The sinking of PT-109

At around 2.30 a.m. on 2 August 1943, in Blackett Strait between the islands of Kolombangara and Gizo in the central Solomon Islands, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri came out of the darkness straight at the American motor torpedo boat PT-109 and cut it in two. Two sailors were killed outright; eleven – two of them badly burned – spent six days hiding on uninhabited islets behind Japanese lines until they were found by two young islanders, scouts for an Australian coastwatcher. The boat’s commander was 26-year-old Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy, son of the former US ambassador in London. From a military point of view it was a minor episode in a failed night action by torpedo boats, one of many in the New Georgia campaign. Yet the story of the PT-109 castaways became the best-known tale of American torpedo boats in the entire war, and twenty years later part of the legend of a President of the United States.

Background: the night war in the waters of New Georgia

Since 30 June, when the landing on Rendova began, the Americans had been fighting for New Georgia and the Japanese airfield at Munda. The island’s Japanese garrison depended on reinforcements and supplies brought by night from Rabaul and the Shortland Islands in fast destroyers – runs the Americans called the “Tokyo Express”. The ships unloaded men and cargo at Vila on the southern tip of Kolombangara, from where barges carried them on to New Georgia. Twice in July American cruisers and destroyers had barred their way – in the Battle of Kula Gulf and the Battle of Kolombangara – but in both clashes Japanese torpedoes inflicted heavy losses on the Allies, and most of the reinforcements got through.

The second line of defence against the night convoys was the PT (Patrol Torpedo) motor torpedo boats (PL). From mid-July a dozen or so of them were stationed at a makeshift base on Lumbari Point at the northern end of Rendova. Every night they went out to hunt Japanese barges and watch Ferguson Passage and Blackett Strait, through which the Tokyo Express passed. They were fast, 24-metre boats with wooden hulls of mahogany plywood, three Packard engines with a combined output of 4,500 hp, and a load of aviation fuel that turned a boat into a torch if it was hit. Their armament consisted of four Mark 8 torpedoes, a 20 mm cannon and machine guns. The torpedoes were the weakest point: obsolete and slow (about 28 knots, less than Japanese destroyers at full speed), they often failed on launching, ran at the wrong depth or did not explode. Only some of the boats had radar.

PT-109 and its commander

PT-109, built in 1942 by the Elco yard at Bayonne, New Jersey, had been fighting since December 1942 off Guadalcanal with Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 2, based at Tulagi. Kennedy, who thanks to his father and influential family friends had got into the navy despite a bad back, and had then himself pressed for a combat posting, took command of the war-worn boat on 23 April 1943. In the summer the boat, together with the whole squadron, was moved first to the Russell Islands and then to Rendova. The day before its last patrol Kennedy had an army 37 mm anti-tank gun that he had acquired lashed to the bow in place of the life raft – the timbers on which it was mounted later saved the crew’s lives.

On the night of 1/2 August there were thirteen men on board: Kennedy, his executive officer Ensign Leonard Thom, Ensign George “Barney” Ross, who had earlier lost his own boat and was aboard as an observer, and ten enlisted men.

The Tokyo Express on the night of 1/2 August

Thanks to decrypted Japanese signals, the command at Rendova knew that another convoy would be heading for Vila on the night of 1/2 August. This time it consisted of four destroyers – Hagikaze, Arashi, Shigure and Amagiri – carrying some 900 soldiers and supplies for the Kolombangara garrison. The ships came from Rabaul, with Japanese floatplanes circling overhead.

That same afternoon Japanese bombers attacked the base at Rendova and destroyed two boats. Even so, in the evening the base commander, Lieutenant Commander Thomas Warfield, sent fifteen boats to sea. They were divided into four groups, deployed in Blackett Strait along the destroyers’ route. PT-109 belonged to Group B, positioned furthest north, along the western coast of Kolombangara. Warfield directed the action by radio from Rendova, several dozen kilometres away, without seeing the battlefield.

Chaos in the dark

The destroyers entered Blackett Strait shortly before midnight. The first to spot them on his radar screen was the commander of Group B, Lieutenant Henry Brantingham in PT-159; he fired his torpedoes from about one and a half kilometres and – without warning the other boats of his group by radio – turned away behind a smokescreen. His torpedoes missed, and one of the tubes caught fire, giving away the boat’s position. Things went much the same for the other groups. The boats fitted with radar fired their torpedoes first and, as ordered, returned to base, leaving the rest without “eyes”. The others groped about in the mist and darkness, and since radio silence was in force, many crews, including that of PT-109, were not listening carefully to the radio and did not know that the destroyers had already passed. Kennedy thought the flashes and gunfire he saw and heard came from Japanese shore batteries on Kolombangara.

The outcome was dismal. Eight boats fired some thirty torpedoes, and not one hit; reports of explosions alongside the destroyers proved illusory. At around 1.45 a.m. the Japanese unloaded men and supplies at Vila and then set off on the return journey, so as to be out of range of American aircraft before dawn. After the war the official historian of the US Navy’s PT boats, Robert Bulkley, called that night the most confused and least effectively conducted action the boats had ever taken part in.

The collision

At around 2 a.m. PT-109, together with PT-162 and PT-169, was still patrolling the strait. The night was moonless and overcast. To keep its phosphorescent wake from betraying the boat to Japanese floatplanes, Kennedy was running on one engine at minimum speed. At around 2.30 a.m. one of the crew saw a shape racing northwards out of the darkness. It was Amagiri, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Kōhei Hanami, with the commander of the 11th Destroyer Division, Captain Katsumori Yamashiro, on board. Kennedy tried to turn to attack, and Ross did not have time to load the gun. Idling along, the boat had no chance of escaping – the crew had a few seconds. The destroyer struck the starboard side at a sharp angle, cut the boat in two and carried on without stopping.

Whether it was a deliberate ramming or an accident is still not known. Years later Hanami claimed that he had deliberately steered his ship at the boat. Yamashiro and some of the crew recalled the opposite: that the destroyer had tried to avoid it for fear of the torpedoes exploding. The American journalist Robert Donovan, author of the first full-length book on PT-109 (1961), spoke to the Japanese helmsman and concluded that the order had been to steer a collision course.

The collision ignited the petrol from the boat’s tanks; the water around the wreck was set ablaze. Torpedoman Andrew Jackson Kirksey and motor machinist Harold Marney were killed outright – their bodies were never found. Motor machinist Patrick McMahon, who had been in the engine room, was badly burned. The bow section of the boat, kept afloat by its watertight compartments, stayed on the surface. Kennedy and Thom gathered onto it the survivors scattered in the water, including the burned McMahon. The nearby PT-169 and PT-162 still tried to attack the destroyer – the first missed, and on the second the torpedoes would not leave their tubes – and then they left without searching for survivors. No order covered what to do when a boat was lost. At the base on Rendova the crew of PT-109 were given up for dead and a memorial service was held for them.

Six days on the islets

The castaways clung to the drifting bow for about eleven hours. All around, on the large islands – Kolombangara, Gizo and New Georgia – there were Japanese troops. When it became clear in the afternoon that the wreck was sinking, Kennedy decided to swim to the tiny, uninhabited islet of Plum Pudding (Kasolo) on the southern edge of the strait. The non-swimmers, the lantern and the shoes were put on a timber from the gun mounting, which the others pushed as they swam alongside. Kennedy, who had swum for the Harvard team as a student, towed McMahon, holding the strap of his life jacket in his teeth. Covering the few kilometres took them about five hours.

The islet was a few dozen metres across and had neither water nor food. In the evening Kennedy, with a lantern and a revolver, swam out into Ferguson Passage, through which American boats usually passed, hoping to stop one of them. That night, however, the boats were patrolling other waters; exhausted and carried by the current, he did not get back until morning. The following night Ross made a similar attempt. On 4 August the castaways swam to the somewhat larger island of Olasana, where coconut palms grew. The next day Kennedy and Ross reached the neighbouring island of Naru, right by Ferguson Passage. There they found a small canoe, a box of Japanese biscuits and a drum of fresh water, and in the distance they saw two islanders, who paddled away at the sight of them.

The scouts and the coconut

The islanders were Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, young inhabitants of the western Solomon Islands and scouts for Sub-Lieutenant Arthur Reginald Evans of the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve. Evans was one of the coastwatchers – a network of Australians, New Zealanders and islanders who reported enemy movements by radio from hidden posts behind Japanese lines. His post on the slopes of the Veve volcano on Kolombangara, above the Japanese garrison at Vila, looked out over the site of the disaster. On the night of 1/2 August Evans had seen a ball of fire over the strait in the distance, and in the morning he received a coded signal reporting PT-109 missing and asking for information. So he sent his men out to search. Gasa and Kumana paddled their canoe to Naru to search the wreck of a Japanese barge. Whether or not they had been sent by Evans – accounts differ – it was they who found the castaways on Olasana on 5 August. At first they took the bearded, sunburnt Kennedy for a Japanese, and only after a while believed that these were Americans.

As there was no paper, Gasa suggested that Kennedy carve a message with a knife on the husk of a green coconut. In telegraphic shorthand it read: “NAURO ISL COMMANDER NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY”. Thom wrote a more detailed report in pencil, with a password and signals. On 6 August Gasa and Kumana paddled east with both messages to the island of Wana Wana, where they passed the news to a senior scout, Benjamin Kevu, who informed Evans. Then, at night and across rough seas patrolled by the Japanese, they reached the American post on the islet of Roviana, and on 7 August the base on Rendova. Meanwhile Evans sent the castaways food and a letter asking their commander to come to him. Kennedy, hidden under palm fronds in the bottom of a canoe, reached Evans’s post on the islet of Gomu on the evening of 7 August.

On the night of 7/8 August PT-157 under Lieutenant William Liebenow, a friend of Kennedy’s, escorted by PT-171, picked him up from Gomu. Kennedy guided them through the reefs to Olasana, where sailors in rowing boats took off the castaways. By the morning of 8 August all of them were at Rendova. War correspondents were already waiting there.

The night’s balance sheet and a lesson for the US Navy

The night of 1/2 August was a failure for the American torpedo boats. Fifteen boats failed to stop four destroyers and did not hit a single one of them; the only Japanese loss was the damage to Amagiri’s bow in the collision with PT-109. The convoy landed all its troops at Vila, and they went on to defend Kolombangara and the central Solomons. Behind this lay technical weaknesses – unreliable torpedoes, the lack of radar on most boats, hulls that went up in flames after a single hit – and failures of command: directing the battle by radio from a distant base, no requirement to warn neighbouring boats and no procedures for searching for survivors.

The command of Admiral William Halsey drew its conclusions. It was decided that torpedo boats were unsuited to fighting destroyers, and on the next run of the Tokyo Express six radar-equipped destroyers were sent against it. On the night of 6/7 August, while the PT-109 castaways were still waiting on Olasana, they sank three of the four Japanese destroyers in the Battle of Vella Gulf, including Hagikaze and Arashi, which five days earlier had passed unscathed through Blackett Strait. The torpedo boats returned to the tasks at which they were genuinely effective: hunting the barges in which the Japanese moved men between the islands, patrolling and supporting landings.

Its place in the war

In the history of the Pacific War the sinking of PT-109 was a minor episode. The New Georgia campaign went on. The Americans captured the airfield at Munda on 5 August, and later that month, bypassing heavily garrisoned Kolombangara, they landed on Vella Lavella – the Japanese on Kolombangara, including those brought in on the night of 1/2 August, were evacuated in the autumn.

The significance of the event, however, went far beyond the military balance sheet. A few days after the crew was rescued, American newspapers, led by The New York Times, were reporting that Kennedy’s son was a hero in the Pacific. Kennedy, Thom and Ross received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and Kennedy also the Purple Heart. A month later he returned to duty in command of the gunboat PT-59, and in December, with worsening back pain and after malaria, he left the Pacific. In June 1944 John Hersey described the crew’s ordeal in the article “Survival” in The New Yorker. An abridged version in Reader’s Digest, circulated through the efforts of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, accompanied John’s first campaign for Congress in 1946. The story of PT-109 became one of the pillars of his political image: in the 1960 presidential campaign he handed out tie clips in the shape of the boat to supporters, in the Oval Office he kept the coconut with the carved message on his desk, and in 1963 the film PT 109, starring Cliff Robertson, reached cinemas. The legend usually left out the part played by Thom, the crew, Evans and the scouts, and critics asked whether the commander of a boat running on one engine in a strait full of enemy ships did not bear some of the blame. Most historians, however, do not hold him responsible for the collision, pointing to the lack of warnings and the chaos of the whole action. Asked how he had become a war hero, Kennedy himself would reply: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

The lives of the other people in this story remained bound up with it for ever. In 1952 Kennedy wrote a letter to Kōhei Hanami wishing for peace between Japan and the United States; in 1961 he invited Evans to the White House. Gasa and Kumana, invited to the President’s inauguration, never reached Washington – colonial officials sent other men in their place. Plum Pudding islet was later renamed Kennedy Island. In 2002 an expedition led by Robert Ballard found the remains of PT-109’s bow section at a depth of about 370 metres.