The House of Kennedy(19)
Bulkeley embarks on a promotional tour touting the success of the PT boat program. More than five hundred vessels—forty-three PT squadrons each with twelve boats—would be commissioned for the war effort. A fleet of two hundred is soon to be dispatched to the Pacific theater.
In the sumptuous privacy of Kennedy’s suite at the Plaza Hotel, Joe Sr. meets with the newly ranked lieutenant commander. The patriarch pitches the decorated veteran “Sea Wolf” on the navy neophyte Jack and his qualifications as skipper. Although Joe’s motivations on behalf of his son—the postwar veterans’ vote—are transparent to Bulkeley, he moves Jack into active duty in the Pacific.
In April 1943, Jack is in command of a PT boat.
“Without PT-109,” presidential aide Dave Powers boldly declares, “you have no President John F. Kennedy.”
Chapter 13
Ship at two o’clock!” the lookout shouts to Lieutenant Junior Grade Jack Kennedy, skipper of PT-109. He’s silenced the radios and powered down the eighty-foot craft to a single, idling engine to avoid detection by the advancing Japanese fleet.
Light, fast, and heavily armed but not heavily armored, PT boats are designed to attack in great numbers as the “Mosquito Fleet.” On August 2, 1943, there are only three—PT-109, PT-162, and PT-169, in picket formation—on the Blackett Strait, south of Kolombangara in the Solomon Islands.
At 2:30 a.m., the ships are patrolling in total darkness. It’s impossible for Jack to get his bearings on the open water, and his vessel is not equipped with radar. He doesn’t have time to turn the boat, with its diminished thrust, out of the line of attack. At a speed of over thirty knots, a 1,750-ton Fubuki-class Japanese destroyer called the Amagiri collides with them, severing the fifty-ton PT-109 in half.
On impact, Jack smashes into the helm. And the gas tank ruptures.
The crew sustains immediate and widespread casualties. Motor Machinist Mate Second Class (MM2) Harold William Marney and Torpedoman’s Mate Second Class (TM2) Andrew Jackson Kirksey are killed instantly. The water’s surface is coated with a slick of engine oil and fuel. The eleven survivors’ eyes are burning as they choke on the fumes—all the while clinging to pieces of wreckage floating in the shark-infested waters.
Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class (MM1) Patrick Henry “Pappy” McMahon is blasted from his post in the engine room. He’s severely burned and struggling to swim. Acting on instinct, Jack supports the injured man across his own back and uses the strap of the machinist’s life preserver as a towline, pulling McMahon’s weight with his teeth.
McMahon’s stepson, William H. Kelly, later tells the Associated Press, “Dad was burnt so bad. He thought he was holding [Kennedy] up, so he asked the [future] president, ‘Just leave me. I’ll be all right by myself.’ But of course, he would not think of it.”
Hoping for rescue, the crew clings to the hull of the boat for a dozen hours, but it begins to take on water. Creating a makeshift flotilla from the debris of PT-109 and loading it with salvaged supplies, the strongest among the surviving crew push the injured for three or four miles toward the closest safe land they can find, Kasolo Island, nicknamed Plum Pudding Island.
Though Kick later writes home from England, “The news about Jack is the most exciting I’ve ever heard,” only Joe Sr. knew—and he kept the message from Rose—that Jack is declared “missing in action” by the Navy Department.
Plum Pudding Island is uninhabited and without food or drinkable water, so after two days, Kennedy braves his injuries and leads the search for help, assisted by Ensign George H. R. “Barney” Ross. The two of them swim between Olasana Island and Nauro Island, where they startle “Coastwatchers”—Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana—aiding the Allied forces. The native Pacific islanders don’t initially trust the men, but upon discovering the stranded survivors of PT-109, they decide it’s safe to help Kennedy.
The islander scout Gasa helps Jack use a jackknife to scratch a distress message onto a green coconut—“NAURO ISL…COMMANDER…NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT…HE CAN PILOT…11 ALIVE…NEED SMALL BOAT…KENNEDY”—that Gasa and Kumana deliver to Australian Lieutenant Arthur Reginald Evans, a fellow Coastwatcher on yet another island, who sends rescue.
The next morning, Jack awakens to four islanders looking down at him and the crew. One of them says, in a perfect British accent, “I have a letter for you, sir.” Lieutenant Wincote, a New Zealander who is working with the US Army, writes, “I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me.”
On August 8, after enduring six days in enemy territory, Jack and the crew reach the US base at Rendova.
Nearly two decades later, that crucial dried coconut husk is displayed on President Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office, and he remains in correspondence with Gasa and Kumana, even inviting them to his inauguration.
The machinist McMahon, whose burns covered 70 percent of his body, eventually recovers from his injuries. The onboard collision ruptured a disk in Jack’s back. He will require surgery, but his psychological wounds run even deeper.
Elevated to full lieutenant and now in command of PT-59, Jack sees further action in the Solomon Islands until November 16, 1943, when the mentally and physically exhausted officer is ordered to the naval hospital at Tulagi Island, where he relinquishes his command. Jack returns to the United States on December 21, already having been declared a “Hero in the Pacific” by the New York Times.