During the hotly contested struggle for the Solomon Islands during World War II, while Japanese and U.S. soldiers and Marines were engaged in heavy fighting on Guadalcanal and other islands in the chain, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) supported its forces ashore by using destroyers to make frequent sorties down a water passage that ran among the islands and became known as “The Slot.” These sorties—dubbed the “Tokyo Express” by the Americans—led to frequent engagements with U.S. warships in the area and resulted in a number of major naval engagements that proved to be key components to the ongoing campaign.
On the night of 1 August 1943, 15 U.S. torpedo patrol boats engaged four of these Tokyo Express destroyers in combat. Unlike many other nights, neither side suffered any major losses in the fighting. But one of the U.S. patrol boats—the PT-109—was unfortunate to be lying in the path of the IJN Amagiri, one of the marauding enemy destroyers. It was a pitch-black night, and neither vessel’s captain was aware of the other’s presence in the darkened Slot.
The fast-moving Japanese ship smashed into the PT-109 with great force. The smaller vessel never stood a chance; she was cut in two and her fuel tanks exploded. Two of the American sailors were killed in the collision and resulting conflagration, and several others were badly injured.
The Japanese destroyer continued on down the Slot, and the survivors were left in the dark waters to fend for themselves. Fend they did. With the fitter men helping the more seriously injured, these PT sailors swam to one of the many islands that make up the Solomon archipelago.
The PT-109’s captain devised several plans to avoid capture and get them rescued, including swimming out into the Slot in hopes of getting the attention of U.S. vessels on patrol. The plan that ultimately worked, causing them to be rescued on 8 August, involved the carving of a message on a coconut shell and delivering it to the U.S. forces via friendly natives in the area.
The captain was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism and was later elected President of the United States. On his desk in the Oval Office, he kept a small plaque that quoted a Breton Fisherman’s prayer: “O God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.”
John F. Kennedy and ten of his crew escaped death that dark night in the Solomons Slot, but he could not escape it in the glaring daylight of Dallas 20 years later when, on 22 November 1963, he was felled by an assassin’s bullet.
To honor this former sailor, an aircraft carrier was commissioned as the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) on 7 September 1968. Seven years later, in an ironic reminder of the collision of the PT-boat and the destroyer, the aircraft carrier bearing Kennedy’s name was involved in a terrible collision with the guided-missile cruiser USS Belknap (CG-26). Reminiscent of the ensuing conflagration in the Slot in 1943, aviation fuel poured down from the carrier’s flight-deck refueling stations into the cruiser’s superstructure, feeding a horrific fire that burned most of the night and virtually melted the Belknap’s superstructure. Heroic efforts saved the ship, but six Belknap sailors and one from the Kennedy died, with many others seriously injured.
This coincidence of collision was bizarre in its own right, but even more amazing was that out of 365 possible days in a year the accident between the Belknap and John F. Kennedy could have occurred, this tragedy took place on the night of 22 November 1975, on the anniversary of the President’s assassination.