AUGUST 2, 1943
Twenty-six-year-old US Navy lieutenant Jack Kennedy motored his patrol torpedo (PT) boat through the darkness off Vanga Point, just northwest of Kolombangara, a circular island in the Blackett Strait of the Solomon Island chain.
It was just after midnight, and the sky was black. With no moon and no stars, the darkness was total.1 Kennedy and his crew were navigating the waters virtually blindfolded and alone. The men had become separated from a fifteen-boat formation sometime before midnight while trying to avoid a Japanese searchlight. Kennedy’s mission was simple—to engage, damage, and turn back Japanese destroyers serving as supply ships to reinforce Emperor Hirohito’s troops. The convoy they were waiting for consisted of four Japanese warships in total: the Amagiri, Arashi, Hagikaze, and Shigure. The destroyers belonged to Japan’s 8th Fleet, which also included five heavy cruisers and two light cruisers. The Tokyo Express, as it was called, had to make its resupply missions at night due to Allied air superiority in the South Pacific.
The destroyers were not due to sail through the area for another hour or so. American code breakers had unlocked the Imperial Navy’s schedule and predicted an arrival time of about 1 a.m.
Another patrol torpedo boat, PT-159, had engaged the enemy a short time before and several miles away, but Kennedy knew nothing of this. The boat’s captain, Lieutenant Henry “Hank” Brantingham of Fayetteville, Arkansas, had mistaken four blips on the radar screen for Japanese barges when in fact they represented four enemy destroyers carrying heavy guns and more than 1,000 troops. The approaching warships were also sailing under the invisible protection of several armed Japanese floatplanes flown by pilots eager to strafe any and all Allied intruders. Believing that he had the advantage over what he had presumed were ill-equipped barges, Brantingham aligned his boat with nearby PT-157, and together they forged an attack. The American sailors soon realized their mistake as the destroyers immediately opened fire on the small patrol boats. PT-157 launched four torpedoes, but none made contact with the enemy. Outgunned and outnumbered, the patrol torpedo boats moved out of firing position and zigzagged their way for more than ten miles before they found themselves out of danger.
To complicate matters even more, Commander Thomas Warfield, the man in charge of the PT formation, had ordered PT-159, the only boat with radar, back to base. Without radar coverage and separated from the nearest American boat by at least 1,000 yards, Kennedy took a defensive posture and laid down a smoke screen with the boat’s stern-mounted generators while waiting for the Tokyo Express to enter the area en route to a Japanese military base on the island of Kolombangara.
The Japanese destroyers had now successfully breached four American picket lines, raining lightning down upon the patrol boats while evading a myriad of torpedoes launched in their direction. Thus far, not one of twenty-four torpedoes fired at the Japanese had hit its mark. The Japanese convoy arrived at the island outpost at approximately 12:30 a.m. and unloaded troops and supplies. The destroyers set sail again nearly two hours later. By this time, Kennedy’s boat was patrolling the waters north of the island along with two other lost boats: PT-162 and PT-169.
A heavy mist lay over the water. Kennedy guided PT-109 quietly along, utilizing only one of the patrol boat’s three 1,500-horsepower engines. Four crewmembers were off duty and had fallen asleep on deck, while the remaining six were on high alert at their stations at the gun turrets both forward and aft, next to the machine gun on the port side and on the forward deck next to the big 37 mm gun.
Ensign Barney Ross saw it first—the dark outline of a massive vessel headed directly toward them from about 1,000 yards away. Before Ross could utter a word, crewmate Harold Marney, a normally quiet nineteen-year-old sailor from Springfield, Massachusetts, shouted a warning from his position by the forward gun turret.
“Ship at two o’clock!”2
Lieutenant Kennedy believed it to be another PT boat fumbling around in the darkness. As the vessel drew closer, he noticed the huge phosphorescent wake of a massive ship. The destroyer Amagiri was bearing down on them at a speed of thirty-four knots with no signs of shifting course. Kennedy jerked the wheel in an attempt to fire off a torpedo. He ordered his men to prepare to launch a torpedo while Ensign Ross worked feverishly to stuff a shell into the 37 mm antitank gun. But Amagiri was closing in fast—too fast for the crewmembers to avoid collision.
The men of PT-109 braced for impact.
This is how it feels to be killed, Kennedy thought.
Amagiri looked like a giant orca as it nearly swallowed PT-109 whole. The destroyer plowed into the small vessel just feet away from Kennedy’s position in the cockpit, tossing the young lieutenant violently against the steel bulkhead. The destroyer continued to eat away at the boat, tearing off a huge chunk of the starboard stern. PT-109 began to sink.
Harold Marney was thrown from the vessel and disappeared below the waterline. Fellow crewmember Andrew Jackson Kirksey, a twenty-five-year-old torpedo man from Reynolds, Georgia, also fell out of the boat and into the black, cold water along with twisted metal from the broken vessel’s aft section. Seven more men were picked up and tossed into the ocean like toy soldiers.
Darkness then turned to daylight as a tower of fire and smoke fed on gallons of gasoline that had leaked from the boat.
Kennedy, though knocked off his feet and onto his back, remained inside the wreckage of PT-109. Another sailor, Patrick “Pappy” McMahon, a motor machinist’s mate from Wyanet, Illinois, found himself trapped in the engine room as torrents of water and flames flooded the small space. McMahon pulled his knees up close to his chest and waited to die. Seconds later, Amagiri’s propellers, working like a giant vacuum inhaling everything in their path, sucked him out of the engine room. McMahon should have been cut to ribbons but somehow managed to evade the massive blades as the turbulent ocean spit him back out moments later. When he breached the surface, McMahon found himself surrounded by a ring of fire, five hundred yards away from Kennedy and the sinking PT-109. Flames licked his body, burning his arms and chest, as he attempted to swim to safety.
Kennedy struggled to his feet and called out to his men.
“Who’s aboard?” he shouted.
Edman Mauer, a young quartermaster from St. Louis, called back, as did radioman John Maguire. Like Kennedy, Mauer had been knocked to the deck. He suffered a deep bruise to his right shoulder but was otherwise okay. Maguire had been standing close to Kennedy at the time of impact but, instead of getting knocked down, was tossed out of the cockpit and into the ocean, where he was at the mercy of the destroyer’s rear gunners, who were firing at will.
Maguire swam back to the patrol boat and climbed onto the sinking hull. The boat’s gas tank was still partially filled, and knowing that it could explode at any moment, Kennedy ordered the two sailors to abandon ship. The men jumped into the sea, where they joined eight other survivors treading water amid the flames and debris from PT-109. Two sailors, Marney and Kirksey, never reemerged after getting thrown into the ocean. Their bodies were never found.
Of the survivors, the man in the worst shape appeared to be Pappy McMahon. He had sustained second- and third-degree burns on his torso, chest, and face.
Kennedy swam over to McMahon and assessed his injuries.
“How are you, Mac?”3
McMahon was barely conscious. He mumbled a response and indicated that he could not move his arms or legs. At age thirty-seven, Pappy was the oldest member of the crew and a full decade older than Kennedy, his commander. Exempt from military service because of his age, McMahon had enlisted in the navy anyway. Now here he was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, drawing what could be his last breaths while ingesting seawater and gasoline fumes. There was no way that the man could make it back to the broken vessel on his own, so Kennedy lifted McMahon onto his back and clenched the strap of Pappy’s life jacket in his teeth. The young lieutenant pushed back through the black, choppy water, towing McMahon toward the wreck of PT-109. The predawn winds howled, and the strong current served as a formidable barrier to the rescue. Yet Kennedy kept fighting against the waves and the pain screaming through his head, shoulders, and legs and especially his lower back. The journey took an hour to complete. Several others also scrambled back to the wreckage.
Another survivor, Gerry Zinser, was attempting to swim in the direction of the bow’s hull when his entire body was overcome by pain.
“Please, God, don’t let me pass out! Bring the boat!”
The boat was splintered and not operational. No other help was on the way.
Zinser, a machinist’s mate first-class and career navy man from Belleville, Illinois, had been standing near the engine hatch at the time of the collision. He was immediately hurled into the air and into the water. Zinser had been knocked totally unconscious, but his life jacket kept him afloat. He woke up about ten to fifteen minutes later. Surrounded by small fires, he was burned on the arm and chest.
Three other crewmen, including radioman John Maguire, tried to pull Zinser through the water, but they too struggled against the stiff current. The men needed help. Kennedy, a strong swimmer, swam the breaststroke toward the sound of Zinser’s quivering voice. His body scorched, the Illinois native was ready to give up. When Kennedy finally reached him, he grabbed Zinser’s shoulder and began shaking him.
“I will not allow you to die!” Kennedy shouted.4
The lieutenant helped escort Zinser back to PT-109. Soon other men emerged from the smoky water, some by their own will and others through the strength and power of their comrades who had refused to let them die.
It had now been three hours since the Japanese destroyer rammed PT-109. Amagiri was long gone. The bow was all that remained of the eighty-foot-long torpedo patrol boat. The stern section, where the engine room was located, had sunk soon after impact. Two crewmembers were still missing. Kennedy and others called out for Marney and Kirksey but heard nothing. The young commander soon came to grips with the painful reality that he had lost two men under his watch.
The eleven exhausted survivors of PT-109 waited for help, but unaware that a Japanese destroyer had rammed the vessel, the other patrol torpedo boat commanders were not coordinating a rescue attempt. Kennedy had a flare gun, but firing it while adrift in hostile waters was too dangerous. He feared that the signal might alert the enemy and trigger a second attack. The battered and burned crewmembers grabbed hold of the broken vessel and found brief moments of sleep as darkness turned to dawn.
The next morning, Kennedy asked his men if they were willing to fight if the Japanese discovered their position, which was now three miles southeast of Kolombangara Island, then occupied by 10,000 Japanese soldiers. “Fight with what?” a crewmember asked. The men were low on arms—they had only a submachine gun, a few knives, and six pistols among them. The men said they would engage the enemy if the fight was fair. But if the Japanese sent out an overwhelming force to dispatch the remaining crewmembers of PT-109, the best option was surrender.
“We’re no good to anybody dead,” quartermaster Edman Mauer said.5
Fighting became less of an option as the morning wore on. The sea continued to swallow what remained of the vessel. Soon all eleven men were struggling to hang on to only fifteen feet of wood and metal sticking out of the ocean. By early afternoon, only one foot of the boat remained above water. It was time for Kennedy and his crew to abandon ship.
The commander scanned the horizon, looking for land not crawling with enemy troops. Soon, he spotted a tiny island that appeared deserted. The decision was made. They would swim for it. Kennedy drew the crew’s attention to a large piece of wood from the wreckage floating in the water.
“I’ll take McMahon with me,” he said. “The rest of you can swim together on this plank.”6
McMahon knew that he would be dead weight in the water and that Kennedy’s only chance to reach the island was to swim alone.
“You go on with the other men,” McMahon told Kennedy. “Don’t worry about me.”
The young commander would hear none of it.
“You’re coming, Pappy,” he said. “Only the good die young.”
Just as he had done hours before, Kennedy bit on the leather strap attached to McMahon’s life vest and started to swim. Their safe haven stood 3.4 miles in the distance. Kennedy swam the breaststroke for fifteen minutes straight before taking a brief rest. He continued to swim in intervals with McMahon on his back. The other men made the journey kicking their legs behind a flotation device jerry-rigged from a pair of two-by-eight wooden planks. It took four long hours for the men to reach their destination, Kasolo Island.
As arduous as the marathon swim was, the most difficult moments for Kennedy occurred when he reached shallow water. He cut his legs and arms badly on jagged coral as he struggled toward the beach. Once he reached land, Kennedy vomited violently—coughing up the seawater he had swallowed during the four-hour swim. Both he and McMahon then crawled toward a nearby tree line for cover. Amazingly, Kennedy had reached the island before the other PT-109 survivors swimming with the assistance of the flotation device.
Now reunited, the survivors hid themselves in the thick bushes and flora of the island, away from the angry eyes of the enemy. The only food on the island was coconuts, but when the men ate them, they all got sick.
Kennedy took stock of the welfare of his crew. Beaten by the enemy and tortured by the ocean, they were now starving and losing hope. The young commander pondered whether any of them would survive this ordeal—especially Pappy McMahon.
“McMahon’s burns, which covered his face, body and arms, festered, grew hard, and cracked in the salt water, and his skin peeled off,” Kennedy later wrote.
Hope of rescue was dim. In this hostile location, there was a greater chance that the men would be mowed down by Japanese soldiers or left to rot and die on the island. If Kennedy wanted help, he would have to go find it. He remembered that for the past several nights, PT boats had made their runs through a nearby channel. Kennedy believed that in order to save his men, he would have to put his own life on the line and swim by himself into Ferguson Passage in the hope of alerting a passing boat to their desperate situation and the position of his men. Despite pleas from his crew not to go—that it was a suicide mission—Kennedy grabbed a lantern and waded back into the cold, dark water. His men watched him go, believing they would never see him alive again.
Kennedy swam for about a half mile before reaching a patch of land called Leorava Island. After a brief rest, he swam for another two miles before reaching the Ferguson Passage. The night sky was the color of charcoal, as it had been on the previous evening. Kennedy had a .38 pistol tied to a lanyard around his neck and a battle lantern. He planned to fire three warning shots into the sky and then flash his lantern in hopes that his fellow PT boatmen would spot him. The young lieutenant waited, treading water, for several minutes as the stiff current pummeled his body. With no American vessel in sight, he decided to turn around and swim back to his men on Kasolo Island. Allowing the current to do most of the work this time, Kennedy floated and swam for several more hours in the never-ending sea. Just before dawn, he washed up on a coral reef jutting out from Leorava Island. He could hardly believe that the current had taken him back to the same spot where he had rested briefly the night before. He fought his way to the sand and fell into a deep sleep.
Later that morning, as the hot sun began to bake his rough skin and open wounds, Kennedy awoke and dragged himself back to the water. About a half mile now separated him from his crew. The young commander had been in the ocean on and off for the past thirty hours and had reached a point beyond fatigue. He had put his body and mind through an ordeal that would have broken most men. The survivors waiting back on Kasolo were now trying to cope with the thought that their leader was dead—that he had succumbed to the dangerous ocean. At around noontime, the stranded sailors saw a figure emerge from the gentle waves rolling up to the shore of the island. It was Lieutenant Kennedy. The young PT skipper fell to the sand and slipped into unconsciousness. His fellow survivors carried him into the thick green cover of the island, where he slept for several hours.
That evening, Ensign Barney Ross, the first to spot the Japanese destroyer on that ill-fated night, attempted the same swim Kennedy had and achieved the same result. The survivors had to come up with a new plan.
Morale was getting low as hunger gripped the crew. The young commander did his best to keep everyone’s spirits up, while privately he voiced anger to two of his senior men about the navy’s apparent decision to leave them all for dead. Kennedy was also growing more concerned for the survival of Pappy McMahon. If not treated soon, the sailor’s burns would become infected, and he would surely die.
Ferguson Passage remained their salvation. Just beyond the body of water was Rendova Island, which served as the US Navy’s major base for patrol torpedo boats. Getting closer to Ferguson Passage was their only chance of rescue. There was another island, bigger than Kasolo, on the horizon. It was a short distance from Ferguson Passage, but there was no telling whether Japanese troops had occupied it or not. Kennedy looked out at the faraway island of Olasana and decided that he must put the lives of his men at great risk in order to save them.
Once again, Kennedy hoisted the injured McMahon onto his back and returned to the water. The others followed on the makeshift raft. After another grueling swim, they arrived at Olasana Island, which was much bigger than the previous atoll. Kennedy and crew discussed whether to search the island for any sign of the enemy but decided it was a bad idea.
“Why go looking for trouble?” one survivor asked.7
The men agreed to remain in place near the beach and on constant watch. There were no Japanese soldiers on Olasana Island. There was no food or freshwater either. To make matters worse, that night six PT boats passed through the area but the weather was too bad and the seas too rough to attempt a swim in their direction. As the sun rose on Thursday, August 5, some survivors took to prayer, while others were convinced they would die stranded on the island. To cheer each other up, they took to repeating Kennedy’s phrase: “Only the good die young.”
The young lieutenant felt his strength returning and asked Barney Ross, the strongest swimmer among the crew, to accompany him on an hour-long swim to nearby Nauru Island, a four-hundred-yard-wide atoll thirty-eight miles north of Rendova Island. They made it to the island with relative ease and soon after found a box of rations left behind by the Japanese. The men, who had not eaten for days, devoured a few small bags of crackers and candy, washed down with potable rainwater collected in a fifty-gallon catchment drum. With their thirst and hunger abated, Kennedy and Ross continued to explore the small island and discovered an old wooden canoe. Kennedy paddled the one-man canoe into Ferguson Passage that night but, finding no PT boats in sight, returned to Nauru, loaded the canoe with the drum of drinking water, and ferried it back to his men on Olasana Island.
Kennedy paddled overnight, hoping that his men would greet the water drum as a welcome surprise. But the survivors had a surprise of their own to share with their young skipper.
“We’re saved! Two locals have found us!” they cheered.8
The survivors introduced Kennedy to two native scouts who had stumbled on the island in search of food. The native peoples of the Solomon Islands hated their Japanese occupiers and had proven strong supporters of the Allied cause. They were organized and inspired by Allied spies known as “coastwatchers,” brave men who lived behind enemy lines reporting on Japanese troop movements and building coalitions among the tribes. The native scouts agreed to take Kennedy back through Ferguson Passage in their canoe. They placed him in the bottom of the vessel and covered him with coconut leaves. Kennedy told the scouts to take him back to Nauru Island to rendezvous with Barney Ross, but Ross had decided to swim back to Olasana Island on his own. The scouts found Ross midway between the two small islands and pulled him aboard the canoe.
Once back on Nauru, Kennedy reexamined his options. He concluded that the tribesmen offered them the best chance for survival. The native islanders, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, were young like Kennedy and had been schooled by Seventh Day Adventist missionaries. Still, they did not speak much English. Kennedy filled in the communications gaps with pidgin: words, gestures, and body language that the tribesmen understood. He needed Gasa and Kumana to deliver a message to the PT base at Rendova but had nothing to write with or on. Gasa looked up at a coconut tree and came up with a clever solution. He ordered Kumana to climb the tall tree and retrieve a hanging fruit.
“We natives have lots of ‘papers,’” Gasa explained to Kennedy. “You can write a message inside this husk of coconut.”9
Kennedy thought the idea was ingenious. Using his knife, he dug into the sturdy husk and carved out this message:
NAURO ISL
NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT
HE CAN PILOT
11 ALIVE
NEED SMALL BOAT
KENNEDY
The scouts took the husk, along with another note to serve as backup written by fellow survivor Lenny Thom, a native of Sandusky, Ohio, and Kennedy’s executive officer, and headed out to sea. Kennedy now had two new concerns. There was a good chance the tribesmen would not make it all the way to Rendova as they were traveling in shark-infested waters made more treacherous by steady Japanese patrols. They could easily be killed or captured. If the coconut and emergency message fell into enemy hands, the eleven men left from PT-109 would surely be doomed.
Gasa and Kumana paddled seven miles east of Nauru to the island of Wana Wana, where they rendezvoused with a senior scout who worked directly under Lieutenant Reginald Evans, a coastwatcher from Sydney, Australia. Coincidently, Evans had witnessed the Japanese attack on PT-109 from his bamboo hut hidden high atop a mountain on the island of Kolombangara. Evans conferred with the scouts at a secret jungle location on the island of Gomu. The coastwatcher was shocked to hear that eleven men had survived the fiery collision with the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Evans would need to mount a rescue mission, but it would take some time to plan and execute. In the meantime, he sent the scouts back to Nauru with supplies for the starving survivors. He also sent this note to Kennedy:
To Senior Officer, Naru Is. Friday 11 p.m.
Have just learnt of your presence on Naru Is. & also that two natives have taken news to Rendova. I strongly advise you return immediately to here in this canoe & by the time you arrive here I will be in Radio communication with authorities at Rendova & we can finalise plans to collect balance of party. Will warn aviation of your crossing Ferguson Passage.
A. R. Evans Lt RANVR
On the morning of August 7, five days into the PT crew’s ordeal, a long canoe holding seven scouts and filled with supplies arrived on the shores of Nauru Island. Kennedy and Ross climbed in and guided the scouts to Olasana Island, where their nine comrades awaited them. The scouts handed out potatoes, yams, roast beef hash, and fish, which the starving survivors heated on a small cooking stove. While the men filled their empty bellies, an exhausted Kennedy got back into the canoe and headed for another nearby island to meet with Reginald “Reg” Evans.
When the coastwatcher first encountered the young lieutenant, he saw immediately that Kennedy had been through hell.
“He looked like a very tired, a very haggard and a very, very, sunburned young man,” Evans recalled several years later.10
The Aussie offered Kennedy a cup of tea and advised him to travel to the safe haven of Rendova Island while PT boats were dispatched to rescue the remaining survivors. But these were Kennedy’s men, and the suggestion that he would not see this rescue to the very end was unthinkable. Instead, the skipper joined the rescue party aboard PT-157 and returned to Olasana Island in the predawn hours of August 8, 1943. The survivors of PT-109 were all asleep in the bushes when help finally arrived. Kennedy called out to his men as, one by one, they stumbled slowly out of the jungle toward salvation.
For the next two hours, the survivors, including a badly burned Pappy McMahon, were carefully loaded onto the rescue boat. As they motored out to sea, Kennedy was escorted to a bunk belowdecks. Fatigued and overwhelmed by the emotions of the moment, he collapsed on the bunk and wept for the men he had saved and the two sailors he could not—Harold Marney and Andrew Jackson Kirksey.