A destroyer cuts PT-109 in half; the young skipper swims for shore towing a burned man by his life vest
In the dark waters of Blackett Strait near Guadalcanal, American PT boats hunted Japanese supply runs with Mark 8 torpedoes that too often failed to detonate. Just after 2 a.m. on August 2, 1943, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri sliced through PT-109, splitting the 80-foot boat and killing crewmen Andrew Jackson Kirksey and Harold William Marney instantly. Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, the boat's commander, gathered the eleven survivors on the floating wreckage and swam them to a small island three miles away. Kennedy towed a badly burned crewman by a strap clenched in his teeth.
Kennedy's survival on a scrap of Solomon Islands coral became the founding legend of his political career, invoked repeatedly in his campaigns as proof of grit under fire. It also exposed a real problem for the Navy: the Mark 8 torpedo's poor detonation rate, a design failure made worse by comparison to Japan's devastating Long Lance, one the American war effort had to correct at sea.
QWhy did Kennedy bolt an Army antitank gun to PT-109's deck the day before it sank?
Kennedy bartered for a U.S. Army 37mm antitank gun and had his crew lash it to the foredeck, replacing a small two-man life raft, because he had no faith in the boat's Mark 8 torpedoes. The gun itself never fired a shot in the final battle, but the timbers used to secure it to the deck ended up saving lives anyway: after the collision, survivors used those same planks as flotation aids during the three-mile swim to Plum Pudding Island. The gun mount meant to defend the boat ended up saving lives instead, a detail that rarely makes it into the retellings focused on Kennedy's swim itself.
QWhat happened the last time PT-109's own weaponry nearly killed its crew before the fatal ramming?
Weeks before the Amagiri struck, PT-109 nearly destroyed itself. With squadron commander Alvin Cluster at the wheel in storm conditions, an inadvertent launch sent the port forward torpedo only half out of its tube, knocking a depth charge through the foredeck. The torpedo's propellers kept spinning on a live hot run until executive officer Leonard Thom managed to deactivate it by hand. The boat had to return to Tulagi for repairs and a replacement depth charge before it could resume patrols. Cluster had asked for the wheel because he was used to older 77-foot Elco boats, not PT-109's newer design, a mismatch that nearly wrecked the boat weeks before Blackett Strait.
QHow many torpedoes did the fifteen American PT boats actually land on the Japanese destroyers that night?
Zero. Of the roughly 24 torpedoes fired by eight of the fifteen PT boats sent into Blackett Strait on August 1, not a single one struck the four advancing Japanese destroyers, despite a Navy report initially claiming five or six explosions reached the targets. Commander Thomas Warfield had been directing the operation by radio from 40 miles away with no view of the battle, and several boats without radar cruised blindly in fog and darkness. PT-109 itself never got a radio warning before the Amagiri appeared, because the four radar-equipped boats had already fired and been ordered home, leaving the rest of the fleet effectively deaf and blind.
