PT 109

by William Doyle

  Finally, more than three hours after the collision, eleven survivors were gathered on and around the floating remains of the PT 109. Throughout the dark morning Kennedy and others called out for the two missing crewmen, “Kirksey! Marney!” No reply ever came.

  McMahon was suffering from extremely painful burns on his hands, face, arms, legs, and feet. Johnston and Zinser were burned less severely, while other crewmen were variously battered and bruised. Despite their suffering, the survivors were happy to be alive, and they waited for a rescue they were sure would arrive soon. Mauer furtively signaled with the blinker device to summon other PT boats that might be in the area.

  But no rescue was coming. The two boats that had been closest to the PT 109, the PT 169 and PT 162, had long ago vanished into the dark. John Maguire recalled bitterly, “We were waiting for the other PT boats to come back. Those sons of bitches ran away from us.”

  One piece of equipment that survived the collision was the boat’s Very pistol, or flare gun. Kennedy decided not to fire it, for fear of attracting the enemy, but this may have been a costly mistake. If he had sent up a distress signal soon after the crash, it might have been spotted by Lowrey, Potter, or Liebenow, and they could have investigated and found the survivors. Harris remembered, “We had a Very pistol, but we didn’t shoot it off because we didn’t know what had happened yet. We were in Japanese waters, and we didn’t want the Japanese coming out after us.”

  Kennedy added, “We figured the Japs would be sure to get us in the morning, but everyone was tired and we slept.”

  They drifted south throughout the night in the direction of Ferguson Passage, beyond which was the Solomon Sea—and thousands of square miles of open ocean.

  When the sun rose, the eleven survivors still clung to pieces of their crippled boat.

  Flanked by enemy-held islands, the floating wreckage of the PT 109 could easily be seen from at least two Japanese outposts. It stuck out, remembered Barney Ross, “like a sore thumb.”

  Three miles to their northeast loomed the massive shape of Kolombangara Island, which one visitor described as “right out of a King Kong movie.” It was home to a garrison of 10,000, Japanese troops. About a mile to the southwest was Gizo Island, the site of another Japanese outpost of more than 200 troops. To the east were the Japanese-held islands of Arundel and New Georgia, and five miles west was Vella Lavella, also controlled by the enemy.

  If Japanese spotters were positioned at the proper elevations and positions on either Kolombangara or Gizo, they could see the wreckage with the naked eye; with the aid of field glasses or a telescope, they could have identified the figures as Americans.

  The PT 109 survivors were almost within range of Japanese artillery guns based on Kolombangara.

  “What do you want to do if the Japs come out?” Kennedy asked his men. “Fight or surrender?”

  “Fight with what?” a voice asked. They had little in the way of firepower, only six .45-caliber automatic pistols, one .38, one Thompson submachine gun, a flashlight, a battle lantern, and three knives. They had the flare gun, but they still were reluctant to fire it for fear of alerting Japanese forces, who were becoming notorious for their barbaric mistreatment of prisoners of war.

  “Well,” asked Kennedy, “what do you want to do?”

  “Anything you say, Mr. Kennedy,” replied one sailor. “You’re the boss.”

  “There’s nothing in the book about a situation like this,” said Kennedy. “Seems to me we’re not a military organization anymore. Let’s just talk this over.” He continued: “A lot of you men have families and some of you have children. What do you want to do? I have nothing to lose.”

  “If they [the Japanese] do come out, we will see them before they get here,” suggested Mauer. “If it seems that we have any chance at all, let’s fight. But if they send out three or four barges with enough men to overwhelm us, let’s surrender. We’re no good to anybody dead.” But, he added, he would follow any orders Kennedy decided to issue. Zinser agreed, saying they should estimate the size of any approaching Japanese force before they decided what to do.

  A more immediate concern was the precarious nature of their “life raft.” The daylight revealed the remains of the boat were underwater all the way up to the bow. Some 15 feet of the 80-foot-long boat were poking out of the water at a 45-degree angle, right side up. By 10 A.M. the bow of the wreckage was slowly rolling upside down, still floating, and the two most severely injured crewmen, William Johnston and Patrick McMahon, had to be carefully repositioned on the upturned hull. On Kennedy’s order, the others hugged the deck and stayed down as low and still as possible to avoid being spotted by Japanese lookouts. It is not known whether the rear portion of the PT 109 was severed completely by the crash and sank quickly, or if it remained partially attached below the waterline. Naval historians Clay and Joan Blair have speculated the latter was the case: “The rear section, containing the three heavy engines, was badly mangled and sank below the water and the bow lifted to an angle of perhaps 30 to 40 degrees.”

  “If I ever get out of this,” someone quipped, “I’ll never ride a PT boat again!” Curses erupted against the Navy, the entire war, and the PT crews who had abandoned them. The men peered hopefully at the southern sky looking for a low-flying American PBY search-and-rescue plane, but none came. As the hours passed, the men were increasingly amazed that it seemed no one was looking for them. The tantalizing sight of Allied-held Rendova Peak was barely visible some thirty-eight miles to the south.

  The bow of the boat was rotating such that the smooth, slippery keel was faceup, and soon there was nothing for the men to grasp on to. By 1 P.M. it seemed clear the boat would soon sink, and that there was no rescue under way. The crew would have to seek shelter on land before dark.

  “We clung to the unburned bow of the boat for nearly 12 hours,” remembered Kennedy, “and we left it only when it was just a foot above water.”

  The question was where to go.

  Kennedy quickly ruled out several islands that looked big enough to contain Japanese troops. Spotting the shape of a tiny island farther away, east of Gizo, Kennedy decided they should head for it, as it looked small enough to be of no practical use to the enemy. Called Kasolo, meaning “Gods of Paradise,” by native Solomon Islanders, it had been dubbed Plum Pudding Island by homesick English colonial authorities, who thought its outline vaguely resembled the shape of the traditional English dessert.

  “We will swim to that small island,” said Kennedy, pointing out their destination. “We have less chance of making it than some of these other islands here, but there’ll be less chance of Japs, too.”

  As Ross remembered, “The boat didn’t look like it would make it through another night. That land over there looked pretty good and reasonably attainable. I think we did the right thing. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t stay with the boat.”

  “I’ll take McMahon with me,” said Kennedy. “The rest of you can swim together on this plank. Thom will be in charge.”

  “Will we ever get out of this?” a voice wondered.

  “It can be done,” declared Kennedy. “We’ll do it.”

  At one point McMahon said, “Go on, skipper, you go on. I’ve had it.”

  “Mac,” said Kennedy, “you and I will go together.”

  “I’ll just keep you back,” countered McMahon. “You go on with the other men—don’t worry about me.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” cried Kennedy. “Get your butt in the water!”

  “Skipper,” pleaded the badly burned McMahon, “I can’t make it. Leave me here.”

  “You’re coming, Pappy,” replied the officer. “Only the good die young.”

  McMahon felt death was very near. The prospect of getting back in the salt water with such severe burns must have seemed a needless agony. But Kennedy insisted, eventually persuading him into the water. The PT 109’s skipper grasped the strap of McMahon’s kapok in his teeth, and at about 2 P.M.
began towing him in the direction of the small island, swimming in intervals of fifteen minutes or so, then stopping to rest. “The skipper swam the breaststroke,” remembered McMahon, “carrying me on his back, with the leather strap of my kapok clenched between his teeth.”

  “How do you feel, Mac?” asked Kennedy during one of their breaks.

  McMahon, lying on his back with his face to the sky, replied, “I’m okay, Mr. Kennedy, how about you?” When he asked, “How far do we have to go now?” Kennedy told him they were doing well.

  McMahon was amazed by how cool and confident Kennedy appeared, as if it were a routine maneuver. In later years, Kennedy was fond of quoting Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure,” and in this moment, as well as many others to come during the ordeal, he would live it.

  While Kennedy pulled the wounded McMahon, the other nine sailors gathered around an improvised floatation device they made from two-by-eight wooden planks salvaged from the 37 mm antitank gun mount. The nine men attached their shoes and lantern to one of the timber planks, and began kicking and paddling themselves toward the little island in the far distance. Mauer and Johnston, in particular, clung for their lives to the float, as neither knew how to swim.

  The two officers in the main group, Thom and Ross, alternatively exhorted and encouraged the others. Still, a few of the men lost hope during the journey.

  “If we go on like this, we’ll all be lost,” griped one of the men.

  “As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to stay here,” said Mauer. “You swim by yourself if you want to.”

  Thom countered, “I’m giving orders here. We all stick together.”

  During the arduous three-and-a-half-mile swim, Ross, who had tied his shoes around his head, lost them as he struggled in the water. Maguire had to let go of the heavy tommy gun, which dropped away into the sea toward the ocean floor more than a thousand feet below.

  The longest Olympic swimming event ever staged before then, the men’s 4,000-meter freestyle race, was held only once, in 1900. Fourteen of the twenty eight competitors registered a result of “did not finish,” and the distance was promptly retired. On the afternoon of August 2, 1943, John F. Kennedy covered that same distance, plus a mile more, over open water, behind enemy lines in broad daylight, fully exposed for four hours to any Japanese lookouts or pilots who happened to look his way. All the while, he bit on to a strap and towed a badly burned sailor along with him. Simultaneously he was charged with leading nine other men, including several injured and several non-swimmers, toward safety. It was a performance Kennedy would rarely talk about publicly, but it was an astonishing feat that his crewmen never forgot. On this day, his leadership and example delivered them the hope, however slim, that salvation may be on the horizon.

  After nearly four hours, Kennedy touched solid ground in the shores off Plum Pudding Island, at about 6 P.M., still towing McMahon by the strap gripped in his teeth. The two men’s limbs were slashed and bruised on sharp coral as they struggled through shallow water onto the beach. With his feet still in the water, an exhausted Kennedy planted his face on the dry sand, and rested awhile. He had been in the ocean for much of the last sixteen hours, and he vomited repeatedly due to the salt water he ingested while towing McMahon. Neither he or the badly burned McMahon could walk, so they crawled on their hands and knees across ten feet of beach to take cover in the trees and bushes of the tiny island. The other nine survivors arrived soon after. They lay there behind bushes, recovering from the swim, breathing hard, and gazing at the massive outline of enemy-held Kolombangara Island across the passage.

  The survivors of the PT 109 had joined the grim fraternity of history’s shipwrecked “castaways,” the most famous of whom, British buccaneer Alexander Selkirk, was stranded on another South Pacific island for four years and four months before being rescued in 1709, and inspiring Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe. After a dispute with his captain, Selkirk was abandoned on a rugged 29-square-mile volcanic island 418 miles west of Chile. He was left with a musket, a pistol, gunpowder, a knife and hatchet, navigation tools, a bedroll, a cooking pot, some clothes, small quantities of tobacco, cheese and rum, and a Bible. He survived largely on prayer, crayfish, local vegetables, and his favorite meal of feral goat broth sprinkled with cabbage palm, watercress, turnips, and black pimento pepper. When he was rescued by another British buccaneer ship on February 2, 1709, Selkirk was a wild-looking, bearded creature clothed in goatskins. According to one of his rescuers he “so much forgot his Language for want of Use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seem’d to speak his words by halves.” Selkirk recovered and went back to sea for eleven years, before dying aboard the HMS Weymouth off the coast of Africa. His body was dumped overboard.

  The Death Zone: tiny Plum Pudding Island, the first land reached by the shipwrecked crew of PT 109. (nativeiowan.wordpress.com)

  Curiously, John Kennedy and his crewmen were not the only American castaways in the area, for on the neighboring, much larger Japanese-held island of Arundel, another dramatic saga was unfolding. There, a shipwrecked U.S. Navy lieutenant named Hugh Barr Miller was hiding in the jungle, living off the land and waging a one-man war against vastly superior Japanese forces. After his destroyer, the Strong, was torpedoed a month earlier, on July 4, 1943, Miller scavenged among Japanese barge wrecks for weapons and supplies. He ambushed and wiped out a Japanese patrol with grenades, collected valuable intelligence by observing Japanese movements on nearby Kolombangara, and gathered a satchel full of Japanese documents. A U.S. Marine Corps pilot finally spotted him on the beach on August 16 and realized his red beard marked him as an American. Soon a seaplane landed to pick up Miller, who had lost forty pounds to malnutrition. Under the noses of Japanese forces a mere 2,000 yards away on Kolombangara, Miller struggled out to meet the rubber boat sent over by his rescuers. As he was being evacuated, his arms clutched a cache of Japanese intelligence materials he had captured during his forty-three-day ordeal.

  On the other side of Blackett Strait, on Plum Pudding Island in the late afternoon of August 2, the survivors of PT 109 were just beginning their suffering. At least they were on dry land, they reasoned, and it looked like there were no Japanese troops on the tiny island.

  Suddenly, however, the men were startled to hear the mechanical hum of a vessel approaching.

  They peered through the bushes, and were horrified to see a Japanese barge slowly passing by a few hundred yards off the beach. The American crewmen were in no condition to fight, and they had only a few knives and waterlogged small arms to defend themselves. If the Japanese had seen the PT 109’s explosion and were searching for survivors, the Americans had little chance to avoid capture and the inevitable torment that would follow as POWs.

  But instead of stopping, the barge glided past them in the direction of the Japanese outpost at Gizo Island. The weak and wounded William Johnston wondered aloud, “They wouldn’t come here. What’d they be walking around here for? It’s too small.”

  The survivors slowly fanned out to explore the island, careful to remain hidden behind the foliage.

  Nearby, John Kennedy lay sprawled out in the bushes, exhausted.

  “If I were a king,” wrote the famed American author and journalist Jack London, “the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.” He added, “On second thought, I don’t think I’d have the heart to do it.” In 1907, London attempted to circumnavigate the globe from San Francisco in a 45-foot sailboat, but the voyage ended in the Solomon Islands, where London was attacked by venomous centipedes, contracted skin ulcers and malaria, and fell victim to a mystery illness that paralyzed his hands and sent him into months of recovery in an Australian hospital.

  At first, the survivors of the PT 109 thought their new Solomon Island home offered a tantalizing promise of survival. Measuring a mere one hundred yards by seventy yards, it was a picture-postcard vision of a balmy South Pacific island floating la
nguidly in azure waters, ringed by a wedding-cake-white beach. A miniature forest of tall casuarina trees promised cover from the enemy, tropical birds frolicked in the branches, and a scattered coconuts could be seen. A few dozen yards offshore, where the coral reef dropped off to 1,000-foot depths, the waters were rich with an array of brightly multicolored fish.

  But within minutes of their reconnaissance, it became alarmingly clear to the survivors that if they remained on the island for long, it would kill them. There was no fresh water source on the island. The plant life offered no apparent source of nutrition. There were a handful of coconut-bearing palm trees, but when Kennedy and McMahon cut open some coconuts and tried to eat them, they were sickened. Most of the coconuts they tried turned out to be unripe or inedible.

  The castaways had no way of catching the birds that scampered high in the trees other than by gunfire, and given the difficulty of such a shot and the weakened condition the crewmen were in, this would probably only waste ammunition. There were no apparent land animals to hunt and eat, other than some scrawny, skittering land crabs that no one wanted to risk eating. And there was no obvious way for the survivors to catch the countless fish who abounded just offshore. Compounding their predicament was the fact that PT boat officers and crew received little if any specialized survival training. Their knowledge of escape-and evasion techniques or of the skills needed to live off the land in such an exotic locale would have been rudimentary at best.

  By late afternoon, the second night of their ordeal was approaching, and the men of the PT 109 were at a loss. How could they could summon a rescue without revealing their position to the enemy? Several aircraft flew over them, but the survivors couldn’t make out the planes’ markings, in part because Kennedy ordered the men to lie down in the bushes to avoid being spotted. “We didn’t do anything to try to signal them,” remembered Maguire. “We should have, but we blew it.” Ross recalled, “We were paranoid about being seen by Japanese, so in a sense, we were almost fighting rescue.”