He took his shoes off and tied them to the life jacket, then struck out into open water. Treading water; he listened for the muffled roar of motors, getting chilled, waiting, holding the lamp.
Once he looked west and saw flares and the false gaiety of an action. The lights were far beyond the little islands, even beyond Gizo, ten miles away. Kennedy realized that the PT boats had chosen, for the first night in many, to go around Gizo instead of through Ferguson Passage. There was no hope. He started back. He made the same painful promenade of the reef and struck out for the tiny island where his friends were.
But this swim was different. He was very tired and now the current was running fast, carrying him to the right. On the beach the men were hopefully vigilant. They saw the light and heard the shouts. They were very happy, because they thought that Kennedy had found a PT. They walked out onto the reef, sometimes up to their waists in water, and waited. It was very painful for those who had no shoes. The men shouted, but not much, because they were afraid of Japanese.
They waited a long time, but they saw nothing except phosphorescence and heard nothing but the sound of waves. They went back, very discouraged. Kennedy had drifted right by the little island. He thought he had never known such deep trouble, but something he did shows that unconsciously he had not given up hope. He dropped his shoes, but he held onto the heavy lantern, his symbol of contact with his fellows. He stopped trying to swim.
He seemed to stop caring. His body drifted through the wet hours, and he was very cold. His mind was a jumble. A few hours before he had wanted desperately to get to the base at Rendova. His mind seemed to float away from his body.
Darkness and time took the place of a mind in his skull. For a long time he slept, or was crazy, or floated in a chill trance. The currents of the Solomon Islands are queer. The tide shoves and sucks through the islands and makes the currents curl in odd patterns. It was a fateful pattern into which Jack Kennedy drifted.
He drifted in it all night. His mind was blank, but his fist was tightly clenched on the kapok around the lantern. The current moved in a huge circle—west past Gizo, then north and east past Kolombangara, then south into Ferguson Passage. Light came to both at about six. Kennedy looked around and saw that he was exactly where he had been the night before when he saw the flares beyond Gizo. For a second time, he started home. He thought for a while that he had lost his mind and that he only imagined that he was repeating his attempt to reach the island.
But the chill of the water was real enough, the lantern was real, his progress was measurable. He made the reef, crossed the lagoon, and got to the first island.
He lay on the beach awhile. He found that his lantern did not work any more, so he left it and started back to the next island, where his men were. This time the trip along the reef was awful. He had discarded his shoes, and every step on the coral was painful. This time the swim across the gap where the current had caught him the night before seemed endless.
But the current had changed; he made the island. He crawled up on the beach. He was vomiting when his men came up to him.
Ross, seeing Kennedy so sick, did not look forward to the execution of the order. He distracted himself by complaining about his hunger. There were a few coconuts on the trees, but the men were too weak to climb up for them. One of the men thought of sea food, stirred his tired body, and found a snail on the beach. Give me that. The snail put its head out and looked at him. Ross was startled, but he shelled the snail and ate it, making faces because it was bitter.
In the afternoon, Ross swam across to the next island. He took a pistol to signal with, and he spent the night watching Ferguson Passage from the reef around the island.
Nothing came through. Kennedy slept badly that night; he was cold and sick. The next morning everyone felt wretched. Planes which the men were unable to identify flew overhead and there were dogfights. That meant Japs as well as friends, so the men dragged themselves in to the bushes and lay low. Some prayed. When Ross came back, Kennedy decided that the group should move to another, larger island to the southeast, where there seemed to be more coconut trees and where the party would be nearer Ferguson Passage.
Again Kennedy took McMahon in tow with the strap in his teeth, and the nine others grouped themselves around the timber.
This swim took three hours. The nine around the timber were caught by the current and barely made the far tip of the island. Kennedy found walking the quarter mile across to them much harder than the three-hour swim. The cuts on his bare feet were festered and looked like small balloons. The men were suffering most from thirst, and they broke open some coconuts lying on the ground and avidly drank the milk. Kennedy and McMahon, the first to drink, were sickened, and Thom told the others to drink sparingly.
In the middle of the night it rained, and someone suggested moving into the underbrush and licking water off the leaves.
Ross and McMahon kept contact at first by touching feet as they licked. Somehow they got separated, and, being uncertain whether there were any Japs on the island, they became frightened. McMahon, trying to make his way back to the beach, bumped into someone and froze. It turned out to be Johnston, licking leaves on his own. In the morning the group saw that all the leaves were covered with droppings. Bitterly, they named the place Bird Island. On this fourth day, the men were low.
Even Johnston was low. He had changed his mind about praying. He asked Ross if he would swim with him to an island called Nauru, to the southeast and even nearer Ferguson Passage. They walked painfully across Nauru to the Ferguson Passage side, where they saw a Japanese barge aground on the reef.
There were two men by the barge—possibly Japs. They apparently spotted Kennedy and Ross, for they got into a dugout canoe and hurriedly paddled to the other side of the island. Kennedy and Ross moved up the beach. They came upon an unopened rope-bound box and, back in the trees, a little shelter containing a keg of water, a Japanese gas mask, and a crude wooden fetish shaped like a fish.
There were Japanese hardtack and candy in the box and the two had a wary feast. Down by the water they found a one-man canoe. They hid from imagined Japs all day. When night fell, Kennedy left Ross and took the canoe, with some hardtack and a can of water from the keg, out into Ferguson Passage. The men there told him that the two men he had spotted by the barge that morning were natives, who had paddled to Bird Island. The natives had said that there were Japs on Nauru and the men had given Kennedy and Ross up for lost.
Then the natives had gone away. Kennedy gave out small rations of crackers and water, and the men went to sleep. During the night, one man, who kept himself awake until the rest were asleep, drank all the water in the can Kennedy had brought back. In the morning the others figured out that he was the guilty one. They swore at him and found it hard to forgive him. Before dawn, Kennedy started out in the canoe to rejoin Ross on Nauru, but when day broke a wind arose and the canoe was swamped.
Some natives appeared from nowhere in a canoe, rescued Kennedy, and took him to Nauru. There they showed him where a two-man canoe was cached. Ross and Kennedy lay in a sickly daze all day. Toward evening it rained and they crawled under a bush.
When it got dark, conscience took hold of Kennedy and he persuaded Ross to go out into Ferguson Passage with him in the two-man canoe. Ross argued against it. Kennedy insisted. The two started out in the canoe. They had shaped paddles from the boards of the Japanese box, and they took a coconut shell to bail with. As they got out into the Passage, the wind rose again and the water became choppy. The canoe began to fill. Ross bailed and Kennedy kept the bow into the wind.
The waves grew until they were five or six feet high. The two clung to it, Kennedy at the bow, Ross at the stern. The tide carried them southward toward the open sea, so they kicked and tugged the canoe, aiming northwest.
They struggled that way for two hours, not knowing whether they would hit the small island or drift into the endless open. Soon the two could see a white line ahead and could hear a frightening roar—waves crashing on a reef.
They had got out of the tidal current and were approaching the island all right, but now they realized that the wind and the waves were carrying them toward the reef. But it was too late to do anything, now that their canoe was swamped, except hang on and wait.
His ears roared and his eyes pinwheeled, and for the third time since the collision he thought he was dying. Somehow he was not thrown against the coral but floated into a kind of eddy. Suddenly he felt the reef under his feet. He, too, had been thrown on the reef. He had not been as lucky as Kennedy; his right arm and shoulder had been cruelly lacerated by the coral, and his feet, which were already infected from earlier wounds, were cut some more. The procession of Kennedy and Ross from reef to beach was a crazy one.
They fell on the beach and slept. Kennedy and Ross were wakened early in the morning by a noise. They looked up and saw four husky natives. To the Senior Officer, Nauru Island. I have just learned of your presence on Nauru Is. I am in command of a New Zealand infantry patrol operating in conjunction with U. Army troops on New Georgia. I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me.
Meanwhile I shall be in radio communication with your authorities at Rendova, and we can finalize plans to collect balance of your party. Will warn aviation of your crossing Ferguson Passage. Everyone shook hands and the four natives took Ross and Kennedy in their war canoe across to Bird Island to tell the others the good news. There the natives broke out a spirit stove and cooked a feast of yams and C ration.
Then they built a leanto for McMahon, whose burns had begun to rot and stink, and for Ross, whose arm had swelled to the size of a thigh because of the coral cuts. The natives put Kennedy in the bottom of their canoe and covered him with sacking and palm fronds, in case Japanese planes should buzz them.
The long trip was fun for the natives. They stopped once to try to grab a turtle, and laughed at the sport they were having. Thirty Japanese planes went over low toward Rendova, and the natives waved and shouted gaily. They rowed with a strange rhythm, pounding paddles on the gunwales between strokes.
At last they reached a censored place. Kuroshio sank immediately. Kagero and Oyashio sank later that day after being attacked and further damaged by U. In what National Geographic called a "poorly planned and badly coordinated" attack, 15 boats with 60 available torpedoes went into action. However, of the 30 torpedoes fired by PT boats from four sections, not a single hit was scored.
In the battle, only four PT boats the section leaders had radar, and they were ordered to return to base after firing their torpedoes on radar bearings. When they left, the remaining boats were virtually blind and without verbal orders, thus leading to more confusion. Patrolling just after the section leader had departed for home, PT was run down on a dark moonless night by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri , returning from the supply mission.
Members of the destroyer crew believed the collision was not an accident, though other reports suggest Amagiri' s captain never realized what happened till after the fact. President John F. His crew was assumed lost by the U. Military Wiki Explore. Popular pages. Project maintenance. Register Don't have an account?
Battle of Blackett Strait. Edit source History Talk 0. Merrill Masao Tachibana Strength 3 cruisers , 3 destroyers 2 destroyers Casualties and losses None 2 destroyers sunk, killed [1] v t e.
Solomon Islands campaign. George Karavia Bay.
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