircraft losses in the Rabaul–Solomons–New Guinea areas were extremely high and finally resulted in the destruction of the cream of the Naval air forces. The high losses are attributed to the superiority of American fighter aircraft; breakdown of Japanese aircraft supply system, [and the] inability of the Japanese to replace experienced pilots and maintenance personnel.” In Nomura’s words, Japanese pilots “had a horror of American fighters.” They thought their workhorse fighter plane, the Zero, was the equal of the American P-40 and F4F, but understood it was no match for the F4U and the F6F, which they especially feared.
The Japanese supply situation was so bad that Shuichi Miyazaki, no less than a lieutenant general and the chief of staff of the 17th Army, stationed in Solomons, spent two months in a field hospital in
summer of 1943 for malnutrition. After the war was lost, he summed up the Japanese predicament in the Solomons: “The biggest problem of all was destruction of our supply lines as a result of air attack upon shipping.”
In late June 1943, a major Allied offensive signaled a new phase of the Solomon Island Campaign. Admiral William Halsey unleashed two aircraft carriers, six battleships, nine cruisers, and more than sixteen destroyers upon Japanese-held islands in the New Georgia group. The campaign ground north and west through 1943, making slow, bloody progress against entrenched Japanese opposition. One by one, islands fell into the hands of the Americans, and PT boats advanced to new bases. To support the campaign, the PT 109 was ordered on July 15 to move from its post at the Russell Islands and proceed to a base on the exact front line of combat, at the island of Rendova.
By mid-July 1943, about twenty-five PT boats, mostly from Squadrons 10, 9, and 5, were stationed at the newly captured outpost at Rendova, including the PT 109, which was now attached from Squadron 2. From their station at tiny Lumbari Island, just off Rendova, the PT boats had three main missions: to intercept Japanese barge traffic between enemy-held islands, to harass the “Tokyo Express” Japanese supply convoys, and to block Japanese attacks in the area. By now, many in the Navy were beginning to realize the PT boats on their own did not have the strength, range, or accuracy to directly face off against large enemy surface craft like destroyers.
The new base commander at Rendova (and therefore Kennedy’s temporary commanding officer) was Lieutenant Commander Thomas G. Warfield, a former gunnery instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy. Warfield was a short-tempered, by-the-book officer who already was disliked by several of the base officers. “He was a first-class SOB, a Captain Queeg,” said Kennedy’s squadron commander, Al Cluster, recalling the day Warfield took command. Warfield immediately demanded that a brig be built at the end of the dock, to house two men he had detained at sea for an unknown infraction. According to Cluster, Warfield declared the men would stay in the brig, even if there was an air raid.
When PT boat skipper Paul “Red” Fay accidentally got his boat stuck on a sand spit, he too felt the lash of Warfield’s temper. “We got it off without damage,” Fay remembered, but when Warfield learned of the incident, he relieved Fay of command on the spot. Years after the episode, Fay recalled bitterly of Warfield, “He was a shit.” In Warfield’s defense, however, yet another PT boat commander in Warfield’s Squadron 10, Philip Potter, recalled, “Warfield was a good man. A lot of the guys in the squadron didn’t like him because he was all business.” As for Red Fay, Potter reported, “He was considered a joke. The squadron clown. Warfield was out there to fight a war. I’m sure he never even considered giving him [Fay] command of a boat in combat.” Years later, Potter was stunned to learn John F. Kennedy, as president, had appointed his avuncular World War II chum Red Fay to be undersecretary of the Navy.
One PT boat crewman, Glen Christiansen, remembered Warfield with unrestrained bitterness. “You couldn’t find anything good to say about that son of a bitch, I swear!” he explained. “He was pitiful to work for, just a bad fellow all the way around. They even had fellows that pushed him off the dock, knocked him into the water a couple of times, they disliked him so much, they’d run like hell so he couldn’t find out who they were. Things like that start happening when you’re a bad officer.”
In July 1943, Rendova Island was the site of an American PT boat base that was on the very front line of a turning point in the Pacific War. (National Archives)
As the new commander of a blended force of PT boats abruptly mixed together from several different boat squadrons, Thomas Warfield rarely rode on the boats himself, preferring to run operations from behind the front lines in his command tent at the Rendova base. “Warfield obstinately vested his trust in the powerful new radio aerial [antenna],” wrote naval historians Clay and Joan Blair, “and a belief in attack by numbers.” John Meade, then a PT boat officer based at Tulagi, later called Warfield “the biggest shit in the Pacific. He simply never learned the tactical lessons of the year before that PT boats were ineffective in groups larger than two. Because they [multiple-boat formations] were ordered by Warfield to keep strict radio silence save in emergency, the lead boat could not signal the trailing boats that he was about to move out. The second boat would react to the movements of the first boat, but at a delay. The delay was magnified with each boat. So, often, the fourth boat would get detached.” For the crew of the PT 109, this command flaw would soon have dire consequences.
In a series of major naval clashes between July 5 and July 13 around the Solomon Islands, the Americans and Japanese each lost two destroyers and one cruiser. While technically a draw, the actions, later dubbed the Battle of Kula Gulf and Battle of Kolombangara, succeeded in slowing the Tokyo Express. Soon after, between July 15 and July 31, Kennedy’s PT 109 completed seven combat patrols, during three of which the 109’s group of boats were chased and attacked by Japanese floatplanes.
Amid crippling darkness and plagued by bad communications, the PT boats were entangled in a series of friendly-fire incidents, though none involved Kennedy. After U.S. forces captured Rendova on June 30, PT boats led by Lieutenant Commander Robert Kelly launched torpedoes at the 10,-ton transport USS McCawley, the flagship of Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, believing it was a Japanese ship. The boat was already damaged by Japanese fire, and empty, being towed out of the battle zone. The episode was one of only three confirmed sinkings of major vessels by PT boats in World War II—unfortunately it was an American ship.
On the night of July 17–18, Commander Warfield ordered a large formation of twelve PT boats out into the darkness to ambush the Tokyo Express in Blackett Strait, a roughly seven-mile-long passage of water that lay to the south of the island of Kolombangara. A daisy chain of confusion ensued. Spotting what he thought were six Japanese destroyers speeding along at nearly 40 knots, PT 159 skipper Oliver Hayes led an attack that launched ten torpedoes toward the ships. The PT boat crews thought they scored hits on two of the targets, but luckily, they were wrong. The vessels turned out to be American destroyers. They, in turn, had been alerted to attack the PT boats, which had been mistaken as Japanese vessels by a Navy patrol plane. The pattern of friendly fire incidents finally turned tragic on July 20, when a formation of Army B-25 bombers and three PT boats from Squadron 10 mistakenly attacked each other in broad daylight. Eleven PT sailors were wounded by strafing, and three American airmen died when PT boat antiaircraft guns shot down one of the B-25s. “I got confused,” said one of the gunners, “and thought it was a Jap plane with our insignia.”
On the night of July 19, the PT 109 was again patrolling in Blackett Strait off the small Japanese-held island of Gizo. After several uneventful hours in the darkness, then-crewman Leon Drawdy spotted an airplane approaching at an altitude of less than a hundred feet, close enough for him to see the red Rising Sun emblems on the plane’s wings.
Before the crew could react to Drawdy’s shouts of warning, the boat was rocked by two close bomb explosions marked by bright orange bursts, which slammed the PT 109 hard to starboard and sent fragments of hot metal shrapnel into the boat. Drawdy was propelled out of a hatch, knocking his head on the deck. Both he and fellow crewman Maurice Kowal suffered shrapnel wounds to their limbs that drew blood but were not life-threatening. Kowal was brought down to the crew’s quarters and tended to by Edgar Mauer. “My shoes were soaked with blood,” recalled Kowal. “It just poured out. And from that day on I was scared.” He added, “I was terrified. First time away from home, first time I got shot at, so I was terrified from that day on, until I got home.”
Kennedy tried to engage the idling engine, but it stalled. Engineer McMahon, despairing that they were now sitting ducks for a second attack, managed to reengage all three engines, enabling Kennedy to circle out of the plane’s path. Kowal and Drawdy, both lightly wounded, left the PT 109 for treatment, never to return. Another one of the PT 109 crewmen, Andrew Jackso
n Kirksey, was so upset by the attack that he had a premonition of his own imminent death.
“I won’t be around much longer,” Kirksey darkly mused.
Kennedy later explained: “He never really got over it; he always seemed to have the feeling that something was going to happen to him. He never said anything about being put ashore—he didn’t want to go—but the next time we came down the line I was going to let him work on the base force. When a fellow gets the feeling that he’s in for it, the only thing to do is to let him off the boat. Because strangely enough they always seem to be the ones that do get it. I don’t know whether it’s just coincidence or what.” While Kirksey did not shirk his duties or request a transfer, Kennedy decided to replace him the next time they went back to Tulagi.
That day would never come.
5
THE RAID
PT BASE AT RENDOVA
AUGUST 1, 1943
On the afternoon of August 1, John F. Kennedy and his crew were focused on figuring out how to attach an old 37 mm U.S. Army antitank gun to the foredeck of the PT 109, in an experiment to beef up the boat’s firepower. The idea for the extra armament was the brainchild of South Pacific area commander Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who thought that if the wooden PT boats were equipped with high-caliber guns, they might be effective against agile, fast-moving Japanese transport barges made of steel. So far, of course, the PTs had mostly been a bust as barge hunters.
Kennedy was enthusiastic about the idea, but he was having problems fastening the gun onto his torpedo boat. It was an unwieldy, breech-loading antitank weapon that was mounted atop a two-wheeled carriage with bracing posts. Since it had no protective armor or turret, the gunner would be exposed to enemy fire, and its manual operation meant new shells had to be loaded by hand, one at a time. Kennedy was looking for a carpenter to construct wooden supports for the improvised gun mount, and since he and his crew hadn’t figured out how to firmly fasten the gun onto the vessel by themselves, they opted to use rope to temporarily lash it and some large wooden support planks onto the deck until a carpenter could be found.
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