![]() ![]() “My son and I are honored to be able to thank you in person for what your fathers did 80 years ago,” she told them. In a speech on Kennedy Island on Tuesday, the late president’s daughter saluted her father as well as Gasa and Kumana, whose families were in attendance. ![]() Kennedy was later awarded the Navy and Marine Corps medal “for his courage and leadership,” according to the presidential library account. On August 8, 1943, a week after the PT-109 was lost, its surviving crew were safely back in US Navy hands. ![]() The swim between Olasana and Naru, which her father made multiple times, was recreated by Ambassador Kennedy on Wednesday.Įventually, the PT-109 crew would get help from two islanders, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who were scouts for the Allies and put Kennedy in contact with the US Navy. In subsequent days, according to an account from his presidential library, JFK and his crew would swim to nearby islands, including Olasana and Naru, in search of food and rescue. Kennedy gathered his surviving crew – 11 of the 13 aboard PT-109 – and set them out on a 3.5-mile (5.6-kilometer) swim to tiny Plum Pudding Island, which is now named after him. The wooden-hulled small boat was ripped open by the Japanese ship and capsized. JFK’s PT-109 was struck by a Japanese Imperial Navy destroyer in the early morning darkness of August 1, 1943. “I have a lot of appreciation and admiration for what my grandfather did, and the perseverance it must have taken to survive,” Schlossberg said in a Twitter post. Kennedy, 65, made the swim with her son, the late president’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg. “It gave me a renewed appreciation of the heroism of my father and his crew,” the ambassador said in a post on the US Embassy’s account on Twitter, now known as X. Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images ![]() Kennedy and his brother Joseph Kennedy Jr, in 1945. ![]()
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