Just then Warfield radioed an order to all the vessels: “Boats that have fired torpedoes return to base. All others return to station.”
Kennedy condemned Warfield’s instructions as “the dumbest order in the entire dumb-ass operation.” He added, “This rattled me no end. If you think these things are conducted with great skill and aplomb, forget it.”
In the forward gun turret of the PT 105, Keresey’s gunner’s mate spotted an enemy destroyer. Keresey ordered two torpedoes to be fired, which sailed off target. Their position exposed, a Japanese floatplane swooped down and dropped bombs toward the PT 105, which also missed.
Keresey chose to stay out on patrol by himself and try to attack the Tokyo Express on its return voyage. He decided he’d rather face the possibility of a court-martial than turn tail and run away from the enemy.
So far that night, fifteen American PT boats had fired twenty-four torpedoes, every one of which had missed the Japanese convoy. Unscathed and undeterred, the ships of the Tokyo Express arrived at the Vila Plantation garrison on the island of Kolombangara at 12:30 A.M. and began efficiently offloading their supplies and cargo. Nine hundred Japanese soldiers streamed off the ships to reinforce the outpost. Their mission complete, the Amagiri, Shigure, Arashi, and Hagikaze headed back on their return voyage to Rabaul at around 2 A.M.
Kennedy’s PT 109 and four other PT boats remained in Blackett Strait, while five more waited outside the strait. The first American craft to encounter the homebound Tokyo Express was Richard Keresey’s PT 105, which was stationed just inside Blackett Strait near Ferguson Passage. Gunfire around the Kolombangara coast, possibly from Japanese shore batteries on the island, illuminated the outline of a destroyer some 2,000 yards away to the east of Keresey’s position, traveling slowly to the north at a speed of about 10 knots. Keresey fired his two remaining torpedoes at the enemy ship. They missed.
By now, Kennedy’s and Lowrey’s boats had moved north of Kolombangara, in the direction of the island of Vella Lavella, groping for direction. By chance at 2 A.M. they linked up with another “lost boat,” Lieutenant (jg) Philip Potter’s PT 169 from the now-scattered Division A. The three American vessels drifted in the darkness, but soon they had trouble staying together. Kennedy suggested to Lowrey and Potter by VHF radio that they should try to link up with other remaining PT boats. They agreed, and began motoring to the southeast, each carrying their full load of four torpedoes.
When the three PT boats arrived at their new patrol area, they drifted apart again in the darkness, and soon were separated by wide gaps of several thousand yards or more. They did not realize that William Liebenow’s PT 157 had also wound up in the same general area, still observing radio silence and himself unaware of where any other PT boats were. “We didn’t know what the score was,” recalled the PT 109’s Barney Ross, “so we resumed our patrolling back and forth with the other boat,” Lowrey’s PT 162.
Richard Keresey, commanding the PT 105 several miles east, issued an open broadcast warning by radio shortly after 2 A.M.: “Destroyers coming up through the passage. Have fired fish [his two remaining torpedoes] and am withdrawing through Ferguson Passage.” It is not known if Kennedy heard this on the often unreliable ship-to-ship radio. No one was issuing clear details of what was going on, either from Blackett Strait or from Commander Warfield’s command tent at Rendova. Warfield himself was making no coherent effort to coordinate the overall action. With radio communications so fragmentary and visibility so limited, Kennedy, Potter, and Lowrey apparently still had little concreate information on either the earlier skirmishing in Blackett Strait or the exact trajectory of the Tokyo Express. The PT 109 was now separated in the darkness from the nearest PT boat, the 162, by a distance of several thousand feet—at, or beyond, the limits of visual contact.
As the clock passed 2:15 A.M., Kennedy was at the wheel in the cockpit of the PT 109, with radioman John Maguire standing next to him. Harold Marney manned the forward gun turret. Barney Ross was acting as lookout on the forward deck near the 37 mm gun. Pappy McMahon was on watch at his post down in the engine room. Raymond Albert stood watch near the machine gun on the port side of the boat, gunner Raymond Starkey was acting as lookout in the rear gun turret, and Gerard Zinser was on the deck, having just come off watch. Four men were not up and alert: Ensign Lenny Thom was reclined on the port, or left, side of the deck, while Charles Harris, William Johnston, and Andrew Kirksey were off duty, relaxing or dozing on the deck.
The boat was caressed by a gentle ocean breeze and the sound of water lapping at its sides. Only one of the PT 109’s three 1,500-horsepower engines were engaged; the rest were idling to cut down the boat’s telltale wake, which also allowed the crew to better hear the approach of the PT’s nemesis, Japanese floatplanes. According to Kennedy, visibility “was poor—the sky was cloudy—and there was a heavy mist over the water.”
Suddenly, Ensign Ross, the night-blind night lookout on the bow of PT 109, sensed an immense shape less than 1,000 yards away, and closing rapidly.
“Ship at two o’clock!”
When Lieutenant Kennedy heard the warning shouted by Harold Marney from the forward .50-caliber machine-gun turret, he had less than twenty seconds to react.
At first Kennedy thought it was another PT boat, but he quickly sensed the massive hull of a Japanese warship looming like a wall speeding for the right side of his boat, which at 80 feet long was less than a third of the size and height of the Japanese vessel. According to Kohei Hanami, the Japanese commander of the approaching destroyer Amagiri, its speed was 34 knots.
“Lenny, look at this,” Kennedy said matter-of-factly. Ensign Thom, who had been lying on the deck outside the cockpit, stood up to behold the awesome sight of a Japanese warship bearing down on them on a collision course.
“As soon as I decided it was a destroyer,” Kennedy recalled of seeing the phosphorescent wake of the Amagiri’s bow barreling toward him, “I turned to make a torpedo run.”
Kennedy thought, impossibly, of firing one of his notoriously unreliable and inaccurate Mark VIII torpedoes straight at the target like a Wild West gunslinger, evidently hoping a lucky hit would detonate near the enemy vessel’s bow, somehow deflect it off its path, and save the thirteen souls he had aboard his boat, including his own.
To achieve this, Kennedy would need to engage his two idling engines, rotate his 56-ton PT 109 to starboard by 30 degrees and into a firing position, and simultaneously command his crew to line up a deck-launched torpedo shot at a target that was speeding north toward them at the point-blank range of a thousand yards. Kennedy apparently did not seriously consider the option of trying to move out of the way of the oncoming vessel—there was no time. Instead, he chose to confront it in the seconds that remained.
“Sound general quarters!” Kennedy told his radioman John Maguire, who was standing beside him.
Maguire relayed the order with a shout, “General quarters!” and turned the keys to prepare to fire the boat’s torpedoes. Within a few seconds, the enemy destroyer was so close Maguire heard excited Japanese voices coming from its deck. The Japanese ship was “hauling ass” for a direct collision. Maguire grasped the Miraculous Medal hanging around his neck and began to pray. “Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us. . . .”
On the foredeck, Barney Ross moved to jam a shell into the 37 mm antitank gun that had been lashed on to the deck the previous afternoon. But the breech was closed—dooming his slim chances of getting off a shot in time. Out of the darkness, the Amagiri rose before him, its size multiplying with each quickened heartbeat.
“It was the first time I’d ever seen an enemy ship,” Ross later recalled. “The next thing I knew he was turning into us. We all shouted at once. Kennedy started turning the boat. It happened fast, very fast.” Like a predator closing on its prey, the Japanese destroyer strained toward the PT 109. From Ross’s perspective, the Amagiri was making such a hard, sharp turn that its mast was at a 45-degree angle to the water.
&n
bsp; “He turned into us, going like hell,” Kennedy recalled.
Their fate now inescapably upon them, several members of the crew were too stunned and helpless to move. Some felt their feet were gripped by a strange paralysis.
“This is how it feels to be killed,” thought the PT 109’s skipper.
At 2:27 A.M. the night air was shattered by the sound of the steel bow of the Amagiri cracking into the wooden hull and steel sections of the PT 109. The Japanese destroyer “broke out of the mist on top of the PT 109,” Kennedy later recounted, “and smashed into it.” The sharp bow of the Amagiri pierced the PT 109 near its front starboard torpedo tube, close to the cockpit where Kennedy was stationed. In the cockpit, Lieutenant Kennedy was knocked down from the impact and crashed hard against a steel bulkhead, which may have injured one of his spinal disks. Now on his back, Kennedy looked up and saw the Japanese destroyer plowing through the gun turret of his boat just a few feet away. A flash of bright light exploded and illuminated the destroyer.
The Amagiri proceeded to cut through the PT 109 diagonally, crunching open the boat’s unarmored mahogany hull like a wooden toy, and shearing off a large piece of the starboard stern, or right rear, portion of the vessel.
Much of the boat’s stern quickly sank below the surface of the water.
Kennedy recalled, “I can best compare it to the onrushing trains in the old-time movies. They seemed to come right over you. Well, the feeling was the same, only the destroyer didn’t come over us, it went right through us.”
Two sailors, nineteen-year-old Harold William Marney and twenty-five-year-old father of two Andrew Jackson Kirksey, vanished in the collision, never to be seen again. Marney had been stationed in the starboard (right-hand side) gun turret, directly in the path of the Amagiri’s bow, and he had shouted out the first warning as the enemy ship charged toward the PT 109. Kirksey was lying down on the aft (rear) starboard side of the boat, also squarely in the impact area. Both men were incapacitated by the impact of the crash and explosion, if not killed instantly; their bodies likely descended underwater with the wood and metal wreckage of the boat’s aft section. No trace of them was ever found. Kirksey’s eerie premonitions had been realized: he and Marney joined the estimated 331 PT men who were killed in action during the war.
A hundred-foot-high fireball rose from the crash site, fed by thousands of gallons of fuel that spilled into the water from the crippled boat. Despite the night’s poor visibility, the inferno was visible for miles.
The crash propelled seven of the thirteen men into the blazing ocean, most of them wearing life jackets and helmets: Ray Starkey, Raymond Albert, Gerard Zinser, William Johnston, Charles Harris, George Ross, and John Maguire. They fell into a world of horror—a black, shark-infested ocean punctuated by pockets of flaming gasoline, lethal fumes, and muffled shouts and screams, with their boat nowhere to be seen. As they struggled in the water and gulped salt water and gasoline, they had every reason to believe they could very soon be drowned, consumed by fire, or eaten alive from beneath.
At first, only Kennedy and Edman Mauer remained on the wreckage of the boat—a piece of the craft’s bow that stayed afloat because of its sealed watertight compartments. Mauer had been knocked onto the deck, sustaining a bruise to his right shoulder.
Radioman John Maguire was thrown out of the cockpit onto the canopy atop the dayroom, then tumbled into the ocean. He glimpsed that a part of the Japanese ship was aflame, probably from burning gasoline from the PT 109 splashing onto the vessel, and he recalled hearing two “cannon” shots coming from the ship, which corresponds with Lieutenant Commander Hanami’s report of his rear gunners firing back at the wreckage. Maguire quickly climbed onto the boat’s wreckage, joining Kennedy and Mauer.
The only sailor belowdecks at the time of the collision was Motor Machinist’s Mate “Pappy” McMahon, who was down in the engine room, in the boat’s rear. The Amagiri sliced straight through McMahon’s position, thrusting him painfully against the boat’s auxiliary generator. He wondered if the boat had hit an underwater obstacle: “I felt a hell of a jar,” he recalled. “I thought we had hit a rock.” Gathering himself, he looked up through an open hatch in the forward of the engine room and screamed, “Oh my God! There’s fire!” Then he clinched his lips. In training he had been told not to breathe in case of fire, because the boat’s aviation fuel would roast a man’s lungs on contact.
A blast of fire hit McMahon, followed by a curtain of water as the sea rushed in. The stern of the boat began sinking, pulling the PT 109’s motormac down with it. Kennedy described the scene: “McMahon was thrown against the starboard bulkhead. A tremendous burst of flame from the exploding gas tanks covered him. He pulled his knees up close to his chest and waited to die.” According to Kennedy, McMahon was dragged underwater by the momentum of the Amagiri’s churning propellers, pulled directly underneath them, and was pounded, twisted, and turned below the surface until, incredibly, he popped up nearly five hundred yards from the wreckage of the PT boat.
Unfortunately, McMahon came to the surface inside a large gasoline fire. “I hit the surface, right in flames,” McMahon remembered. “How I ever got out of there I don’t know.” His face, chest, and limbs were seared by fire, and his whole body was consumed in pain. He frantically beat his hands in the ocean, trying to clear a safe patch of water.
Harold Marney (left in right photo), the nineteen-year-old gunner’s mate who shouted the first warning of danger as a Japanese destroyer was about to hit the PT 109. He was never seen again. Pictured in photo at right with his brother Roland Marney, home on leave in Springfield, Mass. (Dennis Harkins & Frank J. Andruss Sr.)
George “Barney” Ross mistook the first burst of flames from the collision for a searchlight, and was afraid that Japanese troops above were about to open fire. He was also scared of getting snagged in the ropes that held the 37 mm gun to the deck, so he lowered himself into the water and took shelter behind the boat’s hull. There he witnessed the gasoline ignite, which he described as “not an explosion but a terrific roar.”
Once in the water, Ross choked and passed out amid the gasoline fumes.
Motor Machinist’s Mate Second Class William Johnston was asleep on the deck when the collision flipped him overboard. He glimpsed fire and the shape of the Japanese destroyer and its sailors scampering around the deck. Like McMahon, Johnston then was pulled underwater by the force of the ship’s pounding propeller, where he was spun around, shaken, and pummeled by the thrust of the churning water. Johnston’s lungs exploded with the pain of drowning; he realized he was being pushed to the ocean floor. He was tempted to surrender to the water, but then he thought of his wife, Nathalie. Fighting his way up toward a bright glow, he surfaced, battered but alive, in a pool of burning gasoline, frantically trying to push it away. He inhaled gas fumes and began to faint.
Gunner’s Mate Charles A. “Bucky” Harris also was asleep on the deck, using his life jacket as a pillow, when a shout awoke him to the terrifying sight of the charging Amagiri, now just a few yards away. He jumped up and dove over a torpedo tube, out toward the water. As he was in midair, the Japanese destroyer hit the PT 109. A flying object struck Harris, propelling him sideways in the air and injuring his leg. Once in the water, he somersaulted upright into a floating seated position, grateful that somehow his life jacket wound up around his neck, untied. Soon his leg went completely numb.
When the Japanese destroyer struck, Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class Gerard Zinser had just come off deck watch. “Before I knew what had hit,” he recalled, “I was flying head over heels.” The impact thrust him into the ocean, where he burned his arm and chest in the flaming water. He remembered, “I was hurled into the air. I was unconscious ten to fifteen minutes. When I woke up there was a lot of small fires. I heard other voices.”
Crewman Raymond Starkey was slammed down on the deck by the collision and also tumbled into the water. Seeing flames everywhere, he wondered, as he began to pass out, if this
was what Hell looked like.
Meanwhile, the Amagiri, raced away into the void, leaving a trail of fire in its wake.
Minutes earlier, aboard the Amagiri, nineteen-year-old Gunner’s Mate Third-Class Haruyoshi Kimmatsu was standing at his post at the forward Number One gun turret, staring into the blackness ahead and thinking of his home in city of Nagoya.
“Ship ahead off port bow!” called out the Japanese destroyer’s lookout.
“Look again!” shouted Commander Kohei Hanami from the bridge, “report instantly!”
Kimmatsu spotted a moving object in the water ahead, shooting toward the Amagiri at incredible speed. At first, he could make no sense of what he was seeing—“a sleek, black whale!” he thought. Then he realized it was an American PT boat. Stabbed with fear, he felt his guts knot in his torso and he could not breathe. He never seen the enemy so near.
The Amagiri. (John F. Kennedy Library)
“Fire! Fire!” yelled Petty Officer Mitsuaki Sawada from the gunnery command. But the target was coming in so low and close that the forward auxiliary gun crew could not fire their weapon in time.
Holding a shell in his hands, Kimmatsu stood motionless at his loading station in the gun turret, his body paralyzed with terror. He knew the two craft were about to collide. Seconds passed, but time felt suspended.
The port torpedo crew was poised at the ready, waiting for the order to fire. But torpedo officer Lieutenant Hiroshi Hosaka realized it was too late, the target was so close the torpedoes would travel right under it.
At nearly the same instant that Commander Hanami snapped an order to Kazuto Doi, the experienced coxswain at the wheel, the piercing klaxon horn of the ship’s collision alarm went off, warning of an impending impact.
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