PT 109 Read online

  On board the Amagiri, skipper Hanami had posted ten lookouts at spots around the bow and bridge, and they now were sweeping the horizon with binoculars. Standing nearby on the bridge was Hanami’s superior officer, Captain Katsumori Yamashiro, commander of the 11th Destroyer Flotilla. Yamashiro was the senior ranking officer on the multi-ship operation, and Hanami was the ship’s skipper, having taken command of the Amagiri several weeks earlier.

  Hanami took note of his speed, which now approached 34 knots. In shakedown trials, the 382-foot-long Amagiri registered up to 39 knots, and Hanami had every reason to feel confident in the capabilities of his ship. The destroyer boasted powerful engines, a highly maneuverable design, nine torpedo tubes equipped with accurate and lethal Type Eight “Long Lance” torpedoes, ten guns, mine-laying equipment, and twelve depth charges. The Amagiri was a member of the innovative Fubuki (“Snowstorm”) class of Japanese destroyers, which the U.S. Navy’s own analysts acknowledged “led contemporary destroyer design the world over, introducing enclosed twin-gun mounts, shielded torpedo tubes, and high, all-steel bridges.”

  “Ship ahead!” a lookout called out suddenly.

  “Look again!” Hanami ordered.

  “Torpedo boats to the forward port!” declared the lookout.

  Hanami leaned over the rail at the extreme starboard side of the bridge, straining to see forward. There he spotted a small dark object churning up white waves in the water some 800 to 1,000 meters distant, just slightly to the right by 10 degrees—almost dead ahead.

  Immediately, he recognized it as an American torpedo boat. He figured they would collide with the craft in less than twenty seconds. Hanami raced through his options: “I had come to the conclusion that it was too difficult to shoot and hit a target as small and fast as a torpedo boat, and that ramming was the best method of dealing with them. Such an opportunity had never arisen in my many previous encounters with torpedo boats, but this was a favorable situation for ramming and I decided to try it.” He added, “To veer away would have meant exposing our flank to torpedo attack at point blank range. My decision was to ram, and I gave the order.”

  “Ten degrees turn,” Hanami ordered the helmsman, “full speed ahead!”

  “Ram into them!”

  In a Rashomon-style clash of conflicting memories, Hanami’s superior officer, Captain Yamashiro, recalled giving an order that was the exact opposite of Hanami’s command: to avoid hitting the smaller boat.

  “For just an instant I thought it was one of our inter-island steamboats [small transport barges], and then I knew it was an enemy torpedo boat,” Yamashiro remembered years later. “It did not change its heading in the slightest, but continued steadily to approach. The bow of the boat seemed to be pointing to starboard [due east] of Amagiri. In the event of a collision we would be damaged too, and if a torpedo should be detonated, it would be much worse. Instantly, in an attempt to pass astern of the boat, I extended my left arm and shouted ‘Hard aport!’” Adding to the confusion, on another occasion, Yamashiro recollected giving the order in the opposite direction, or “Hard astern!” Hanami had no memory of an order from Yamashiro, and years later, the man then at the wheel of the Amagiri, Coxswain Kazuto Doi, said diplomatically that “Captain Yamashiro does not remain much in my memory.”

  No one disputes what happened next: the enemy vessel disappeared as if the Amagiri had swallowed it up; there was an instantaneous dull thud, followed by a brilliant flash of light and the smell of smoldering cotton.

  “We crashed right into it,” remembered Hanami. “I saw the enemy ship break in two with a tremendous roar. White gasoline flames shot out. The torpedo boat disappeared in the dark. I knew that at least one half and probably both halves sank.”

  Lookouts on the Japanese destroyer scanned the dark waters, but they saw nothing except bits of wreckage. According to Hanami, the Amagiri’s rear gunners fired a few salvos back in the direction of the wreckage as the destroyer headed onward at 28 knots. He noted, “The thing for us was to get out of the enemy’s theater of air superiority as quickly as we could.”

  On board the nearby destroyer Shigure, skipper Captain Tameichi Hara was flashed a message from the Amagiri: “Enemy torpedo boats encountered! One rammed and sunk!” At this, he remembered, cheers of joy and laughter erupted on each destroyer as they continued running at top speed. “I understood the elation at our good fortune,” he added, “but could not join in the merrymaking. My spine was still creeping at the thought of the close shave we had had, as I recalled the loss of Terutsuki [‘Pale Moon’], in December 1942, to torpedo boats.” He realized the same fate could have just as well befallen them on this night if the Americans had spotted them a few minutes earlier.

  When the convoy safely returned to Rabaul a few hours later, Lieutenant Commander Hanami and Captain Yamashiro were greeted on the flagship cruiser Sendai by the towering figure of Rear Admiral Matsuji Ijuin, who laughed triumphantly and playfully chided them, “Why didn’t your radio report say that the torpedo boat had been crushed underfoot?”

  The Imperial Japanese Navy saw a rare, morale-boosting publicity opportunity in the dramatic incident, and within forty-eight hours, the Tokyo newspapers were ablaze with jubilant headlines and bulletins celebrating the highly unusual events, some comparing the Amagiri’s feat to that of a master samurai swordsman: “Enemy Torpedo Boat Run Through,” “Enemy Torpedo Boat Rammed Through in the Dark of the Night!” “Superhuman display of courage,” “Going full force at high speed, it rode straight through one of them sending it instantly to its watery grave. This is the very first instance where one of our destroyers has sailed into an enemy ship since the beginning of the Greater East Asia War and it well illustrates the dauntless spirit of the Japanese destroyer fighting units,” “Enemy Torpedo Boat Sliced in Two: Our Destroyer Saves Companion Ships by Crashing Bodily into Enemy Craft,” “This heretofore unheard of feat which transcends all common naval fighting practices is an event for rejoicing that has no precedence in the history of naval affairs. Because of this unusual action, enemy morale has been dealt a heavy blow while the encouragement it gives to our allies is immeasurable.”

  After the flurry of attention from the crash soon evaporated, Kohei Hanami returned to his duties as a Japanese naval commander. “I thought probably no one aboard the small boat survived,” recalled Hanami.

  But he was wrong. As the Amagiri sped away from the crash in the early hours of August 2, it left eleven American men widely scattered across the surface of the ocean, several of them wounded, struggling in pools of burning gasoline and choking from the fumes amid the wreckage of their boat.

  For these eleven men lost in enemy waters, their ordeal was just beginning.

  1

  GIVE ME A FAST SHIP

  I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast for I intend to go in harm’s way.

  —COMMANDER JOHN PAUL JONES, 1780

  John F. Kennedy loved the sea as “a child, boy, and man,” observed his widow Jacqueline.

  “I have been interested in the sea from my earliest boyhood,” Kennedy himself once wrote. “My earliest recollections of the United States Navy go back to the days when as a small boy, I used to be taken to the USS Constitution in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The sight of that historic frigate, with its tall spars and black guns, stirred my imagination and made American history come alive for me.”

  Growing up as one of nine children of the fabulously wealthy financier Joseph P. Kennedy, young “Jack” Kennedy learned to pilot small sailboats with the help of a family sailing instructor at their oceanside vacation estate in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and later at their winter mansion in semitropical Palm Beach, Florida.

  In his teens, Kennedy became a keen swimmer and a highly skilled, competitive sailboat racer. He preferred to command a boat rather than serve in the crew, and he took racing very seriously, firmly chastising crew members who didn’t measure up. In 1936, at the age of twenty, Kennedy won the Nantu
cket Sound championship in the Star boat category and represented the sound in the Atlantic Coast championships. As a student at Harvard University, he was on the crew that won the McMillan Cup in the annual collegiate competition at Annapolis, Maryland. When he was fifteen, Kennedy’s parents gave him his own wooden 26-foot Wianno Senior sailboat, called the Victura, which he would enjoy as a young man, congressman, senator, and as president.

  While he occupied the White House, Kennedy speculated that humanity was drawn to the ocean because it was our primordial home. “I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea,” he told an audience gathered in Newport, Rhode Island, for the 1962 America’s Cup race. “And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.”

  For himself, Kennedy may also have seen the open water as an escape from a life of frequent physical agony inflicted by a progression of illnesses that plagued him from birth. The precise origins and nature of his lifelong back pains still are uncertain based on the available medical records, but Kennedy appears to have been born with a slightly malformed and unstable back, which, according to private conversations Kennedy had with his Navy doctors, was strained by a 1938 car trip through rough roads in Europe and a 1940 tennis injury. These conditions periodically required him to wear back braces and crutches and eventually necessitated two spinal surgeries.

  Family patriarch and financial mogul Joseph P. Kennedy had a master plan to engineer his eldest sons Joseph Jr. and John into national politics. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

  From boyhood, John F. Kennedy had a passion for the sea—seen here aboard the Victura. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

  Although he once recalled his childhood as “an easy, prosperous life, supervised by maids and nurses, with more and more younger sisters to boss and play with,” Kennedy’s frequent illnesses as a child and adolescent included chicken pox, ear infections, appendicitis, fatigue, mumps, a near-fatal case of scarlet fever at the age of two and a half, whooping cough, bronchitis, and German measles. Late in his twenties he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a deterioration of the adrenal glands that can trigger symptoms including fatigue, dizziness, muscle weakness, weight loss, difficulty standing up, nausea, sweating, and changes in personality and mood. He remained underweight well into adulthood. Navy doctor Lee Mandel, who examined Kennedy’s medical records years after Kennedy’s death, speculated that Kennedy’s Addison’s disease was probably caused by a rare condition, called autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2, or APS 2, which also likely caused Kennedy’s hypothyroidism, diagnosed in 1955, according to Mandel’s report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2009.

  Kennedy also often fell victim to abuse from his older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr., a relentless bully. Younger brother Bobby Kennedy recalled lying in bed at night as a boy and hearing “the sound of Joe banging Jack’s head against the wall.”

  “It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood,” wrote Winston Churchill in his biography of John Churchill, Marlborough, one of Kennedy’s favorite books. “The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in the early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.” John Kennedy’s boyhood suffering was cushioned somewhat by his father’s increasingly spectacular wealth, which funded large family homes, chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces, and trips in private railway cars. But amid the privilege, Kennedy also seemed to have felt a lack of maternal warmth. “My mother never hugged me, not once,” he once recalled. A family friend explained of the Kennedy children, “They really didn’t have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available.” A youthful John Kennedy would ask his mother, Rose, “Which room do I have this time?”

  While immobilized for endless days in hospitals and sick beds for tests, treatment, and recuperation, the young Kennedy escaped his physical torments by reading multitudes of books, through which he conjured up dreamscapes of adventure, heroism, history, and fantasy. As a boy he read tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the stories of Sir Walter Scott, the Billy Whiskers children’s book series about a globe-trotting goat, Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Lays of Ancient Rome, Ivanhoe, James Fenimore Cooper’s stories of the American frontier, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Black Beauty, Pilgrim’s Progress, Arabian Nights, and Wonder Tales from East and West.

  Family friend Kay Halle had a vivid memory of seeing a “very pale” fifteen-year-old Kennedy lying in a Palm Beach hospital bed “so surrounded by books I could hardly see him. I was very impressed because at this point this very young child was reading The World Crisis by Winston Churchill.” Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, recalled, “History made him what he was. You must think of this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes.” She described JFK’s adult reading habits vividly: “He’d read in the strangest way. He’d read walking, he’d read at the table, at meals, he’d read after dinner; he’s read in the bathtub . . . he’d really read all times you don’t think you have time to read. He was always reading—practically while driving a car.” Jim Reed, a wartime buddy of Kennedy in the South Pacific, recalled, “He had read almost every book on the American presidents. He had read every word that Winston Churchill had ever published. He’d read T. E. Lawrence and was a devotee of Lord David Cecil’s racy account of Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb in The Young Melbourne.” JFK biographer Nigel Hamilton speculated that Kennedy was attracted to combat on the eve of World War II by “the wayward urge to cut a figure—and be seen to do so—that would bind him to his latest hero, Lord Byron, the roguish star of David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne.”

  In a passage from Kennedy’s favorite book as an adult, Pilgrim’s Way (1940), the aristocratic British politician and adventure novelist John Buchan wrote that the sea “was a wholesome emancipation” that “seemed to slacken the bonds of destiny and enlarge the horizon.” Describing the “debonair and brilliant and brave” English noble Raymond Asquith, who died in World War I, Buchan wrote a passage John F. Kennedy recited from memory for the rest of his life, perhaps because it reminded him of himself on the eve of World War II: “The War which found the measure of so many never got to the bottom of him. . . . He went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.” One of Kennedy’s best British friends, David Ormsby-Gore, who served as ambassador to the United States during Kennedy’s presidential years, theorized, “Whether Jack realized it or not, I think he paralleled himself after Asquith all the way, I really do.”

  On the pages of his personal copy of Pilgrim’s Way, Kennedy marked up passages describing the famed British Arabist, narcissist, and World War I guerrilla chief T.E. Lawrence, a figure who clearly fascinated him: “His character has been a quarry for the analysts, and I would not add to their number. It is simplest to say that he was a mixture of contradictories which never were—perhaps could never have been—harmonized. His qualities lacked integration. He had moods of vanity and moods of abasement; immense self-confidence and immense diffidence. He had a fastidious taste which was often faulty. The gentlest and most lovable of beings with his chivalry and considerateness, he could also be ruthless.” In Lawrence, Kennedy might have seen reflections of his own self-image: the
refined rebel, the charismatic loner, the sensitive young officer ready for battle.

  Before the war, as well as after, Kennedy’s dreams of adventure and conquest found an outlet in sex, a sport he appeared to pursue with obsessive devotion. In the spring of 1943 Kennedy was only twenty-five years old, but he had already conducted affairs with a seeming multitude of women—so far their numbers included a fashion model, an actress, an heiress, students, and members of the European aristocracy. His adventures have variously been interpreted as evidence of compulsive risk taking and an obsessive search for the maternal intimacy that was withheld from him as a boy, or they may have simply been routine male promiscuity sharply magnified by near-unlimited wealth and mobility, and striking personal seductiveness. Kennedy’s physical magnetism was so powerful it led one female reporter to remember that Kennedy “didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.”

  Kennedy’s own father, whose influence on his life was near supreme, likely also inspired and encouraged his promiscuity. JFK once explained to Clare Boothe Luce, “Dad told all the boys to get laid as often as possible.” And he asserted, “I can’t get to sleep unless I’ve had a lay.”

  Among Kennedy’s conquests before he went overseas on his first combat assignment was the twice-married, Danish-born journalist Inga Arvad, who shared a VIP spectator box with Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, befriended other top Nazis like Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, and was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who put her under surveillance and authorized the bugging of her apartment and tapping of her telephone line. In early 1942, in the course of electronically surveilling Arvad, the FBI reportedly generated audiotapes of her lovemaking with John F. Kennedy, then a junior U.S. Navy officer.