The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [122]
A strong searchlight punctured the darkness. Jack thought that a Japanese shore battery had latched on to his boat, and he guided the boat in a twisting pathway until he was once again in the embrace of darkness. The Japanese rarely had searchlights onshore, and the light probably came from a Japanese boat, not a shore battery. PT-109 should have attacked, not roared away from this ersatz island, but Jack hadn’t been briefed as well as he should have been, and he was playing a game knowing only some of the rules.
In the blackness the phosphorescence stirred up by the torpedo boat’s propeller left a shimmering white trail that risked exposing its position. Jack ordered the boat throttled down so that it would operate on only the center engine. As PT-109 idled in the black water, the men saw a ship looming toward them. They assumed it was one of the other PT boats and would soon veer off. The vessel continued its course, bearing down on them.
A Japanese destroyer pressed toward them only a hundred yards away. Jack frantically turned the wheel, but working on one engine, the PT boat responded with languid indifference. The destroyer cut through the PT boat as if it were no more than foam floating on the surface and moved on into the darkness. As Jack fell to the deck, he thought to himself that this was death, that this was what it felt like.
Around the wreckage, gasoline burned furiously. The sea was lit up like a gigantic searchlight sweeping down on the survivors, pinpointing them in the blackness. Luck is always a matter of perspective. Although two of Jack’s men had died, the wind blew the flaming sea away from the eleven survivors.
The front half of the PT boat sat in the water perfectly intact, as if the Japanese ship had performed surgery, neatly amputating the back half of the ship. It was all bizarre and inexplicable. Some of the men paddled in the water half giddy after inhaling gasoline fumes. They tried to make sense of the senseless. The wrecked boat, which to George “Barney” Ross looked like a fishing bobber, was the only mooring. One by one they swam over and laid themselves out on it, the only sound the water slowly seeping into the watertight passages. Pat McMahon was burned and William Johnston was sick, they were all in a state of semishock, and they knew they could not stay on the wrecked boat much longer.
Jack said that he was not the commander, that they were equals in this situation, but the men asked him to lead. And he led them now, not because he outranked them, but because they wanted him to lead, and he was willing to think and to do and to plan and to dare. By midmorning the remnant of PT-109 appeared as if it might soon sink into the dark blue waters. Jack decided the men would have to swim to a small island that they could see three or four miles away. Floating in the water was a plank that they could all cling to as they paddled along, but McMahon was too far gone for the exertion. So Jack took a tie from McMahon’s “Mae West” life jacket, put it like a bit in his teeth, and pulled the stricken sailor along with him as he swam. After five hours, the group reached their precious refuge. The island turned out to be not much bigger than a football field, its only virtue that there were no Japanese soldiers.
Jack and the men huddled on the ground hoping that the Japanese would not spot them. Jack had one wounded man on his hands, one sailor with the look of terror in his eyes, and several others in middling shape at best. If he had decided that they should just stay there on the tiny island, like shipwrecked sailors on a raft, no one would have thought that he had done less than his duty. As Jack lay there exhausted, he called upon much that he had learned in his twenty-six years. Jack’s father had taught his sons that the world was not a place where history was done unto them, but that they had the right