PT skipper Arthur Berndtson recalled the search planes “flew up over Blackett Strait, saw the bow section floating toward Kolombangara, but said there was nobody on it.”
“It was depressing news.”
John Kennedy stood alone. Partly submerged on a coral reef, he gazed into the darkness.
He thought of a warning one of his crewmen had offered him before he headed out—“these barracuda will come up under a swimming man and eat his testicles.” With this frightful image in mind, Kennedy pushed into the water at about 6:30 P.M. and quickly flipped over into a backstroke. He made it to a tiny piece of land a half mile to the southeast, a sandbar called Leorava Island, which sported a single tree and a patch of bushes. He then crawled and stumbled along a reef that jutted into Ferguson Passage, hoping to hail a passing PT boat on patrol. Stopping periodically to rest on the reef, he cut his knees and shins on the sharp coral.
Kennedy’s swim may have been a quixotic, needle-in-a-haystack venture, but he evidentially concluded the alternative—staying put on the island—was hopeless. As skipper of the lost PT 109, he bore responsibility for their predicament, and he must have felt that the burden of getting them out of the death zone rested on his shoulders alone. To remain on Plum Pudding amounted to waiting for starvation or capture. Action was needed, and fast, however long the odds. Perhaps so, but Kennedy’s movements also carried severe risks, as historians Clay and Joan Blair reasoned: “The PTs entered Ferguson Passage on full alert. The men manning the guns were, to put it mildly, trigger-happy, as who wouldn’t be in enemy waters at night? Suppose Kennedy had seen or heard them, shined his lantern on them, and fired his pistol? The reaction might well have been a reflexive hail of small arms fire in Kennedy’s direction.” JFK must have appreciated those risks as well as anyone when he entered the water that night.
When Kennedy reached Ferguson Passage around 9 P.M. after a marathon swim of more than two miles, he treaded water and poised himself to fire three pistol rounds and flash his lantern light to attract attention. But there were no signs of PT boats. Instead, he saw flares being dropped by Japanese seaplanes in the far distance, over Gizo Island.
Gripping his lantern, Kennedy tied his shoes to his life jacket so he could paddle better, kept treading water, and searched in vain for rescue. The current apparently began pulling him laterally into Blackett Strait, then in a wide arc back to Ferguson Passage. His fatigue intensified, and his shoes slipped away from him into the ocean.
Eventually, Kennedy gave up and struggled back toward Plum Pudding Island, aided this time by the current. After midnight, Kennedy’s men thought they heard him faintly shouting the code word “Roger! Roger!” and believed they saw his lantern flashing. Assuming their skipper had found a PT boat, they were jubilant and rushed out to greet Kennedy. Lenny Thom splashed into the water, yelling, “Jack! Jack!”
But no rescue was coming, and Kennedy, still some distance from the shore, was tiring and helpless to fight the strong ocean current that threatened to pull him past the tiny island. Kennedy drifted away into the emptiness.
Back on the island, with Kennedy gone, his executive officer Ensign Lenny Thom was in charge, and according to several crewman he rallied and inspired them. The outlook, however, was bleak. They could find no fresh water on the island, even when they burrowed down in the ground. When a light rain fell, the men lay on their backs and tried to catch the drops in their mouths. The men licked water off the leaves, and realized the source of its bitter taste. Thousands of birds had appeared after dark in a hail of noise, and added to the island’s already thick coating of bird waste. The men soon dubbed their new home “Bird Island.” That night few of the crewmen could sleep.
In the morning, the hungry, thirsty survivors despaired when there was no sign of Kennedy. It seemed he was lost, swallowed up in the vast ocean. McMahon’s burn wounds were increasingly painful, and Johnston was semiconscious. Harris busied himself with an experiment to disassemble and try to lubricate a pistol with coconut meat, but this only gummed up the weapon instead.
Kennedy floated in the ocean in his trancelike state through the rest of the night. When dawn came after 6 A.M. on August 3, he worried he had lost his mind, because when he looked around, it seemed he had somehow wound up on the reef off the sandbar of tiny Leorava Island, close to where he had started his journey the night before, around the confluence of Blackett Strait and Ferguson Passage. Now barefoot, he suffered cuts and abrasions as he staggered and scrambled along the coral reef. Groping his way onto the sandbar, he collapsed into sleep.
At noon a cry went up.
“Here’s Kirksey!” shouted a jubilant Maguire, mistaking the figure coming toward them for one of the two sailors originally lost in the crash. But it wasn’t the doomed Kirksey; rather it turned out to be an exhausted, retching John F. Kennedy returning from his fruitless swim over the reefs. He had slept until the late morning, then summoned the strength to swim back a half mile from Leorava to Plum Pudding Island to rejoin his crew. Bearded, hair matted, eyes bloodshot, stripped of any trace of privilege, Kennedy fell in a heap on the beach. Ross and Thom dragged him into the bushes, where he fell into a feverish sleep. He had been in the water for some thirty out of the thirty-six hours since the collision.
Kennedy’s harrowing night-long, solitary ordeal in the swirling blackness of Blackett Strait had been desperate, courageous, and perhaps heroic. But it was also futile, and it could easily have cost him his life from exhaustion and drowning, and left his crew without their commanding officer. Nevertheless, their present location was a deathtrap; doing nothing was a poor option. That afternoon, when Kennedy awoke and his crew gathered around, he looked up at Ross and said, “Barney, you try it tonight,” before again passing out.
Ensign Ross thought venturing out alone to try to hail a PT boat was a hopeless idea, but he obeyed Kennedy’s order. At four in the afternoon on August 3, he swam toward Ferguson Passage onto a section of the reef he could place his foot on, desperately trying to memorize every detail of his surroundings so he wouldn’t get lost on the way back. The current pushed him off the reef, but he struggled back into position. In horror, he spotted sand sharks measuring several feet long. When dusk came, Ross waded toward the passage in hopes of summoning patrolling PT boats. He bolstered his courage by recalling Kennedy’s swim the previous night, repeating the mantra, “If he can do it I can do it.”
Ross apparently treaded water for a short while, pulled out the .38 pistol, and fired three shots into the air at intervals, as a test. The water flattened the noise of the firearm. And for the second night in a row, the PT boats were not patrolling Ferguson Passage, but were instead off the island of Vella Lavella, where Lieutenant Commander Warfield had sent five PT boats on a barge-hunting mission. A column of Japanese barges engaged the PTs in a firefight, killing George Cookman of the PT 107 and wounding two other American sailors.
Ross spent most of the night clinging to the reef. In the morning he made landfall at the Leorava islet, where Kennedy wound up the night before, and likewise collapsed in sleep.
Lieutenant Reginald Evans, the Australian Coastwatcher, spent part of August 2 and 3 following up on Rendova’s requests for information on the lost PT boat, and tracking what looked like possible debris from the collision.
Among the native scouts under the command of Coastwatcher Evans were two young men named Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, both about nineteen years old.
At the same time John Kennedy was making his futile swim for help, Gasa and Kumana had spotted Japanese reinforcement troops landing at Kequlavata Bay on Gizo Island. They made the observation from their scout camp on Sepo Island, which was between Plum Pudding and Gizo. Soon they headed toward Kolombangara to deliver the intelligence to Evans.
Along the way, Gasa and Kumana picked through some washed-up debris near Bambanga Island, including a box containing shaving gear and a letter signed by PT 109 crewman Raymond Albert. Stopping briefly at the village of Wana Wana,
they gave the items to senior scout Benjamin Kevu, who spoke and read English, but they didn’t connect the letter to the PT 109. When they reported to Evans at Kolombangara, the Coastwatcher asked him if they’d seen any survivors of a PT boat, and they said no. Sending them back to Sepo, Evans told them to be on the alert for survivors. The next morning, August 3, Evans messaged Rendova, “No survivors found at Gizo.”
At 11:30 A.M. on August 3, Evans received a message from Rendova asking, “Where was hulk of burning PT boat last seen. If still floating request complete destruction [presumably to eliminate any codebooks or clear it as an obstacle to navigation]. Also request information if any Japs were on or near floating hulk.”
At 5:05 that afternoon, Evans reported back, “Cannot confirm object seen was floating hulk of PT. Object last seen approx two miles NE Bambanga, drifting south. Not seen since PM Second. P Fortys flew low over it and Gizo scouts have no knowledge object or any Japs that vicinity.”
By Wednesday, August 4, there was still no hint of rescue for the men of PT 109. Japanese and Allied planes clashed in dogfights in the distant sky. The survivors again hunkered down in the bushes to avoid being spotted.
Intense thirst slashed at the exhausted castaways of the PT 109. They had eaten nothing since Sunday afternoon except a few unripe coconuts, and drank only what drops of rainwater they could gather. “Hunger didn’t seem to bother me too much,” remembered Gerard Zinser; “thirst was our main discomfort.” Zinser was also tormented by thoughts of his wife not knowing what had happened to him, once the Navy reported him as missing. For his part, John Maguire couldn’t shake the feeling that the Japanese had already spotted them and would soon take them into captivity.
Kennedy drew his two officers aside to tell them privately how furious he was at the American commanding officers at Rendova for apparently abandoning them. To the enlisted men, however he projected an attitude of confidence and made occasional reassuring wisecracks to keep their spirits up. At one point, Kennedy announced exuberantly, “We’re going to get back if I have to tow this island back!”
“What I would give for a can of grapefruit juice!” Kennedy quipped to Zinser. JFK himself recalled, “I was always thirsty. Guess I drank quite a bit of salt water. Somehow I couldn’t get pineapple juice out of my mind and at the time would willingly have paid a year’s pay for one can of it.”
According to Barney Ross, Kennedy “never allowed us to sit around and mope.” They “kept going” thanks to his leadership.
Their most urgent worry, according to Ross, was the severely burned McMahon. “Pappy lay in the water, and the salt water was apparently good for him,” despite the initial pain it caused to his wounds. “He kept moving his fingers so that he wouldn’t lose the use of his hands,” Ross remembered.
But Kennedy knew their outlook was increasingly grim. Zinser’s arms were burned and in urgent need of medical attention. Pappy McMahon was in terrible condition, with hideous-looking burn wounds and scabs on his hands and eyelids. If his wounds became infected, McMahon would die before their eyes. Everyone else was growing weaker from thirst, hunger, and exhaustion.
Time was running out.
Somehow, they had to find food and water. To have any chance of being rescued, they figured they had to get closer to Ferguson Passage, past which lay the Rendova PT base. From Plum Pudding Island they could see Olasana—another, somewhat larger islet a mile and three-quarters to the southeast and closer to Ferguson Passage—and it appeared to have plenty of coconut trees. But the men were wary of the long open-water crossing—and afraid the larger island might also contain Japanese troops.
Kennedy decided it was worth the risk. “We’re going to that small one,” he said, pointing at Olasana. “We’ll have to swim for it. Everyone on the log [the planks from the 37 mm gun mount]. I’ll take McMahon.”
They slowly waded into the water and swam off as a group for Olasana, fighting a strong current. After several hours, Kennedy came ashore first, once again pulling McMahon by gripping the injured man’s lifejacket strap in his teeth. When Raymond Albert arrived ahead of some of the others, he yelled back to them so loudly they feared he might have alerted any Japanese on the island, and the men were furious at him.
Once they were all ashore, the eleven men gathered in the shelter of the bushes and discussed in hushed tones whether they should search the island for the enemy. “Why go looking for trouble?” concluded one of the men. And so they stayed put, in a roughly fifty-yard patch of the island.
“The second island was much bigger,” remembered Harris. “We were really concerned that there might be some Japs on it. We kept a watch all the time.”
Yet again, the shipwrecked sailors of the PT 109 were thwarted. While no Japanese appeared to occupy the island, neither was there fresh water, and the available coconuts in the tiny patch of the island they dared explore sickened a few of the men. Barney Ross tried eating a little snail, but he reported it tasted awful, scaring everyone else off from trying another.
That night, August 4, the weather was too foul for anyone to swim out to Ferguson Passage to try to intercept and hail a PT boat. In keeping with the crew’s horrible luck, this unfortunately turned out to be the first night that PT boats returned through Ferguson Passage into Blackett Strait; six boats were patrolling in Blackett Strait by 9:30 P.M.
The next day, Thursday, August 5, one of the disheartened castaways lamented that they were all going to die.
“Aw, shut up,” countered William Johnston, echoing a recent exhortation by Kennedy. “You can’t die. Only the good die young.”
“You guys make me sore,” griped Johnston when some in the group began praying. “You didn’t spend ten cents in church in ten years, then all of a sudden you’re in trouble and you see the light.”
Kennedy and Ross were so desperate to procure food and water for their group they decided to make the hour-long swim over to yet another small island located a half mile to the southeast, called Naru (also known as Gross Island or Cross Island), despite observing the ominous sight of a New Zealand P-40 fighter aircraft making a strafing run on the island.
That afternoon, the two American officers surfaced on the four-hundred-yard-wide Naru Island and scampered into the bushes.
They could see the outline of Rendova Peak, agonizingly visible just thirty-eight miles south.
Soon, they explored around the island and were delighted to find a box containing some thirty little bags of Japanese crackers and candy, a fifty-gallon catchment drum of potable rainwater, and a small, damaged one-man canoe. It wasn’t much, but after more than three days of exhausting swims and living on little more than a few rotten coconuts and rain drops, it was a victory.
Then Kennedy and Ross froze.
They saw two men out on the ocean paddling a dugout canoe, heading directly toward them.
9
THE HAND OF FATE
NARU ISLAND, AUGUST 5, 1943
4:00 PM
Earlier that afternoon, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana spotted boat wreckage on a reef south of Naru Island, and they paddled their canoe over to investigate.
Their two-man scout team was one of five such tandems under the supervision of Coastwatcher Reg Evans. They were linked by an ingenious network of relief canoes and relay paddlers that formed a communication line between scouts, Coastwatchers, native villages, and Allied outposts in the region.
It was a vital—and demanding—job. Earlier in the war, Gasa helped summarily execute a Japanese pilot who had parachuted out of a disabled plane, and on other occasions, he captured and shuttled Japanese prisoners into Allied custody. “We scouts would paddle out to the small islands—especially this island called Naru,” Gasa related in a 1967 oral history. “We would go to stay on the island watching for planes and ships. We would usually stay for one week, when two men would come to replace us, so that Ferguson Passage was always watched. We would also paddle around [the Japanese-held island of] Gizo, always two of us in each cano
e.”
On this day, after they sighted the remains of a boat run aground on a reef, evidently the remnants of a Japanese barge, they decided to climb aboard to investigate and see what they could salvage. “We found a jacket, a long sword, and a tommy gun,” Gasa recounted. “We were about to carry them off when we saw a man watching us from the shore of Naru Island, one of the many small islands in Ferguson Strait. We thought the man was a Japanese and started to paddle off in the opposite direction to get back to Sepo Island.” In fact, the man was John F. Kennedy. But from their distant vantage point, the man’s unkempt, sunburned appearance and his proximity to a Japanese shipwreck strongly suggested to Gasa that the man was a stranded Japanese soldier or sailor.
By now Kennedy and Ross realized the black men in the canoe were not Japanese, and they watched helplessly as their potential saviors slid away.
But soon something happened in the scouts’ canoe, a perfectly ordinary occurrence that may have affected, in a subtle yet profound way, the subsequent course of history. Simply stated, Biuku Gasa’s throat was dry. He was thirsty. He wanted a coconut—to cut it open and drink the sweet milk.
And so he and his partner changed direction. Instead of heading straight for their home base at Sepo Island, they took a detour to the usually uninhabited island of Olasana.
“We stopped at the next island [Olasana] because I wanted to drink a coconut,” recalled Gasa.
Solomon Islands Scouts Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana. (Elliot Erwitt, Magnum Photos)
As Gasa waded toward the shore, he was startled to see a man crawling out from the bushes. “Eroni,” he said to his companion, “a Japanese here!” The two scouts pushed their canoe away and prepared to escape.
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