After harrowing nights spent on several desert islands—nights during which the skipper showed most extraordinary stamina, resourcefulness, and courage—the ship-wrecked sailors were found by native scouts. They took the heroic skipper by canoe to a coast-watcher station, and there he boarded a rescue PT and returned for his marooned companions.
The skipper of the 109 was, of course, the same John F. Kennedy who on January 20, 1961, became the thirty-fifth President of the United States.
After Munda fell and with it all of New Georgia, American strategists studied the map and decided that island-by-island reduction of Japanese strength was too tedious. They decided to start by-passing some of the bases, cutting off the by-passed garrisons and starving them behind an American sea blockade. More night work for the PTs.
Up the line a bit was the island of Vella Lavella, only lightly held by the Japanese. American strategists chose a beach called Barakoma as a possible landing spot and ordered a reconnaissance.
Four PTs, on the night between August 12th and 13th, carried a scouting party of 45 men to the beach at Barakoma. A Japanese plane nagged the boats with strafing and bombing runs for two hours. A near miss tore up the planking on the 168 and wounded four sailors, so the 168 had to drop out of the operation, but the other three boats put their passengers ashore safely. Scouts reported that the only Japanese around that part of the island were ship-wrecked survivors of an earlier sea battle, so thirty-six hours later four more PTs landed reinforcements.
Japanese snooper planes spotted the PT passenger runs, but apparently the Japanese high command couldn’t think of torpedo boats as invasion craft, so the scout landings were made without interference.
The main force followed, and by October 1st all of Vella Lavella was in American hands.
The Japanese began shrinking their Solomon Islands perimeter, falling back to the islands on the near side of the new American base at Vella Lavella. American destroyers, out to smash the evacuation bargeline, met a Japanese destroyer screen for the daihatsus on the night between October 6th and 7th. As usual, Japanese torpedoes were deadly. One American destroyer went down and two others were sorely damaged. More important, the Japanese supply and evacuation train ran its errands without molestation from the American cans.
The American destroyers did sink the Japanese Yugumo, and American PTs were sent to pick up 78 survivors. Aboard the 163, an American sailor offered a cup of coffee to one of the captive Japanese, who killed the Good Samaritan (and of course died himself at the hands of the murdered sailor’s shipmates). PT sailors felt less uneasy about the massacre of the shipwrecked Japanese at the Bismarck Sea after the treacherous murder of their comrade by a rescued Japanese.
Having successfully leapfrogged once, American strategists looked at the map again. The whole point to the island-hopping campaign was to put American fighter planes close enough to Rabaul so that they could screen bombers over that base and keep the Japanese pinned down there under constant bombardment. The best site for a fighter base was Bougainville Island, so American planners put their fingers on the map and said: “This is the place for the next one.”