Vet who helped rescue Kennedy

[Kyt]

Local vet helped rescue Kennedy in Pacific during WWII

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Like many World War II veterans, W.F. “Bud” Liebenow of Mount Airy has plenty of stories about his experiences in the Navy, including fighting the Japanese in the Pacific and carrying out clandestine missions along the French coast before D-Day.

Oh yeah, and there was this one time when he led the rescue of some guy from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy and the PT boat crew he commanded had been stranded on an island in the South Pacific after a Japanese destroyer rammed into and sliced their vessel in two while it was patrolling during a dark moonless night. Liebenow, a fellow PT boat skipper and tent-mate of Kennedy's, feared his friend had been killed during the mission.

Then two islanders in a dugout canoe showed up with some coconut shells that had the message “11 safe” carved in them. It was Kennedy's way of telling his fellow sailors that most of his crew had miraculously survived and were ready to rejoin their outfit.

It would be Lt. Commander Bud Liebenow and his PT 157 crew who would negotiate the dangerous reefs leading to the small island and rescue Kennedy, allowing him to continue a remarkable voyage through history that led all the way to the White House.

Liebenow, meanwhile, would remain close to his war buddy after the hostilities ended, exchanging family visits over the years and attending JFK's inauguration as the nation's 35th president in 1961. Their long association would end with the assassination of Kennedy 44 years ago this month in Dallas.

However, similar to many of those being honored on Veterans Day, the memories of a turbulent time and the special people he served with - including a fellow with a funny Boston accent - remain vivid for Liebenow, now 87.

“We went to PT school together,” said Liebenow, a Fredericksburg, Va., native who has lived in Mount Airy since April 2006 along with his wife, Lucy.

“At that time, we didn't know he was going to be president. So he was just like the rest of us,” added the Navy veteran, who moved to Ridgecrest Retirement & Assisted Living Community from Edenton after the couple lost a home there to Hurricane Isabel in 2003.

While many of his personal mementos were lost in the hurricane as well, Liebenow still has a scrapbook filled with pictures and documents from the World War II era, along with photographs of him and Kennedy. A framed black-and-white photo of the two hangs on the Liebenows' bedroom wall, showing the familiar face of JFK as he stands beside his old friend. It was taken in Grand Rapids, Mich., around 1959, about the time Kennedy was mounting his presidential bid.

“We were living in Michigan at the time,” Liebenow recalled, “and Jack came up to see us.”

Another picture shows Liebenow in a group with Admiral “Bull” Halsey, who was visiting Liebenow's barracks.

Though it was a naval incident that created a military heritage for Kennedy as well as Liebenow, another naval incident had propelled Liebenow into the service in the first place.

It was December 1941, and the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing outrage to every corner of America.

“Everybody - every young guy - wanted to get out there and kill Japs,” Liebenow said. “You couldn't get to the recruiting station.” The Virginia native attempted to enlist right after the Dec. 7 attack, but the lines were so long he couldn't get accepted until Dec. 21.

And it wasn't hard for him to choose which branch of service to enter, either. “I was going with Lucy, and she was a Navy brat,” Liebenow recalled with a twinkle in his eye. Bud and Lucy, whose father was a Navy man who served in both world wars, celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary last month.

“A Pretty Fast Boat”

But while Liebenow's choice of the Navy seemed well-informed, his involvement with PT boats resulted from sheer ignorance while still in midshipman school, he readily admits.

“A lot of us hadn't learned yet that you don't volunteer for anything, so we volunteered,” the local veteran said with a chuckle. “PT boats was a volunteer service.”

After all, PT, or “Patrol Torpedo” boats were small (80-foot) wooden vessels which usually carried a crew of only 10 crewmen and two officers. With much of the U.S. naval fleet having been destroyed in the Pearl Harbor attack, PT boats were employed to harass the Japanese fleet then holding sway in the Pacific. Along with trying to disrupt supply lines, another goal of the small boats was to sink larger Japanese ships such as destroyers with torpedoes, usually against long odds.

“You depended on speed and deception,” said the former PT boat skipper, who mentioned that the vessels were powered with three 12-cylinder engines. Even loaded with four torpedoes, they could travel 60 mph. “At that time, it was a pretty fast boat.”

“PT boats could be built on an assembly line basis,” Liebenow added.

Despite each PT boat being equipped with four torpedoes, a downside was that they were World War I-style torpedoes. “Sometimes they went off and sometimes they didn't,” Liebenow said. For example, historical accounts say that 60 torpedoes were fired against the Japanese during the mission in which Kennedy became stranded - without a single hit being scored.

Yet the story of the small boats achieving huge successes despite their limitations is credited with boosting U.S. morale in the difficult days after Pearl Harbor's bombing.

Liebenow had arrived in the South Pacific about nine months ahead of Kennedy. “He could have been a boat instructor in New England, but he wanted to come out and see action,” the local man recalled. The PT boat service tended to attract many people with the same background as Kennedy: wealthy, privileged - and experienced.

“The reason they gravitated to PTs was because they were familiar with small boats,” Liebenow explained. Kennedy effectively traded a sailboat on Cape Cod for a PT boat in the Pacific Ocean.

Historic Mission

John Kennedy had only been at his post in the Pacific a short time before his PT 109 and three other boats, including the one led by Liebenow, were sent out on a mission to intercept Japanese convoys in August 1943. “The four of us were patrolling together,” the veteran recalled. The radar of the time was still being perfected, so navigation was an issue during that dark night in the Blackett Strait.

Upon spotting four Japanese destroyers, which the Americans fired upon, Kennedy's boat became separated from Liebenow's group while patrolling afterward. “I just think he got lost, frankly,” the Mount Airy man said.

Liebenow's boat spent a couple of hours going back and forth in the darkness, and at one point the crew saw a flash on the horizon. “So we headed over that way,” he said. But they could see no sign of the others, and eventually headed back to their station.

It was not until the next morning when Liebenow learned that PT 109 had been cut in two after being run down by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri, which was returning from its supply mission. The Japanese crew, however, never even noticed the smaller boat. Its engine half immediately sank, leaving Kennedy and the others clinging to the remaining half of the wooden boat as it floated in the darkness.

“We thought they were all killed,” Liebenow said.

But the PT 109 crew, minus two men who died, were saved with the assistance of the two Solomon Islanders, who brought them food. An Australian coastwatcher also played a key role in the effort that would lead to Kennedy's rescue by Liebenow's crew.

And Bud Liebenow's PT boat exploits didn't end there. He later would find himself serving in the English Channel in the months before the D-Day invasion of June 1944. “We took three PT boats,” Liebenow said. The mission there, which began in January of that year, was to pick up downed pilots from the French underground, carry in agents and sometimes deliver messages as part of preparations for the invasion that would lead to Germany's defeat.

Another of the vintage photos in Liebenow's collection shows the USS Corry as it was beginning to sink during the Allied invasion itself. The destroyer, which led the Normandy assault, had hit a mine, then came under fire from German batteries along the coast. Liebenow remembers that the rescue efforts produced 65 survivors.

“Even in June, that English Channel is cold.”

War Aftermath

Liebenow would survive the war and decided to leave the Navy in 1947. He could have stayed in that branch of service, but figured that the peacetime Navy was not for him. “It was too much formality, and we had no formality on these (PT) boats,” he explained. Indeed, his pictures of the sailors mostly show them in T-shirts and other casual clothing, and sometimes with no shirts at all, rather than stuffy uniforms.

An environmental engineer by trade, Liebenow would work for several years in a testing laboratory before joining the CSX railroad. He was employed by that company for 30 years before retiring to Edenton in 1981.

In addition to maintaining his friendship with John F. Kennedy, Liebenow met most everyone else in the Kennedy family over the years and attended a 50th-anniversary commemoration of PT 109's sinking held in 1993 in Fall River, Mass. He still keeps in touch with Edward and Patrick Kennedy.

However, Liebenow will never forget the dark day in November 1963 when his old friend was gunned down on a Dallas street.

“I was still in Michigan at the time,” he said in recalling the tragic event.

“My boss came over and told me that Jack had been assassinated and, of course, I couldn't believe it - you just couldn't believe it for a long time.”