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JFK'S PT 109 CREW

JFK PT Float

To Orwell Today,

Jackie Jura:

Saw your name on the website about memories of JFK and the PT 109. Do you know where I can find a list of the crew members of Kennedy's PT 109?

Thanks,
Stormy Knight

Greetings Stormy,

Below are the names of the men in JFK's (Lt. Kennedy's) PT 109 crew (in the order of their photos above). The names in bold are those who were on board the night it sank:

Harold Marney (died)
Andrew Jackson Kirksey (died)
George "Barney" Ross (joined crew last minute)
Leonard J. Thom
William Johnston
Raymond Starkey
Patrick McMahon
*Leon Drawdy
*Maurice Kowal
*Edmund Drewitch
Edgar Mauer
Gerald Zinser
John E. Maguire
Charles "Bucky" Harris
Raymond Albert (no photo)

The photos are scanned from the book "PT 109: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN WORLD WAR 11" by Robert Donovan:

PT Book Cover

It was published in 1961 and was the book upon which the movie "PT 109" was based. President Kennedy wrote its author (a journalist and Washington, DC reporter) a letter of appreciation telling him that he had read it "with great interest and find it to be a highly accurate account of the events of the war."

All the best,
Jackie Jura

PS - *Three of the men named above - Drewitch, Kowal and Drawdy - were no longer PT-109 crew members in August 1943, and therefore not on board when it was hit. They had been injured in a Jap air attack on PT-109 in Blackett Strait near Gizo earlier in July. They had been replaced by Starkey, Zinser, Marney, Albert and - at the very last minute, Ross - a friend of JFK from Princeton whose PT-boat had been recently sunk and asked to come along.


JFK PT-109 WHO'S WHO

JFK TO NAVAL CADETS

JFK SAVED THE MARINES

JFK'S PT-59 CREW

PT-109 HIT BY TSUNAMI

PPS - Articles so far (new ones added above): JFK'S BOAT & COCONUT and JFK PT 109 MOVIE and JFK SWAM TO NARU NOT NAURU and JFK'S LETTER TO SOLOMONS and THE STORY OF PT-109 and JFK NEPHEW THANKS NATIVES and SEARCHING FOR JFK'S...BOAT and JFK'S BROTHER FLEW DRONE

PPS - There are more stories to be told about some of JFK's other missions in the Solomons - as I learned in the "PT 109" book mentioned above - including how the ship he was on en route to the Solomons was bombed by the Japanese, and the destroyer protecting them was sunk. One day soon (I hope) I'll write them up and share them with "Orwell Today" readers.

PPPS - Below is the news (3 1/2 years ago) of the death of one of JFK's crew:

JFK was his dad's friend and comrade in arms.Tallahassee News, Nov 21, 2003
John E. "Mac" Maguire Sr. was JFK's radioman aboard PT-109, the torpedo boat the late president skippered when it was sunk by a Japanese destroyer in August 1943. Forty years since Kennedy's assassination, the Camelot legend survives...The older Maguire stayed in touch with his former commanding officer after they were rescued from the Pacific atoll they'd swum to, with Kennedy, holding a tether in his teeth, towing a severely wounded shipmate on his back...After the war, Maguire Sr. worked on Kennedy's congressional campaigns, and later in his campaign for the presidency..."When I was in the sixth grade we had a show-and-tell," Jack Maguire recalls. "The assignment had to have something to do with somebody famous. I brought in an autographed copy of 'Profiles in Courage.'" At that point, Kennedy was a senator, and Maguire remembers telling his classmates that his father told him, "Someday he'll be president." When that came to pass, Maguire Sr., a New York native who'd moved to Jacksonville, became the U.S. marshal for what became the Middle District of Florida, thanks to JFK's influence. It was a job he would hold until Richard Nixon became president almost nine years later. Maguire Jr. says his father never had a bad word to say about his friend and former skipper. Among Jack Maguire's mementoes is a taped PBS interview of his father that was conducted years after Kennedy's death but never aired. The older Maguire says in the interview that he often visited JFK in the White House when he was in Washington on official business. In a newspaper story published 29 years ago, Maguire Sr. told his interviewer, "He was my commanding officer, my president and my friend. I'll never forget him."

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

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