The man stood up, waved, and beckoned to the scouts in English, “Come!” “No,” declared Gasa, “you’re Japanese!” “Come, come,” said the man, who was joined by a companion stepping out of the brush, “I’m American, not Japanese.” Phrases of “Pidgin” (a fragmentary mix of English and local languages) and English were shouted as the castaways tried to explain they were Americans who had lost their PT boat, but the words seemed so broken to Gasa that he could barely understand them. Despite Coastwatcher Evans’s recent order to be on the lookout for survivors of a sunken PT boat, Gasa still was convinced the bedraggled men were Japanese. The two scouts understood little English.
One of the Americans held up his arm and said, “Look at my skin—its white.”
“No matter skin white or skin red—you Japan!” a skeptical Gasa called back. “No. We are afraid.”
“Where are you going?” asked an American. Gasa and Kumana gave a false destination.
“Are you two native scouts?”
“No,” replied Gasa and Kumana.
“Are you helping the British or the Japs?”
“No one!” replied the scouts, “We are not helping any country.” The scouts tried to push away from the shore with their spears, but were instead carried toward the Americans by a strong current.
“Then another white man crawled out from the bushes” and walked straight toward them, recalled Gasa. It was Lenny Thom, the strapping ensign of the PT 109, sporting a striking blond beard that marked him clearly as a non-Japanese. At first, Kumana reasoned the Nordic-looking Thom must be a German.
“Do you know John Kari from Rendova?” asked Thom. This question proved to be the decisive icebreaker. John Kari was a prominent Solomon Island scout leader who was instrumental in the rescue of many Americans in the area.
“Yes, I know him,” replied Gasa, “He’s living at my village.” “At this point I began to believe the soldiers and to understand what had happened,” remembered Gasa. “We went ashore, and our canoe was hidden in the bushes. We were taken to where the other crew members were hidden. It was then about four P.M. Some of the men had burns on their faces. We were told not to shake hands with them because they couldn’t move.”
Gasa and Kumana shared with the shipwrecked sailors the yams and cigarettes they had with them. The men of the PT 109, according to Kumana, were overjoyed and deeply moved to meet the two potential angels of their deliverance. “Some of them cried, and some of them came and shook our hands,” Kumana recalled. Though several of the crew seemed more ravenous for nicotine than they did for food, the PT 109 castaways were fortunate to be given yams as emergency nourishment, as the root vegetable is a highly nutritious plant loaded with carbohydrates, fiber, potassium, as well as other vitamins and minerals. To Ensign Lenny Thom, however, time seemed to be running out, especially when the scouts pointed to Naru Island, where Kennedy and Ross were, and reported there could be Japanese there. Thom decided he and Ray Starkey would immediately set off for Rendova in the scout canoe, with Biuku Gasa as the pilot. Gasa declared it a bad idea. The boat was too small to carry the former Ohio State lineman Thom and two others, he argued. But Thom insisted, and the three men donned life jackets and set off paddling into the night sea toward Rendova, which was barely visible in daylight from their island prison.
Ensign Leonard Thom: Kennedy’s second-in-command on the PT 109 had been a football star in Ohio. (National Archives)
They made it into Ferguson Passage, where the three men struggled in the dark. The wind whipped up in a churning sea, and waves threatened to capsize the little boat. They were forced to retreat to Olasana.
Thwarted, Thom decided he had to send the two scouts to Rendova the next day by themselves. He took a pencil stub that Maguire had managed to keep in his pocket through the ordeal, and scribbled a detailed distress message on a piece of scrap paper someone had found on the island, a blank invoice, No. 2860, of the Gizo office of the Burns Philp inter-island steamship company—the same company Coastwatcher Reg Evans worked for prior to the war.
The message contained radio signals and call signs, to minimize the chances that Rendova would suspect a Japanese trick:
TO: COMMANDING OFFICER–OAK 0
From: Crew P. T. 109 (Oak 14)
Subject: Rescue of 11 (eleven) men lost since Sunday, Aug 1st in enemy action. Native knows our position & will bring P.T. boat back to small islands of Ferguson Passage off Naru IS.
A small boat (outboard or oars) is needed to take men off as some are seriously burned.
Signal at night–three dashes( ~ ~ -) Password - Roger -Answer - Wilco
If attempted at day time—advise air coverage or a PBY could set down. Please work out suitable plan & act immediately. Help is urgent & in sore need.
Rely on native boys to any extent
L J Thom
Ens. U.S.N.R. Exec 109
Once again, the crew of the PT 109 collapsed in sleep on a remote island in enemy-held waters. A few nervous members of the crew were suspicious of the nearby Gasa and Eroni and stayed awake to watch them.
Although the PT 109 was only a sad memory for its crew, it was still a preoccupation for Coastwatchers Reg Evans and Frank Nash. At 9:40 A.M. that day, Evans radioed his Coastwatcher base station: “Similar object now in Ferguson Passage drifting south. Position half mile SE Gross [Naru] Is. Cannot be investigated from here for at least twenty-four hours. Now on reef south Gross Is.” And still later: “Hulk still on reef but expect will move with tonight’s tide. Destruction from this end now most unlikely. In present position no canoes could approach through surf.” In late afternoon on August 5, Evans received a report that a “hulk” was examined by an overflying plane and the pilot concluded that it was so “badly damaged it was not worth wasting ammunition on.”
It was the last-ever sighting of the PT 109.
After dark on the night of August 5, Kennedy paddled the damaged yet seaworthy canoe that he and Ross had found that afternoon, and headed out into Ferguson Passage to try to summon help. Once again, he found none, so he decided to return to Naru Island, pick up the supplies he and Ross had salvaged earlier in the day, then venture back to his men on Olasana, using the canoe to tow the drum of drinking water. Ross meanwhile stayed on Naru, fast asleep.
After midnight, the crew on Olasana was alerted by shouts from Kennedy that he was making landfall. They called out to him jubilantly: “We’re saved! Two locals have found us!”
When Kennedy absorbed the news of the scouts’ arrival, he ran to Gasa and Kumana and threw his arms around them. Gasa found it easy to talk to Kennedy, he recalled, “because he knew Pidgin.” Kennedy asked if it was Gasa and Kumana whom he had seen off Naru the day before, and as Gasa recounted, “We said ‘yes.’ And he said, ‘Why didn’t we come when he waved?’ We answered that we thought he was Japanese.”
As the fourth day of the ordeal dawned, the crewmen discovered that during the night, one of the men had secretly guzzled all the drinkable water in the can Kennedy had recovered. When they found out, his colleagues swore at him furiously, though they would never reveal the culprit’s name to anyone outside the crew. Despair returned. It was as if the loss of the water had brought them back to the reality of how precarious their situation still was.
Spotting the rosary beads draped around John Maguire’s neck, William Johnston asked, “McGuire, give that necklace a working over.”
McGuire replied, “Yes, I’ll take care of all you fellows.”
On the morning of August 6, Kennedy wanted to return to Naru to try to hail passing Allied ships or planes. “He was going to swim,” recounted Gasa, “but we said we would take him by canoe. We put him in the bottom of our canoe and covered him with coconut leaves.” On the way, they intercepted Ross, who was swimming back toward Olasana, and took him over to Naru as well. Once on Naru, the natives revealed to the Americans a secret cache containing a two-man canoe.
The Americans were still nearly forty miles inside enemy waters,
and there seemed to be no sure way to evacuate the eleven men in the crew as the available canoes barely had room for four. They had to get a rescue message to friendly lines. But if the scouts got to Rendova without a written message from the PT 109 skipper, they might not be believed. By then, Kennedy and his crew could be dead from starvation, or prisoners of war of the Japanese.
“Kennedy said that he wished to send news to Rendova to tell about the shipwreck,” recalled Gasa, “but none of us had paper or pencils.”
The magnitude of their predicament seemed to hit Kennedy hard. “Biuku, I’m sorry for my crew. There’s no paper.”
Considering a nearby coconut tree, Gasa had an idea—a brainstorm that, in combination with Thom’s small distress note, offered the possibility of salvation of the crew of the PT 109. He explained, “I remembered that it is possible to cut a message into a piece of coconut husk.” Gasa asked his partner Kumana to climb a tree and fetch a coconut for the group to drink, and to save the husk. Showing it to Kennedy, he explained that residents of the Solomon Islands had another way of sending messages: “We natives have lots of ‘papers’—you can write a message inside this husk of coconut.”
Kennedy made a test carving on the husk and tried in vain to rub it off. It worked. Kennedy gazed in wonder at Biuku Gasa. “Jesus Christ, Biuku,” he said. “How did you think of this?”
An impressed John F. Kennedy came over to Gasa, and, according to the scout, “took my head with both hands, twisting it slowly and studying it.” Kennedy then grasped the knife and scratched a brief message on the coconut husk:
NAURO ISL
NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT
HE CAN PILOT
11 ALIVE
NEED SMALL BOAT
KENNEDY
The group returned to Olasana, where Gasa and Kumana were-given the small paper distress note that had been scribbled by Lenny Thom, to accompany the coconut, apparently to serve as a backup message.
Kennedy’s distress note, carved with a knife into a coconut. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
Kennedy and his crew watched Gasa and Kumana paddle off to the horizon. They had no way of knowing if the natives would make it through to Rendova.
The odds may well have looked bleak. It would be a nearly forty-mile journey through enemy waters by two unarmed teenagers in a small canoe, in an area where Japanese aircraft and surface craft roamed widely. Their risks of being strafed or captured by the enemy were high. If the two natives were detained by the Japanese, the coconut distress message from Kennedy that they carried, as well as the paper note written by Thom, could lead a Japanese force directly to the PT 109 crew. The two young men were, Kennedy would have realized, the slenderest reeds of hope to cling to. Still, the natives offered Kennedy his only visible avenue of salvation.
Gasa and Eroni set off for Rendova, stopping first at Wana Wana, an island south of Kolombangara and seven miles east of Naru, where they linked up with Benjamin Kevu, a senior Solomon Islands scout under Coastwatcher Evans’ supervision. Unlike Gasa and Eroni, he spoke excellent English. At this point, Ben Kevu apparently took three steps that sharply boosted the odds of a successful rescue of the PT 109’s crew. He assigned a bigger canoe to the two scouts for their remaining journey; he added to the mission a third man, John Kari—the same John Kari whose common acquaintance to the scouts and Lenny Thom convinced the scouts that the crew were Americans—and Kevu alerted nearby Coastwatcher Reg Evans of the discovery of the PT 109 crew. Evans was in the process of separating from American Coastwatcher Benjamin Franklin Nash on Kolombangara and relocating to Gomu, a small island just north of Wana Wana, to get a better view of events in lower Blackett Strait and Ferguson Passage.
Pushing off from Wana Wana, Gasa, Kumana, and Kari set out in rough seas to attempt their all-night canoe journey.
On the night of August 6, a scout sent by Ben Kevu linked up with Evans at his new secret surveillance post buried in the jungle of Gomu Island, and told him of Gasa and Kumana’s astonishing discovery. Eleven lost American sailors were found, some wounded and all starving and dehydrated, on Naru and Olasana Islands.
For four days, Evans had been tracking the fragmentary possibility that the PT 109, or pieces of it, might have survived the explosion he witnessed early in the morning of August 2. So far, he had only negative results to relay to Rendova.
Now Evans finally had confirmation that many of the survivors were actually still alive. The trouble was, he hadn’t set up his cumbersome radio equipment, and it would take hours of working through the night to get it and his new headquarters into operation. So Evans decided to transmit the news to Rendova the next morning, August 7, and meanwhile dispatch a canoe to Naru filled with supplies to relieve the survivors, retrieve Lieutenant Kennedy, and ferry him back to confer with Evans. He wrote a note for them to carry to Kennedy:
To Senior Officer, Naru Is.
Friday 11 p.m.
Have just learnt of your presence on Naru Is. & also that two natives have taken news to Rendova. I strongly advise you return immediately to here in this canoe & by the time you arrive here I will be in Radio communication with authorities at Rendova & we can finalise plans to collect balance of party.
Will warn aviation of your crossing Ferguson Passage.
A.R. Evans Lt RANVR
On Naru Island, meanwhile, on the night of August 6, Kennedy decided to make yet another nighttime attempt to intercept passing PT boats in Ferguson Passage, since there was no certainty that Gasa and Kumana would successfully make it to Rendova in time for a rescue to be organized before he and his men began dying or were captured by the Japanese.
Kennedy beckoned Barney Ross to help him push out into the ocean the two-man canoe the natives had furnished them. “Gee, I think we’ll tip over, Jack, if we go out,” warned a highly skeptical Ross; “it looks a little rough.”
Kennedy insisted, “Oh, no, it’ll be all right, we’ll go out.”
The two naval officers paddled out into the ocean, and were promptly pounded by fierce winds, pouring rain, and five-foot waves as they struggled to pilot the little canoe, which soon got swamped, flipped over, and dumped them in the water.
Kennedy shouted to his friend, “Sorry I got you out here, Barney!”
“This would be a great time to say I told you so, but I won’t!” was Ross’s retort.
They struggled in the swirling surf for up to two hours, at one point becoming separated amid the chaos and darkness.
“Barney!” screamed Kennedy. “Barney!”
He finally found Ross struggling, half-submerged on top of a reef outcropping, which had sliced into his right shoulder and arm and further wounded his already infected and swollen feet. Kennedy had to place oars over the coral in order for Ross to make the torturous step-by-step journey along the reef back to the beach, where the two men collapsed in slumber.
Once again, it turned out, no PT boats went through the Ferguson Passage that night. By now, Admiral William Halsey was fed up with ineffective PT assaults on the Tokyo Express, and that night, August 6–7, he instead dispatched a radar-guided force of six destroyers into action to intercept the Express. In what became known as the Battle of Vella Gulf, not far from the site of the Battle of Blackett Strait, the Americans this time sank no less than four Japanese destroyers carrying 900 soldiers and 50 tons of cargo headed for Kolombangara, including two of the ships involved in the action the night the PT 109 was sunk: the Arashi, and the Hagikaze. “Awed PT sailors in Kula Gulf 28 miles away sighted the loom of flame,” wrote naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “and thought the volcano on Kolombangara must have blown its top.” The victory ended Japanese attempts to use destroyers to supply their island bases, and they turned to the more difficult method of only using smaller barges instead.
The victory, of course, came too late to mean anything to the men of PT 109. In spite of the hope they placed in the native scouts, they were in as desperate a condition as ever. In the five days since the crash,
the castaways had consumed little to nothing: some raindrops, pieces of often-inedible coconut, sips from a cache of fresh water that soon disappeared, a few pieces of Japanese candy that Kennedy and Ross had found on Naru, and the vegetables Gasa and Eroni had shared with them at one meal, which Kennedy was present for but Ross had missed, as he was sleeping on Naru. Zinser thought they would start dying off soon, and believed the wounded Barney Ross would be the first to go.
At 9:20 A.M. on August 7, 1943, Reginald Evans sent an electrifying radio message to Rendova, confirming Gasa and Kumana’s discovery of the PT 109’s crew: “Eleven survivors PT boat on Gross [Naru] Island. Have sent food and letter advising senior [officer] come here without delay. Warn aviation of canoes crossing Ferguson.” The message took several hours to be relayed through the Coastwatching radio network and was passed to Rendova at mid-day.
The same morning, after paddling all through the night on choppy seas, scouts Biuku Gasa, Eroni Kumana, and John Kari finally arrived at a U.S. military outpost at Roviana Island off the island of New Georgia, and came face-to-face with Colonel George Hill, commander of a U.S. Army artillery unit supporting the 43rd Infantry Division. With the help of an officer who understood some Pidgin phrases, Hill deciphered what Gasa was urgently trying to convey: “Americans stranded on island behind the Japs,” “One man with feet badly burned or injured and needs help,” and finally that Hill, as “Chief for Americans,” should “give him rescue boat immediately.”
Years later, Colonel Hill retold the story in a letter. “I reported the incident to our Intelligence Section and then tried to remember where I had seen a Navy [boat] pool,” he wrote. “I finally thought of Bau Island [Lumbari] back at Rendova. How could I make contact? I had regular intervals for ammo reports from Kokrana by radio so decided for a relay of your copra [coconut] message signed ‘Kennedy.’ The name at the time meant nothing to me except another joker needing help. I told them [Rendova] the Native Chief [presumably Gasa] was at my command post and could be picked up at Roviana landing pier when a pickup boat was available.”
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