Posted on 08/07/2014 9:03:18 AM PDT by Borges
On a moonless night in August 1943, on a pitch-black strait in the Solomon Islands, two vessels collided.
A fireball bloomed, and the Navy gave up John F. Kennedy’s PT-109 crew for dead. But Lieutenant Kennedy fought, swimming for hours with his 10 remaining crewmembers, pulling one along by holding his life jacket strap in his teeth.
Kennedy’s heroics may have been for naught without Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, two Solomon Islanders. They found Kennedy and his crew six days after the wreck, subsisting on coconuts on a small island.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
Kennedys - Can’t Drive, Can’t Fly, Can’t Ski, Can’t Skipper a Boat....but they know what’s best for us.
After almost killing his crew, he gets a medal, what the Army calls the Soldier’s medal.
I think most people are not clear which medal he won, his powerful dad tried to get him a Medal of Honor, after all LBJ got a Silver Star.
Reminds me about the old joke about Ted Kennedy being the only one not worth assassinating.
Gotta give JFK credit, even if he screwed up in piloting the boat, he went all out to save his crew.
I think “collided” while maybe technically true, is the wrong word.
The Japanese Destroyer saw him and rammed the PT-109 cutting it in half.
I once knew another Captain in Kennedy’s squadron. I asked him a lot of questions. Basically he said Kennedy was well liked but getting rammed was the worst thing which could happen to a PT boat. They were the fastest things on the ocean.
Well that's what he had everyone believe.
The world’s most dangerous pastime - riding in a vehicle driven by a Kennedy.
If John had been killed or had died on that island, then the old man would have used Robert to fulfill his presidential ambitions. Oh wait, Robert wasn’t a war hero, so perhaps he wouldn’t have even been electable to congress.
I’ve read that he was unintentionally out of position (couldn’t navigate), and not following orders at the same time.
I think it's in Robert Caro's first LBJ volume that MacArthur had sized up LBJ (being the only congresscritter not to resign his seat when enlisting) on his first meeting, and decided that LBJ was going to be rising in the political strata, so for going on one bombing mission as an observer, MacArthur decided to plant a seed of military goodwill with the cutthroat pol, and arranged for the medal, which ribbon LBJ almost always wore on his suit in civilian life.
I have no reason to doubt it.
The Navy's first reaction was to plan a Court Martial. Old Joe reacted with a brilliant PR campaign. The rest is history of a sort. The silence of key crew members was bought with a lifetime of preferment in Kennedy jobs. Kennedy was not tried, but decorated. We of course, will never know the full story.
Until the day he was awarded his medal, Kennedy lived in Fear of a court martial.
And the watch must have been asleep. How else does a destroyer sneak up on a adrift PT boat on a calm night?
JFk cut the engines. They were sleeping.
I am not sure why, maybe they trained in it, but the Japanese Navy were masters of night fighting early in the war.
I saw an interview of the Japanese Captain of the destroyer. He did say he was surprised to see the PT boat simply cruising and not seeing them. He definitely rammed the PT 109, it was not an accident as some have tried to insinuate.
He ran a loose ship. The only way a PT boar is going to be rammed by a Japanese destroyer is if the crew is flaking out.
LBJ put himself in for a medal after flying as a passenger in a transport plane in the Pacific theater, and it turned into a John Frikkin’ Kerry Silver Star.
The 1960 Democratic `War Hero’ Ticket: both recipients of the (quite possibly) least deserved but most appreciated medals ever awarded by the US government. Until JFrikkin’K of course.
Since it had been six days, and there wasn't time to ferment any coconut juice, Kennedy was sober.
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