PT 109 Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Naomi and Brendan, and to my American and Japanese families.

  And to my friend John K. Castle.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Maps

  Prologue: Samurai in the Mist

  1 Give Me a Fast Ship

  2 Summit Meeting on Fifth Avenue

  3 Into the Labyrinth

  4 The Front Line

  5 The Raid

  6 The Battle of Blackett Strait

  Photo Section

  7 Lost at Sea

  8 Land of the Dead

  9 The Hand of Fate

  10 The Rescue

  11 Life and Death at the Warrior River

  12 The Winged Chariot

  13 Mission to Tokyo

  14 The Greatest Actor of Our Time

  Epilogue: The Rising Sun

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Appendix A: JFK’s Lost 1946 Narrative of the Sinking of PT 109

  Appendix B: 1952 Letters Between JFK and Kohei Hamami

  Appendix C: JFK’s 1957 Narrative

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by William Doyle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  “Without PT 109, there never would have been a President John F. Kennedy.”

  —DAVID POWERS, White House official,

  Kennedy Administration

  “Jack’s life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga, and story than with political theory or political science.”

  —JACQUELINE KENNEDY

  In the early morning darkness of August 2, 1943, during a chaotic nighttime skirmish in the South Pacific, a Japanese destroyer struck the U.S. Navy’s motor torpedo boat PT 109, killing two American sailors instantly. Eleven others were shipwrecked in enemy waters. As the survivors clung to the sinking wreckage, the sea around them burned; 1,200 feet of ink-black, shark-infested water loomed beneath.

  Written off for dead by their superior officers, the Americans emerged from a harrowing ordeal of survival seven days later, rescued by the combined efforts of a heroic group of Solomon Island natives, an intrepid Australian Coastwatcher, and a courageous American naval officer, Lieutenant William “Bud” Liebenow, captain of PT 157.

  The incident received brief national publicity during the war, but it forever transformed the PT 109’s young commander, John F. Kennedy, the son of the former U.S. ambassador to England. Despite long-simmering controversy among some veterans and military historians over whether he was negligent in the sinking of his boat, Kennedy came home from the Pacific a decorated hero, receiving a medal for “his courage, endurance, and excellent leadership [which] contributed to the saving of several lives.” After the war, when Kennedy’s ambitions turned to politics, the event played a role in molding his public image from “child of privilege” to “battle-tested combat veteran” and helped propel him into the House of Representatives in 1947, into the U.S. Senate in 1953, and into the White House in 1961.

  The ordeal shaped Kennedy’s view of the world and of himself, and established a touchstone by which his character would be defined for the rest of his life. “Everything” about JFK, wrote journalist Robert T. Hartmann in 1960 of Kennedy’s PT 109 experience, “dates from that adventure,” “the only time Kennedy ever was wholly on his own, where the $1 million his father gave him wouldn’t buy one cup of water.” Kennedy’s mettle and leadership had been proven, and yet his brush with death marked him. The tragic episode haunted Kennedy, and triggered the little-known story of his 1951 journey to American-occupied Tokyo to try to find the Japanese man who had nearly killed him, and who did take the lives of two men in his command. But when he got to Japan, disaster stalked Kennedy, and he was once again thrown upon the gates of death.

  In short, the PT 109 incident made John F. Kennedy—both the man and the myth. It is therefore, a critical “ripple point” in our national story. Without the PT 109 episode, there might not have been a President John F. Kennedy, and in turn, the contours of modern American history that Kennedy helped shape during his brief but consequential presidency—including civil rights, the Vietnam War, space travel, the Cold War, and the nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union—might have turned out quite differently.

  Kennedy himself considered his command of the PT 109, and his experiences in combat during World War II, to be central to his own destiny. “I firmly believe,” he wrote, “that as much as I was shaped by anything, so I was shaped by the hand of fate moving in World War II. Of course, the same can be said of almost any American or British or Australian man of my generation. The war made us. It was and is our single greatest moment. The memory of the war is a key to our characters. It serves as a break wall between the indolence of our youths and the earnestness of our manhoods. No school or parent could have shaped us the way that fight shaped us. No other experience could have brought forth in us the same fortitude and resilience. We were much shrewder and sadder when that long battle finally finished. The war made us get serious for the first time in our lives. We’ve been serious ever since, and we show no signs of stopping.”

  Before he died, JFK hoped, as veterans sometimes do, to seek out and reconcile with his former enemy. So he sent his younger brother Robert to Tokyo in 1962 to begin preliminary planning for what would be the first-ever U.S. presidential state visit to Japan, a journey that would culminate in an emotional reunion in Japan of JFK and the surviving members of Kennedy’s PT 109 with the veterans of the Japanese warship that destroyed her. But as the Japanese nation watched on live TV, a riot brewed when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy took the stage at a tumultuous gathering of thousands of students at Tokyo’s elite Waseda University. In the chaos, Robert Kennedy delivered an impassioned, impromptu speech that amazed the people of Japan and strengthened the two former enemies’ historic postwar embrace, a relationship that was vividly renewed with the arrival of John F. Kennedy’s daughter Caroline as the U.S. ambassador to Japan in 2013.

  I grew up in the America that was shaped by John F. Kennedy. I also was raised in JFK’s New York City, the place where the Kennedy family based much of its operations from the 1920s through the 1960s. For years, patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy ran his financial, motion picture, real estate, and investment empire from offices in Manhattan, commuting by limousine and train from Grand Central Terminal to family estates in Riverdale and Westchester. John Kennedy grew up as a seasoned part-time New Yorker, spending boyhood years in Bronxville and Riverdale, briefly attending Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx and frolicking in Manhattan hotspots as a young man. Indeed three of the pivotal scenes of the PT 109 story took place in Manhattan—at the Plaza hotel, the Stork Club, and the offices of the New Yorker magazine on West Forty-Third Street.

  Like John Kennedy, my father (also named William Doyle) was an Irish Catholic and a veteran of military service in the South Pacific combat zone during World War II. As an Army military police and intelligence officer on the island of New Guinea, he became friendly with U.S. Navy PT boat crews stationed nearby. While posted in Port Moresby on April 7, 1943, my father was subjected to the dual-pronged Japanese mass aerial attack that JFK simultaneously endured near Guadalcanal, the biggest such Japanese air raid since Pearl Harbor. He became a devoted admirer of Kennedy in the 1950s, and he cheered on each JFK campaign victory like a football fan. My mother Marie Louise Doyle served as a volunteer at John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign office in New York City, and today she still vividly recalls the day in 1960 when Robert F. Kennedy came through the door. The office was packed, and RFK was short, so he stood on a chair to give the workers a pep talk. “Thanks to you,” he said, “m
y brother will be president.”

  Soon after, my family was attending Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, as we did every Sunday. I was three years old. On that day, I experienced one of the first clear memories of my life, a recollection no doubt sharpened by years of family retelling. My father suddenly realized that a few feet away from us, John F. Kennedy, then a forty-three-year-old U.S. senator and presidential candidate, had slipped into a nearby pew. Kennedy was already rocketing to stardom, but in this age before presidential candidates became surrounded by large security retinues, he had only a single aide with him. My father elbowed my mother. She then leaned down and whispered to me, “This is very, very important. I want you to remember this. Do you see that man right there? He is going to be the next president of the United States.” At Communion, she made a special point of taking me with her, and slowly walking right past the man, now kneeling in the pew with his head bent. I remember two things about John F. Kennedy that bounced around my toddler brain. Like my father, he looked like a nice guy. And he had a deep, golden suntan.

  In the years that followed, I stood a few feet away from a diminutive U.S. Senate candidate Robert F. Kennedy and an elephantine President Lyndon Johnson as they held a joint 1964 campaign speech on the corner of Fourteenth Street and First Avenue in our neighborhood of Stuyvesant Town; watched Robert F. Kennedy march up Fifth Avenue in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade; saw Jackie Kennedy strolling near her Upper East Side home; and saw John F. Kennedy Jr. running or Rollerblading around the Central Park Loop and walking through Midtown in a business suit as starstruck pedestrians pirouetted and murmured in his wake. One morning a few years ago I rode a nearly empty downtown No. 6 local subway train as Caroline Kennedy sat across from me pleasantly looking at subway ads, unnoticed and unbothered. To me and many New Yorkers, the Kennedys were not only an American political dynasty; they were kind of like neighbors.

  John F. Kennedy has been portrayed by some as a great man, and by others as a sex-crazed scoundrel. I see him as a fascinating character, a bridge across twentieth-century American history, someone who chatted with Herbert Hoover on the Oval Office phone and greeted Bill Clinton in the Rose Garden. He catalyzed the television news age, pioneered modern political campaigning, grappled with civil rights, made catastrophic mistakes in Vietnam and Cuba, launched mankind toward the moon, navigated through a potentially apocalyptic nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union, and projected an inspiring vision of the United States and its ideals to the world. Without the PT 109 incident he may have still become president, or instead he might have wound up a failed congressional candidate, an obscure New York writer or Ivy League history professor, or just another handsome, forgotten son of a rich man with a Park Avenue penthouse and a desk in the family investment office. As Kennedy’s longtime aide David Powers once said, “Without PT 109, there never would have been a President John F. Kennedy.” Looking back in 2015, former JFK aide Richard Donahue agreed, saying the PT 109 episode “was the entire basis of his political life.” That makes Kennedy’s lost, grueling seven days in the South Pacific, and the events that flowed from the ordeal, both consequential and fascinating.

  This book is based on an examination of a wide range of archival material in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the national archives of the United States, Australia, the Solomon Islands, and Japan, much of it not available to authors of previous accounts of the incident, including a long-lost account written by JFK himself in 1946. Of invaluable importance was a series of extensive interviews with a critical living link to the event, William Liebenow, the PT boat commander who served in combat with John F. Kennedy and led the hazardous mission that set out to rescue Kennedy and his crew in enemy waters. The project was further aided by interviews with sixteen surviving contemporaries of John F. Kennedy in the PT boat service, interviews with political aides to JFK, and interviews with two family members with intimate connections to events in this book: John Kennedy’s sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy, and his nephew Maxwell Kennedy, the son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy.

  This is a true tale of war, survival, the randomness of fate, the fog of battle, the vagaries of memory, and the power of myth.

  It is an account of how thirteen American sailors went into battle on the night of August 1, 1943, and how eleven of them wound up stranded and shipwrecked deep in enemy waters, alone and forgotten, stalked by injuries and starvation.

  It is the creation story of a young naval officer who became America’s most admired modern president.

  W.D.

  New York City, 2015

  MAPS

  Maps designed by Nick Springer

  PROLOGUE: SAMURAI IN THE MIST

  THE SOUTH PACIFIC

  AUGUST 2, 1943

  2:27 A.M.

  He thought of the River Styx, the boundary between Earth and the Underworld.

  Lieutenant Commander Kohei Hanami stood at the helm of the 2,000-ton Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Amagiri, or “Heavenly Mist,” as it sped through the darkness at 34 knots.

  He saw nothing ahead but the black of a moonless night cloaked by low cloud cover and rainsqualls. Patches of haze hung over the water.

  “I stood on the bridge, straining to see as we moved northward up Blackett Strait,” Hanami later remembered, referring to a reef-choked channel in the central Solomon Islands. “I had ordered ‘battle alert,’ since we were under constant harassment by U.S. planes in the daytime and by night raiders and torpedo boats at night.”

  Hanami, the thirty-four-year-old grandson of a feudal samurai warrior, graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy in 1929, and joined a Japanese Navy goodwill training cruise to the United States. As he journeyed to Hawaii, the West Coast ports, through the Panama Canal, and up to New York City, Hanami grew fond of America and was impressed by the friendliness and exuberance of Americans. He recalled that on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, “All of us felt a terrible thing was about to happen. Most naval officers were opposed to a war with the United States. We realized Japan had virtually no chance of victory. But if it had to be war, we resolved to do our best.”

  On this night, Hanami’s destroyer was acting as a scout ahead of three other destroyers—Arashi (“Storm”), Shigure (“Drizzle”), and Hagikaze (“Clover Wind”)—on an operation launched from the Japanese regional superbase at Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Their mission was to ferry fresh combat troops, as well as food, ammunition, and other supplies, to the advance Japanese garrison at Kolombangara island in the middle of the Solomon Island chain, then the front line of the Empire of Japan’s twenty-one-month-long war with the United States and its allies. The almost perfectly round jungle island was an imposing redoubt, nine miles across and capped by a massive volcano whose peak loomed 5,800 feet above the base’s docks.

  In the summer of 1943 the Pacific War was roughly stalemated. The Japanese still possessed substantial fighting strength and controlled vast territories from the Indian border to Manchuria, Indonesia, and the Aleutian Islands, but over the past fifteen months the Allies had blunted Japanese momentum with victories at the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal. Here in the Solomon Islands, on the southeasternmost perimeter of Japanese expansion, a fierce war of attrition was under way; Japanese shipping losses were heavy, and their aircraft and pilot casualties had reached alarming levels.

  As the three ships quickly and efficiently unloaded their men and cargo on Kolombangara, the Amagiri screened them by running a wide rectangular patrol pattern south of the island, in Blackett Strait, at the brisk speed of 21 knots. Now all four ships were heading northwest back toward their base and picking up speed. After briefly losing track of the other boats, Hanami found his ship was 2,000 meters west of the pack, and he maneuvered to regain the lead position.

  Some Japanese destroyer officers hated these supply runs, which made them feel more like mail carriers than gallant warriors. Captain Yasumi Toyama, chief of staff to the Destroyer Squadron 2 com
mander, griped in a diary entry, “We are more a freighter convoy than a fighting squadron these days—the damned Yankees have dubbed us the Tokyo Express—we transport cargo to that cursed island—what a stupid thing! Our decks are stacked high with supplies and our ammunition supply must be cut in half. Our cargo is loaded in drums which are roped together. We approach the island, throw them overboard, and run away—it is a strenuous and unsatisfying routine.”

  The warships were surrounded by Japanese-held islands, but American air superiority forced them to travel at night with their light sources blacked out, except for colored signal-blinker lights. The darkness held the threat of hidden underwater reefs and torpedo attacks by much smaller, nimble American PT (patrol torpedo) boats. Lieutenant Commander Hanami had ordered his 245-man crew and thirteen officers to be extra alert: they had lost ten men to enemy shellfire in nearby waters several weeks before, and only a few hours earlier on their inbound journey to Kolombangara their four-boat convoy was the target of a ragged, futile torpedo attack by a small picket line of PT boats—an attack the Japanese easily brushed aside with a few shots from their guns and overflights by Japanese floatplanes zeroing in on the PT boats’ telltale phosphorescent wakes.

  The Amagiri, or “Heavenly Mist,” destroyer of the Japanese Imperial Navy. (Japanese Government Photo)

  Captain Tameichi Hara, the skipper of the nearby destroyer Shigure, braced himself throughout the journey as he considered these reef-infested waters a “weird and treacherous” zone. “The enemy, with his tight scout networks in this area, must have detected our activities,” he recalled, “and might spring out from any of the myriad shoals that lined the mazelike strait.” The convoy accelerated to 30 knots to make its getaway: “This was a truly breakneck speed for such a hazardous waterway. In peacetime no ship would have ventured here at night in excess of 12 knots, even with all lights burning. We, of course, were running fully blacked out. The night was sultry, but cold sweat stood out on every brow.” The convoy drew into a tight column formation with only 500 meters between ships.