A third radar boat, Lieut. George E. Cookman’s 107, picked up the cans on the radar set and missed with four fish. Three other PTs, aroused by the flash of destroyer gunfire, came running from the southeast. A Japanese float plane strafed them, and destroyer salvos straddled the boats, but they got off all their torpedoes—12 of them—and all 12 missed. The Tokyo Express went through the strait and unloaded 900 soldiers and supplies. So bad were communications between the PTs that most of the 15 skippers who had started the patrol still didn’t know that the destroyers had arrived and been unsuccessfully attacked, much less that they had already discharged their cargoes and were going home. And that meant the destroyers were coming up on the PT lookouts from behind. At the wheel of the 109 was Lieut. John F. Kennedy. The boat was idling along on one engine to save fuel and to cruise as silently as possible—good PT doctrine for night patrol. A lookout on the destroyer _Amagiri_ saw the 109 at about the same instant a lookout on the PT saw the destroyer. Making a split-second decision, Japanese Commander Hanami ordered the helmsman to spin the wheel to starboard and ram. The _Amagiri_ crashed into the starboard side of the 109 and killed the lookout on the spot. The boat was cut in two; the rear section sank; burning gasoline covered the sea. The _Amagiri_ sailed on, but at a reduced speed, because the 109, in its death agony, had bent vanes on the _Amagiri’s_ starboard propeller, causing violent vibration at high speeds. PT 169 fired torpedoes at the _Amagiri_, but at too close a range for them to arm and explode. PT 157 fired two that missed. Thirty torpedoes were fired that night, and the only damage inflicted on the destroyers was by the quite involuntary and fatal body block of the 109. It was not the greatest night of the war for the PT navy. Eleven survivors of the 109 searched surrounding waters for two missing shipmates, but never found them. They spent the night and the next morning on the still-floating bow section. By midafternoon they decided that no rescue was on the way. Since they felt naked and exposed to Japanese plane and ship patrols, they set out to swim three and a half miles to a desert island, the skipper towing a badly burned shipmate for four hours by a life-jacket tie-tie gripped between his teeth. 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.