PT 109

by William Doyle

  “How are we going to get out of here?” Kennedy asked the group.

  Without water or food, the island was a death trap. The crew was weakening. McMahon was already badly burned on his arms, hands, and face to the point of immobility, and Johnston was, in Ross’s memory, “in terrible shape, coughing and retching.”

  Kennedy was deeply moved by the sight of his injured crewmen, especially McMahon. Kennedy wrote in his unpublished narrative of the incident that “McMahon’s burns, which covered his face, body, and arms, festered, grew hard, and cracked in the salt water, and his skin peeled off. McMahon, however, did not utter a word of complaint. His only answer when others question how he felt was a weak, but courageous smile.” Kennedy’s executive officer Ensign Lenny Thom recalled of McMahon, “You could see he was suffering such pain that his lips twitched and his hands trembled. You’d watch him and think if you were in his place you’d probably be yelling, ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something?’ But every time you asked Mac how he was doing, he’d wrinkle his face and give you a grin.”

  Once Kennedy fully absorbed the terrible shape his crew was in, he understood he had to act fast. The risks of simply waiting around for rescuers to somehow find them on their forsaken island were too high. At this moment, Kennedy must have felt a deep responsibility to his sailors—they, in turn, looked to him to lead them out of this unfolding nightmare. He decided to take an incredible risk to try to save them. It occurred to Kennedy that for the last several nights, PT boats had patrolled at night through nearby Ferguson Passage. He declared he would swim alone far out into the darkness of Ferguson Passage and try to hail a passing PT boat with their ship’s lantern.

  McMahon believed it was a suicidal idea. He later explained: “In the first place it was a hell of a long way out to the passage. He’d go out there and float. Now in my mind if the boats had seen a light in the water they’d have blown the light out of the water.” Ross also thought it was an absurd idea, and Maguire pleaded with their skipper not to go. But Kennedy insisted. Even though he had just been in the water for more than twelve hours, a harrowing experience he was lucky to have survived just a few hours earlier, he now was planning to return to the ocean, at night, alone for an unknown length of time. Kennedy stripped down to his pants, donned shoes to protect himself from the coral, put on a life jacket, and attached his .38 to a lanyard around his neck.

  “I’ll take the light out and blink at them,” Kennedy told his men. “If I find a boat, I’ll flash the lantern twice. The password [for when he returned] will be ‘Roger’; the answer will be ‘Wilco.’”

  Kennedy waded into the water at dusk, hoping the PT boats mustering at Rendova for patrol would come up through Ferguson Passage that night.

  As the sun set, the shipwrecked sailors of the PT 109, some on the edge of despair, watched their skipper slowly vanish into the ocean.

  8

  LAND OF THE DEAD

  THE SLOPE OF MOUNT VEVE VOLCANO

  AUGUST 2, 1943, 2:27 A.M.

  “He’s going to get court-martialed for that,” thought Benjamin Franklin Nash as he saw the PT 109 erupt in a giant fireball.

  Nash was the sole American soldier on the Japanese-held mountain island of Kolombangara. He was stationed in a secret jungle observation post on a slope of the dormant Mount Veve volcano, 1,400 feet above the 10,000 Japanese troops garrisoned at Vila Plantation.

  Nash and his superior officer and fellow “Coastwatcher,” Sub-Lieutenant Arthur Reginald Evans of the Royal Australian Navy, were watching the final moments of the Battle of Blackett Strait some three miles away through their binoculars, as the phosphorescent wake of a fast-moving ship crossed right into that of a smaller vessel and ignited a fireball flash in the night. Though neither man knew any details of the players involved, Nash was stunned by what he had witnessed, and he felt sure that whoever was on the receiving end of such an explosion was bound to get charged with negligence—if they survived.

  U.S. Army Corporal Benjamin Franklin Nash was a stocky, twenty-six-year-old Army radio technician who grew up on in a conservative, patriotic family on a cattle ranch in Colorado. He was awarded a Legion of Merit and a Bronze Star for his actions under fire inside the control tower of Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field on February 1, 1943, when he remained at his post to guide aircraft takeoffs and landings during the battle’s most violent moments. Now, after convincing his superiors that his radio skills would be an asset to the Coastwatching service, he was on “loan” from the U.S. Army to the Allied Intelligence Bureau as the only American Coastwatcher on the front lines of the Pacific War. The high-risk, cloak-and-dagger nature of the assignment appealed to Nash, who first heard about the Coastwatchers at Guadalcanal. “Their job was to report information on the Japs,” he later explained, “and that just intrigued the hell out of me.”

  Nash and his fellow Coastwatcher, “Reg” Evans, a slightly built, thirty-eight-year-old former steamship accountant and native of Sydney, Australia, had one of the loneliest and riskiest jobs of the Pacific War. Armed only with a few small arms, binoculars, a telescope, a compass, logbook, and canned rations, they and several hundred other Coastwatchers lived behind enemy lines in a network of tiny isolated outposts scattered across a 2,500-mile arc from the west of New Guinea, through the New Hebrides and the Solomons, which alone had twenty-three outposts. Evans was impressed by his new assistant Ben Nash, whom he described as a “quiet, good-humored farming man,” who was “so long in the legs, it was quicker to lead a horse under him than ask him to mount it.”

  The Coastwatchers, overseen by the Royal Australian Navy and the U.S.-run Allied Intelligence Bureau, helped rescue downed Allied pilots and shipwrecked sailors, observed movements of Japanese troops, aircraft, and vessels, and broadcasted coded reports to Allied intelligence stations using bulky “Type 3BZ Teleradio” communications equipment that required a team of a dozen natives to carry. The Coastwatchers’ job was to stay hidden, wait, watch, and report—not to fight. But they were an invaluable asset. By one estimate, 280 American sailors and 321 Allied airmen were rescued behind enemy lines with the help of the Coastwatchers during the Solomon Islands campaign.

  American Coastwatcher Benjamin Franklin Nash. He and his partner, Australian Reginald Evans, were startled by a flash of light in the ocean at 2:27 A.M. on August 2, 1943. (Family of Benjamin Franklin Nash)

  Many of the Coastwatchers were Australian nationals who had been living in the islands before war—settlers, plantation managers, and missionaries—and who chose to remain behind the lines. The force also included some New Zealanders and British nationals, and in the Solomon Islands, three native Coastwatchers drawn from the local population. There was just one American, Frank Nash.

  Of the roughly 700 people who served in the Coastwatching service during the war, only 38 were killed, a tribute to the protection given them by local people—as well as the often impossibly remote locations of their jungle hideaways. “The coastwatchers’ working conditions were spooky, lonely, and dreadful,” wrote PT 105’s skipper, Richard Keresey. “The coastwatcher hid in the hills at a spot with a broad view of the waters of the slot where enemy ships could be seen. Except for the Melanesians [native people], in whose friendship his life depended, he was there alone. He survived mainly on the meager fare of the island. Since their observation posts were seldom near prewar buildings, the coastwatchers often lived in hastily built shacks overrun with rats, and they suffered inadequate netting in their battles with mosquitoes and flies.”

  On the island of Kolombangara, meaning “Water Lord,” Reg Evans and Frank Nash lived in a bamboo hut hidden high up on a mountain slope amid a jungle so rugged that even the few hundred beach-dwelling island natives on the island almost never ventured far inland. The natives built for them two treetop lookout posts, facing west and south, offering them full coverage of Blackett Strait, Ferguson Passage, and the nearby Japanese garrison below at Vila Plantation.

  Every night, Evans and Nash scanned the
ir surroundings from their mountain perch, making notes for broadcast to their superiors in the Allied Intelligence Bureau at the Coastwatching base station on Guadalcanal. In summer 1943, Japanese barges were frantically attempting to reinforce garrisons at Munda and Kolombangara’s Vila Plantation. Nash recalled, “The barges would come in on the dark side of the moon, and stay as close to the islands as they could, so the PT boats and destroyers in the channel couldn’t see them. If you’re on the island side looking at the ocean, you can see a silhouette anywhere,” but if “you’re on the ocean side looking in, you can’t see anything.”

  The previous fall Coastwatchers had secured their reputation by delivering critical intelligence that turned the tide of the Battle of Guadalcanal, inspiring U.S. Navy Admiral of the Fleet William “Bull” Halsey to declare, “The Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific.” Halsey added, “I could get down on my knees every night and thank God for [Australian Coastwatchers] Commander Eric Feldt.”

  The Coastwatchers, in turn, placed their lives in the hands of the Solomon Island native people, who were remarkably loyal and helpful to the Allies. They scouted locations to hide the Coastwatchers, frequently moved them to avoid detection, staged guerrilla attacks against Japanese targets, and fed the Allies a constant flow of intelligence on Japanese movements. Australian Coastwatcher John Keenan recalled: “If it wasn’t for local help I don’t know what we could’ve done, we wouldn’t have lasted 10 minutes.” Many local men and police constables were deputized as armed and unarmed scouts into the British Solomon Islands Defence Force.

  Before the war, relations between the British colonial authorities and settlers and local people in the Solomons were often correct but distant, and marred by white attitudes of racial superiority. But the arrival of frequently heavy-handed and abusive Japanese troops to the islands in 1942 strengthened the natives’ loyalty to the Allies, and when American forces began retaking the islands, these attitudes were cemented further. Overall, the Americans seemed relatively less hierarchical or class-and-color conscious than the British, and they made a strong positive impression on the Solomon Islanders, with black and white U.S. troops working, eating, and relaxing side by side with the islanders. One local scout, John Kari, said the Americans “really went inside the local people,” and another Solomon Islander, David Welchman Gegeo, who helped conduct a wide range of oral histories with islanders who lived through the war, observed that the Americans cultivated a mythic image as “generous, egalitarian, wealthy, audacious and rescuers of the Solomon Islands.” As a result, Solomon Island natives were highly disposed to help American servicemen in peril.

  When the sun came up on the morning of August 2, Coastwatcher Reg Evans spotted debris drifting in Blackett Strait close to where he and Nash had seen the explosion hours earlier. Using the teleradio gear that Nash meticulously maintained, the two broadcast a dispatch to the Coastwatching office at Guadalcanal: “All four [Japanese warships] went west [at] 0220,” and “small vessel possibly barge afire off Gatere and still visible.”

  Evans received a response at 9:30 A.M. that read: “PT Boat 109 lost in action in Blackett Strait two miles SW Meresu Cove. Crew of twelve [sic]. Request any information.”

  At 11:15 A.M. Evans replied, “No survivors so far. Object still floating between Meresu and Gizo.”

  The response: “Definite report PT destroyed last night Blackett Strait between Vanga Vanga [on the coast of Kolombangara] and group of islands SE of Gizo. Was seen burning at 1 AM [sic] The crew numbers twelve possibility of some survivors landing—either Vanga Vanga or islands.” (Barney Ross was unaccounted for in the total.)

  That afternoon, Evans reported, “This coast being searched. If any landed other side will be picked up by Gizo [native] scouts. Object now drifting toward Nusatupi Island.”

  Evans put the word out to his network of native scouts to look for survivors, but no sign of them was found along the Kolombangara coast.

  John Kennedy and his crew had fallen off the face of the Earth—or at least that’s how it seemed to the PT boat officers at the Rendova base.

  After daybreak on the morning August 2, when PT 157 skipper Bud Liebenow heard the news at the daily boat captain’s meeting that the PT 109 had disappeared with all hands, he was startled to realize that his tent mate was gone. Until now, Liebenow had not connected the flash he spotted in the distance after 2 A.M. to the total loss of a PT boat. “Of course we had lost boats before, but in those cases there had been some of the crew around to tell how it had happened,” Liebenow recalled. “This seemed to be a total disappearance with no survivors.”

  At the morning officers’ meeting, one of the PT boat skippers asked Commander Thomas Warfield, “Do you want to send some boats back to look [for the PT 109]?”

  “What do you think?” asked Warfield, looking at Potter and Lowrey, the two boat captains who had been nearest Kennedy. “Is there any point in going back?”

  “There’s no chance they’re alive,” declared Lowrey, skipper of the PT 162, the boat closest to the PT 109 at the time of the collision. “The boat went up in a ball of fire.”

  Bud Liebenow remembered, “As far as I know, everybody believed Lowrey when he reported at the boat captains meeting that the 109 was lost, and all hands were dead.”

  Warfield moved to cut off any discussion of a seaborne search, which angered at least two of the skippers, including Ensign Bill Battle, who like Liebenow was a tent mate of Kennedy. He wanted to return to Blackett Strait immediately and conduct a daylight search, and in fact had already begun fueling-up for the rescue mission. Dick Keresey, skipper of the PT 105, agreed. He recalled, “There was a whole group of us who wanted to do this. We figured that if we didn’t take torpedoes, we’d be pretty light and we could really travel fast. We could run in there at high speed before the Japs woke up to what we were doing and run back and forth and find them. But the base commander [Warfield] was not too impressed with this idea. It was extremely dangerous. It exposed a lot of people. I certainly don’t fault him for saying it would be hopeless.”

  Warfield cut them off and ended the discussion. There would be no seaborne rescue mission. Bill Battle was ordered to stop fueling his boat and tie it up back at its berth.

  Years later, Keresey recalled bitterly, “The tragedy was that the comrades of the 109 did not go back to look for survivors, even though we saw the search as hopeless. We had not yet learned that hopeless searches should still be made, so that those of us who still had to go out night after night would know that, if we did not return, our comrades would look for us and would fight to save us beyond any reasonable expectation. We should have gone back.” Keresey recalled that of the litany of mistakes made during the Battle of Blackett Strait—the withdrawal of all the radar-equipped boats, the rule of radio silence, the orders being issued by Warfield from a bunker dozens of miles away from the action—the worst decision was not to have PT boats return to look for survivors.

  Keresey nonetheless did not press the point. As he later explained, he and the others were not thinking straight. They had been up for more than twenty-four hours, enduring the daylight Japanese bombing raid on their base, making two fruitless early morning mass torpedo attacks on the Tokyo Express, and in the case of Keresey and his crew, enduring enemy shelling and float plane attack. Keresey recalled, “All this adds up to a fatigue so severe that thought processes start shutting down. That morning I did not think about the consequence for me, for all boat captains, of failing to look for survivors of the 109. The gain in going back is in the message it sends. Even if you are seen to disappear in a ball of flame, your friends will come looking for you. We should have gone back.”

  In 2015, PT 107 veteran crewman John Sullivan argued the proper time for a search would have been immediately after the PT 109’s explosion around 2:30 A.M., an explosion that was visible, at least in the distance, by several of the PT boats remaining in Blackett Strait. He said, “Nobody went over to look for
survivors, nobody. I’ve just thought of that in the last three or four years—why didn’t we go over there and look for survivors? We should have! But we didn’t.”

  Ensign Paul Fay wrote a letter to his sister informing her of the death of Kennedy and his crew: “George Ross has lost his life for a cause that he believed in stronger than anyone of us, because he was an idealist in the purest sense. Jack Kennedy, the Ambassador’s son, was on the same boat and also lost his life. The man who said that the cream of a nation is lost in war can never be accused of making an overstatement of a very cruel fact.”

  For the next week, according to Dick Keresey, “I never thought of them nor were they ever mentioned. This was normal; when a man died in combat, he was banished from mind and conversation as if he’d never lived. It made no difference even if he’d been a close friend. Kennedy, Thom, and Ross had been consigned to the dead.” Nobody ever talked about who was gone. “That was a subject that wasn’t discussed,” according to Keresey. “You just did not sit around and say what nice guys they were and how you missed them. You kept all that to yourself. And even in yourself you tried to forget it as soon as possible. You couldn’t think about that. You had too many other things to think about.”

  Commander Thomas Warfield, however, evidently had not totally abandoned hope of finding Kennedy and his crew. Probably spurred to action by Coastwatcher Reg Evans’s reports of floating wreckage, Warfield is believed to have dispatched several New Zealand P-40 fighter aircraft to fly over Gizo and Blackett Strait to look for survivors of the PT 109. In the late afternoon of August 2, a formation of P-40s apparently spotted boat wreckage, but no survivors were visible. By then, the shipwrecked PT 109 crewmen were hiding below the trees and bushes of their island refuge.