A Day with JFK on PT-109, 1943
The Time Travel Series
The Time Travel Series attempts to recreate past events as realistically as possible - Daily Episode Guide.
Historical Backdrop
In the sweltering summer of 1943, the Solomon Islands campaign was grinding through a second year, and the U.S. Navy’s Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons operated from crude, jungle-fringed bases on islands the American public never heard of. Lieutenant (junior grade) John Fitzgerald Kennedy — 26 years old, six feet tall, barely 155 pounds, the privileged son of a former ambassador who had used his father’s connections to overcome a 4-F rejection and get into the war — commanded PT-109 from the ramshackle base at Lumbari Island, known as Todd City, off the northwest coast of Rendova. He was tanned nearly copper from relentless sun, suffering from a chronic bad back, ulcers, and a host of ailments he concealed from Navy doctors, yet driven by a restless, almost reckless courage that his crew both admired and worried about. His EO: Ensign Leonard “Lenny” Thom, a 220-pound former Ohio State football tackle who looked like a figure from Norse mythology with blond goatee and muscles in places most people don’t have places.
The oldest man aboard was Motor Machinist’s Mate 1st Class Patrick “Pappy” McMahon, 37, a graying, quiet mechanic from Wyanet, Illinois, who kept the boat’s three Packard engines running in impossible conditions. Riding as a passenger that night was Ensign George “Barney” Ross, a Princeton graduate whose own PT boat had been wrecked — a dark-haired, wiry observer who suffered from night blindness and had talked Kennedy into letting him come along. Together with nine other men they would sail into one of the most chaotic and consequential nights in American naval history, a night that would kill two of them, strand the rest behind enemy lines for six days, and forge a legend that would propel a young lieutenant into the White House.
August 1, 1943 — 0630 hours — Lumbari Island (Todd City), Rendova Harbor, Solomon Islands
You wake on a damp cot beneath a sagging canvas tarp, your back cramping as it does every morning. The air is already thick — 90% humidity, 86 degrees before sunrise. Mosquito netting drapes around you like a burial shroud. You can hear the base stirring: a clanking mess kit, someone retching in the mangroves, the low beat of a generator. The smell hits — rotting copra, diesel fuel, human waste from the latrines they dug too close to the sleeping area, and the sweet stench of the jungle itself. You swing your legs off the cot. Your feet find mud. Pull on your khaki shorts and duck out of the tent into Todd City — a few dozen tents, a crude wooden dock, fuel drums stacked under palm fronds, and a hand-painted sign reading TODD CITY nailed to a coconut palm. PT boats bob at their moorings, their mahogany hulls streaked with salt and algae. You scratch a mosquito bite on your forearm and walk toward the mess area, where powdered eggs and lukewarm coffee await. Your stomach burns — the ulcers again — but you eat. Tonight could be busy.
August 1, 1943 — 1030 hours — PT-109, moored at Lumbari dock, Rendova Harbor
You climb aboard PT-109, feeling the familiar give of the mahogany deck beneath your bare feet. The boat is eighty feet of plywood and mahogany, powered by three Packard 4M-2500 engines that can push her to forty knots when they’re cooperating, which is less often than you’d like. You run your hand along the torpedo tube — four Mark 8 torpedoes, each 21” in diameter, each one finicky. Down in the engine compartment, Pappy McMahon is already at work, his graying head bent over the starboard engine, a wrench in his oil-blackened hand, muttering about fuel filters. You crouch beside him. The heat below deck is unbearable — easily 110 degrees. McMahon’s undershirt is soaked, and sweat drips from his nose onto the engine block, sizzling on contact. He looks up, squinting — “Skipper, this starboard engine’s gonna give us trouble. Fuel line’s got air in it again.” You nod. Always has air in it. You climb back up to the cockpit, where Lenny Thom is checking the .50-caliber machine guns mounted fore and aft, his massive blond frame making the gun look like a toy. “Brantingham says we’re going out tonight,” Thom says, not looking up. “Tokyo Express.”
August 1, 1943 — 1430 hours — Under coconut palms near the Lumbari radio shack
You sit on an overturned ammunition crate beneath the palms, a creased chart of Blackett Strait spread across your knees. The afternoon rain has just broken — a fifteen-minute tropical deluge that has already ended, leaving everything steaming. Thom stands beside you, water still dripping from his goatee, pointing at the strait between Kolombangara and Gizo with a thick finger. Barney Ross has wandered over, borrowed binoculars around his neck, listening. Word has come down from Commander Warfield: intelligence has decoded Japanese transmissions — up to five enemy destroyers will run the strait tonight, the Tokyo Express resupplying the Vila garrison on Kolombangara’s southern tip. Fifteen PT boats will deploy in four groups. Your group, led by Lieutenant Hank Brantingham, consists of four boats. PT-109 does not have radar. You will rely on the boats that do to spot the enemy. You fold the chart, feeling the familiar knot in your gut — not fear exactly, but… anticipation. Around you, it’s subdued. The morning’s Japanese bombing raid on PT-117 and PT-164 — the torpedoes blown off 164 running crazily across the harbor before beaching themselves — is still fresh in everyone’s mind. You look at Ross. “Still want to come along tonight?” He grins. “Wouldn’t miss it, Skipper.”
August 1, 1943 — 1745 hours — Crew quarters and dock, Lumbari Island
