PT 109

by William Doyle

  Back at the Tulagi PT base, on September 1, 1943, just three weeks after the rescue of the PT 109 survivors, Al Cluster gave a barely recuperated John Kennedy the command of another boat, the PT 59, a 77-foot Elco design that was slightly older than the PT 109. So far, PT boats had proven mostly ineffective in sinking Japanese capital ships, and Cluster and Kennedy decided to pursue Admiral William Halsey’s idea of converting them into barge-hunting gunships.

  Cluster recalled, “I guess you could say we were in a kind of miniature arms race with the Japs. They armed the barges with big guns and protected them with armor. Then we responded by creating what we called a gunboat, a radical departure for the PT force.” On the PT 59, Cluster and Kennedy decided to remove two depth charges, the four torpedo tubes, and the 20 mm Oerlikon cannon, and install bigger guns, including ten .50-caliber machine guns and two 40 mm Bofors cannon, one of which was retrofitted with Japanese motorcycle handlebars that had been salvaged at Guadalcanal.

  Additionally, Cluster recalled, “We reinforced the decks with armor plate. They were really very heavily armed little boats.” Typically, Kennedy pitched himself into the tough physical work. “I don’t think I ever saw a guy work harder, longer hours,” said Cluster. By the time they finished, the boat was bristling with heavy firepower.

  The new experiment in PT gunboats took place as the Allies were slowly pushing north through the Solomon Islands, having finally captured the Munda airfield, landing on Vella Lavella on August 15, and occupying the islands of New Georgia and Gizo. The Japanese were falling back to the islands of Choiseul and Bougainville, and were preparing to evacuate their large garrison on Kolombangara, which they completed at the end of September.

  On October 8, Kennedy was promoted to full lieutenant. But he still needed a crew for the newly refitted gunboat PT 59, now stationed at Tulagi, off Guadalcanal. One day, two volunteers appeared on the dock and greeted Kennedy. He looked stunned. There before him were two fellow survivors of the PT 109 disaster, Edman Edgar Mauer and John Maguire.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Kennedy.

  “What kind of a guy are you?” they replied. “You got a boat and didn’t come get us?”

  Kennedy became choked up; according to Maguire, it was “the nearest I ever seen him come to crying.” No less than three other crewmen who had previously served under Kennedy on the PT 109 before the crash also volunteered: Maurice Kowal, Edmund Drewitch, and Leon Drawdy. “Have a picked crew, all volunteers, and all very experienced,” Kennedy wrote proudly of his new crew. “Every man but one has been sunk at least once, and they all have been in the boats for a long time.”

  Kennedy’s executive officer, Lieutenant (jg) Robert Lee “Dusty” Rhoads, remembered, “What impressed me most about Jack then was that so many of the men that had been on PT 109 had followed him to the 59. It spoke well of him as a leader, I thought.” Similarly, John Klee, who was a gunner on the PT 59 under Kennedy’s command in November 1943, recalled in a 2014 interview that he was struck by how “not a single one of the those PT 109 men ever had a bad word to say about Kennedy.” Klee was also impressed by the quality of the sexy “pinup” photos Kennedy kept of some of his girlfriends posted in the boat’s captain’s quarters.

  Gunner’s mate Glen Christiansen, who became chief petty officer of the PT 59, described the newly reconfigured boat: “It had so many guns on it that we literally had two crews: one that lived on the boat, and one that would come on the boat. We had sixteen men and three officers, whereas normally, a PT boat, a seventy-seven-foot Elco, would have eight men and two officers.”

  Kennedy’s Revenge: PT 59, which Kennedy converted into a gunboat. He was so hell-bent on attacking the Japanese that one of his crew despaired to a senior officer, “My God, this guy’s going to get us all killed!” (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

  New guns installed by Kennedy on PT 59. (Frank J. Andruss Sr.)

  At Tulagi, Kennedy continued his habit of organizing discussions on politics, history, and current events. One sailor remembered seeing Kennedy wading through back issues of the New York Times piled up in his bunk. Using copies of popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Collier’s as discussion guides, Kennedy and his friends debated world affairs in his tent, as Kennedy exhorted his colleagues to read, to form opinions, and to understand, in the words of Red Fay, “why the hell we’re out here.” Fay added, “He made us all very aware of our obligation as citizens of the United States to do something, to be involved in the process. Yet side by side with this seriousness he had a great sense of humor—that laugh of his: the laugh was so contagious that it made everybody laugh. You’d tell a story or a joke and then that laugh would come out, he just had everybody laughing.”

  Despite the ordeals of the PT 109’s sinking and his chronically fragile health, Kennedy retained the powerful charisma that would eventually help propel him into the Oval Office. A Catholic priest who met him in the fall of 1943 wrote that John Kennedy was a “fine, upstanding lad, guts, brains, courage to give away, generous, worshipped by his lads.” James Reed marveled of his friend Kennedy, “He always had that sense of leadership: quietly assertive. Not at all flamboyant. And that magical quality that everybody liked him. But I tell you this about Jack, he never complained. He always had a terrific humor, a really acute sense of humor. He was very self-deprecating.” After joining several patrols on Kennedy’s PT 59, Commander Thomas Warfield’s intelligence officer, future Supreme Court justice Byron “Whizzer” White, recalled, “I began to get a strong feeling about what kind of fellow he was. He proved himself to be very intelligent in the way he ran his boat, as well as cool and courageous under fire.”

  Kennedy strikes a jaunty pose in a photo believed to be taken at Tulagi after his rescue. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

  Kennedy’s health, however, was increasingly precarious. His weight was plunging toward 150 pounds, his chronic back trouble was intensifying, and he was limping around with a cane. The Navy needed live bodies in action, and he qualified, just barely. After a routine medical exam required for promotion to full lieutenant on October 20, he wrote to a friend: “I looked as bad as I could look . . . [but] I passed with flying colors, ready ‘for active duty ashore or at sea’ anywhere, and by anywhere they mean no place else but here. They’d give you twenty-twenty with no strain. Everyone is in such lousy shape here that the only way they can tell if he is fit to fight is to see if he can breathe. That’s about the only grounds on which I can pass these days.” The following month, the Tulagi medical officer conducted X-rays of Kennedy and diagnosed an “early duodenal ulcer.”

  In letters to his family and friends from September through November 1943, Kennedy revealed flashes of bitterness and disillusion at the war. “The war goes slowly here, slower than you can ever imagine from reading the papers at home,” he wrote. “Munda or any of those spots are just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope to never see again.” In a letter to Inga Arvad, he expressed guilt over one of the men he lost, Andrew Jackson Kirksey: “He told me one night he thought he was going to be killed. I wanted to put him ashore to work. I wish I had.”

  In another letter to his parents, he reassured them of his intention to come home to enjoy the pleasures of family vacation life: “After this present fighting is over will be glad to get home. When I do get out of here you’ll find that you have a new permanent fixture around that Florida pool. I’ll just move from it to get into my sack. Don’t worry at all about me, I’ve learned to duck.”

  On October 18, 1943, Kennedy moved from Rendova up to Lambu Lambu Cove, site of a primitive, rat-infested, new advance PT base on the northeast coast of Vella Lavella Island. The mission of the PT 59 and the handful of other PT boats at Lambu Lambu was to harass and attack Japanese barge traffic, as Allied forces geared up for a critical landing on the Japanese stronghold of Bougainville island and smaller diversionary landings on the
island of Choiseul, where up to 5,000 exhausted Japanese troops awaited evacuation. The ultimate target was the Japanese military’s regional headquarters on the island of Rabaul.

  For the next month, October 18 to November 18, Kennedy commanded the PT 59 gunboat in a total of thirteen patrols from Lambu Lambu to the nearby island of Choiseul. Kennedy’s boat was bombed several times by Japanese floatplanes, and it shot up some apparently unmanned Japanese barges. In a replay of his PT 109 experience, he never engaged in combat with Japanese surface craft, with the exception of the night of November 5–6, when the PT 59 opened fire on three barges, which quickly vanished. “The 59 experiment was a failure,” recalled his executive officer Dusty Rhoads. “The theory was to provide one gunboat with each section of PTs. The gunboats, screened by the PTs, would move in and attack the barges. Unfortunately, by the time we got the three boats converted, the barge threat was gone. We never fought anymore. We only certainly saw barges on one night. They were coming out of Choiseul and they went right back in. So everything we were built for, barge fighting, we never did.”

  On the night of November 1–2, 1943, however, John F. Kennedy had an opportunity to save the lives of ten American servicemen, this time in a daring emergency rescue mission in the midst of combat. It was an operation for which Kennedy received no medals or special recognition, and he rarely ever talked about the event again. But Kennedy’s actions meant salvation for ten U.S. marines.

  In the midafternoon of November 1, Lieutenant Kennedy was abruptly asked by Lieutenant Arthur Berndtson, executive officer of Squadron 10 and temporary base commander at Lambu Lambu, if he could support an operation to evacuate a trapped force of eighty-seven exhausted Marines from the island of Choiseul, where they were engaged in a campaign aimed at diverting Japanese attention from the American’s real target, Bougainville.

  The PT 59’s fuel tank was less than half-full. Kennedy did not expect to go on a mission that night, and he had confirmed this with the planners at the Lambu Lambu PT boat office. Refueling the boat was a laborious, time-consuming process. Berndtson recalled, “It was a hell of a place to try to refuel. All by hand. Jack had about seven hundred gallons. That was not enough to get over and back. He needed at least one thousand gallons. I asked him if he would go anyway. I was sending two other PT boats along. If Jack ran out of fuel, one of the other boats could tow him home. He was disconcerted, but he agreed to go.” Kennedy had good reason to be fearful, as he was embarking on a sixty-five-mile journey into the night, with less than half a fuel tank and with only a compass bearing to navigate by.

  “Let’s go get them,” Kennedy declared to his crew. “Wind her up!”

  The three PT boats rushed out from Lambu Lambu toward Choiseul at 4:35 P.M., stopping along the way at Voza Village, where the marines had established an outpost on Choiseul, to pick up a marine officer and Navy officer as guides. Kennedy was surprised to see his friend from Rendova, Richard Keresey.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Kennedy asked Keresey.

  “Never mind that, we have to haul ass up the coast,” snapped Keresey, jumping aboard the PT 59. “There’s a bunch of marines trapped!”

  They found the mouth of Choiseul’s Warrior River at about 6 P.M., following the faint sounds of gunfire and screaming. It was dark and rainy as Kennedy’s PT 59 pulled up toward the beach, joining one other PT boat and three steel amphibious landing craft, or LCPLs (Landing Craft, Personnel, Large). The marines had splashed into the water and were struggling aboard the LCPLs as Japanese troops poured heavy fire toward them from the shore. One of the landing craft was maneuvering to race the marines back to Voza. But the other overloaded LCPL had scraped its hull open on a coral reef, stalled, and was sinking some 250 yards from shore. “There were Japs on the shore and the marines were in the water, shooting at them,” recalled PT 59 crewman Maurice Kowal in an interview decades later with PT boat historian Frank J. Andruss Sr.

  “Here’s a PT boat!” shouted one of the marines. Kennedy placed the PT 59 between the shore and the crippled landing craft, and his crew pulled some ten marines on board, several of them wounded. Kennedy’s gunners were poised to rip up the jungle with suppressive counterfire but were prevented from doing so by fear of hitting friendly forces in the darkness.

  Minutes earlier, Corporal Edward James Schnell of Wilmette, Illinois, was critically wounded by a bullet in his chest. As the medic helped carry him to shore, Schnell beseeched him, “Doc, don’t leave me.”

  The medic, a Lieutenant Stevens, assured him, “I’m not going to leave you, Jimmy.”

  As he lifted Schnell aboard the PT 59, Stevens said, “Lieutenant, I’ve got a man in bad shape here.”

  “We’ll find a place for him,” replied Kennedy from the cockpit. “Any left?” When it was clear all the marines were aboard, Kennedy headed back to Voza. On the way there, Kennedy checked in on the severely wounded Corporal Schnell, who was laid out in Kennedy’s bunk as medic Stevens readied a plasma bottle and sutures to treat him.

  “Am I all right, Doc?” asked Schnell.

  “Jimmy, don’t worry about it,” replied Stevens, “you’re going to be all right.”

  At Voza, most of the marines were moved over to landing craft for the final trip over to the Lambu Lambu base on Vella Lavella Island. Schnell, however, couldn’t be moved and stayed aboard Kennedy’s PT 59.

  At 1 A.M. on November 2, as the medic held his hand, Corporal Schnell died.

  Two hours later, the PT 59’s engines went dead, having burned through the last of the fuel. PT 236 slowly towed it the rest of the way to Lambu Lambu, where the marines were offloaded to safety. Glen Christiansen, the PT 59’s chief petty officer, remembered a tragic episode during the last stage of the operation: “We called for air cover. We were sitting out there vulnerable as hell, out of gas. As I remember, they sent us a bunch of Australian P-40’s [to provide air cover]. Either four or six of them. Well, none of them came back. They all got shot down. It wasn’t our fault: we’d been ordered out, and they knew we’d run out of gas, but there was a big stink about it.”

  Despite the tragic loss of the Australian flyers, Kennedy was energized by his rescue of the marines. In the span of three months, he had played a starring role in saving twenty American lives. Now he fantasized about leading an extremely dangerous, daylight mission back to the same island to attack Japanese positions. “What would you think of this?” Kennedy asked Christiansen, explaining the idea to him.

  “Jesus Christ, Mr. Kennedy,” said Christiansen, “there’s no way. We don’t know what’s up there!”

  Christiansen was so alarmed at Kennedy’s idea that he went around Kennedy to appeal to Kennedy’s superior officer and squadron commander, Al Cluster, who was visiting the Lambu Lambu outpost. “I hope he doesn’t go through with this, because we’re going to get slaughtered up there!” despaired Christiansen. “Mr. Kennedy was very gung ho,” recalled Christiansen years later. “He had this vendetta or revenge thing on his mind.” He reasoned, “We had terrific firepower, and could have raised hell in the river, but I had read a report on the Kolombangara raid [Warfield’s “suicide mission” of August 22] where all those people got killed. The problem was, they got inside the river and couldn’t turn around. It was real hairy. I couldn’t see risking our lives. I felt we ought to try to do something to get at them, bomb them with aircraft or something, but let’s not go up the river ourselves.”

  According to Cluster, “Jack got very wild.” Some of Kennedy’s men, he related, “said he was crazy and would get them killed.” Cluster squashed Kennedy’s plan for a daylight gunboat raid up the Warrior River. But Custer observed that the Warrior River rescue on November 1–2, 1943 was a turning point in JFK’s life, signaling a “change of seriousness” that that made him “grow up emotionally.” Previously, according to Cluster, “We were kind of a happy-go-lucky bunch down there in the Solomons, ‘knights of the sea’ and all that crap, going out and attacking these large ships with all th
at glamour: whereas in reality it had become a dirty, minor war in which you just had to do the best you could.” Now, after the PT 109 crash and the rescue of the marines, Kennedy was a seasoned warrior.

  In Kennedy’s final performance report in December 1943, Cluster gave him a perfect 4.0 for his leadership as PT 59’s commanding officer, writing that Kennedy “demonstrated a cool effectiveness under fire and exhibited good judgment and determination in entirely strange conditions. His cheerful attitude and initiative qualify him to be the exec. officer of a PT Squadron.” For Kennedy’s actions in wake of the PT 109 crash, Cluster remembered recommending him for the Silver Star, the Navy’s third-highest award after the Medal of Honor and Navy Cross, both of which are awarded for exceptional heroism in combat. Instead, Kennedy, Ross, and Thom were each given the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for their actions. The medal is a “lifesaving” medal, not a combat decoration.

  In a 1944 review of the action, the Navy ruled that no other medals were warranted, since the “heroism” at issue did not involve actual engagement with the enemy—this despite the fact that the PT 109 was participating in a combat operation at the time of the sinking, and the crew’s post-crash ordeal obviously took place in a combat environment, in areas that were controlled or contested by the enemy. The enlisted men of the PT 109, some of whom were involved in lifesaving efforts as heroic as the officers, received no medals, though they made no public complaint or comments on this point.