SOLOMON ISLANDS (10 July 2002) -- They were beautiful, fast and glamorous -- a rare opportunity for a young reserve officer like John F. Kennedy to earn a coveted command at sea. But should a PT boat ever be caught with idling engines in the path of a Japanese warship, the outcome was quick and final. In the predawn hours of Aug. 2, 1943, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed Kennedy's PT-109 in the waters of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, killing two crewmen, nearly slicing the boat in half and leaving Kennedy and the rest of his crew to ride the crippled hulk until they could swim to a nearby island. The ordeal earned Kennedy the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and contributed to the charismatic aura that envelops him even now. And, yesterday, nearly 59 years after PT-109's fatal encounter, marine archaeologist Robert Ballard announced that he had found its sunken remains in tumbling underwater sand dunes 1,300 feet below the surface of the Solomons' Blackett Strait. "The currents get stronger and stronger," Ballard told a news conference. "What you have are large active sand waves [on the sea bottom]. Think of being in the Sahara on top of a big sand dune, and down in the trough, you see a piece of a boat sticking out. That's what we had." Using a special sonar and a tiny robotic submarine called "Little Hercules," Ballard's team located and photographed what experts identified as a Mark 18 torpedo tube of the type used on Kennedy's PT boat, with a World War II-vintage Mark 8 torpedo still partly inside it. Nearby was a hand-operated "training gear," used to manually aim the torpedo. "There's only 40 to 60 percent of the tube remaining," said Naval Historical Center staff curator Mark Wertheimer. "The torpedo is broken in half and is lying on the sand, and you can see the propellers and some of the works." Wertheimer was part of a Naval Historical Center team that authenticated the find at the invitation of the National Geographic Society, the expedition's principal sponsor. Wertheimer said the team examined expedition videotape and confirmed through Navy records that no other patrol torpedo boat was ever lost in the area. "There was one other item that was kind of intriguing," Wertheimer said. "It was a large two-headed mallet lying in the sand." Wertheimer explained that PT boats during torpedo runs always had a seaman standing by to whack the firing pin in case the electric trigger malfunctioned. Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic as well as other notable sunken ships, both ancient and modern, is a pioneer in the field of deep-water archaeology, using sonar to pinpoint wrecks on the ocean bottom, then diving to the sites to explore and photograph the remains in small, manned submarines or robotic vehicles such as Little Hercules, which are steered by "helmsmen" sitting at topside computer consoles. Ballard said his team deliberately left vague the exact location of PT-109, adding that, "historically, we do not disturb these sites. We find them and document them." He noted that the U.S. Navy owns its wrecks and does not allow them to be exploited. He also said the team "has an understanding" with the Kennedy family "not to disturb the site or dig it up." Ballard said that naval records had accurately pinpointed the spot where PT-109 was rammed, but that when the expedition's sonar scanned the area, it picked up "thousands of objects," mostly rocks that had tumbled from an underground limestone wall or debris from the nearby volcanic island of Kolombangara. The rocky bottom made it impossible to distinguish a wrecked boat, so the expedition moved south to where Blackett Strait narrows, dramatically accelerating the ocean currents that course through it with the changing tide, Ballard said. | | Top photo of Lt. John F. Kennedy (standing at right) with PT-109 crew in 1943. Middle photo of PT-109 with torpedo highlighted. Bottom photo of torpedo at the PT-109 wreck site at a depth of almost 400 meters (1,300 ft). The currents had stirred up the "dunes" in the sandy bottom, Ballard said, and there was only "one hard target" to examine. The sonar, which creates remarkably detailed images of the sea bottom by running sound waves back and forth along it like a lawn mower, picked up an object about 21 feet wide and 38 feet long -- about the size of a PT boat engine room, Ballard said. The deep-sea robots finished the job. While wooden boats are generally eaten by worms on the ocean floor at any depth, they can survive if they're buried. Ballard also said that worms tend not to attack dense hardwoods such as teak and mahogany, used extensively in PT boats. Motor torpedo boats were built early in World War II based on a British design and were intended for port defense, explained Naval Historical Center historian and staff curator Jack Green. "They were supposed to stealthily sneak up on a large ship, fire torpedoes and get out fast." They seemed ideally suited for the job. They were 80 feet long, built of mahogany and plywood, and equipped with three 12-cylinder Packard aircraft engines that ran on aviation gasoline. With three propellers and 4,500 horsepower, they could travel 45 mph. Driving one was a dream job for a reserve lieutenant, junior grade, like Kennedy. The trouble was that U.S. ports were not threatened, Green said, so the PT boats were dispatched to the South Pacific in 1942 to attack Japanese resupply ships as the allies worked their way northward in a bitter, 15-month U.S. campaign to drive the enemy from the island of Guadalcanal and the rest of the Solomons. But the occasional destroyer -- more than three times the size of a PT boat and almost as fast -- still appeared as an escort, and Japanese doctrine on PT boats "was to kill them before they killed you," Green said. The Amagiri was traveling more than 35 mph when it rammed PT-109, whose crew had shut down two engines and idled the third to minimize its noise and wake. The impact sheared off part of the right side of the boat, killed two topside crewmen instantly and left the damaged hull drifting with the current until it sank about four miles away, where Ballard found it more than a half-century later. |
