Ships
- USS PT-109 (PT-109) In command, August 1943
Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy had PT-109 in August 1943. She was an Elco boat, eighty feet, lying in a bush berth at Rendova with Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 2.
On the night of 1 August the boats went up to stop a run into Vila, on Kolombangara. The boats with radar fired and were ordered home. PT-109 was left in Blackett Strait, idling on one engine. Around two in the morning the destroyer Amagiri came back down the strait. Kennedy called for a turn and full power. The boat did not get clear. Amagiri cut her in two. Whether that captain aimed the bow is still argued.
Two men were killed, Harold Marney and Andrew Kirksey. The other eleven reached a scrap of an island, then another. Kennedy towed the burned Patrick McMahon with a strap in his teeth, and he swam out alone toward Ferguson Passage to flag a boat that did not come. Solomon Islands scouts, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, carried a message he cut into a coconut. Before dawn on 8 August, PT-157 took them off. Asked later how he had come to be a hero, he said it was involuntary. They sank his boat.