An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (16 page)

Rose and Joe were relieved that he didn’t think it “absolutely necessary” to give his life, but they found nothing funny in Jack’s flippant remark about sacrificing himself for his brother’s ambitions. Jack’s decision to enter combat in the PTs was “causing his mother and me plenty of anxiety,” Joe told a priest. He was proud of his sons for entering the most hazardous branches of the service, but it was also causing their parents “quite a measure of grief.”

Joe’s anxiety about seeing Jack enter combat as a PT commander may have been the determining influence behind a decision to keep Jack in Rhode Island for six months to a year as a torpedo boat instructor. A few of the best students in the program were routinely made instructors, Jack’s commander said later. But a fitness report on him, which described Jack as “conscientious, willing and dependable” and of “excellent personal and military character,” also considered him “relatively inexperienced in PT boat operations” and in need of “more experience” to become “a highly capable officer.” Why someone as inexperienced as Jack was made a training officer is difficult to understand unless some special pressure had been brought to bear.

Jack certainly saw behind-the-scenes manipulation at work, and he moved to alter his orders. He went directly to Lieutenant Commander John Harllee, the senior instructor at Melville. “Kennedy was extremely unhappy at being selected as a member of the training squadron,” Harllee recalled, “because he yearned with great zeal to get out to the war zone. . . . As a matter of fact, he and I had some very hard words about this assignment.” But Harllee insisted that Jack stay.

It was not for long, however. Jack, distrusting his father’s willingness to help, went to his grandfather, Honey Fitz, who arranged a meeting with Massachusetts senator David Walsh, the chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh, who was very favorably impressed with Jack, wrote a letter to the Navy Department urging his transfer to a war zone. In January 1943, Jack was detached from his training duties and instructed to take four boats to Jacksonville, Florida, where he would be given reassignment.

Though he thought he was on his “way to war,” as he wrote his brother Bobby, who was finishing prep school, he was not there yet. During the thousand-mile voyage, he became ill with something doctors at the naval station in Morehead City, North Carolina, diagnosed as “gastro-enteritis.” Since he recovered in two days and rejoined the squadron on its way to Jacksonville, he probably had an intestinal virus or food poisoning rather than a flare-up of his colitis. It was a signal nonetheless that his health remained precarious and that he was a wounded warrior heading into combat. “Re my gut and back,” he soon wrote Billings, “it is still not hooray—but I think it will hold out.” Upon his arrival in Jacksonville, his new orders assigned him to patrol duty at the Panama Canal. Unwilling to “be stuck in Panama for the rest of the war,” he immediately requested transfer to the South Pacific and prevailed upon Senator Walsh to arrange it. By the beginning of March, he was on his way to the Solomon Islands, where Japanese and U.S. naval forces were locked in fierce combat. After U.S. victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway in the spring of 1942, both sides had suffered thousands of casualties and lost dozens of ships in battles for control of New Guinea and the Solomons.

Jack’s eagerness to put himself at risk cries out for explanation. Was it because he felt invincible, as the young often do, especially the privileged? This seems doubtful. The reality of war casualties had already registered on him. “Your friend Jock Pitney,” he wrote Lem on January 30, 1943, “I saw the other day is reported missing and a class-mate of mine, Dunc Curtis . . . was killed on Christmas day.” Was Jack then hoping for a war record he could use later in politics? Almost certainly not. In 1943, Joe Jr. was the heir apparent to a political career, not his younger brother. Instead, his compelling impulse was similar to that of millions of other Americans who believed in the war as an essential crusade against evil, an apocalyptic struggle to preserve American values against totalitarianism. One wartime slogan said it best: “We can win; we must win; we will win.” Small wonder, then, that Jack applauded Lem’s success in getting himself close to combat in North Africa by becoming an ambulance driver in the American Field Service. “You have seen more war than any of us as yet,” he told Billings, who had failed his army physical, “and I certainly think it was an excellent idea to go.” Jack also admired their friend Rip Horton for thinking about transferring from the Quartermaster Corps to the “Paratroopers—as he figured if my stomach could stand that [the PTs] he could stand the other. He’ll be alright if his glasses don’t fall off.”

The seventeen months Jack would spend in the Pacific dramatically changed his outlook on war and the military. “I’m extremely glad I came,” Jack wrote Inga, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but I will be extremely glad to get back. . . . A number of my illusions have been shattered.”

Among them were assumptions about surviving the war. The combat he witnessed in March 1943, on his first day in the Solomons, quickly sobered him. As his transport ship approached Guadalcanal, a Japanese air raid killed the captain of his ship and brought the crew face to face with a downed Japanese pilot, who rather than be rescued by his enemy began firing a revolver at the bridge of the U.S. ship. “That slowed me a bit,” Jack wrote Billings, “the thought of him sitting in the water—battling an entire ship.” An “old soldier” standing next to Jack blew the top of the pilot’s head off after the rest of the ship’s crew, which was “too surprised to shoot straight,” filled the water with machine-gun fire. “It brought home very strongly how long it’s going to take to finish the war.”

It also made the perils of combat clearer to Jack. His Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald described a letter Jack wrote the next day, telling Macdonald “to watch out and really get trained, because I didn’t know as much about boats as he [Jack] did, and he said I should know what the hell I was doing because it’s different out in the war zone.” A visit to the grave of George Mead, a Cape Cod friend who had been killed in the Guadalcanal fighting, underscored the grim realities of the war for Jack. It was “among the gloomier events,” he told Inga. “He is buried near the beach where they first landed.” It was “a very simple grave” marked by “an aluminum plate, cut out of mess gear . . . and on it crudely carved ‘Lt. George Mead USMC. Died Aug. 20. A great leader of men—God Bless Him.’ The whole thing was about the saddest experience I’ve ever had and enough to make you cry.” When Rose told Jack that “all the nuns and priests along the Atlantic Coast” were “putting in a lot of praying time” on his behalf, he declared it comforting. But he hoped “it won’t be taken as a sign of lack of confidence in you all or the Church if I continue to duck.”

What impressed Jack now was not the eagerness of the men in the war zone for heroic combat—that was romantic stuff dispelled by battlefield losses—but their focus on getting home alive. He told Inga that the “picture that I had in the back of my greatly illusioned mind about spending the war sitting on some cool Pacific Beach with a warm Pacific maiden stroking me gently” had disappeared. What “the boys at the front” talked about was “first and foremost . . . exactly when they were going to get home.” He wrote his parents: “When I was speaking about the people who would just as soon be home, I didn’t mean to use ‘They’—I meant ‘We.’” He urged them to tell brother Joe not to rush to join him in the Pacific, as “he will want to be back the day after [he] arrives, if he runs true to the form of everyone else.” When Billings told Jack that he was considering a transfer to Southeast Asia to fight with the British, Jack expressed delight that he was “still in one piece,” noting that “you have certainly had your share of thrills,” and advised him to “return safely to the U.S. and join the Quartermaster Corps + sit on your fat ass for awhile. . . . I myself hope perhaps to get home by Christmas, as they have been good about relieving us—as the work is fairly tough out here.”

Jack’s letters make clear that he was particularly cynical about commentators back home pontificating on the war from the safety and comfort of their offices and pleasure palaces. “It’s not bad here at all,” Jack wrote Billings, “but everyone wants to get the hell back home—the only people who want to be out here are the people back in the states—and particularly those in the Stork Club.” He made a similar point to Inga: “It’s one of the interesting things about this war that everyone in the States, with the exception of that gallant armed guard on the good ship U.S.S. Stork Club—Lt. Commander Walter Winchell—wants to be out here killing Japs, while everyone out here wants to be back at the Stork Club. It seems to me that someone with enterprise could work out some sort of exchange, but as I hear you saying, I asked for it honey and I’m getting it.” “I always like to check from where he [the columnist] is talking,” he wrote his parents, “it’s seldom out here.” All the talk about “billions of dollars and millions of soldiers” made “thousands of dead” sound “like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw [on my boat]—they should measure their words with great, great care.”

Jack admired the courage and commitment to duty he saw among the officers and men serving on the PTs, but he also sympathized with their fear of dying and saw no virtue in false heroics. When one of the sailors under his command, a father of three children, became unnerved by an attack on their PT, Jack found his reaction understandable and tried to arrange shore duty for him. After the man was killed in another attack on Jack’s boat, he wrote his parents: “He never said anything about being put ashore—he didn’t want to—but the next time we came down the line—I was going to let him work on the base force. When a fellow gets the feeling that he’s in for it—the only thing to do is to let him get off the boat—because strangely enough they always seem to be the ones that do get it.”

Jack reserved his harshest criticism for the high military officers he saw “leading” the men in his war zone. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, was no hero to him. Jack thought MacArthur’s island-to-island strategy was a poor idea. “If they do that,” he wrote his parents, “the motto out here ‘The Golden Gate by 48’ won’t even come true.” Jack reported that MacArthur enjoyed little or no support among the men he spoke to. The general “is in fact, very, very unpopular. His nick-name is ‘Dug-out-Doug,’” reflecting his refusal to send in army troops to relieve the marines fighting for Guadalcanal and to emerge from his “dug-out in Australia.”

The commanders whom Jack saw up close impressed him as no better. “Have been ferrying quite a lot of generals around,” he wrote Inga, “as the word has gotten around evidently since MacArthur’s escape that the place to be seen for swift and sure advancement if you’re a general is in a PT boat.” His description to Inga of a visit to their base by an admiral is priceless. “Just had an inspection by an Admiral. He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three. . . . ‘And what do we have here?’” he asked about a machine shop. When told what it was, he wanted to know what “you keep in it, harrumph ah . . . MACHINERY?” Told yes, he wrote it “down on the special pad he kept for such special bits of information which can only be found ‘if you get right up to the front and see for yourself.’” After additional inane remarks about building a dock in a distant bay, he “toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table. . . . That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.”

Worse than the posturing of these officers was the damage Jack saw some of them inflicting on the war effort. As far as he was concerned, many of them were little more than inept bureaucrats. “A great hold-up seems to be the lackadaisical way they handle the unloading of ships,” he wrote his parents a month after arriving in the Solomons. “They sit in ports out here weeks at a time while they try to get enough Higgins boats to unload them. . . . They’re losing ships, in effect, by what seems from the outside to be just inertia up high. . . . They have brought back a lot of old Captains and Commanders from retirement and stuck them in as heads of these ports and they give the impression of their brains being in their tails, as Honey Fitz would say. The ship I arrived on—no one in the port had the slightest idea it was coming. It had hundreds of men and it sat in the harbor for two weeks while signals were being exchanged.” Jack was pleased to note, however, that everyone had confidence in the top man, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. But he was especially doubtful about the academy officers he met. Now Rear Admiral John Harllee recalled Kennedy’s feeling in 1947 that “many Annapolis and West Point graduates were not as good material as the country could have selected. . . . He felt, for example, that some of the senior officers with whom he had had contact in the Navy left something to be desired in their leadership qualities.” Somewhat ironically, given his own convoluted path into military service, Jack saw political influence on admitting candidates to the academies as the root of the problem. The resulting unqualified officers were a significant part of what he called “this heaving puffing war machine of ours.” He lamented the “super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.”

Another difficulty Jack and others saw was the overestimation of the PTs’ ability to make a substantial contribution to the fighting. Despite wartime claims that just one PT squadron alone had sunk a Japanese cruiser, six destroyers, and a number of other ships in the fighting around Guadalcanal, a later official history disclosed that in four months of combat in the Solomons, all the PT squadrons combined had sunk only one Japanese destroyer and one submarine. One PT commander later said, “Let me be honest. Motor torpedo boats were no good. You couldn’t get close to anything without being spotted. . . . Whether we sunk anything is questionable. . . . The PT brass were the greatest con artists of all times. They got everything they wanted—the cream of everything, especially personnel. But the only thing PTs were really effective at was raising War Bonds.” Jack himself wrote to his sister Kathleen: “The glamor of PTs just isn’t except to the outsider. It’s just a matter of night after night patrols at low speed in rough water—two hours on—then sacking out and going on again for another two hours.” The boats were poorly armed with inadequate guns and unreliable World War I torpedoes, had defective engines and highly imperfect VHF (very high frequency) radios that kept conking out, lacked armor plating, and turned into floating infernos when hit.