In the pitch-black waters of Blackett Strait, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri sliced through the motor torpedo boat PT-109, killing two crewmen instantly. Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, despite a severe back injury, towed a badly burned sailor by a life-jacket strap clenched in his teeth for hours, swimming to a nearby island where the crew survived six days before rescue.
Kennedy had been patrolling the strait with a small flotilla of PT boats hunting Japanese supply convoys when the Amagiri emerged from the darkness at speed, giving the crew only seconds to react. The collision sheared the wooden torpedo boat in half and ignited a wall of flame across the water, though the fuel tanks had mostly emptied, sparing the crew from a worse inferno.
Kennedy, a Harvard graduate from a wealthy Massachusetts family, gathered his surviving eleven crewmen and swam them more than three miles to Plum Pudding Island, towing machinist Patrick McMahon, whose burns were severe, using a strap from McMahon's life jacket clenched between his teeth the entire way.
Local Solomon Islander scouts, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, discovered the stranded Americans and helped carry a message carved into a coconut shell to the nearest Allied base: coordinates and the word 'HELP.' That coconut shell later sat on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. The ordeal, and Kennedy's chronic back pain from the injury, became central to his political mythology and 1960 presidential campaign.