But the drama was not quite over, as the 449 soon came upon a downed Japanese pilot bobbing in the water some twenty yards away. To Kennedy he looked impossibly youthful, with his close-cropped, jet-black hair. “He suddenly threw aside the life belt he was wearing, pulled a pistol, and started firing,” Jack wrote afterwards in a letter to his parents. “We let go with everything but he didn’t seem to get hit until finally an old soldier aimed with his rifle and took the top of his head off. He leaped forward and sank out of sight. That I understand is the usual story with the officers. With the men, however, there would seem to be no such desire for the glorious death.”12
This unvarnished realism would be a theme in Jack’s letters home in the weeks to come, both before and after he assumed command of his boat—PT 109—on April 25. He’d gotten an early lesson in the perils of combat and the die-hard commitment of the enemy, and it gave him pause. His training, he realized, had not prepared him for the arena he had now entered, as he relayed in an early letter to Torby Macdonald. To Inga Arvad he wrote that a visit to the “very simple grave” of George Mead, a friend from Cape Cod whom Inga had met and who had been killed in the fighting for Guadalcanal, was “about the saddest experience I’ve ever had, and enough to make you cry.” When he learned from home that “all the nuns and priests along the Atlantic coast” were “putting in a lot of praying time” on his behalf, Jack was comforted but said he hoped “it won’t be taken as a sign of lack of confidence in you all or the Church if I continue to duck.”13
All the signs pointed to a long and brutal struggle, he surmised, though one that his side, with its technological superiority and immense productive capacity, would probably ultimately win. “Our stuff is better,” he wrote in an early letter. “Our pilots and planes are—everything considered—way ahead of theirs—and our resources are inexhaustible—though this island to island stuff isn’t the answer. If [the U.S. commanders] hold to that motto out here ‘The Golden Gate by 48’ won’t even come true.”14
It struck Kennedy that few of the men he met who had been in the war zone for any length of time expressed any longing for combat—they just wanted to get home alive. (“It’s one of those interesting things about the war,” he told Inga, “that everyone in the States…want[s] to be out here killing Japs, while everyone out here wants to be back. It seems to me that someone with enterprise could work out some sort of exchange, but as I hear you saying, I asked for it, honey, and I’m getting it.”) Nor did anyone have many good words for the high command. When told by his parents of MacArthur’s popularity in the United States, Jack answered, “Here he has none—is, in fact, very, very unpopular. His nickname is ‘Doug-Out-Doug,’ ” for his alleged refusal to use Army forces to relieve the Marines at the time of the first invasion of Guadalcanal, and for not coming out of his “dugout” in Australia. “No one out here has the slightest interest in politics—they just want to get home—morning—noon—and night….I didn’t mean to use ‘They’—I meant ‘WE.’ ” It all meant, he added, that Joe Junior, who had received his wings the previous year but was still stateside, should be in no hurry to get out to the South Pacific. “I know it’s futile to say so, but if I were he I would take as much time about [it] as I could.”15
The local commanders seemed scarcely better than the top brass. “Just had an inspection by an Admiral,” he informed Inga in one witty passage. “He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three.” At the machine shop, the admiral seemed confused about its purpose.
After it was gently but firmly explained to him that machinery was kept in the machine shop, and he had written that down on the special pad he carried for such special bits of information which can only be found “if you get right up to the front and see for yourself” he harrumphed again, looked at a map, wanted to know what we had there—there being a small bay some distance away. When we said nothing, he burst out with, “well, by God, what we need is to build a dock.” Well, someone said it was almost lunch and it couldn’t be built before lunch….After a moment of serious consideration and a hurried consultation with a staff of engineers he agreed and toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table….That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.16
Jack’s concerns with his situation may have owed something to his dawning realization that the PT boats, however glamorous in the popular imagination, were of questionable military utility. Fast, nimble, and versatile, their prows riding high in the water, the boats could make hit-and-run attacks in narrow waters or close to land, and they were excellent for rescuing downed fliers and trapped Marines. But their torpedoes, designed in the 1920s, were outmoded and had to be launched through tubes that often caught fire. The torpedoes were also slow, traveling at a speed of only twenty-eight knots, insufficient to catch the faster-moving Japanese vessels. To compound the problem, the guns were inadequate and the radios frequently conked out. Worst of all, with their thin mahogany shells (two layers of one-inch planking) and heavy fuel loads, the PTs were, to say the least, combustible, prone to turning into floating infernos when hit. Both in Melville and on Tulagi, Kennedy was drilled on the importance of avoiding detection by enemy aircraft and ships, which meant, above all, operating under the cloak of darkness and moving stealthily. It took guts to make your close approach in this way—the enemy could obliterate you in an instant if his lookouts ever saw you.17
Lieutenant Kennedy on board PT 109, July 1943.
“The glamour of the PT’s just isn’t except to the outsider,” he wrote his sister Kick after reading a John Hersey Life magazine feature on the boats. “It’s just a matter of night after night patrols at low speed in rough water—two hours on—then sacking out and going on again for another two hours.” Even so, Jack continued, the position was “a hell of a lot better” than any other in the Navy. “As a matter of fact this job is somewhat like sailing, in that we spend most of our time trying to get the boat running faster.”18
James Michener offered a more unvarnished assessment in Tales of the South Pacific: “I have become damned sick and tired of the eyewash written about PT boats. I’m not going to add to that foolish legend….They shook the stomachs out of many men who rode them, made physical wrecks of others for other reasons. They had no defensive armor. In many instances they were suicide boats. In others they were like human torpedoes….Even for strong tough guys from Montana it was rugged living.”19
PT 109 had already seen considerable action by the time Kennedy assumed command. Produced by the Electric Launch Company (Elco) and plunked into the oily waters off Bayonne, New Jersey, the previous June, the boat had performed well in early testing runs and by September 1942 was en route to the South Pacific, where she soon saw heavy action north of Guadalcanal around the turn of the year. By April 1943 she was grimy and battle-scarred, infested with rats and roaches, and in need of an engine overhaul and a general sprucing up; mechanics at the Sasape port, on Tulagi, worked on the engines while Jack and his crew performed the cosmetic work of cleaning and painting. They were a varied lot, all but one chosen by Jack (Ensign Leonard “Lennie” Thom, the executive officer, a barrel-chested bear of a man who had played tackle at Ohio State, had only recently come on board under the previous commander and so stayed put), and they appreciated that he got right down to work with them, scraping and painting the bottom of the boat. Jack had learned that a good PT crew stuck together, enlisted men and officers alike.20
Action was sparse in the early weeks—a lull had set in after the Allied victory at Guadalcanal—which gave Jack time to arrange for flowers to be sent to his mother for Mother’s Day and to write letters home, all of them thoughtful, some of them vivid and evocative.21 “On good nights it’s beautiful,” he wrote his parents in mid-May. “The water is amazingly phosphorescent—flying fishes which shine like lights are zooming around and you usually get two or three porpoises w
ho lodge right under the bow and no matter how fast the boat keep just about six inches ahead of the boat. It’s been good training. I have an entirely new crew and when the showdown comes I’d like to be confident they know the difference between firing a gun and winding their watch.”22
On land, the conditions were rougher, with heavy rains every day that caused his blue uniform to grow a quarter-inch-thick “green-mold,” and primitive living quarters featuring huts with no walls in which the rats and roaches roamed at will. Yet Jack kept his sense of esprit de corps and his quick humor, a fact much appreciated by his crew and, no doubt, by his family. To Kick he remarked wistfully that his vision of “lying on a cool Pacific island with a warm Pacific maiden hunting bananas for me is definitely a bubble that has burst.” Even swimming was a no-no: “There’s some sort of fungus in the water that grows out of your ears—which will be all I need. With pimples on my back, hair on my chest and fungus in my ears I ought to be a natural for the old sailors home in Chelsea, Mass.”23 Then again, he was an officer, which, he deadpanned to his parents, brought certain perks: “They have just opened up an Officer’s Club which consists of a tent. The liquor served is an alcoholic concoction which is drawn out of the torpedo tubes, known as torp juice. Every night at about 7:30 the tent bulges, about five men come crashing out, blow their lunch and stagger off to bed. This torp juice, which is the most expendable item on the island, makes the prohibition stuff look like Haig and Haig but probably won’t do any one any permanent harm as long as their eyes hold out.”24
Kennedy himself seldom touched alcohol, and he was not much for card playing, preferring instead to sit around and talk or write letters or read. (Among his companions: Tolstoy’s War and Peace.) With someone else, such seemingly “refined” preferences might have caused grousing among the men, but by all accounts—contemporaneous as well as retrospective—Kennedy was liked and respected for his sunny demeanor and his wit as well as his calm self-possession and unflappability. Lennie Thom, who, in addition to being Jack’s executive officer, roomed with him, wrote his fiancée that he liked Jack from the moment they met. A second roommate, Johnny Iles, felt the same, while a third appreciated that the young Kennedy wore his celebrity status lightly and did not act like the Ivy League son of an ambassador. “He just seemed like the ordinary young fellow—just like Lennie and Johnny.” Radioman John Maguire, for his part, recalled, “I knew just three things about him. The kid himself was a millionaire. His father was an ambassador. And once, when a ship’s carpenter bawled the hell out of him for accidentally splashing some water on him, the lieutenant just stood there in his skinny green shorts and said, ‘Excuse me,’ and let it go at that. The carpenter did a lot of gulping later when he found out the kid was PT 109’s skipper.”25
The squadron commander, too, evidently liked what he saw. He gave Jack a perfect 4.0 in “ship-handling” and a 3.9 for his ability to command.26
III
That ability to command would soon be tested. In June 1943, preparations began at the key staging bases in the South Pacific—at Guadalcanal and Tulagi and farther south at Nouméa, in New Caledonia—for a major Allied offensive designed to capture the New Georgia islands (where the Japanese had an important airfield at Munda Point) and then oust the Japanese from New Guinea. Suddenly the PT night patrols took on new significance, as the boats were to disrupt Japanese supply vessels, most of them destroyers escorting reinforcements through the New Georgia Sound, the sea lane running through the middle of the Solomon archipelago, which U.S. commanders referred to as “the Slot.” The supply ships they called the “Tokyo Express.”27
The PT 109 crew off Guadalcanal, July 1943. Back row, from left: Allan Webb, Leon Drawdy, Edgar Mauer, Edmund Drewitch, John Maguire, and Jack Kennedy. Front row, from left: Charles Harris, Maurice Kowal, Andrew Kirksey, and Lennie Thom.
PT 109 was dispatched to the Russell Islands, southeast of New Georgia, and then, in July, to the epicenter of the war zone, west of New Georgia near Lumberi Island, in the mid-Solomons. Japanese aircraft struck frequently, seeking to destroy bases and ships and to regain the air superiority over the area that they had lost in recent months. On the night of August 1, Lieutenant Kennedy’s boat was one of fifteen PTs sent from Rendova Harbor into Blackett Strait, in four groups, in order to try to intercept a Rabaul-based Japanese transport convoy streaming southward to Vila, on the southern tip of Kolombangara, laden with supplies as well as nine hundred soldiers. One of the Japanese ships, the two-thousand-ton destroyer Amagiri, carried thirteen officers and 245 men under Lieutenant Commander Kohei Hanami, a compact, muscular thirty-four-year-old graduate of Etajima, the Japanese naval academy. Hanami’s superior, Captain Katsumori Yamashiro, commander of the 11th Destroyer Flotilla, was also aboard the Amagiri that night.
The fifteen PT boats were quite a sight—and sound—rumbling to life in the harbor, each with three engines of twelve cylinders each. Five hundred and forty cylinders drummed in unison. The sun had dipped below Lumberi Island, and the sleek boats looked menacing in the twilight, their guns pointed to the sky. Engines growling, the boats mustered by division, and Kennedy maneuvered through traffic to fall in behind PT 159, PT 157, and PT 162 in Lieutenant Henry J. Brantingham’s Division B. This division had the farthest to go, having been assigned the station on the Kolombangara coast off Vanga Vanga, about forty miles away, so it moved out first, followed by the other three groups. Off the starboard side, barely visible in the fading light, the crews could just make out the low-slung coastal hills of New Georgia. Behind them, cloaked in a thin cloud, was the top of Rendova Peak, rising 3,400 feet.*1, 28
One wonders if Kennedy, as he steered his boat into the night, reflected on a comment he’d made in a letter to his family mere days before: “I myself am completely and thoroughly convinced that nothing is going to happen to me. I think this is probably the way everyone feels—someone else, yes—themselves no. Feeling that way makes me anxious to see as much of it as possible and then to get out of here and back home. The more you see [the war], the quicker you get out—or so they tell us.”29
By 9:30 P.M. the PT boats had reached their respective patrolling stations without incident. It was a moonless, starless night, so dark that it was hard to tell where the water ended and the sky began. At around midnight the Japanese destroyers passed through the strait, and some minor skirmishing occurred involving a few PTs, whereupon the destroyers continued on their way. Poor communication among the PTs meant that several of the boats without radar, including Kennedy’s 109, did not know what had occurred. The 159 and the 157, having fired their torpedoes, left the scene, leaving Kennedy’s boat as well as Lieutenant John Lowrey’s 162 behind. The two skippers stayed put, patrolling at idling speed and straining their eyes in the darkness looking for ships they didn’t know had already passed through. To conserve fuel and reduce the size of their wake so it wouldn’t be spotted by enemy boats or aircraft, Kennedy and Lowrey throttled down, operating on only one of three engines. A third boat, the 169, under the command of Lieutenant Phil Potter, emerged out of the blackness to join them. He, too, throttled down. The three boats now formed a picket line as they continued their slow patrol. Unbeknownst to them, the Japanese convoy had already discharged their cargoes and were now on the way back up the strait.30
At 2:27 A.M., a silhouette suddenly appeared out of the darkness off Kennedy’s starboard bow, some two to three hundred yards away. Must be another PT boat that will soon veer off, the men thought. So did the crews on the 162 and the 169, who spotted the vessel at about the same time. But it kept coming, and suddenly everyone on the 109 understood what was happening: a Japanese destroyer was bearing down on them, like some charging skyscraper. Kennedy turned the wheel, but it was too late—with only his center engine in gear, he had no hope of maneuvering out of harm’s way, or of firing his torpedoes. Maguire grabbed his Miraculous Medal and had just begun to say, “Mary, conceived wi
thout sin, pray for us,” when the Amagiri sliced into the starboard bow of the 109 at a twenty-degree angle, shearing off a portion of the boat, then moved on into the night.31
“This is how it feels to be killed,” Kennedy thought to himself as he was thrown onto the deck.32 Two of his men—Machinist’s Mate Harold Marney, who was in the forward turret, and Torpedoman Andrew Kirksey, who had had strong premonitions of death in the days prior—perished more or less instantly; their bodies were never found. But Jack and ten others on the boat miraculously survived, most of them floating amid the debris and burning fuel, some of them barely conscious. Fortunately for them, the Amagiri’s churning wake had sucked most of the flames away from the wreckage, even as it cast the entire scene in a phantasmagoric light. Half of the wrecked boat stayed afloat, and one by one the men made their way over to it and climbed aboard. Machinist’s Mate Patrick McMahon, however, who had been belowdecks at the time of the collision and then had been carried some distance under the destroyer’s propellers, was too burned to make it on his own, so Kennedy dove back in and towed him back to the boat, a laborious task that took the better part of an hour. He also hauled in Gunner’s Mate Bucky Harris, who’d badly hurt his leg and could barely swim. (“For a man from Boston, you’re certainly putting up a great exhibition out here, Harris,” Kennedy said. Harris told him to go to hell.) Maguire, meanwhile, rescued Machinist’s Mate Gerard Zinser, and Lennie Thom hauled in William Johnston, another machinist’s mate who had inhaled gasoline fumes and could hardly move.33
JFK Page 42