Where Is the Real PT-109 Now transcript

On the night of August 2nd, 1943, in the waters of Blacketit Strait in the Solomon Islands, a Japanese destroyer came out of the darkness and cut a small American torpedo boat in half. The impact lasted less than 10 seconds. [music] Two men were killed instantly. The commanding officer was thrown into water that was burning with aviation fuel. His name [music] was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He would go on to become president of the United States.

[music] Most people know that part. What almost nobody asks is what happened to the wreck after she went down. What Kennedy did in the days that followed, what object he carved a message into that ended up on the desk in the Oval Office, and where the real PT 109 actually [music] is today. The answer is not what most people expect. Stay to the end. Before we get into it, I want to hear from you. Where in the world are you watching from?

Does anyone here have a personal connection to this story? A family member who served in the Pacific? someone who has visited the Solomon Islands or anyone with a connection to the Kennedy story, drop it in the comments. Let's start with the boat because the story doesn't make sense without it. PT boats were the smallest warships the United States Navy put into combat in the Pacific. 80 ft long, built of plywood over wooden frames, running on three packard engines that burned aviation gasoline and could push the hole to over 40 knots in ideal conditions.

They carried torpedoes, machine guns, and depth charges. They were not built to fight destroyers. They were built to get in fast fire and get out before the other side could organize a response. Small, fast, and loud. And if either speed or surprise failed, plywood and aviation fuel did not give the crew many options. By the summer of 1943, PT boats were running nightly patrols through the waters of the Solomon Islands, Blackit Straight, Cooler Gulf, Ferguson Passage, intercepting Japanese supply runs that were keeping their island garrisons alive.

The Japanese had troops on Colum Bangora and New Georgia and a dozen smaller islands, and they were resupplying them every few nights with fast destroyer runs the Americans called the Tokyo Express. The PT boats were the answer the Navy had [music] found. Too small to stop a convoy the way a cruiser could, but fast enough to harass it, slow it down, make the Japanese pay for every run. The work was dangerous, exhausting, and unglamorous.

The big fleet carriers got the headlines. The PT boats got the dark water and the no radar and the nights nobody wrote home about. The crews went out every night and came back with stories that sounded impossible because they were impossible. They were fighting destroyer class warships in plywood boats. The commanding officer of PT 109 was 26 [music] years old. His name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy had no obvious business being in the South Pacific.

He was the second son of Joseph Kennedy, one of the wealthiest men in America. His older brother, Joe Jr., was the one the family had planned on for politics. John was supposed to be the writer. He had a bad back, a Harvard degree, and a book about why Britain failed to prepare for the Second World War. His health had initially complicated his efforts to serve because the army had rejected him for his back. He eventually entered the Navy and [music] he volunteered for PT boats specifically because PT boats were where the action was.

He was not the kind of man who spent his advantages staying safe. He had been in two engagements already by August. He understood the odds and he went out anyway. Every night the orders came. [music] On the night of August 1st into August 2nd, PT 109 was part of a 15boat patrol group in Blackit Straight. Their orders were to intercept any Japanese vessels running supplies to Colum Bangara. The patrol had spread out across the straight in the darkness, spread too thin, as it would turn out.

The boats could not coordinate effectively. Several of them had been firing at shadows most of the night. Crews were tired. The Japanese destroyer Amigiri was running fast through the same water, bringing supplies to Japanese forces on Colum Banganger. The Amigiri was not looking for a fight. She was on a schedule. She was making 30 knots. There was no working radar on PT 109 that night. The lookouts were watching for wakes.

In calm water, in total darkness, a destroyer running at full speed leaves almost no wake at all. The Amigiri hit PT 109 at approximately 2 in the morning. The bow of the destroyer cut the patrol boat diagonally in two. The impact lasted less than 10 seconds. Two of Kennedy's crew, Andrew Kirsy and Harold Marne were killed instantly. Their bodies were never found. The forward section of the hole stayed afloat, burning.

The aft section sank within minutes. The Amigiri did not stop. Her commander later said he assumed no one could have survived. He kept going. The other PT boats in the patrol saw the explosion, assumed PT 109 was gone, and withdrew. They did not know they were survivors. They searched briefly, and then turned for home. In the middle of a night patrol in enemy held waters, staying in one place, looking for men who probably weren't.

There was not a calculation most commanders would make differently. For the next several hours, 11 men clung to the wreckage of the forward hole section as it drifted, burning aviation fuel spreading across the water around them. Kennedy gathered the survivors, 11 men, some injured, one badly burned, all of them behind Japanese lines in water that was still on fire. He made an assessment. They could try to stay with the wreckage and hope someone came for them, or they could swim for it.

The wreck was sinking slowly. Japanese patrol boats used this stretch of water. Staying was not safe. He told them they were going to swim for it. Here's what most people don't know about what happened in the next 6 days. One of Kennedy's crew was a machinist's mate named Patrick Mcmman. Mcmman had been working below decks when the Amigiri hit and the fire had burned him over most of his body. [music] His hands were badly damaged.

He could. He told Kennedy to leave him behind. He said he was done. He told the skipper to save the others and go. Kennedy told him he would not. [music] When the survivors abandoned the wreck and began the swim to shore, he took the strap of Mcmah's life jacket between his teeth and towed the badly burned man for roughly four miles through the dark water. Kennedy had a bad back before he got in the water. The swimming made it worse in ways he would carry for the rest of his life.

By the time he reached the shore, he could barely stand. He put Mcmman down on the beach, then he went back for the others. The island they reached, a small coral island the crew called Plum Pudding, had coconut palms and no fresh water and no food they could safely eat, and it sat inside Japanese controlled waters. Patrols passed nearby. Discovery meant capture or death. Kennedy could see that the island was too small, too exposed.

He moved his men to a larger island nearby, Olasana, where they found coconuts and a freshwater source and enough cover to stay hidden. The green coconuts kept them from dying of thirst. [music] They were not a comfortable meal. After 4 days on nothing else, they were barely a meal at all. Kennedy went back into the water alone that first night, swimming out into Ferguson Passage with a lantern, trying to flag down an American PT boat.

The patrol routts should have brought boats through that area. None came. He swam back empty-handed, reaching shore, exhausted, and lay on the beach for a while before he could walk back to the men. He tried again the following night. [music] The current caught him and swept him out to sea. He eventually reached a small island exhausted and slept there until morning before making his way back to the others. [music] He did not tell his crew what had really happened.

He found them, said there were no boats, and told them to rest. 4 days in, two Solomon Island scouts arrived by canoe. Their names were Buu Gasassa and Eroni Kumana. They were local men working with Australian coast watchers, a network [music] of observers hidden across the islands, watching Japanese movements and feeding information back to Allied command. The coast watchers had heard about the PT 109 [music] and had sent Gassa and Kuma out to search the islands for survivors.

They found Kennedy's crew on Olesana hidden in the trees surviving on coconuts and they were the first contact the Americans had made [music] with anyone since the Amigiri hit. Kennedy needed to get a message back to the American PT boat base at Renova. He had no paper, no radio, nothing to write on. He found a coconut, pulled out his knife, and carved a message into the husk. Narrow ISL commander, native POS [music] Hein pilot 11 alive, need small boat Kennedy.

He handed it to Gasser and Kumana. They understood what it was. They took it [music] and paddled through Japanese patrolled waters back to the coast watcher network. And from there, the message reached the base commander at Renova. On August 7th, Kennedy was taken by canoe to coast watcher Reginald Evans, who arranged the final rescue. That night, Kennedy made contact with PT57 in Ferguson Passage and guided the boat back toward his men.

In the early hours of August 8th, nearly a week after the Amigiri cut PT 109 in half, all 11 survivors were brought aboard and taken back to Renover. All 11 of them alive. Kennedy did not go home after that. Three months later, he was given command of a second boat, [music] PT59. In November 1943, he used it to rescue 55 Marines trapped on Schezole Island, running the boat into shallow, hostile water in the dark to get them out.

He had not changed. Kennedy kept that coconut for the rest of his life. He had it mounted inside a clear plastic shell to protect it. [music] When he ran for Congress, he kept it. When he ran for Senate, he kept it. When he won the presidency and moved into the White House in January 1961, he brought it with him and put it on the desk in the Oval Office. It sat there on the most powerful desk in the world for the entirety of his presidency.

Every head of state who met him in that office saw [music] it. Every aid who briefed him in the morning saw it. It is now in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. [music] You can go and see it today. A coconut shell with words scratched into it. the object that launched the rescue of 11 men from behind [music] Japanese lines in the Solomon Islands in 1943. Kennedy came home from the Pacific with injuries that never fully healed.

He received the Navy and Marine Corps medal for his actions, [music] the highest non-combat decoration available, and a Purple Heart. [music] He did not talk about PT 109 much in private. He talked about Kirsy and Manne, the two men who were killed in the first 10 seconds, whose families he had written to, whose bodies the ocean had kept. That part of the story he kept close. What he let the public see [music] was the coconut, the survival, the joke he told about how he became a war [music] hero.

Someone asked him once, he said, "It was easy. They sank my boat." PT 109 became a significant part of his political >> [music] >> identity in the 1960 presidential campaign. and his team produced PT 109 tie clips that volunteers handed out across the country. [music] There was an image being built around the story of a young man who went into the water and kept his men alive and came home. It was effective because it was true.

[music] The story did not require embellishment. Nobody had to invent the towing of Mcmman through four miles of open water or the nights alone on the reef. Those things happened and they were more compelling than anything a campaign office could manufacture. In 1963, a Hollywood film called PT 109 was released with the actor Cliff Robertson playing Kennedy. Kennedy approved the production himself and chose the actor from a list of candidates the studio submitted.

He saw the film before it was released. It came out in June of 1963. It came out 5 months before Dallas. His older brother, Joe Jr., the one the family had always intended for politics, had been killed in a bombing mission over England in August 1944, the year after PT 109. When John Kennedy became president, he was fulfilling a role that had been meant for someone else in a life that had been shaped by two years of war, one night of collision, and six days of swimming between islands in the dark.

He kept the coconut on the desk as a reminder of all of it, or perhaps as a way of making sense of why he was the one who came home and Joe was not. In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. He was 46 years old. He had been president for less than 3 years. Most people assume that's where the story ends. It isn't. For nearly 60 years after the sinking, nobody knew exactly where PT 109 was. The position was never recorded precisely.

It went down in a night patrol in total darkness with no time and no reliable navigation to mark where the pieces settled. Blacket straight runs deep. Much of it over a,000 ft. Submarine ridges and channels shift the seafloor in ways that are hard to predict. The currents move things. Several searches have been attempted in the decades that followed. Using whatever equipment the technology of the time made available.

None produced a confirmed identification. The straight gave nothing back. In 2002, a National Geographic expedition led by Robert Ballard arrived in the Solomon Islands. Ballard was the oceanographer who had found the Titanic in 1985, the Bismar in 1989, and the Yorktown in 1998. Finding things that were supposed to be unfindable was by that point what he did. His team used remotely operated underwater vehicles, robots with cameras and sonar to sweep the seafloor of Blacket Strait systematically at depths between 300 and 1200 ft covering a search area built from the best available historical accounts of where the collision happened.

They found a torpedo tube, then a section of hull, then engine components and hardware. The remains of a small patrol boat lying scattered in the sediment of the straight at approximately 1,200 ft below the surface. The identification was not immediately certain. Other American PT boats had gone down in the same waters during the same campaign. The fighting in Blackit Straight had been intense. Several boats had been lost, but the location was consistent with the historical accounts.

The physical characteristics matched what was known about PT 109. The torpedo tube was the right type. The engine fittings matched the Packard Marine engines that powered the class. Ballard's team and the Kennedy family accepted the identification. In May of 2002, after nearly 60 years, the wreckage of what was identified as PT 109 had finally been located on the seafloor of Blackit Straight. The wooden sections are long gone.

Over 60 years at that depth leaves nothing of plywood frames and mahogany planking. What the cameras found was metal. The torpedo tube, the engine fittings, the hardware that outlasted the hull, scattered across the seabed in a debris field in the same water where the amigiri hit without stopping and kept going into the dark. She is a war grave. She will not be raised. Andrew Kirsy and Harold Mani were never found at all.

The commander of the Amigiri that night, the man who gave the order to keep the engines running after the collision, was a Japanese naval officer named Coheami. His standing orders were to avoid engaging the enemy and to keep moving at full speed to protect his ship and the supplies aboard. He did not stop. He survived the war. Years later, Kennedy tracked him down. The two began corresponding despite having met on opposite sides of a wartime collision in the dark.

Hanami wrote Kennedy in 1952, expressing his respect for the young officer's courage and his hopes for lasting friendship between Japan and the United States. Kennedy invited Gasser and Kumana to his inauguration in January 1961. Neither could make the journey. He stayed in correspondence with them for years. He did not forget them. Aroni Kumana lived until 2014. The Solomon Islands gave him a state funeral. The island the crew called Plum Pudding, the small coral island where Kennedy first brought his men ashore, is still there in Blacketit Strait.

It still has coconut palms. It still looks like every other small island in that part of the Solomons. Local fishermen pass it. It is not on most maps. It is called Kennedy Island now. It [music] has been called that for over 80 years. Not named by a government, not named by a memorial committee, named by the people who were already there, who watched it happen and decided that was what it deserved to be called. [music] No one issued a decree.

No committee voted. The name simply took hold and stayed. [music] A small island in a straight that most people will never visit. In a part of the world that the war moved through and then left behind, [music] but the name holds. Andrew Kirsy and Harold Manne have no grave. The coconut that saved 11 of them is in a museum in Boston. And the boat is 1,200 ft down in Blackit Straight in the same water in the same dark where the Amigiri left it.

If you want more stories of ships that history lost, found or threw away before anyone thought to stop it, the next video is already on screen.