PT 109

by William Doyle

  “more fucked-up than Cuba”: Robert Donovan, Oral History, JFKL.

  “the shrill voice of a man gripped by fear”: Keresey, PT 105, pp. 83, 84.

  “This stupidity meant”: Ibid., p. 87.

  “There was more confusion in that battle”: The Search for Kennedy’s PT 109, National Geographic television program, 2002.

  “This was perhaps the most confused”: Bulkley, At Close Quarters, p. 123.

  “Ship at two o’clock!”: Gerard Zinser obituary, New York Times, August 29, 2001.

  “As soon as I decided”: Leo Damore, The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 67.

  “He goofed off”: Interview with PT 103 veteran Jack Duncan. Duncan reported that Brantingham, whom he worked for later in the war, told him this in a conversation years later.

  “Since roaming enemy bombers”: Keresey, PT 105, p. 45.

  “We were patrolling at low speed,” “I can best compare it”: Inga Arvad, “Kennedy Lauds Men, Disdains Hero Stuff,” Boston Globe, January 11, 1944.

  “The destroyer then turned”: Damore, The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, p. 67.

  Was the PT 109 cut in two at the time of the crash? In the end, accounts by survivors and researchers differ widely on this point. In the days after the collision, Coastwatcher Reg Evans visually tracked debris that is widely believed to be part of the PT 109. John Kennedy later referred to the boat being “cut in two” in the crash, as do many accounts, but the exact shapes and sizes of the PT 109 wreckage created by the collision, and precisely which pieces sank when, has never been clearly established.

  For an interesting discussion of this topic, see: http://www.ptboatforum.com/cgi-bin/MB2/netboardr.cgi?st=0&nd=10&fid=102&cid=101&tid=2470&pg=33&sc=20

  Of 531 PTs that entered U.S. Navy service, 69 were lost, including the PT 109, which was the only PT to be sunk by ramming from an enemy vessel.

  Was the crash Kennedy’s fault? Over the years, some have criticized Kennedy’s performance in the PT 109 incident, including some veterans of the PT boat service. The criticism usually focused on Kennedy’s decision to patrol with two of his three engines disengaged, and on claims that he did not have his crew alert.

  To William Liebenow, Kennedy’s decision to muffle two of his engines in combat was a reasonable one, though one that was forbidden in Liebenow’s own squadron. “The night of August 1 was his [Kennedy’s] first major operation with Squadron 9,” Liebenow explained. “Our practice was, when in danger of attack or in enemy waters, keep all three engines engaged. There was, however, some logic in operating with one engine engaged—mainly, one engine exhaust created less wake and therefore the boat was harder to spot. By using one engine you might be able to sneak in closer to the enemy and fire your torpedoes without being seen. As far as we were concerned, the ability to maneuver and get away fast far outweighed the fact of not being spotted. Anyhow, that’s what we were trained to do and that’s the way we did it.” Liebenow added, “In later questioning Kennedy implied that the PT 109 had only one engine engaged and that he would not recommend patrolling this way. This does not satisfy some people, they argue that even with one engine the 109 should have been able to avoid being rammed. I would say that those people have never been in close operations in a PT boat against the enemy. One engine operation was probably a mistake but the same thing could have happened with all three engines engaged. I believe Kennedy when he said he didn’t know how it happened.”

  To defend themselves, some PT skippers improvised such procedures to minimize their telltale wakes, such as patrolling at very low speed, running with their engines muffled, or running with two of the three engines in neutral and only the center one engaged, which best minimized the wake but maximized the time it would take to reach high speed for evasive action. This last technique was thought dangerous by many skippers as it slowed a boat’s response time, and in the case of Squadron Ten, which Kennedy was now temporarily working with, it was not allowed, but Kennedy may not have known this. The tactic was also forbidden in Squadron Nine, where Lieutenant William “Bud” Liebenow recalled, “We always ran with all three engines in gear. We never took them out of gear. [Commander Robert] Kelly [a legendary figure from Bulkeley’s original squadron in the Philippines] and [Lieutenant Hank] Brantingham [who also served with Bulkeley] were experienced in combat. They knew all the tricks. If Kelly or Brantingham came on your boat and saw you didn’t have three engines in gear, they would kill you.”

  It is true that Kennedy did not have all his men in an alert condition; four men, Thom, Kirksey, Johnston and Harris, were all lying down relaxing on the deck at the time the Amagiri approached the PT 109, and the latter three are believed to be dozing or fast asleep. It was not unheard of for PT skippers to allow men to take a nap when they were off their duty shift, but it wasn’t the way things were done, for example, in Liebenow’s Squadron Nine, which was previously run by the tough, exacting and highly respected commander Robert Kelley. “In our squadron,” remembered Liebenow, “when we were on patrol, nobody slept.”

  At the time of the crash, the PT 109 crewmen were exhausted from days of constant night patrols and lack of sleep, and it’s understandable why some were trying to catch up on sleep, but an interesting question is whether the boat could have escaped the collision if Kennedy had all his men up, and alert, serving as lookouts.

  In Kennedy’s 1946 narrative of the incident, he writes that the Japanese destroyer “broke out of the mist”, which was a weather condition that few if any other accounts describe. Mist combined with near-total darkness would of course have reduced his visibility even more. The Amagiri would have been churning up some phosphorescence at its bow, but the most visible phosphorescence would have been in its wake, most visible to an observer perpendicular to or behind the Amagiri, not viewing it head-on as Kennedy was.

  A related and somewhat mystifying question is, if Kennedy had already received a timely, clear warning of Japanese destroyers in the area (as he admitted in his 1946 narrative), why he didn’t have his whole crew on alert and all three engines engaged, ready for fast maneuvering. Kennedy’s probable fear of attack by Japanese floatplanes may explain why he was patrolling on only one engine.

  In the September 15, 1943 edition of PT boat newsletter Mosquito Bites, Kennedy candidly blamed the collision on his decision to patrol on one engine: “Lt. (jg) Jack Kennedy believes that the reason that he was unable to get out of the way of the Jap destroyer which rammed him was because only one of his engines I was in gear. He strongly advises that, whenever enemy destroyers are known to be in a patrol area, all engines should be in gear.”

  There were sporadic rumors that General Douglas MacArthur wanted to court-martial Kennedy for his performance in the PT 109 incident, but MacArthur publicly denied this and no evidence to support the charge has been found.

  In the end, the collision that sunk the PT 109 was probably a one-in-a million, fluke event that Kennedy had no way to defend against in time, even if he had all three engines engaged and his crew fully alert, given the darkness, the lack of accurate radio communications, the speed of the Amagiri, and the clear intention of its captain to turn into and ram the American boat. A different PT boat skipper with more combat experience might have operated that night in a way that avoided the collision.

  In the PT 157, around the time Kennedy’s boat was hit, Liebenow saw a distant flash of light on the horizon, and figured a PT boat had scored a torpedo hit on a Japanese target. “We headed that way for maybe a half an hour and didn’t see anything,” he recalled, “so we went back to our patrol area and stayed there until daylight and went home. We were the last boat that came in to Rendova. It might not have been the 109, it might have been a [Japanese] shore battery firing. But we had no idea that the 109 had been hit. If anybody should have been looking for him [Kennedy] it would have been J. R. Lowrey’s boat [the PT 162], which was with the 109 when it got sunk. But when all that happened, they got
out of there and went back to the base and reported that everybody was lost.”

  Ross memories of crash: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, p. 263.

  “I was hurled into the air”: Gerard Zinser obituary, New York Times, August 29, 2001.

  “Fifteen PT boats ventured out”: Keresey, “Farthest Forward,” American Heritage, July 1998.

  Details of events on board the Amagiri from Haruyoshi Kimmatsu’s point of view: Haruyoshi Kimmatsu and Joachim Heinrich Woos, “The Night We Rammed J.F.K.,” Argosy, December 1970.

  “This was perhaps the most confused”: Bulkley, At Close Quarters, p. 123.

  Chapter 7: Lost at Sea

  “McMahon and I”: Damore, The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, p. 67.

  “We seemed to be drifting”: Ibid., p. 68.

  “As dawn came up”: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, p. 264.

  “What do you want to do”: Hersey, “Survival.”

  Kennedy swimming the backstroke: Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession, p. 54.

  Chapter 8: Land of the Dead

  Benjamin Franklin Nash thoughts and biography: Interviews with Nash’s children, Clint Nash and Julie Nash.

  Background on Coastwatchers: Walter Lord, Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons (Viking Press, 1977); Eric A. Feldt, The Coast Watchers (Lloyd O’Neil, 1975). Also, “Reports from Coastwatchers in the Solomon Islands Area, 1942–1944,” National Archives of Australia, Melbourne, is an extraordinary document containing scores of highly detailed real-time intelligence reports from coastwatching stations across the Solomons theater of battle. Messages between Coastwatcher Reginald Evans and PT boat staff at Rendova were relayed through Coastwatching stations at Munda (code name “PWD”) and/or Guadalcanal (code name “KEN”). For simplicity these messages are referred to as between Evans and Rendova.

  “The coastwatchers’ working conditions”: “I never heard one of them say anything”: Keresey, PT 105, p. 173.

  “quiet, good-humored farming man,” “so long in the legs,” “The barges would come in on the dark side”: Undated paper on Benjamin Nash, courtesy of the Nash family.

  “the Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal”: Alan Powell, War by Stealth: Australians and the Allied Intelligence Bureau 1942–1945 (Melbourne University Publishing, 1996), p. 48.

  “I could get down on my knees”: Semaphore, Royal Australian Navy publication, May 2014.

  “If it wasn’t for local help,” “really went inside the local people”: Anna Annie Kwai, “Islanders in the Second World War: A Solomon Islander Perspective,” subthesis submitted in partial satisfaction of master of arts, history, Australian National University, November 2013.

  “generous, egalitarian, wealthy”: Geoffrey Mills White, Remembering the Pacific War (Center for Pacific Studies, 1991), p. 33.

  Details and dialogue of Warfield boat captains meeting: Interview with William “Bud” Liebenow; also comments by Dick Keresey in “The Search for Kennedy’s PT 109,” National Geographic program, 2002.

  PT boat historian and former naval officer Ted Walther pointed out that the PT 109 survivors were not “written off for dead” in the technical sense as they were not listed as MIA or KIA in the seven day period they were lost. In an email to the author, he noted that Commander Warfield “probably should have sent boats to search, but starting on August 3 the PTs at Rendova started interdicting and attacking Japanese barge traffic that was resupplying Japanese troops ashore on the northwestern end of New Georgia and Kolombangara (Blackett Strait, Diamond Narrows area, Northern Sound, and Kula Gulf, not to Ferguson Passage). They set up a new Op area which was east of Makuti Island, (7 miles away to south east) and off Gatere, Kolombangara (7 miles away to east) away from Kennedy’s crew. Fact of the matter is, in one day, the war moved on and the PT 109 crew was passed by, because of the operational commitments.” But while Warfield never authorized a full-scale, proper attempt at search-and-rescue, he did keep tracking Evans’s reports of wreckage, encouraged him to check for survivors, and apparently authorized at least one aerial attempt to spot for wreckage or survivors.

  Presented with PT 169 skipper Philip Potter’s claim of having conducted a short search, William Liebenow told the author, “No, I don’t think anybody searched for survivors.” Warfield ordered no immediate search of the scene, despite Potter’s claimed report to Warfield that the PT 109 was hit. The timing and details of any air search missions for the PT 109 initiated by Warfield are unclear and are not mentioned in Warfield’s after-action report of the events.

  On August 2, Warfield had indeed cancelled any hope of a waterborne search, but he declared years later to Clay and Joan Blair, “I’m sure we had an air search, some kind of reconnaissance looking for them. I couldn’t tell the fliers what to do. I couldn’t even get them to send night fighters up against the float planes, but I’m sure I told [Admiral] Wilkinson’s staff to get some kind of reconnaissance up there after them.” Warfield’s communications officer Lieutenant James Woods agreed, remembering, “That very morning we had them send up some air search. They looked around up there but they didn’t see anything. Then, in the ensuing days, we got dispatches from Halsey and, well, everybody but the president, telling us to find Kennedy. And we sent more aircraft the next day and the day after. We were in daily contact with the coast watcher, Evans.”

  “The tragedy was”: Keresey, PT 105, p. 93.

  “stupid, useless, and frightening,” “All this adds up”: Dick Keresey, “Farthest Forward,” American Heritage, July 1998.

  “That was a subject that wasn’t discussed”: “The Search for Kennedy’s PT 109,” National Geographic program, 2002.

  “I never thought of them”: Dick Keresey, PT 105, p. 92.

  “universal experience of passage”: John Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession, p. 43.

  “What I would give for a can of grapefruit juice!” Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy: A Biography, p. 149.

  “never allowed us to sit around and mope,” “Pappy lay in the water”: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, p. 267.

  Chapter 9: The Hand of Fate

  Biuku Gasa, Eroni Kumana and John Kari detail in this and following chapter: Biuku Gasa Oral History, Oral History Collection, JFKL; The PT-109 Rescue: The Scouts Stories, MS 84-57, JFKL; Hugh Laracy and Geoffrey White, eds., “Taem Blong Faet: World War II in Melanesia,” A Journal of Solomon Islands Studies, No. 4, 1988, pp. 85-97.

  “Awed PT sailors in Kula Gulf”: Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: Breaking the Bismarks Barrier, p. 219.

  “I have a letter for you, sir,” “You’ve got to hand it to the British,” “To Senior Officer, Naru Is.”: The text of this message was first reported by Hersey in “Survival” as authored by Lieutenant Wincote of the New Zealand infantry, a disguised name required by wartime censors. Subsequent accounts corrected this to Reginald Evans, the Australian Coastwatcher.

  “I recall the day very, very clearly”: “PT 109 Story,” Jack Paar Show, October 1962, Film TNN:4, JFKL.

  Kumana and Gasa landing at Roviana Island, encounter with George Hill: George Hill letter to John F. Kennedy, October 21, 1957, David Powers Papers, PT 109, JFKL.

  Chapter 10: The Rescue

  Some accounts have described a “funeral service” or “simple funeral” being conducted at the Rendova base after the PT 109’s disappearance, but this author had not found a clear record of one occurring at either Rendova or Tulagi. A Catholic Mass “being said” for someone, as Johnny Iles described occurred at Tulagi, is a traditional mass that includes a usually brief mention of the person’s name as a dedication. When asked about it in 2015, William Liebenow did not remember any such a service being held at Rendova, and if one were held for his fellow officer and tentmate, surely he would have been invited.

  “did service above and beyond”: John F. Kennedy to Clare Boothe Luce, October 20, 1943, Clare Boothe Luce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

  “Dear Folks
; This is just a short note”: Thomas Maier, The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings (Basic Books, 2004), p. 147.

  “I never heard one of them say anything”: Keresey, PT 105, p. 92.

  Chapter 11: Life and Death at the Warrior River

  “if your boat was sunk”: Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, p. 607.

  “I think all these things came together”: Ibid, p. 608.

  “Kennedy did a fine job”: Hamilton, Ibid., p. 611.

  PT 59 armament, Bofors cannon retrofitted with Japanese motorcycle handlebars: Interview with John Klee.

  “It had so many guns”: Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, p. 611.

  “I did all I could to prevent the attack”: Ibid, p. 608.

  “What are you doing here?,” “Have a picked crew”: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, pp. 277, 278.

  Jack Bernard Kahn/John Klee on JFK: Interview with John Klee.

  “If people asked me later, when did I first think Kennedy would ever be president,” “He always had that sense of leadership”: Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, p. 630.

  “fine, upstanding lad”: Maier, The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings, p. 166.