PT 109

On the pre-dawn morning of August 2, 1943, a fierce, confusing night clash in the Solomon Islands ended with a Japanese destroyer, the Amagiri, cutting through fog and ramming the U.S. Navy motor torpedo boat PT 109. The collision broke the vessel nearly in two and killed two of its sailors on the spot. John F. Kennedy, the boat's commander, and the ten crewmen who survived held onto the wreckage in the water, with more than 1,200 feet of open sea beneath them. Back at the American base, the report was that all hands had been lost, so no one was coming to save them.

For the men still alive, the struggle had only started. Their survival became one of the best-known episodes of the Second World War, and its aftermath reached all the way to the White House two decades later. William Doyle built this account from interviews with the last surviving witnesses, Japanese wartime records that had not been studied before, and documents from the Kennedy Library, among them a long-lost first-hand report written by Kennedy himself.

The second half of the book examines how the ordeal shaped Kennedy's character and the course of his life. Doyle argues that the episode was essential to his rise to the presidency. An aide, David Powers, is quoted as saying that without PT 109 there would never have been a President Kennedy.

The narrative follows the castaways on a deserted island, a network of local islanders who acted as spies, an Australian coastwatcher hiding on the slope of a volcano, an S.O.S. message carved into a coconut, and a risky rescue attempt by Kennedy's fellow PT boat crews.