Jack’s Navy ID card.
“He was in pain,” a roommate remembered, “he was in a lot of pain, he slept on that damn plywood board all the time and I don’t remember when he wasn’t in pain.” But Jack relished the training, most of it in Elco motor torpedo boats of the PT 103 class. Low and squat and measuring eighty feet in length, with a twenty-foot, eight-inch beam, the vessels had wooden hulls and were powered by three twelve-cylinder Packard engines, each with 1,350 horsepower, allowing a speed of forty-three knots. Each carried four twenty-one-inch torpedoes and four .50-caliber machine guns on two twin turrets, as well as depth charges, rocket launchers, and mine racks. A normal complement was two to three officers and nine men. Jack, comfortable on the sea from his many years of sailing off the Cape, loved handling the boats, and he loved their speed. Most of all, he cherished the freedom they brought. “This job on these boats is really the great spot of the Navy,” he crowed to Lem, “you are your own boss and it’s like sailing around in the old days.”67
Even the evident inadequacies in the training—the men received little instruction on the handling and use of torpedoes and virtually no nighttime training, though it was well known that the PT boats were too vulnerable to enemy aircraft to operate except under cover of darkness—didn’t deter him, and he impressed his mates with his seafaring skills and intelligence as well as his self-deprecating wit and lack of pretension. He was “receptive to everybody,” recalled Sim Efland, a roommate, and in no way “a stuck-up individual” with a superior attitude. “When I think of my association with Jack: he associated with people no matter who—and that was unusual. Here I was, a southerner, and all these other people from Harvard, Yale, and these other places would give me hell. Say, ‘We can’t understand what you’re talking about, you don’t talk like we do, you talk too slow,’ or something. Now Jack didn’t do that. He respected people. He was also a good analyst, I felt….I had a lot of respect for him.”68
Another roommate, Fred Rosen, likewise held Jack in high regard, notwithstanding one rocky episode in their Quonset hut. As Rosen recalled in an interview many years afterwards, Jack one evening observed casually that Jews were all “going into the Quartermaster Corps” in order to avoid combat. Rosen, who was Jewish, bristled. “They must be good at trigonometry, Jack,” he shot back. “Why?” “Because the navy’s navigators are drawn from the Quartermaster Corps.” An extended exchange followed, in which Rosen persuaded Jack to recant his anti-Semitic assertion. To Rosen, Jack’s casual, unthinking prejudice likely owed much to his father’s pontifications around the family dining table over the years, and he admired Jack all the more for his willingness to admit his error.69
At the end of the eight weeks, in late November, John Harllee, the senior instructor, graded Jack superior in boat handling, good in engineering, and “very willing and conscientious.” So impressed was Harllee that he selected Jack to be a PT instructor, which meant he would remain stateside for a minimum of six additional months instead of getting a combat assignment. (It’s possible there was more involved in the decision than Jack’s stellar performance: his father had made clear to Bulkeley and perhaps to Harllee his anxiety about seeing his sons in combat.) Far from being flattered or relieved at the news, Jack reacted angrily, insisting that he be sent overseas to one of the war zones. (He was being “shafted,” he said to his Navy pals, who promptly gave him the nickname “Shafty.”) Harllee refused to bend. “I told him that we needed people of his ability for instructors. I absolutely insisted that he remain, which made him extremely unhappy.”70
Jack did not give up. With the help of his grandfather Honey Fitz, he arranged a one-on-one meeting with Massachusetts senator David I. Walsh, the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh liked what he saw—“Frankly, I have not met a young man of his age in a long time who has impressed me so favorably,” he wrote to Honey Fitz. “He has a fine personality, energetic and outstanding qualities of leadership, and with all a becoming modesty”—and urged the Navy Department to transfer Jack to a combat zone.71 The appeal evidently had an effect, for in January 1943 the young officer was detached from his Melville duties and ordered to take four boats to Jacksonville, Florida, and await further instructions on his next assignment. En route to Florida, one of the boats ran aground and Jack dove into the freezing water to clear a towrope that had become tangled in a propeller. He became ill and was laid up in Morehead City, North Carolina, with a temperature of 103, but soon recovered and rejoined his flotilla in Jacksonville. Expecting a combat assignment (“Am on my way to war,” he wrote to brother Bobby, who was in his final year of prep school), Jack learned, to his annoyance, that he was being sent not to a war theater but to patrol duty at the Panama Canal. He again turned to Senator Walsh, who again wrote on his behalf.72
How to explain this unrelenting determination to see military action? More than a few fellow draftees, after all, whatever their subsequent claims to the contrary, were quite content to wear the uniform in safer locales, far from enemy concentrations—locales like, well, Panama. Was it because he felt invincible, as young men often do? This seems unlikely, given his checkered health history and that, even this early in the war, he was writing sober letters about college chums who had been killed or were missing in action. Did he want a war record on which he could later run for political office? Again, maybe, though it seems far-fetched to believe that this calculation drove him, even if one folds in a perceived need to overcome any lingering “Kennedys are cowards” whispers arising from his father’s actions in London during the Blitz. No, the real answer seems more basic: Jack’s long immersion in world politics, through reading and writing and travel, together with the inspirational exhortations of people like James Forrestal, John Bulkeley, and Clare Boothe Luce, had convinced him that this was a crusade against totalitarianism, in which the future of Western civilization was at stake and in which all must do their part. Thus he applauded Lem Billings (who had been rejected by the Army and the Navy because of his poor eyesight) for getting himself close to combat as an ambulance driver in North Africa, and Rip Horton for contemplating switching from the Quartermaster Corps to a paratrooper role. And thus he cheered brother Joe’s efforts to become a Navy flier.73
Senator Walsh’s intervention did the trick. On March 6, 1943, Lieutenant John Fitzgerald Kennedy boarded the troop carrier Rochambeau on pier 34 in San Francisco, bound first for San Diego for a troop pickup and then for the New Hebrides, eleven hundred miles northeast of Australia. He was on his way to the war.
* Inga’s fluency in so many tongues was a source of eternal fascination and admiration for the two Kennedy siblings, both of whom had a tin ear for languages. Kick, though she had spent the better part of a year in France, always struggled with the language. And on a visit to Italy, after getting separated from her friends on a packed sightseeing bus and being pinched by a male passenger, she was heard to shriek, “Stoppa the bus! Stoppa the bus!” (McTaggart, Kathleen Kennedy, 62.)
TWELVE
OVERBOARD
It was like a scene out of an old Hollywood blockbuster. On March 28, 1943, after a desultory voyage of eighteen days, the Rochambeau neared her destination, Espiritu Santo, a Navy staging base in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), south of the Solomon Islands. Jack Kennedy and a fellow officer, James Reed, an Amherst College grad from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, were at the rail, taking it in. “I must say, as I look back on it, it was one of the most dramatic moments I have ever seen in my life,” Reed remembered. “As we came in from the ocean into Espiritu Santo, there was a river a few hundred yards wide.” The sheer tropical beauty of the tableau before them—lush green rainforests sloping down to powdery white beaches and turquoise water—stunned the two young Americans, as it had a lieutenant commander by the name of James A. Michener, whose Tales of the South Pacific would appear in a few short years and draw its inspiration from this very place. Quietly the Rochambe
au entered the river, the wreckage of a sunken transport ship silently slipping by. Then, a little farther in, American “fighter planes came down and flew over us,” after which came a final bend into the harbor and the magnificent sight of a large fleet—some twenty destroyers and four cruisers—riding at anchor around the aircraft carrier Saratoga. “Jack and I were standing looking at this thing, and I remember him saying, ‘What a sight!’ I mean, it really made the hair stand up on the back of your neck. It was so exciting.”1
Just like that, they had arrived at the war. For Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, the next few months in the South Pacific would be the decisive phase of his life, would shape him like no other event. For the first time ever, he was truly on his own, ten thousand miles from his family, from his father. Here his family’s fortune and his Ivy League degree would count for little. The same was true of the political and academic debates that had so consumed him during the past several years—about isolationism versus interventionism, about appeasement and its effects, about military preparedness and the fickleness of public opinion. Two months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, Jack Kennedy was entering a new arena, the kind that had made the heroes he’d read about as a young boy.
It is perhaps meaningful that on the way across the Pacific he read John Buchan’s memoir Pilgrim’s Way, which would become one of his favorite books and which he would go back to again and again in the years to come. (He promised Reed he would send him a copy at war’s end, and fulfilled his pledge.) Little remembered today, the book, a sterling example of English prose, is among other things a paean to an age when panache and daring were treasured, when the great and honorable in literature and politics and statecraft were deemed worthy of emulation. In particular, Buchan’s depiction of Raymond Asquith, a young Briton whose glittering promise (his father was prime minister) was cut short by his death in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, stirred something in the combat-bound American: “There are some men whose brilliance in boyhood and early manhood dazzles their contemporaries and becomes a legend. It is not that they are precocious, for precocity rarely charms, but that for every sphere of life they have the proper complement of gifts, and finish each stage so that it remains behind them like a satisfying work of art.”2
“He disliked emotion,” Buchan added of Asquith, “not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.” Two decades later, Ted Sorensen would use this phrase to describe John F. Kennedy.3
Jack’s mates on the Rochambeau remembered him as soft-spoken and friendly. Reed spoke of a “certain aura of shyness,” which “in itself was rather engaging” and which Reed emphasized was a “pure” reaction on his own part—that is, he was attracted to Jack’s personality with no prior knowledge of who he was, for his new friend had introduced himself merely as “Jack.” Edgar Stephens, an ensign from Missouri, remembered sitting next to Jack at the mess table. “He impressed me then as a real quiet, very nice person…the type of person who knew how to state a point concisely, and a man who, having chosen a position, would stand by it.” When, during the first evening at sea, a spirited debate broke out about Neville Chamberlain and appeasement, Jack held firm to his long-established position but showed respect for others’ views and made no attempt to bulldoze them by bringing up his book. “He always made the listener feel that he, the listener, knew a great deal more about the subject than he really did,” Reed later said of the shipboard discussions. “One of his great traits.”4
As often happens with young officers headed to a war zone with time on their hands, conversation ranged to the broad trends in the war and the strategic choices of top leaders. The previous months had seen positive developments for the Allies in both theaters. The Germans had gained against the Russians in their summer 1942 offensive against oil fields in the Caucasus, but in November the Red Army, under Generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky, counterattacked, surrounding the million-strong German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, on the Volga River. Fighting block by block in the deadly cold, racking up huge losses, the Russians took the city in early 1943 in what would later (but only later) be deemed a major turning point on the Eastern Front. Three hundred thousand Germans were captured, including twenty-five generals. Though the Kremlin didn’t trumpet the fact, Lend-Lease aid from the United States was highly beneficial to the Soviet effort. In North Africa, meanwhile, a joint Anglo-American force drove the Germans out of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya, and the British and Australians scored an epic victory against General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein.5
In the Pacific, American success at the Battle of Midway, in June 1942, made possible landings at Guadalcanal and nearby islands in the Solomons. Furious fighting ensued amid swamps, heat, driving rain, disease, snakes, and crocodiles—not to mention screaming cockatoos—as well as an acute shortage of rations. Some eight thousand Americans died in six months of fighting, while the Japanese lost more than thirty thousand men. At sea, the Solomons campaign claimed some fifty major U.S. and Japanese warships, and many lives on both sides—when the cruiser USS Juneau blew up in mid-November, Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, lost five sons. Uncertainties abounded. U.S. pilots taking off could never be sure that when they returned from their mission there would be an intact flight deck to land on; at one point the Americans had only a battleship and a damaged carrier to keep open the supply lines to the besieged Marines on Guadalcanal.6 Little by little, however, as 1942 turned into 1943, U.S. forces gained the upper hand, on land and on sea, and the battered Japanese withdrew from Guadalcanal.
The sheer productive muscle of the United States was making itself felt—in both theaters of the war. Here in the Pacific, it announced itself through the gradual arrival of a new fleet of Essex-class aircraft carriers, starting with the Essex, which was commissioned in December 1942 and arrived in Pearl Harbor a few months later. The Yorktown and the Intrepid soon followed (the former renamed for the Yorktown lost during the Battle of Midway the previous year), and others were on the way, creating the largest carrier force in history. With a top speed of thirty-three knots, the vessels were speedier than their predecessors; they were also longer and broader, and could hold some ninety aircraft each, considerably more than their Japanese counterparts. Also coming online were several light fleet carriers (CLVs)—starting with the Independence, a converted cruiser, in January 1943—each capable of carrying forty-five planes.7
To the officers aboard the Rochambeau, the implications of this astonishing carrier output were at best dimly perceived. They did, however, have opinions about General Douglas MacArthur’s decision to pursue an “island-hopping” campaign toward Tokyo—in essence, bypassing heavily fortified Japanese positions in favor of islands that were less well defended but still strategically significant. Some, including Lieutenant Kennedy, thought it a dubious strategy, wasteful of men and resources. But they were in no position to argue. When Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met at Casablanca in January 1943 to plot objectives for the year, they agreed among other things on a U.S.-led two-pronged westward advance through the Pacific, aimed at capturing mighty Rabaul, the heavily fortified Japanese forward base on the island of New Britain, some six hundred miles off the northeastern tip of Australia. Forces in the South Pacific under Admiral William F. Halsey would advance northward through the Solomons to Bougainville while MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific units would move up the northeast coast of New Guinea, cross the Dampier and Vitiaz straits, land on New Britain, and seize control of Rabaul and its five airfields. Lack of resources soon compelled a modification, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed MacArthur to seek to advance only as far as Cape Gloucester, at the far end of New Britain from Rabaul, while Halsey moved up as far as southern Bougainville.8
The exotic names spoke to the strange and forbidding world the men were entering. Locales in the European theater might be remembered from schoolbooks, but who had heard of Leorava or Kolombangara? Where on earth was Vella Lavella?
And how was one to distinguish between New Britain, New Caledonia, New Ireland, New Guinea, and the New Hebrides? Samuel Hynes, who fought on Okinawa, would write of the islands in the Pacific theater as remote, mysterious places, seemingly untethered from the continents. It was a corner of the world where people spoke in unfamiliar tongues, where there were no towns, no bars, nowhere to go, where history seemed hidden and where there were no monuments of the past, at least ones that Westerners could recognize.9
II
A few days after arriving in Espiritu Santo, Jack Kennedy boarded a transport vessel, LST 449, bound for Tulagi, a tiny island off Guadalcanal where his PT squadron would be based and where Halsey had ordered the erection of a giant billboard on a hillside, visible far and wide: “KILL JAPS. KILL JAPS. KILL MORE JAPS. You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well.”10
As the ship approached the northern coast of Guadalcanal, she suddenly came under attack. The Japanese had chosen this day, April 7, to launch a major aerial assault on U.S. shipping in the area, using 177 aircraft from bases in New Georgia and Bougainville. Jack, who was in his bunk reading when the action commenced soon after 3:00 P.M., scrambled onto the deck just in time to see nine enemy planes bearing down on the 449 and the nearby destroyer Aaron Ward. U.S. Grumman Wildcats were racing from Henderson Field, on Guadalcanal, to engage the Japanese aircraft but had not yet arrived. A five-hundred-pound bomb splashed into the water, knocking the boat into a twenty-degree list to starboard and lifting the stern out of the water. Another bomb hit fifty feet off the port bow, and yet another just off the bridge on the starboard side. Miraculously, the 449 avoided a direct hit—she was loaded with fuel and ammunition and, if struck, might have gone up in a giant fireball—but the Aaron Ward was not so lucky. “They dropped all around us—and sank a destroyer next to us, but we were OK,” Jack wrote coolly to Lem Billings.11
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