John F. Kennedy with his then-fiancee Jackie Bouvier in Massachusetts in 1953, 10 years after Kennedy and his crew were rescued after being shipwrecked in the Solomon Islands. Photo / Getty Images
Eighty years ago a Kiwi soldier by the name of Wincote helped rescue former US President John F. Kennedy and his desperate, shipwrecked crew off a remote island in the Solomons during World War II. Or did he? Jane Phare recounts the story.
“Come up to my tent and have a cup of tea,” the New Zealand lieutenant told the bedraggled shipwreck survivor who clambered out of a dugout canoe, exhausted and with badly infected feet from coral cuts.
It was August 1943 and the young patrol boat skipper, Lieutenant Jack Kennedy, had survived, with 10 of his crew, a terrifying ordeal when their patrol boat was rammed and sliced in two by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands. The fuel tank exploded in the collision and with burning fuel floating in the sea, Kennedy rounded up his men. Two had died, one was badly burned and another injured. Their base at Rendova was 65 kilometres away.
For nine hours they clung in the dark to the remains of the patrol boat hoping for rescue while they drifted south in the Blackett Strait. But when the bow started sinking, the group were forced to start swimming, Kennedy towing the burned crew member by gripping the man’s life jacket strap in his teeth. It would be five exhausting hours before the group crawled ashore at tiny Kasolo Island, also known as Plum Pudding Island. For the next five days, with little water or food, they would try desperately to attract the attention of Allied forces while hiding from Japanese troops. Capture meant the risk of torture and death.
The young lieutenant would later become the 35th president of the United States and, 20 years after his daring rescue in the Solomons, would be shot dead while riding in an open convertible in Dallas with Jackie, his wife and First Lady. But back then, who was to know that? Standing on the foreshore of tiny Gomu Island, he was the 26-year-old skipper of PT-109, destroyed while patrolling in the Blackett Strait, southwest of Kolombangara, in the early hours of August 2.
Without food or water, Kennedy realised the group would not survive long on tiny Plum Pudding Island. He encouraged the men to swim to the larger Olasana Island, again towing the injured crewman by his life jacket strap, where they could at least forage for coconuts. The island was in enemy territory, so the group had to lie low. Kennedy, a former member of the Harvard swimming team, swam out each night into Ferguson Passage hoping to attract the attention of passing patrol boats, to signal that he and his crew were still alive. Exhausted after hours of being buffeted by the currents, he would head back as dawn broke, cutting his feet badly on hidden coral reefs.
Six days after they were shipwrecked, Kennedy and crew member George “Barney” Ross, swam out to Naru Island to be closer to Ferguson Passage through which the US Navy PT (patrol torpedo) boats travelled. Their job was to patrol the coast of what was then known as the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, intercepting convoys of Japanese ships transporting troops further south to fight against US forces in the Pacific. Kennedy, swimming out with a lantern, had tried in vain to attract their attention, as had Ross.
Instead, two Solomon Island “natives”, as they were described at the time, Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, stumbled across Kennedy and Ross. The Solomon Islanders, who were working with Allied coast watchers behind enemy lines, used sign language to communicate with Kennedy, showing him how to scratch a message on to a smooth coconut husk. He wrote: “Nauro [Naru] Isl…Commander… Native knows Posit…He can pilot…11 alive…need small boat…Kennedy.”
Kumana and Gasa paddled the urgent message through Japanese-controlled waters, waving at planes overhead, to deliver the coconut message. Back came a handwritten reply to Kennedy.
“On His Majesty’s Service. To the Senior Officer, Nauru Island. I have just learned of your presence on Nauru Is. I am in command of a New Zealand infantry patrol operating in conjunction with US Army troops on New Georgia. I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Meanwhile I shall be in radio communication with your authorities at Rendova and we can finalise plans to collect balance of your party. Lt Wincote. PS Will warn aviation of your crossing Ferguson passage.”
The group paddled Kennedy and Ross back to Olasana Island to give the crew food and build a shelter for the injured men. Then Kumana and Gasa hid Kennedy under sacking and palm fronds at the bottom of their canoe and, at great personal risk, paddled him to meet Lt Wincote.
However, Wincote never existed. The Herald on Sunday made inquiries with the New Zealand Defence Force about New Zealand’s involvement in the Solomons in 1943. Although the 3rd infantry did arrive in the Solomons in August 1943 to support US troops, the Defence Force’s database of service personnel found no record of anyone by the name of Wincote serving in the New Zealand military. However, three men with the middle name of Wincote did serve in WWII. Two did not serve in the Pacific and records are not available for the third.
Wincote, as it turned out, was Australian coast watcher Lieutenant Arthur “Reg” Evans, one of several stationed on remote island hideouts, to warn of Japanese air strikes, and report on shipping and troop movements. Camped on tiny Gomu Island, Evans, armed with a radio, a pair of binoculars and a tommy gun, had received a report about the fiery sinking of PT-109 in the dead of night and, it was assumed, there were no survivors. Nevertheless, Evans instructed his “Solomon Scouts”, as they became known, to keep checking local islands.
The story goes that the American press made up the name Wincote and his New Zealand identity to conceal the Australians’ presence from the Japanese when reporting the story while the war was still on. For 17 years after Kennedy’s rescue, Lt Wincote from New Zealand was the man of the moment. He came to life in the New Yorker in a long account written by John Hershey in 1944.
“Kennedy came through town the other day and told me the story of his survival in the South Pacific,” Hershey wrote. He also spoke to three other survivors who “filled in the gaps” in the story.
He told the story of how, on August 7, the “natives” hid Kennedy in their dugout and, with Japanese planes buzzing overhead, paddled him to meet the fictitious Lt Wincote.
“At last they reached a censored place,” Hershey wrote (later identified as Gomu Island).
“Lieutenant Wincote came to the water’s edge and said formally, “How do you do. Leftenant Wincote. Come up to my tent and have a cup of tea.”
Late that night, writes Hershey, “after several radio conversations between Wincote’s outfit and the PT base”, Kennedy was paddled out to an arranged rendezvous in Blackett Strait with a PT boat which took him to Olasana Island to rescue the remaining crew and deliver them back to their base at Rendova on the morning of August 8. Kennedy was later awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and the Purple Heart, for his actions in the Solomons. Ross was also awarded the Purple Heart.
Wincote’s true identity was obscured during the war to prevent the Japanese from learning about the secret coast watchers. Evans’ identity wasn’t revealed until January 1961 when he gave an interview to a men’s adventure magazine. Later that year he was invited to reunite with President Kennedy in Washington. Quite why Evans, who died in 1989, kept his identity secret for all those years is a mystery. Kennedy said at the time that he couldn’t read the signature on the note.
Despite the 1961 admission that Evans was the man who invited Kennedy to his tent for a cup of tea, the mythical New Zealand lieutenant refused to die. Wincote is mentioned in a weighty 2003 biography, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, written by Bancroft Prize-winning historian Robert Dallek, a history professor at Boston University. Dallek spent five years researching Kennedy’s life and yet Evans is not mentioned in the book.
Kennedy never saw his rescuers again but in 1961, after his inauguration, Gasa wrote to the new president with the help of a New Zealander who, this time, did exist. Gasa’s letter was translated by an Auckland Methodist minister, the Reverend E. C. Leadley, who handwrote the message on notepaper from a Methodist Church in Dominion Rd.
In it, Gasa wrote of his “joy” that Kennedy was now president, and signed the letter, “I am your friend, Biuku Gasa.”
President Kennedy replied, saying he was delighted to know Gasa was prospering thousands of miles from Washington, praising the Solomon Islander and others involved in the rescue “who so valorously effected our rescue during war time”.
“You will always have a special place in my mind and my heart.”
Both Gasa and Kumana, who died in 2005 and 2014 respectively, were invited to the White House but history has it that the two men weren’t “allowed” to go because of their poor English. However, another Solomon Islander who helped rescue the crew, Benjamin Kevu, did make it to the White House in 1962.
But Kennedy’s family never forgot those involved in saving the lives of Jack Kennedy. Kennedy’s daughter Caroline met Gasa’s daughter and Kumana’s son in Honiara last year when she was there in her role as the US Ambassador in Australia, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the battle of Guadalcanal. She presented them each with a replica of the coconut.
Evans did make it to the White House in May 1961 after President Kennedy learned the coast watcher’s true identity. Wincote did not get an invitation.
Kasolo or Plum Pudding island, where Kennedy and his men first swam to, is now known locally as Kennedy Island and has become a tourist attraction. As for the coconut, it was eventually reunited with Kennedy, who had it coated in resin and kept it on his desk in the Oval Office. It is now on display at the John F. Kennedy Library at the Boston Museum, as is Gasa’s letter to the president, Reverend Leadley’s translation, and President Kennedy’s reply.
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