An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

  It also made the perils of combat clearer to Jack. His Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald described a letter Jack wrote the next day, telling Macdonald “to watch out and really get trained, because I didn’t know as much about boats as he [Jack] did, and he said I should know what the hell I was doing because it’s different out in the war zone.” A visit to the grave of George Mead, a Cape Cod friend who had been killed in the Guadalcanal fighting, underscored the grim realities of the war for Jack. It was “among the gloomier events,” he told Inga. “He is buried near the beach where they first landed.” It was “a very simple grave” marked by “an aluminum plate, cut out of mess gear . . . and on it crudely carved ‘Lt. George Mead USMC. Died Aug. 20. A great leader of men—God Bless Him.’ The whole thing was about the saddest experience I’ve ever had and enough to make you cry.” When Rose told Jack that “all the nuns and priests along the Atlantic Coast” were “putting in a lot of praying time” on his behalf, he declared it comforting. But 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.”

  What impressed Jack now was not the eagerness of the men in the war zone for heroic combat—that was romantic stuff dispelled by battlefield losses—but their focus on getting home alive. He told Inga that the “picture that I had in the back of my greatly illusioned mind about spending the war sitting on some cool Pacific Beach with a warm Pacific maiden stroking me gently” had disappeared. What “the boys at the front” talked about was “first and foremost . . . exactly when they were going to get home.” He wrote his parents: “When I was speaking about the people who would just as soon be home, I didn’t mean to use ‘They’—I meant ‘We.’” He urged them to tell brother Joe not to rush to join him in the Pacific, as “he will want to be back the day after [he] arrives, if he runs true to the form of everyone else.” When Billings told Jack that he was considering a transfer to Southeast Asia to fight with the British, Jack expressed delight that he was “still in one piece,” noting that “you have certainly had your share of thrills,” and advised him to “return safely to the U.S. and join the Quartermaster Corps + sit on your fat ass for awhile. . . . I myself hope perhaps to get home by Christmas, as they have been good about relieving us—as the work is fairly tough out here.”

  Jack’s letters make clear that he was particularly cynical about commentators back home pontificating on the war from the safety and comfort of their offices and pleasure palaces. “It’s not bad here at all,” Jack wrote Billings, “but everyone wants to get the hell back home—the only people who want to be out here are the people back in the states—and particularly those in the Stork Club.” He made a similar point to Inga: “It’s one of the interesting things about this war that everyone in the States, with the exception of that gallant armed guard on the good ship U.S.S. Stork Club—Lt. Commander Walter Winchell—wants to be out here killing Japs, while everyone out here wants to be back at the Stork Club. 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.” “I always like to check from where he [the columnist] is talking,” he wrote his parents, “it’s seldom out here.” All the talk about “billions of dollars and millions of soldiers” made “thousands of dead” sound “like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw [on my boat]—they should measure their words with great, great care.”

  Jack admired the courage and commitment to duty he saw among the officers and men serving on the PTs, but he also sympathized with their fear of dying and saw no virtue in false heroics. When one of the sailors under his command, a father of three children, became unnerved by an attack on their PT, Jack found his reaction understandable and tried to arrange shore duty for him. After the man was killed in another attack on Jack’s boat, he wrote his parents: “He never said anything about being put ashore—he didn’t want to—but the next time we came down the line—I was going to let him work on the base force. When a fellow gets the feeling that he’s in for it—the only thing to do is to let him get off the boat—because strangely enough they always seem to be the ones that do get it.”

  Jack reserved his harshest criticism for the high military officers he saw “leading” the men in his war zone. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, was no hero to him. Jack thought MacArthur’s island-to-island strategy was a poor idea. “If they do that,” he wrote his parents, “the motto out here ‘The Golden Gate by 48’ won’t even come true.” Jack reported that MacArthur enjoyed little or no support among the men he spoke to. The general “is in fact, very, very unpopular. His nick-name is ‘Dug-out-Doug,’” reflecting his refusal to send in army troops to relieve the marines fighting for Guadalcanal and to emerge from his “dug-out in Australia.”

  The commanders whom Jack saw up close impressed him as no better. “Have been ferrying quite a lot of generals around,” he wrote Inga, “as the word has gotten around evidently since MacArthur’s escape that the place to be seen for swift and sure advancement if you’re a general is in a PT boat.” His description to Inga of a visit to their base by an admiral is priceless. “Just had an inspection by an Admiral. He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three. . . . ‘And what do we have here?’” he asked about a machine shop. When told what it was, he wanted to know what “you keep in it, harrumph ah . . . MACHINERY?” Told yes, he wrote it “down on the special pad he kept for such special bits of information which can only be found ‘if you get right up to the front and see for yourself.’” After additional inane remarks about building a dock in a distant bay, he “toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table. . . . That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.”

  Worse than the posturing of these officers was the damage Jack saw some of them inflicting on the war effort. As far as he was concerned, many of them were little more than inept bureaucrats. “A great hold-up seems to be the lackadaisical way they handle the unloading of ships,” he wrote his parents a month after arriving in the Solomons. “They sit in ports out here weeks at a time while they try to get enough Higgins boats to unload them. . . . They’re losing ships, in effect, by what seems from the outside to be just inertia up high. . . . They have brought back a lot of old Captains and Commanders from retirement and stuck them in as heads of these ports and they give the impression of their brains being in their tails, as Honey Fitz would say. The ship I arrived on—no one in the port had the slightest idea it was coming. It had hundreds of men and it sat in the harbor for two weeks while signals were being exchanged.” Jack was pleased to note, however, that everyone had confidence in the top man, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. But he was especially doubtful about the academy officers he met. Now Rear Admiral John Harllee recalled Kennedy’s feeling in 1947 that “many Annapolis and West Point graduates were not as good material as the country could have selected. . . . He felt, for example, that some of the senior officers with whom he had had contact in the Navy left something to be desired in their leadership qualities.” Somewhat ironically, given his own convoluted path into military service, Jack saw political influence on admitting candidates to the academies as the root of the problem. The resulting unqualified officers were a significant part of what he called “this heaving puffing war machine of ours.” He lamented the “super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.”

  Another difficulty Jack and others saw was the overestimation of the PTs’ ability to make a substantial contribution to the fighting. Despite wartime claims that just one PT squadron alone had sunk a Japanese cruiser, six destroyers, and a number of other ships in the fighting around Guadalcanal, a later official history disclosed that in four months of combat in the Solomons, all the PT squadrons combined had sunk only one Japanese destroyer and one submarine. One PT commander later said, “Let me be honest. Motor torpedo boats were no good. You could
n’t get close to anything without being spotted. . . . Whether we sunk anything is questionable. . . . The PT brass were the greatest con artists of all times. They got everything they wanted—the cream of everything, especially personnel. But the only thing PTs were really effective at was raising War Bonds.” Jack himself wrote to his sister Kathleen: “The glamor of PTs just isn’t except to the outsider. 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.” The boats were poorly armed with inadequate guns and unreliable World War I torpedoes, had defective engines and highly imperfect VHF (very high frequency) radios that kept conking out, lacked armor plating, and turned into floating infernos when hit.

  Jack’s doubts about local commanders and the PTs as an effective fighting force extended to the crews manning the boats. In May he told his parents, “When the showdown comes, I’d like to be confident they [his crew] knew the difference between firing a gun and winding their watch.” By September, he declared that he “had become somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off.”

  During his initial service in the Solomons in April and May 1943, Jack had seen limited action. The United States had won control of Guadalcanal by then, and Kennedy arrived during a lull in the fighting. Nevertheless, the island-hopping campaign against the Japanese was not close to being over. In anticipation of another U.S. offensive and to reinforce garrisons southeast of their principal base at Rabaul on New Britain Island, the capital of the Australian-mandated territory of New Guinea, the Japanese launched continual air and naval raids. In June, when U.S. forces began a campaign to capture the New Georgia Islands and ultimately oust the Japanese from New Guinea, the PTs took on what U.S. military chiefs in the region called the “Tokyo Express”: Japanese destroyers escorting reinforcements for New Georgia through “the Slot,” the waters in New Georgia Sound southeast of Bougainville Strait and between Choiseul Island and the islands of Vella Lavella, Kolombangara, and New Georgia itself.

  Jack’s boat was sent to the Russell Islands southeast of New Georgia in June and then in July to Lumbari Island in the heart of the combat zone west of New Georgia. On August 1, his boat—PT 109—was one of fifteen PTs sent to Blackett Strait southwest of Kolombangara to intercept a Japanese convoy that had escaped detection by six U.S. destroyers posted north of the island. The fifteen were the largest concentration of PTs to that point in the Solomons campaign. It also proved to be, in the words of the navy’s official history, “the most confused and least effective action the PT’s had been in.” In a 1976 authoritative account, Joan and Clay Blair Jr. describe the results of the battle as “a personal and professional disaster” for PT commander Thomas G. Warfield. He blamed the defeat on the boats’ captains: “There wasn’t much discipline in those boats,” he said after the war. “There really wasn’t any way to control them very well. . . . Some of them stayed in position. Some of them got bugged and didn’t fire when they should have. One turned around and ran all the way out of the strait.”

  The attack by the boats against the superior Japanese force failed. Broken communications between the PTs produced uncoordinated, futile action; only half the boats fired torpedoes—thirty-two out of the sixty available—and did so without causing any damage. Worse yet, Jack’s boat was sliced in half by one of the Japanese destroyers, killing two of the crew members and casting the other eleven, including Jack, adrift.

  Since the speedy PTs were fast enough to avoid being run over by a large destroyer and since Jack’s boat was the only PT ever rammed in the entire war, questions were raised about his performance in battle. “He [Kennedy] wasn’t a particularly good boat commander,” Warfield said later. Other PT captains were critical of him for sitting in the middle of Blackett Strait with only one engine running, which reduced the amount of churning water that could be seen (and likelihood of being spotted and bombed by Japanese planes) but decreased the boat’s chances of making a quick escape from an onrushing destroyer.

  In fact, the failure lay not with Jack but with the tactics followed by all PT boat captains and circumstances beyond Kennedy’s control. Since only four of the fifteen boats had radar and since it was a pitch-black night, it was impossible for the other eleven PTs to either follow the leaders with radar or spot the Japanese destroyers. After the radar-equipped boats fired their torpedoes, they returned to base and left the other PTs largely blind. “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 boat commanders said later.

  The ramming of Jack’s PT was more a freak accident than a “‘stupid mistake’” on Jack’s part, as Warfield’s successor described it. With no radar and only one of his three engines in gear, Jack could not turn the PT 109 away from the onrushing destroyer in the ten to fifteen seconds between the time it was spotted and the collision.

  With six crew members, including Jack, clinging to the hull of the boat, which had remained afloat, Kennedy and two other crewmen swam out to lead the other five survivors back to the floating wreck. One of the men in the water, the boat’s engineer, Pat “Pappy” McMahon, was seriously burned and Jack had to tow him against a powerful current. He then dove into the water again to bring two other men to the comparative safety of the listing hull. Two of the crew were missing, apparently killed instantly in the collision. They were never found, and Jack remembered their loss as a “terrible thing.” One, who had feared that his number was up, had been part of Jack’s original crew; the other had just come aboard and was only nineteen years old.

  At 2:00 P.M., after nine hours of clinging to the hull, which was now close to sinking, Kennedy organized the ten other survivors into two support groups for a swim to a seventy-yard-wide deserted speck of land, variously known as Bird or Plum Pudding Island. Jack, swimming on his stomach, towed his wounded crewman by clenching the ties of his life jacket in his mouth while “Pappy” McMahon floated on his back. The swim took five grueling hours. Because the island was south of Ferguson Passage, a southern route into Blackett Strait normally traveled by the PTs, Kennedy decided to swim out into the passage to flag a boat. Although he had not slept in thirty-six hours, was exhausted, and would face treacherous currents, he insisted on going at once. An hour’s swim brought him into position to signal a passing PT with a lantern, but no boats showed up that night; believing that no one on the PT 109 had survived the collision, the commanders had shifted their patrol to the northeast in the Vella Gulf. Bouts of unconsciousness marked Jack’s return swim to his crew, who had given him up for lost until he returned at noon. Too exhausted to try another swim to the passage on the night of August 3, he sent another crew member, who returned on the fourth with no better result.

  That day, the party swam to the larger nearby Olasana Island, where they found no drinking water to relieve their increasing thirst except for some rain they caught in their mouths during a storm. On the fifth, Kennedy and Barney Ross, another officer who had come on the boat just for the August 1 patrol, swam to Cross Island, which was closer to Ferguson Passage. There they found a one-man canoe, a fifty-five-gallon drum of fresh water, and some crackers and candy. Jack carried the water and food in the canoe back to Olasana, where the men, who had been surviving on coconuts, had been discovered and were being attended to by two native islanders. The next day, after Jack returned to Cross Island, where Ross had remained, he scratched a message on a coconut with a jackknife, which the natives agreed to take to Rendova, the PT’s main base. NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY. The next day, four islanders appeared at Cross with a letter from a New Zealand infantry lieutenant operating in conjunction with U.S. Army troops on New Georgia: “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 balance of your part
y.” On the following day, Saturday, the seventh day of the survivors’ ordeal, the natives brought Jack to the New Zealander’s camp. Within twenty-four hours, all were aboard a PT, being transported back to Rendova for medical attention.

  “In human affairs,” President Franklin Roosevelt had told the uncooperative Free French leader Charles de Gaulle at the Casablanca Conference the previous January, “the public must be offered a drama.” Particularly in time of war, he might have added.

  Jack Kennedy was now to serve this purpose. Correspondents for the Associated Press and the United Press covering the Solomons campaign immediately saw front-page news in PT 109’s ordeal and rescue. Journalists were already on one of the two PTs that went behind enemy lines to pick up the survivors. In their interviews with the crew and base commanders, they heard only praise for Jack’s courage and determination to ensure the survival and deliverance of his men. Consequently, when Navy Department censors cleared the story for publication, Jack became headline news: KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS PT BOAT, the New York Times disclosed. KENNEDY’S SON SAVES 10 IN PACIFIC; KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN THE PACIFIC, the Boston Globe announced with local pride.