The cacophony subsided and stillness returned. With eleven of the thirteen men accounted for and on board, the men of the 109 set about waiting. They knew the wreckage would not stay afloat forever. Initially, they expected either an enemy vessel or the other PTs to happen upon them, but no boats appeared. In the seconds before the collision, Lowrey’s 162 had tried to attack the Amagiri, but the torpedoes didn’t fire and Lowrey turned away to the southwest. Immediately after the ramming, the 169 fired two torpedoes that missed their target, whereupon Potter moved out of the vicinity. The two skippers would later say they thought the crew of the 109 had been killed in the collision or the flames, so there would be no point in sticking around in these dangerous waters, with more enemy destroyers perhaps coming through.
Some hours passed. “As dawn came up,” one crewman recalled, “we found ourselves on the boat with the boat under water all the way up to the bow. There was about 15 feet of the boat, which was 80 feet long, still sticking out of the water at a 45 degree angle, right side up.”34 They were deep in hostile territory, with Kolombangara to the east, Vella Lavella to the northwest, and the Gizo anchorage to the west-southwest. All were enemy-held, and the airstrip on Gizo was close enough that Kennedy and his men could see Japanese Zekes and Zeros taking off and landing.
As the morning progressed, the PT took on more water and began to turn her keel; soon she would disappear altogether in the dark blue waters. Jack asked the men for their suggestions on what to do—“There’s nothing in the book about a situation like this,” he said—and they made clear that the decision was his. He determined that they would swim to a coral island that could just be made out on the horizon some miles away, east of Gizo. He guessed that the island was too small to be enemy-held, but he could not be sure. Nor could he know if sharks were lurking nearby. They would have to chance it. Kennedy ordered the most severely hurt crew members and the poorest swimmers to hold on to a two-by-eight-foot plank (which had been part of the 37-millimeter gun mount) from which they would paddle along while he towed the ailing McMahon, holding the strap of the engineer’s life jacket in his teeth.35
“Will we ever get out of this?” someone asked.
“It can be done,” Kennedy replied. “We’ll do it.”36
Thus began an epic swim across Blackett Strait—in broad daylight, with the enemy close at hand. Four hours it would last. Jack would do the breaststroke for ten or fifteen minutes, rest a little while, then resume swimming, all the while reassuring McMahon and the other men that they were getting closer to their destination. Near sundown they finally made it, reaching the sandy beach of their precious refuge, Plum Pudding Island (known to locals as Kasolo), which turned out to be not much bigger than a football field and was partly covered in brush. There were coconuts in a handful of trees, but none within reach. A quick scan confirmed Jack’s hunch: no Japanese in sight. Utterly exhausted, he lay panting, his feet in the water and his head in the sand. His back throbbed. When at last he stood up, he vomited, on account of all the salt water he had swallowed. Gradually, he and McMahon made their way up the beach and collapsed under a bush as the others neared the island on their plank.37
Back at Tulagi and Rendova, meanwhile, word had spread rapidly about the ramming of the 109. The boat had exploded and been totally consumed by fire, reports indicated, and all men aboard were assumed dead. Preparations were made for a memorial service. Paul “Red” Fay, a spry and convivial PT officer who had met Jack briefly at Melville and later became a good friend—and would serve as undersecretary of the Navy in the Kennedy administration—despaired at the news, especially as his close pal George “Barney” Ross was on board. Fay wrote his sister, “George Ross lost his life for a cause he believed in stronger than any one of us, because he was an idealist in the purest sense. Jack Kennedy, the Ambassador’s son, was on the same boat and also lost his life. The man that said the cream of a nation is lost in war can never be accused of making an overstatement of a very cruel fact.”38
On his tiny island, Kennedy now had to calculate the odds of being rescued by Allied forces versus being found by the enemy. A Japanese barge floated by close to the shoreline; the men hid as best they could and breathed a sigh of relief when the vessel continued gently on its way. Next time they might not be so lucky. Time was also a factor, with McMahon in bad shape and several of the others, notably William Johnston, also suffering. With friendly boats unlikely to come into this part of Blackett Strait, Kennedy determined that, come evening, he would swim alone into Ferguson Passage, one of the approaches into the strait, in the hope of signaling a PT boat out on patrol. His usual approach in his young life—letting events come to him, being the detached if often perspicacious observer—would not suffice here, he realized. He had to seize control, had to bend destiny to his will. It was a brave idea, and a long shot. Even if an Allied skipper somehow spotted the lone light flashing in the darkness, would he really take his craft over to investigate? And if he did, who’s to say he or an overeager crew member wouldn’t shoot first and ask questions later? Kennedy acknowledged the odds against him, but he had no better idea, and doing nothing was tantamount to suicide. The men agreed, or at least offered no resistance.39
As darkness fell, Kennedy stripped down to his underwear, grabbed the battle lantern, and went on his way. To protect his feet from the coral, he wore shoes. On a lanyard around his neck hung his .38 revolver.
The eeriness of that night would stay with him always. Exotic creatures flitted about near him in the water, and he worried about the presence of sharks and barracuda. Much of the time, not a sound could be heard other than his own breathing and swim strokes. He was alone in the world. For a time he could rest, standing in waist-deep water on the barrier reef. As the hours went by, Kennedy realized there would be no rescue that night—by the flares in the far distance he could see that the PTs were patrolling elsewhere. He turned to swim back to his men, making steady progress until suddenly the current began taking him sideways. He fought it as best he could, swimming harder and ditching his shoes, but fatigue overtook him and he surrendered to the tide, to the immensity, to the blackness. He drifted, clutching his lantern, not sure whether he would live or die, until in the predawn hours he found himself near the tiny islet of Leorava. He straggled onto the beach, his feet bleeding from the coral, his back aching, and promptly fell asleep. Upon waking shortly after dawn, he swam the half mile back to Plum Pudding Island, collapsing in exhaustion as soon as he laid eyes on Lennie Thom and Barney Ross.40
That evening Ross took his turn swimming out into the strait; again, no friendly boat appeared. Hunger was now a major concern, and thirst even more so, so Jack decided the group would take to the water again, bound for Olasana Island, a slightly larger atoll to the south. The journey, on the morning of August 4, took close to three hours against a strong current, Jack again towing McMahon by a strap between his teeth, and it proved a wise move: Olasana had coconuts, in the trees and on the ground, that provided crucial sustenance. But rescue seemed as far away as ever, so on the following day Kennedy and Ross set out once more, swimming to a still larger island, Naru (also known as Cross Island), directly on Ferguson Passage. Here they happened upon a damaged one-man canoe as well as small bags of Japanese candy and crackers and a drum of potable rainwater. They also spotted, some distance away, what appeared to be two native islanders in a canoe. Kennedy and Ross waved at them to stop, but the men, afraid that they were Japanese, paddled frantically away.41
When Kennedy returned to Olasana late that night (Ross had stayed behind on Naru), he was astonished to see the same two locals there, communing with the men of PT 109. Their names were Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, and they were teenage scouts working for the Allies. A new excitement gripped the Americans: could this be the break they needed? Kennedy persuaded Biuku to paddle him back to Naru for another attempt at flagging down a friendly boat in Ferguson Passage. The effort failed
, but, at Biuku’s suggestion, Jack scrawled a now famous message on the husk of a coconut: NAURO ISL COMMANDER NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY. Biuku and Eroni took the coconut, along with a handwritten note by Thom, and made for the Rendova base, some thirty-eight miles away, through dangerous waters. En route, the two men stopped off at a nearby island to inform a fellow scout of the news; he in turn informed an Australian coastwatcher (an intelligence operative who observed enemy ship and troop movements, and also helped rescue stranded Allied personnel), Lieutenant A. Reginald Evans, who promptly dispatched seven of his scouts to Olasana in a large canoe laden with food, drink, and cigarettes.42
The scouts carried a message for Kennedy: “I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Meanwhile, I shall be in radio communication with your authorities at Rendova and we can finalize plans to collect the balance of your party.”43 The following day, Saturday, August 7, the islanders brought Jack, who was hidden under ferns in the boat, to the Australian’s camp. From there, things moved rapidly. The brass at Rendova, fearing it could be a trap to lure American forces into an ambush, allotted only one boat to the rescue attempt, William “Bud” Liebenow’s PT 157, which got to the scene without incident.
“Where the hell you been?” Kennedy shouted when the boat picked him up en route to Olasana, shortly after 11 P.M.
“We got some food for you,” Liebenow called back.
“No, thanks,” Kennedy answered. “I just had a coconut.”44
Soon all eleven men were aboard PT 157 and on their way to Rendova for medical attention, arriving there at 5:30 A.M. on August 8. Their ordeal was over, seven days after it began.
IV
In due course, many questions would be raised about what happened to PT 109 on that moonless night of August 1–2, and why. Some questioned why John F. Kennedy’s boss, Lieutenant Commander Thomas G. Warfield, did not make a more determined effort to locate and rescue survivors after learning of the disaster. He could have done more, certainly, but given that he was assured by Potter and Lowrey that Kennedy’s boat had gone up in a ball of flames, with “nothing left,” one can see why he didn’t. U.S. planes did search the area on August 3, but not until dusk, by which point Kennedy and his men were hiding in the bushes on the island. But why didn’t Potter and Lowrey come to the rescue immediately after the fiery crash? The two commanders were clearly unnerved by the sight of the Japanese destroyer slicing through the 109, and they worried that other enemy vessels were nearby. If an understandable reaction, it was also a problematic one. Potter insisted in the face of questions that he spent thirty or more minutes crisscrossing the crash site looking for survivors but did not find any. Several of his crew members disavowed the claim, saying no serious effort at rescue was made.45
Kennedy’s own actions have been subjected to endless scrutiny over the years. To many journalists and historians he was a hero, particularly for his decisions and his leadership after the ramming. To these analysts his exploits showed his poise, tenacity, bravery, resourcefulness, and imperturbability under intense pressure. Critics, however, have wondered how a commander of a PT boat—a vessel whose great asset was its speed and agility—would ever allow himself to be rammed. In particular, they questioned why Kennedy was sitting in the middle of the strait with only one of his three engines in gear. It may have reduced the amount of churning that could be spotted by enemy boats and planes, but it also made it impossible for him to make a quick escape. Kennedy himself acknowledged afterwards that when he saw the destroyer, he had pushed the throttle forward, stalling his engines. He had neglected to open his flaps first.46
Overall, though, the principal failure that night lay not with the skipper of PT 109, his crew, or the other PT commanders but with the broader tactics and circumstances beyond their control. Only four of the fifteen torpedo boats in the operation had radar (Kennedy’s was not among them), a handicap under any circumstances but especially on a jet-black night. Was it really reasonable to expect the other eleven commanders, instructed to stay off their radios for the most part, to either follow the lead PTs or spot enemy vessels on their own, using nothing but their eyes to guide them? As it was, the radar-equipped boats in the squadron, having fired their torpedoes, hurried back to base, leaving the other boats to fend for themselves. “Abandoned by their leaders and enjoined to radio silence, the remaining PT boats had no real chance, in pitch dark, of ambushing the Japanese destroyers,” one of the skippers said later.47 For his part, the division leader, Brantingham, had done little before the mission to explain tactics and procedures to the other three commanders in his group, a problem made worse by the fact that the radios on the boats periodically lost their frequencies. As for Kennedy’s decision to operate with only the center engine engaged, that was good and sensible PT doctrine for night patrol—Lowrey and Potter were doing the same at the time of the collision. They knew what Kennedy knew: that a phosphorescent wake was a golden invitation to Japanese aircraft to attack.
The ramming of PT 109 was more a freak accident than anything else. From the moment the Amagiri loomed up out of the dark night, Kennedy had perhaps ten seconds to get clear before being hit—a tall order for anyone in his position. Nor did his Japanese counterpart have appreciably more time; Hanami spotted the American boat at about the same time Jack spotted his. There is some question as to whether Hanami tried to avoid ramming the 109 or did so on purpose. He would subsequently say he did it intentionally, the better to protect his own vessel, but Captain Yamashiro, his superior, insisted that he had ordered Hanami to avoid a collision—he worried that the PT would explode on impact and thereby damage or sink the destroyer—but that there was no time to act on the command.48
Critics would also fault Kennedy’s decision to swim alone into Ferguson Passage, calling it reckless and futile. Perhaps it was, but the solo effort nonetheless speaks to Kennedy’s courage, stamina, and refusal to be defeated. He was a strong swimmer, having competed in meets since boyhood and suited up for Harvard. It’s surely meaningful that his attempt, unsuccessful though it was, earned him the undying respect and devotion of his crew. None of them had a word of criticism about how their commander acted after the collision, either then or later.49
Squadron commander Al Cluster, writing home to his parents, said Kennedy was “one of the finest officers I have. He did commendable work in getting his crew out O.K. and we’re all very proud of him. Somehow, when we heard of his boat going down, I could not believe that he was lost. He’s just that type of fellow. You know that he can take care of himself and you can always depend on him.” Of Kennedy’s family and fame, Cluster went on, they “never enter into any of our thoughts here. I’ve only known him about six months but I am proud to serve with him in my outfit. Whatever he does, he earns solely by his capabilities and not by the prestige of his name. People like that make me realize what an American is, something you find nowhere else in this world—men and women achieving ends in spite of their background. In fact, I’d say it would be just as hard for a boy like Jack to make good as it is for a kid from the slums. Both have disadvantages to overcome. No one out here has done a better job than Jack.”50
Ultimately, Jack Kennedy deserves no accolades for losing the first boat he commanded in the war, but he does merit praise for his resourceful and, yes, heroic actions on behalf of his crew, and in particular Pat McMahon. The initial swim from the wreckage, in which Kennedy pulled the severely burned engineer along for close to four hours, was by any measure an extraordinary feat, as McMahon’s recollection makes clear: “I knew he was in no great shape himself; he had been bounced down bad by the ramming. And he never looked more than 140 pounds to me, even on a good day, and today was no good day. But he was swimming for both of us now and not counting the cost. He’d pull and rest, pull and rest, and say, ‘How are you, Mac?’ to keep my spirits up.”51
Author Garry Wills, hardly
uncritical in his assessment of John F. Kennedy’s life and career, notes the Kennedys’ later willingness to embellish the PT 109 story to suit Jack’s political purposes, yet also concludes, “The heroism was real. Kennedy saved the life of Patrick McMahon. He undertook the most dangerous assignments in looking for rescuers. His physical courage can never be questioned.”52
The military evidently felt the same way. Some months after the incident, Kennedy would be awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the Navy’s highest award for gallantry, for his actions. He also received a Purple Heart.53
V
In Hyannis Port, Joseph P. Kennedy had received confidential word soon after the initial disaster in Blackett Strait that Jack was missing. Precisely who told him is not known, but likely it was a contact in the Navy Department. Kennedy opted not to tell Rose, instead spending agonizing days wondering alone what had happened and fearing the worst. He had wanted desperately to keep his sons out of the war, but when they made clear their determination to serve and to see action, he had supported them to the hilt and, in Jack’s case, had even pulled strings to get him his PT assignment. Now the nightmare seemed to be coming true.
It says something about Joe Kennedy’s stoicism—and perhaps the nature of his marriage—that he would keep such devastating information from his wife. Rose, it seems, first learned of the rescue on August 19. “The Globe called me up about 8:20 in the morning,” she wrote her children in a round-robin letter, “when I was in your father’s room waiting to hear the morning radio news. Of course, I was very much surprised and excited and I told them I would contact your father, who had gone over to the farm for his early morning ride….Dad knew he was missing for two weeks, although he gave no sign—for which I am very thankful—as I know we should all have been terribly worried. He just complained about his arthritis and I said it was funny he was nervous now, little knowing what he had to be nervous about.”54
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