Read the book, saw the movie. The story is one of the more fascinating and unusual out of the PTO~WWII. It was night time conditions and very little light, the destroyer was moving rather fast and spotted from a short distance.
Note that JFK was commended for keeping his crew together and exercising effective rescue of them.
EXCERPT:
...
Separation of the 109 from her division
Lieutenant JG Kennedy, official naval photo, 1942
Lieutenant Brantingham on
PT-159, leader of Kennedy's division, and originally stationed near Kennedy, first saw radar blips indicating the southbound destroyers just arriving on the scene, and fired his torpedoes from about 1 mile (1.6 km) away. As he advanced, he did not radio Kennedy's
109 to follow, leaving Kennedy and his crew behind in the darkness. All of Brantingham's torpedoes missed the destroyers, and his torpedo tubes caused a small fire, requiring Lieutenant Liebenow's PT, also in Kennedy's division, to swing in front of Brantingham's PT to block the light emitting from his burning torpedo tubes as they could have given away their location to the destroyers. Liebenow's
157 fired two more torpedoes that failed to hit their target as well, then both boats laid smoke from their smoke generator and zigzagged away to avoid detection. No signal of the destroyer's presence was ever radioed or received by Kennedy's
109, or the other boat in the division, and skippers Brantingham and Liebenow headed blindly west to Gizo Island and away from the destroyers and Kennedy's
109.
[25]
Many of the torpedoes that were fired exploded prematurely or ran at the wrong depth. The odds that a Mark 8 torpedo that made it to a destroyer would explode was less than 50%, due to faulty calibration of the detonators, a problem that was not known nor corrected by the Navy until later in the war. A few other PTs, including the leader of Division A to the south of Kennedy, intercepted the destroyers on their southbound route close to Kolombangara, but were unable to hit any with torpedoes. The boats were radioed by Warfield to return when their torpedoes were expended, but the four boats with radar fired their torpedoes first and were ordered to return to base. Commander Warfield's concept of sending orders to the PTs in darkness by radio from 40 miles (64 km) away and without a view of the battle, was inefficient at best. The radar sets the four boats carried were relatively primitive, and sometimes malfunctioned. When the four boats with radar left the scene of the battle, the remaining boats, including
PT-109, were deprived of the ability to determine the location or approach of the oncoming destroyers, and were not notified that other boats had already engaged the enemy.
Late in the night, Kennedy's
109 and two accompanying PTs became the last to sight the Japanese destroyers returning on their northern route to
Rabaul,
New Britain,
New Guinea, after they had completed dropping their supplies and troops at 1:45 a.m. on the southern tip of Kolombangara.
[26] The official Navy account of the incident listed radio communications as good, but PT commanders were also told to maintain radio silence until informed of enemy sightings, causing many commanders to turn off their radios or not closely monitor their radio traffic, including Kennedy.
[27][28][29]
Collision with the Amagiri, 2 August
Destroyer
Amagiri in 1930
By 2 a.m. on 2 August 1943, as the battle neared its end,
PT-109,
PT-162, and
PT-169 were ordered to continue patrolling the area on orders previously radioed from Commander Warfield.
[30] The night was cloudy and moonless, and fog had set amidst the remaining PTs. Kennedy's boat was idling on one engine to avoid the detection of her phosphorescent wake by Japanese aircraft when the crew realized they were in the path of the Japanese destroyer
Amagiri, which was heading north to Rabaul from Vila Plantation,
Kolombangara, after offloading supplies and 902 soldiers.
[31]
Contemporary accounts of the incident, particularly the work of Mark Doyle, do not often find Kennedy at fault for the collision. The lack of speed and maneuverability caused by the idling engines of the 109 put the ship at risk from passing destroyers, but Kennedy had not been warned by radio of destroyers in the area. Kennedy believed the firing he had heard was from shore batteries on Kolombangara, not destroyers, and that he could best avoid detection by enemy sea planes by idling his engines and reducing his wake.
[27][32]
Kennedy said he attempted to turn
PT-109 to fire a torpedo and have Ensign George "Barney" Ross fire their newly installed 37 mm anti-tank gun from the bow at the oncoming northbound destroyer
Amagiri. Ross lifted a shell but did not have time to load it into the closed breech of the weapon that Kennedy hoped might deter the oncoming vessel.
[33] Amagiri was traveling at a relatively high speed of between 23 and 40 knots (43 and 74 km/h; 26 and 46 mph) in order to reach harbor by dawn, when Allied air patrols were likely to appear.
[34][35]
Kennedy and his crew had less than ten seconds to get the engines up to speed and evade the oncoming destroyer, which was advancing without running lights, but the PT boat was run down and severed between Kolombangara and
Ghizo Island, near
8°3′S 156°56′E.
[36] The
109 was struck on her starboard side at a 20-degree angle, shearing off a piece of the boat.
[37] Conflicting statements have been made as to whether the destroyer captain had spotted and steered towards the
109 with the intention of ramming her, or tried to avoid her at the last minute. Most contemporary authors write that
Amagiri's captain intentionally steered to collide with the
109.
Amagiri's captain, Lieutenant Commander Kohei Hanami, later admitted it himself and also stated that the
109 was traveling at a steady pace in their direction.
[38]
...
en.wikipedia.org
He is secound from the left back row.
