#156: In the Navy; JFK, Part III

After graduating from Harvard, JFK isn't sure of his next steps. He knows that he needs to find a way to serve - the world is at war and everyone is sure the US will soon join the fight. With the help of his father, he follows his brother's footsteps and joins the navy, but soon both Kennedy boys realize their dad is likely pulling strings to keep them out of harms way... and having raised children taught to figure out how to take what they want, both eventually go behind their father's back and get into the fight.

The introduction and transition music heard on the podcast is composed and recorded by the eldest Ghosts of Arlington, Jr. While the rest of his catalogue is quite different from what he's performed for me, you can find his music on bandcamp.com under the names Caladrius and Bloodfeather.

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Transcript

In the sumer of 1941, a recent college graduate is out sailing, trying to figure out his next steps in life. Despite his fancy pedigree that comes with wealth, privilege, and the Kennedy surname, he is just Jack when he sails into Nantucket Sound and notices a type of boat he has never seen before tied up at the pier. The elegant craft is made of wood, about eighty feet (or twenty-five meters) long, and is powered by three enormous Packard airplane engines, each producing 1,350 horsepower and capable of reaching speeds above 40 knots (for us non-nautical types, that’s about 46 miles, or 75 kilometers an hour). 

Built for war, it is armed to the teeth with two twin-.50-caliber machine gun turrets, depth charge launchers, and four torpedo tubes, each loaded with a 21-inch Mark VIII torpedo, capable of taking down both surface and subsurface targets. He would later learn that this type of boat is the fastest, and for its size, most heavily armed craft in the US Navy. After asking around, he is told it is a patrol torpedo (or PT) Boat and is based on models already in use by the British and German navies.

It isn’t just the boat’s speed or armament that impresses Jack. The boat is commanded by a junior officer, a lieutenant. Unlike larger warships where there are any number of junior officers, he realizes that if he volunteers to serve with PT boats, he could get his own command right away. In his mind, commanding a PT boat in the Pacific would allow him to make an important contribution and with the help of his father, in a few short weeks Jack finds himself in the Navy… with a safe, cushy desk job writing intelligence reports; not at all what he had in mind.

HOST: Welcome back to Ghosts of Arlington. I'm your host, Jackson Irish, tracing the shadows of Arlington National Cemetery through the lives buried there. Today, the United States is thrust into World War II and the Kennedy brothers are there to do their part. Thank you for joining me for Episode 156: In the Navy; JFK, Part III.

[INTRO MUSIC]

After graduating from Harvard, and with the specter of war looming over the United States, in late-1940 Jack Kennedy attempts Army Officer Candidate School but is medically disqualified due to his chronic back problems. Unsure of his next step, he goes to Stanford’s school of business out in California and audits a few classes but leaves after one semester so he can help his father, Joe, Sr. complete his memoirs about his time as US ambassador to the United Kingdom. 

In early-1941, Jack tours South America and when he returns, he is about to apply to Yale’s law school but still can’t stand the thought of missing out on World War II when America inevitably joins the conflict (as many people are sure it will). He tells a friend, “I am rapidly reaching the point where every one of my peers will be in uniform, and I do not intend to be the only one among them wearing coward’s tweeds. I am sure there is somewhere where I can make a contribution in all this, despite whatever glaring physical deficiencies might be in evidence on my illustrious person.”

Jack’s brother, Joe, Jr. leaves Harvard Law and  joins the Navy in June of 41; he is off to earn his wings as a naval aviator. Seeing how much his son wants to serve in any future war effort, Joe, Sr. gets some help from his former Naval attache in London - Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk (himself a future Ghost of Arlington) - who is now the director of the office of naval intelligence. Joe, Sr. is able to get Jack a direct commission in the Navy as an intelligence officer on October 26, 1941. Barely a month later, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and Jack gets his wish - he is now serving in a Navy at war.

Jack can’t shake the thought of commanding a PT boat. At Pearl Harbor, Gunner’s Mate Joy van Zyll de Jong and Torpedoman’s Mate George Huffman, aboard PT-23, opened fire with .50-caliber machine guns and shot down two Japanese Nakajima “Kate” torpedo bombers, two of just a handful of US successes on that infamous day. Ensign Kennedy yearns for an overseas combat assignment and after eight months of what he saw as paper pushing and dreary office work, once again Joe, Sr. intervenes; this time providing misleading medical records that seemed to indicate Jack’s back wasn’t as much of a problem as it really was (the true is, e had spent nearly two months in the hospital just before he joined the navy and his doctor recommended corrective surgery) and by convincing PT boat officers that his son’s presence would bring great publicity to the PT fleet. 

Joe, Sr. wined and dined Lieutenant Commander John Bulkeley - the most famous PT boat officer of the day - at the opulent Plaza hotel near Central Park in New York City. Bulkeley was the PT boat commander who had evacuated General Douglas MacArthur and his family, along with a few of the general’s staff, before the fall of Corregidor in the Philippines under President Franklin Roosevelt’s orders. After his rescue, MacArthur promised the young sailor the silver star for his efforts but the huge publicity of the escape turned the Silver Star into the Medal of Honor and a stateside recruiting tour. Now, Bulkeley was the commander of an entire squadron - Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3. If Joe, Sr. could persuade Bulkeley to endorse Jack joining the PT boat outfit, no one would oppose the assignment and Joe, Sr was nothing if not persuasive.

And why is the patriarch of the Kennedy family so determined to get Jack into a higher profile war-time job? Joe, Sr. originally had high political ambitions for himself. This middle-class-raised Irish-Catholic outsider stormed the bastions of America’s WASP aristocracy and his enormous (and not completely above board) successes in the banking and financial realms in the gilded age and roaring 20s - as well as the savvy move to pull everything out of the stock market just before the crash that led to the Great Depression allowed to climb high on the social ladder.

His cunning and charm helped him receive two political appointments to jobs for which he was grossly united from his personal friend - FDR. In 1934, he was made the first chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In other words, the president made this notorious insider trader and stock manipulator the top cop of Wall Street. In private, FDR quipped that it takes a thief to catch a thief. You already know the other position, his 1938 appointment as ambassador to the UK. That job would actually lead to the end of Joe, Sr’s political career.

You see, dear listener, Joe, Sr had one personality defect… okay, in my opinion he had several but this one came back to bite him - he had a big mouth. When the highly opinionated, blunt-speaking, undiplomatic ambassador arrived at the Court of St James he was largely ignored by both FDR and the British Foreign Office for three years, all while the Nazi’s advanced virtually unopposed across Europe. On one occasion, the dispirited and increasingly isolationist Ambassador Kennedy blurted to a reporter, <<QUOTE>> “Democracy is finished in England.”

That quote caused an uproar in the UK, forced FDR to fire Joe, Sr, and killed any other political ambition he had for himself. But Joe, Sr. was not out solely for himself; he wanted to forge a dynasty. In the words of a close family friend, “From the beginning, Joe knew what he wanted - money and status for his family. He had the progenitor's sense; to him, his children were an extension of himself. Therefore, what he did, he did with them always in mind. He played the game differently than if he had been after something entirely for himself.

Joe, Sr. had always believed that Joe, Jr. had what it takes to reach high political office and after his last two years at Harvard coupled with his time in Europe, he could now see the same potential in Jack - with his help, he believed Jack had the potential to be president of the United States.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

A few weeks after his meeting with Joe, Sr, Bulkeley is out recruiting PT officer candidates and is at the Zenith of his popularity. A best selling book about him has just been published called They Were Expendable. He dazzles a crowd of college students and junior navy officers, which includes Jack, with tales of his exploits.

“The PT boat is a great weapon,” he declares. “The enemy has not yet won a brush with one. Our little half squadron sank one [Japanese] cruiser, one plane tender, and one loaded transport, badly damaged another cruiser, set a tanker on fire, and shot down four planes.” After the war, when Japanese naval loss records were examined by US Naval Intelligence experts, it was learned that these claims were inaccurate and greatly exaggerated, but at the time, those in attendance ate it up.

Alvan Cluster, who later became Jack’s squadron commander explained it this way. “America desperately needed heroes after Pearl Harbor, and they would seize on any exploit or any battle to show how great we were. The only reason PT boats ever got the attention they did was that we had nothing else! They really didn’t do a lot of damage, but Roosevelt needed to point to somebody, and that’s why Bulkeley and PT boats got all that attention.” He also claimed that with his superstardom and barnstorming tour of parades and motivational speeches, Bulkeley was seen as a joke to a lot of PT officers. 

Years later, Bulkeley’s assistant remembered encountering Jack at this particular recruiting event. “He was selling himself hard and expressed a great desire to get into close combat with the enemy as soon as possible. This was one of the main reasons why [we] voted to select him. The other reasons were that he was a collegiate sailing champion, had graduated from Harvard cum laude, and made a favorable impression with his appearance and personality. Given all that, plus the fact that PT boat candidates didn’t have to take a physical, Jack would have almost certainly been selected even without the influence of his powerful father.

By the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Jack has completed training at the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island and is in command of his first boat, PT-101.

[Transition Music]

I gave the rough dimensions of a PT boat and explained its armaments at the top of the podcast - but what was the purpose of a torpedo boat? For that, we have to go back to the US Civil War. In 1861, the Union navy blockaded southern ports which crippled the South’s efforts to import war materiel from abroad. The southern Navy was unable to take on the Union Navy on even terms. One strategy to counter the blockage saw the development of torpedo boats - small, fast boats designed to attack the larger capital ships of the blockading fleet in a form of asymmetrical warfare.

These torpedo boats were armed with spar torpedoes - a charge of powder in a waterproof case, mounted on the bow of the torpedo boat below the water line on a spar, or a long pole stretching out from the front of the boat. These early torpedo boats attacked by ramming its intended target which stuck the torpedo into the intended target by way of a barb on the front of the torpedo. The torpedo boat would then back away - theoretically to a safe distance - and then detonate the torpedo, usually by means of a long cord attached to a trigger.

In general, Confederate torpedo boats were not very successful. Their low sides made them susceptible to swamping in high seas, sometimes to the point of having their boiler fires extinguished by spray from their own torpedo explosions. It was not uncommon for torpedoes of this ear to fire prematurely and duds were also a problem.

By the end of the war, an English engineer named Robert Whitehead was developing a self-propelled torpedo which led to a naval revolution. During the mid-19th century, large steam-powered warships with heavy guns and heavy armor called ironclads burst onto the scene. The development of the ironclads eventually led to dreadnaught battleships.

While the weight of the armor made battleships hard to sink, they slowed them down substantially, and the huge guns needed to penetrate enemy armor fired at very slow rates. This allowed for the possibility of a small and fast ship that could attack the battleships, at a much lower cost. The introduction of the torpedo provided a weapon that could cripple, or even sink, any battleship by bypassing its protective armor and attacking the ship’s keel. Essentially, a good torpedo hit could break a battleship’s back.

The first warship of any kind to carry self-propelled torpedoes was HMS Vesuvius in 1873. The first seagoing vessel specifically designed to fire the self-propelled Whitehead torpedo was HMS Lightning, which is considered to be the first modern torpedo boat.

Today, torpedo boats have been largely replaced by submarines as the primary conveyors of torpedoes, and while they had subs in World War II, they were nowhere near as effective as today’s submarines and were frequently supplemented with torpedo boat squadrons in the war.

I guess all that is to say, PT boats were designed to move quickly amongst the larger, slower capital ships of an enemy’s navy and try to pick off the heavier armored ships like cruisers and battleships.

The US Navy began developing torpedo boats in 1914, when World War I broke out in Europe with the PT boat emerging at the dawn of World War II. Among the early orders from the Navy was for a boat numbered PT-109. It was laid down on March 4, 1942, launched on June 20, and delivered to the Navy on July 10. On August 20th, PT-109 was hoisted aboard the liberty ship USS Joseph Stanton to begin its long journey from New Jersey to the Pacific Theater of Operation and its destiny with John F. Kennedy.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

While Jack’s intelligence and experience with small boats makes him an ideal candidate to command a PT boat, his first command is a complete disappointment. Promoted to lieutenant junior grade at the end of his PT boat training course and given quote/unquote command of PT-101 - but PT-101 is a training boat; what this quote/unquote command actually means is that Jack is assigned as the instructor of boat handling at the PT boat training center and will have to wait even longer before getting into combat, which for this ambitious sailor, is still what he wants more than anything. This is what happens when you impress the senior instructor at the schoolhouse a little too much.

After turning out a few new classes of PT boat officers, Jack finally receives new orders and joins Torpedo Boat Squadron 14 which is not assigned to Europe or the Pacific; it is patrolling the Panama Canal. This new assignment is no better in his eyes than the schoolhouse gig. His new colleagues heard him say “I got shafted” so often, they take to calling him Shafty.

Jack writes to his brother to express his disappointment and discovers that Joe, Jr. is in a similar predicament. By now a fully fledged bomber pilot, Joe, Jr. is stationed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, flying search missions for German submarines in an area where no enemy subs have ever been seen. The brothers realize that while they have earned their way into jobs with probable combat roles, their powerful father is likely pulling strings to keep them out of any real danger. But the Kennedy brothers are determined to bypass their father and get into the war. Joe, Jr. volunteers to join a bomber squadron in Europe that was constantly short of pilots, while Jack applies for a combat assignment in the Pacific. 

Thanks to family connections, Jack is acquainted with Massachusetts Senator David Walsh, the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Jack is able to bypass Joe, Sr. - with the help of his maternal grandfather and former mayor of Boston - John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. With new orders in hand, Jack shipped off for the South Pacific on March 15, 1943 aboard the transport ship USS Rochambeau to take up an assignment as a replacement officer for Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 2, based in the Solomon Islands.  

A quick google search shows me that today, I can get from San Francisco, California to the Solomon Islands in roughly 65 hours, including long layovers at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila, Philippines and Jacksons International Airport in Port Morsby, Papua New Guinea. In 1943, it takes nearly a month. On the afternoon of April 7, the Solomon Islands (specifically Guadalcanal) are in sight and Jack is on board LST 449. An LST - or Landing Ship, Tank - is an ocean going ship capable of going right onto the shore and delivering tanks, amphibious assault vehicles, and troops (usually Marines).

LST 449 is being escorted by the destroyer USS Aaron Ward and there to greet them at the end of their long journey are more than 250 Japanese and American planes pitted against each other in aerial combat. Nine dive bombers in particular are focused on the LST. One 500-pound bomb hits so close that the force of its explosion throws the LST’s captain across the bridge, fracturing his neck. Two more bombs detonate near the starboard bow, soaking the deck with geysers of salt water. Another massive blast pushes the ship’s stern out of the ocean and forces it into a 20 degree list. These are Jack’s first moments in combat: “a hell of an attack,” he later remembers.

The twenty-five-year-old is transfixed by the spectacle of dozens and dozens of planes dogfighting above him, and although he is just a passenger on the LST, along with nearly two hundred other servicemen, he scrambles to join the fight. Jack pitches in by passing shells to the LST’s 40mm antiaircraft gun station. One of the sailors manning the position is 16-year-old Ted Gutherie from the hills of South Carolina. He later recalled, “I was only sixteen years old and scared to death. Our ship had just been straddled by bombs and our gun tub” - he’s referring to the anti-aircraft station here - “...our gun tub was knee deep in water. But gained strength from the courage shown by Mr. Kennedy.” 

Earlier on the trip, Guthrie had heard Jack was a “rich man’s son” and had dismissed him as “a sissy.” But as he later wrote to Kenedy, “When you stood there and helped pass those shells to [my] tub, I gained a new perspective in life.” 

During the battle, a Japanese pilot parachutes into the water and LST 449 goes to rescue him. At first, Jack is struck at how young the pilot looks, with his powerful build and close-cropped, jet-black hair; he is stunned by what happens next. When the LST gets within 20 yards of the downed aviator, he abruptly pulls out a revolver and begins firing at the American ship.

Jack later explained, “That slowed me a bit, the thought of him sitting in the water battling an entire ship.” The Americans replied with so much gunfire it seemed as though the water was boiling with bullets, but everybody was too surprised to shoot straight. “Finally, an old soldier standing next to me picked up his rifle, fired once, and [killed the pilot].

As the attack ends, Jack is hit with a powerful realization: it is going to take a very long time to finish the war. One of the three allied ships sunk in the attack is the LST’s escort, the Aaron Ward.

Jack has arrived at the front lines of the Solomon Island campaign, a turning point in the greatest armed conflict the world has ever seen; and not for the last time, Jack’s life and world events seem to be turning on the same axis. On April 25, Jack takes command of Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109.

Jack is finally in a place beyond the reach of his father’s influence, in a place where his privilege means nothing and where he will be judged on his merits alone.

Next week on the Ghosts of Arlington Podcast we will see the decisions that Jack Kennedy makes and the life-long ramifications they will have for him and his crewmates.

And remember, fear not death, for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.