But Kirksey insisted on going on the mission. “They’d say I’m yellow,” he said, apparently fearing dishonor even more than death.
Kirksey and the rest of the crew donned their life jackets, checked their gear and equipment, and prepared to cast off.
“Wind her up,” ordered Kennedy. “Cast off.” In his boat’s small cockpit, or “conn,” Kennedy pushed the three throttle handles, and in response, motormac Gerard Zinser down in the engine room activated the engines.
Andrew Jackson Kirksey, a quiet, friendly twenty-five-year-old from Georgia. Kennedy was fond of Kirksey, but in the days before August 2, 1943, he grew alarmed that Kirksey was having frequent premonitions of death. (Jack Kirksey & Frank J. Andruss Sr.)
As dusk fell and overcast skies enveloped the region, a procession of fifteen torpedo boats moved out of Rendova Harbor through Ferguson Passage toward Blackett Strait, journeying northwest nearly forty miles into enemy waters.
By 9:30 P.M. all the boats were holding at their patrol stations. To increase their coverage, Lieutenant Brantingham divided his division into two separate sections: his own boat paired with Bud Liebenow’s PT 157, and John Lowrey’s PT 162 was coupled with the PT 109.
At about 11 P.M., while drifting close to the beach of Kolombangara, the PT 109 was suddenly illuminated by a powerful searchlight from the island, followed by artillery fire. Ensign George Ross recalled, “Some kind of heavy gun was firing at us, fairly close, and so Jack took what they call evasive action. The whole idea of PT boats is of course to surprise the enemy, and when they surprise you with a searchlight the idea is to get out of the path of the searchlight. We’d been just cruising with one engine as quietly as possible so we wouldn’t be discovered, and so we gunned the motors and Jack zigzagged around and pretty soon the light went out.”
Kennedy put the crew at “general quarters,” and the PT 109’s sailors went to their battle stations.
In the cockpit of the PT 109, radioman John Maguire clutched a string of beads and silently prayed the rosary: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”
Beside him, John F. Kennedy gripped the wheel, watched, and waited.
6
THE BATTLE OF BLACKETT STRAIT
THE SOLOMON ISLANDS
MIDNIGHT, AUGUST 2, 1943
As midnight approached, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy held the PT 109 in position off Vanga Point northwest of Kolombangara, lying in ambush for the “Tokyo Express.” The PT 109 was one of the two westernmost boats in a six-mile-long, fifteen-boat formation containing some 180 officers and crew.
It was a warm, humid, moonless night. The darkness was almost total. The men on the American boats could barely see their hands in front of their faces, much less make out other PT boats or enemy vessels. “It was as dark as if you were in a closet with the door shut,” remembered George Ross; “it was that kind of night, no moon, no stars.”
At midnight, the radar screen of Lieutenant Hank Brantingham’s PT 159 picked up four blips bearing south off the Kolombangara coast at a speed of 15 knots.
“Radar contact!” exclaimed the radar operator.
Brantingham assumed the objects were Japanese barges, and he advanced his boat and the nearby PT 157 forward for an attack from a range of less than two thousand yards. He ordered his gunners to fire low, as they had a tendency to overshoot on the open water at night, then he pulled away to allow a clear path for Bud Liebenow’s PT 157 to attack.
But instead of relatively harmless barges, the craft were Japanese destroyers, and they quickly spotted the approaching PTs. Switching on powerful searchlights, they opened fire on the torpedo boats with high-caliber guns. The Tokyo Express, it turned out, was a full hour ahead of the schedule predicted by the American code breakers. As a result, they approached Blackett Strait unseen, avoiding the detection of Admiral Arleigh Burke’s force of six U.S. destroyers, which was not scheduled to move into position until thirty minutes later. The four approaching Japanese destroyers carried an assortment of heavy guns, plus passengers and crew of more than one thousand troops and sailors in total. They were protected by an unknown number of bomb-laden Japanese floatplanes patrolling overhead.
Under intense fire from Japanese destroyers, Lieutenant Liebenow launched the PT 157’s four torpedoes. Two of them misfired, two missed their target, and his boat moved out of firing position. He was distressed to see that the lubricating oil in one of Brantingham’s torpedo tubes was burning—and now served as a target beacon for the enemy. Liebenow recalled, “I swung between him [Brantingham] and the destroyer to lay a smoke screen so they couldn’t see the fire and use it as a point of aim.”
Men on both boats thought they witnessed a large explosion after firing at the enemy, but as usual, none of the American torpedoes had actually connected with their targets. Both PT boats then withdrew at high speed into the darkness. “We zigzagged for ten or fifteen miles,” remembered Liebenow. “I have no idea what direction we went.” Eventually Liebenow linked up with Brantingham’s boat near Gizo Island.
John F. Kennedy was expected to stay close to Brantingham in keeping with basic PT boat training and practice, but the PT 109 was nowhere to be seen. At some point in the patrol, probably before midnight when it dodged an enemy searchlight, Kennedy apparently became separated from his formation.
In the first of many communications fiascoes of the evening, two of the boats in Brantingham’s division, Kennedy’s PT 109 and John Lowrey’s PT 162, had no details of Brantingham and Liebenow’s first engagement with the enemy, because Brantingham did not radio a contact report to them. The PT 109’s temporary crewman Ensign Ross later said simply, “We didn’t know what the score was.” By now, the 109 and 162 were separated from the two lead boats and well out of visual range with them.
Over the next two and a half hours, the men on board the PT 109 did hear garbled bursts of chatter on the radio: “I am being chased through Ferguson Passage. . . . Have fired fish . . . Well, get the hell out of there!” But without a visual picture of events (by neither sight nor radar) and no radio contact reports being relayed, Kennedy couldn’t clearly understand what was going on.
Even if there had been effective communication between boats, PT skipper William Liebenow observed that “in the middle of combat, with all three engines running wide open with the mufflers off, you couldn’t hear the radio at all.” Further, “the radio man was often away from the radio, to help wherever else he was needed,” said Liebenow, who like John F. Kennedy operated an 80-foot “Elco” PT boat.
Liebenow described how he believed Kennedy got separated from him during the attack: “The simplest explanation of all is probably the true one: the PT 162 and PT 109 just lost contact with the rest of section ‘B’—that is, the PT 159 and PT 157. In other words, they got lost. This undoubtedly happened sometime before we made contact with the enemy and made the initial attack. It is doubtful Kennedy or Lowrey knew that the 159 and 157 had made an attack. Of course they had seen and heard the firing of the Jap destroyer, but had assumed it to be from shore batteries on Kolombangara.” Liebenow’s theory that Kennedy mistook the initial engagement with enemy destroyers for shore batteries from Kolombangara seems sound: the PT 109 already had evaded enemy fire from the island that evening, and besides, the Tokyo Express was not due for at least another half hour, after having run through a gauntlet of American destroyers whose encounter would surely have been relayed through the American radio channels. “Certainly if it had been shore batteries the best tactic was to lay low unless you’re discovered,” Liebenow continued. “The 162 and 109 boats were probably at a distance of five to ten miles from us.”
After Brantingham fired all his torpedoes, and missed, Commander Thomas Warfield then made a fateful decision from the comfort of his command tent at Rendova. By radio, he ordered the PT 159, the only boat in Division B with radar, to return directly to base. This left t
he other three boats of the division, including Kennedy’s PT 109, “blind” and without radar coverage for the rest of the night. Perhaps Warfield was already having trouble managing the mental calculus of tracking the many moving pieces of the chaotically unfolding engagement. Or he may have felt confident in his ability to assert control over the operation from his radio-equipped command tent. But as it would happen, the order to bring PT 159 back to base, compounded by Brantingham’s failure to radio his movements to the other boats in his formation, set off a chain reaction that would soon have tragic results.
PT 109 seemed to be drafting in its own universe. It was separated from the other boats by a thousand yards or more, visibility was nonexistent in the black, moonless night, and most of the boats were trying to observe radio silence, as ordered.
Incredibly, at least two of the PT 109’s crewmen recalled operating in a state of near-complete ignorance of the mission’s objectives. Further, as Liebenow later suspected, much of the crew failed to grasp the significance of the thirty-minute-plus barrage of explosions, spotlights, frantic bursts of emergency radio traffic, shelling, and bombing that had erupted through Blackett Strait. Radio operator John Maguire recalled: “We never got any word that there were destroyers in our area. There were no instructions at all. Once we got out there we never heard from anybody. I remember hearing that somebody was shooting or firing, and somebody said [on the radio], ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ I assumed it was one of our other patrols.”
It was not unusual for Navy enlisted men to know much less about an operation than their officers, but Maguire’s fellow PT 109 crewman Charles Harris also recalled a stunning lack of information on the scene: “We had no idea there were ships [Japanese destroyers] out there that night. We didn’t know the Express had gone down to Vila. We thought it was shore batteries firing. Our lead boat, the radar boat, picked something up, but they didn’t tell us anything about it. They took off after it and left us sitting there. We laid smoke once because the shells were landing pretty close. When we got back we were really going to look up that skipper [Brantingham] and give him the business for leaving us high and dry like that. We were kind of mad. He had the eyes [radar] and we didn’t.” The PT 109 and PT 162, now separated from the PT 157, moved away from Kolombangara and the inbound path of the Tokyo Express, toward the island of Gizo.
Although PT 109 crew members Harris and Maguire did not recall any warning of destroyers, one man on the boat clearly did: their skipper, Lieutenant Kennedy. In a never-before-published passage from a 1946 narrative of the incident written by Kennedy himself, a document discovered in 2014 in the archives of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library during the research for this book, Kennedy confirmed that at “about midnight a report was picked up that Japanese destroyers were in the area.” Why Maguire, the PT 109’s radioman, would not remember this is a mystery.
What’s certain is that the ships of the Tokyo Express, unscathed by the first assault by Kennedy’s boat formation, continued barreling toward their destination, the Japanese military outpost at Vila Plantation on Kolombangara.
At 12:04 A.M. on August 2, four blips traveling as fast as 30 knots appeared on the radar screen of the PT 171, the lead boat of the second American picket line, Division A, commanded by Arthur Berndtson, who also did not have details of the earlier action of Division B. Berndtson correctly figured they were destroyers hugging close to the shore of Kolombangara. Spotting the big phosphorescent bow wakes of the destroyers, he swung forward to launch an attack. At a distance of 1,500 yards, the Japanese destroyer opened fire on the PT 171.
As enemy shells landed around him spraying water onto his boat’s deck, Berndtson radioed the three other vessels in his group, but got no reply. He tried reaching them with his blinker tube, to no avail. Berndtson explained: “We lined up on the second ship and let fly four torpedoes at about fifteen to eighteen hundred yards. Our tubes flashed and we had a nice bright fire. That alerted them. One of the destroyers turned toward us to comb our torpedoes [present a narrower target area]. They turned on searchlights and started firing big guns at us. Well, we put on power, zigzagged, and laid smoke. There was shrapnel raining on deck. It looked like a junkyard.” All four of the PT 171’s torpedoes missed their target. Berndston tried to radio a warning to Bill Rome, the next group leader in the picket line, but couldn’t establish radio contact with him either.
In a replay of the earlier retreat by his fellow division leader, Berndston withdrew the radar-equipped PT 171 from the area, heading first toward Gizo Strait and then home for the Rendova base, without giving a contact report to the other three boats in his Division A, PTs 163, 169, and 172. Now those boats were without leadership or radar coverage, just like John Kennedy’s PT 109. Lieutenant Phil Potter in the PT 169, one of the skippers in Berndtson’s division, tried to maneuver his craft away from Japanese five-inch shells that were bursting overhead, but all three of his engines went dead. It took his motor machinists ten minutes to restart the engines, whereupon he fled the scene.
Still unmolested by the American attacks, the Tokyo Express quickly entered the sights of the boats in the third picket line, Division C. Two blips appeared on the radar screen of the PT 107, skippered by George Cookman, who was leading the four PT boats of Division C south of Ferguson Passage. Cookman’s group had no details of the two previous failed attacks, though Warfield’s after-action report would note that “a searchlight and gunfire had been seen to the north.” In a farcical reprise of the first two failed ambushes, division leader Cookman charged his boat forward to launch all four of his torpedoes, each of which missed its target, and he headed back toward Rendova without leaving a contact report or instructions with the other boats in his formation. Seventy-two years after the battle, in an interview for this book, PT 107 gunner’s mate John Sullivan explained why he thought the PT 107 beat such a hasty retreat: “I think our skipper was afraid of getting hurt.”
The three boats abandoned by the PT 107—PTs 104, 106, and 108—now without radar coverage, patrolled aimlessly through Blackett Strait, dodged an attack by an enemy floatplane, and then headed back toward Rendova. In a 2015 interview for this book, Chester Williams, then quartermaster on the PT 106, stressed the chaotic reality of the experience aboard the American vessels: “That battle was very, very confused. The PT boats were all separated. We did not fire any torpedoes that night because we were out of position. We were all positioned in the wrong places. It was a black night. We never saw anything; it was too dark.”
Back at the Rendova PT boat base, Commander Thomas Warfield whipsawed between following a hesitant, hands-off approach and a sporadic urge to exert direct control over events by radioing orders. Years after the skirmish, he described the night as “pandemonium,” and tried to deflect blame onto his boat captains in the field, claiming: “There wasn’t much discipline in those boats. There really wasn’t any way to control them very well. I just had to leave them pretty much up to their own judgment. Some of them stayed in position. Some of them got bugged and didn’t fire when they should have.” Warfield continued, “A lot of these skippers were pretty green, hell yes, we could hear them hollering, they were all excited and all hell broke loose and they fired their torpedoes, you’d think the damn war was starting all over again.”
At one point that evening, an enraged Warfield called into his microphone, “What the hell is the matter with you fellows? Get in there and fight!” This infuriated several of the PT boat skippers, one of whom later compared Warfield to a quarterback directing his team from the sidelines.
Finally, the Japanese destroyers, now moving at high speed, came into range of the Americans’ fourth picket line—the three PT boats of Division R commanded by PT 174’s Russell Rome, who was alerted to the approach of the incoming Tokyo Express by directly observing flashes, searchlights, and gunfire to the west. Rome spotted the outlines of a destroyer that seemed to be guarding the entrance to Blackett Strait from Ferguson Passage, not far off
the coast of Kolombangara; and at 12:25 A.M., Rome’s PT 174 fired its spread of four “fish” (torpedoes) from a range of 1,000 yards. All missed their targets. Pursued by a Japanese floatplane attempting to strafe the PT 174, Rome then decided to withdraw toward Rendova, which would leave behind the two other boats in his division—the PT 103, which fired four torpedoes from an impossibly long range of 4,000 yards, and PT 105, skippered by Lieutenant Richard Keresey.
Keresey experienced a scene of total confusion in Blackett Strait. He sensed Rome was panicking, which “scared the hell” out of him. In what Keresey remembered as “the shrill voice of a man gripped by fear,” Rome shouted over the radio: “I have fired torpedoes! I am under heavy fire from Jap destroyers! I am under heavy fire! Shells all around me!” Keresey realized Rome was not being shelled by a destroyer but rather was being bombed by Japanese planes drawn to his high-speed wake.
“What the hell is he talking about?” Keresey mused aloud. He radioed Rome to ask, “Where is the target, over?”
“Get out of there, you’re in a trap, you’re in a trap!” came the screaming response from Rome. “Get out!”
“That son of a bitch fired his torpedoes and ran,” Keresey growled to one of his crewmen.
Then Keresey was stunned to get an angry radio message directly from Commander Warfield at Rendova: “Get out of there!”
Keresey recalled bitterly, “I was getting a direct order from base command to carry out the orders of a dingbat [Lieutenant Rome] who’d done a complete funk, had fired torpedoes from out of range, and then had run away, leaving me without radar guidance.” Keresey remembered, “There was more confusion in that battle than at any time in the history of PT boats. We had fifteen boats. Everybody attacked on their own. Nobody communicated anything of any value. Shouts and screams on the radio were all I heard.”
Keresey decided to ignore Warfield’s order to retreat. “Don’t do it,” he thought to himself. “What the hell does he know sitting in a dugout fifty miles away? There are enemy ships to the north of the 105. If I carry out his order, I’ll miss the chance to do what we came all the way out here to do. But if I don’t turn around, I may find myself court-martialed.”
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