The wreckage of the 109 was discovered in July, 2002, by Robert Ballard. It remains on the bottom of the Pacific.

Bob’s sister Midge spent time working in Washington as secretary for NH Senator Norris Cotton. She ended up delivering something to Senator John Kennedy’s office. They must have talked about Ensign Wight and reading the comics Midge had sent to the Pacific. They hit it off and began seeing each other. However, as Bob put it, “I think he had other girlfriends, too.”  Midge found this out the hard way when his engagement to Jackie was announced to her surprise. She fled to NH to visit Bob and as Nancy said, “she was not a happy camper.”

In New Hampshire, Bob went to work at Booth Fisheries as a manager, and started a really great family, one that I am very proud to be a part of. Kennedy may have gone on to be president, but then again, Wight never lost his ship.

I have always been and continue to be fascinated by my grandfather’s stories of the PT Boats. I made models of them as a kid. My first paper in school was about PT Boats. I continue, as do many children and grandchildren of PT veterans on the internet, to research and write about this story. Not just because I thought the boats were cool, though I did and still do. But particularly because it brought me closer to my grandfather. I will always remember him sitting at the table reading the paper with his pipe. Like his son and his grandson, he wasn’t always the easiest person to reach. But in this story of stories we always had common ground. He took me to the unveiling of a new Navy frigate once and we got a special guided tour of the highly advanced ship. I was ecstatic. He took my cousin Ryan and I to the PT Boat museum in Fall River, and I remember it fondly. And he always had another story for me, and it always became more interesting the more I learned.

Beyond that, as a grandfather, I can only say he was perfect. I did not want in that regard. He was there with a few words of support when my father died and those few words were exactly what I needed. He taught me to drive a stick shift by sitting next to me in his truck and letting me figure it out. It almost killed us both but it got the job done. He showed me the basics of sailing, along with my dad, and let me skipper his motorboat as a kid.

Patrol Torpedo Boat 108 at sea. I have long been meaning to write a dramatic piece about my grandfather’s interaction with JFK during WWII, but at this point I’m still gathering research. The following is drawn from comments I wrote for his memorial service in 2005. Robert Wight (aka “Bob”) was Captain of P.T. 108 and Kennedy was famously Captain of P.T. 109. For more detail on P.T. 108 click here.

Robert Wight (far right), with the crew of P.T. 611 at shakedown in Florida. They were spared a trip to the front with the Japanese surrender.

Earl also recounts a less deadly incident on the 108 in the summer of ’44:

“Hello. Mr. Wight was my skipper on the 108 boat. He was a very good one too. He took good care of his men. We had many a patrol together… as to my injury, we went out on patrol in very stormy weather. I was topside and went below to get a shirt from my locker, as the air was cold and the spray stung the body a lot. When I went to put my arm in the sleeve the boat hit a very large wave. it threw me up into the air between the bunks there was a wooden section separating them. When I was slammed down my face hit this section, splitting my right cheek wide open about two inches and very deep. It knocked me out and there was blood all over. One of the crew came looking for me and called Mr. Wight…when he saw how badly my face was gashed open, Mr. Wight took me into the day room where we decided it was too rough to sew up and therefore applied an x shaped tape to hold it closed till we got back to base. I still have a scar under my right eye from this. “

In yet another friendly fire incident, the 108’s gunner almost killed his friend from Boston, Dee Minich, who’d been on the rolling cocktail party with him, as Bob recounts in a letter to him:

“One day we were anchored in the Lagoon at Emirau. My gunners mate was working on one of our twin 50 cal. machine guns when he accidentally fired off a burst just as you were coming up onto your deck. You ducked and screamed as the bullets went over your head. It took you quite a while to get over that experience. You didn’t talk to me for quite a spell.”

With grandaughter Jennifer and great-grandaughter Sabrina in August 2003. He was suffering from Alzheimer’s but was able to add more detail to the story.

Bob and Nancy (front) on the town in NYC. Says my grandmother, Nancy: “I am so glad that you had a chance to talk with Dee Minich.  He was one of Grandpa's favorite friends -- same age -- P.T. boats. etc. He and Grandpa tossed a coin to see who would have the next date with me!! Grandpa won! This was in New York -- pretty exciting all the way around!” They had both met her on an earlier double date.

With Dee Minich, after a “rolling cocktail party” on the voyage out to the Pacific front. Now they tackled the Officer’s Club and it’s “endless supply of beer.”

With Dee Minich,  pilfering a plane for spare parts for their boats.

I can only imagine how my grandfather must have felt when, a few weeks before Christmas in his senior year at Dartmouth, 1942, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

He graduated Dartmouth after leading them to a national sailing championship. As an Ivy Leaguer with a knack for sailing, it is perhaps not surprising that he followed in the footsteps of John Kennedy - another Ivy Leaguer with a knack for sailing - and headed to the PT Boat Training Center in Melville, R..I.

He told me he chose PT’s because it was a good program to keep out of the worst of the fighting. I think perhaps he didn’t have quite the proper information on that. In fact, JFK got into PT’s precisely because he wanted to see combat. I suspect for both of them there was a deeper issue: it was the only way a 22-year-old kid could be put in charge of his very own, fully staffed, armed to the teeth, 10,000 horsepower Naval speedboat. Faced with the same decision, forced by duty to go in harm’s way, I too would have been looking for a fast ship. And to be captain of a boat - any boat - is to have some say in your own destiny.

The training he received was hurried and incomplete. It’s likely he never fired a torpedo in practice before heading to the Pacific.

Which he did in the Fall of 1943. First to Boston, then to Chicago. He called the train ride from Chicago to San Francisco a “rolling cocktail party.”  I can think of no better time to have a party than while heading off to war halfway around the Earth.

In San Francisco he boarded an aircraft carrier bound for Micronesia in the South Pacific. Specifically, the Solomon Islands. General MacArthur saw the Solomons - which lie just off the coast of New Guinea, northeast of Australia - as a kind of ladder leading him back to the recover the Phillipines. The first battle of the Solomon campaign was Guadalcanal. If you’ve seen the movie The Thin Red Line, you have some idea of what was going on there. By the time Bob arrived in late ’43, Allied forces had moved halfway up the ladder.

The staging area at that point was Noumea, New Caledonia. Bob reconnected with a friend who had been with him on the rolling cocktail party but had crossed on a different ship. They enjoyed the officer’s club on the beach there - Bob described it as having an “endless supply of beer,” which he and his friend Dee were happy to try to put a dent in. After a whole day of drinking, Bob was so toasted he jumped off a truck before it had stopped moving and planted himself in a ditch. Minich had to drag him to his bunk.

Bob recalled meeting Jack Kennedy at Calvertville in Tulagi. Jack was a seasoned veteran at this point. In July he had lost PT 109 and helped effect their rescue. Bob may have heard about this in the papers but it was well before the Life magazine cover story glorifying the incident would make JFK a war hero.

He walked up to Bob and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. Let me buy you a drink.” They walked up the hill to the officer’s club, a small hut built around a tree. There may have been raisin jack or brandy available, but for $35 a quart, the drink of choice was “torpedo juice,” a concoction distilled in a freezer from the fuel used to power torpedoes.

Being Ivy Leaguers from Boston, and sailors to boot, Jack and Bob hit it off. At this point Jack weighed less than 120 lbs and his back hurt so bad he could barely walk. He had a new boat - PT 59, stripped of torpedoes and stacked with guns, now called ‘Gunboat 1’ - and had just been promoted to full lieutenant. He offered Ensign Wight and his buddy Ensign Minich a ride on the gunboat up to Squadron 5 at Rendova.

Kennedy drove him past the rows of PT boats docked at the base and asked him, “which one do you want?” I never found out if Kennedy told him why the 108 was available. It had just been repaired after a disastrous mission in August. The Navy had decided to use the 108 in a daring daylight raid, something unheard of for PT’s up till that point. The 108 was to take a small Marine demolitions crew to Japanese-held Kolombungara Island and drop them off to make way for an assault.

But as they approached a supposedly deserted part of the island, snipers and fortified machine guns unloaded on them. The wooden boat - filled with fuel, munitions, and now demolitions - was shot through 268 times, and a Marine, the ship’s cook, and the captain - Sidney Hix - were killed nearly instantly. A demolitions fuse was shot and nearly blew up the boat, but was kicked into the water just before exploding. Many others were injured and the 108 had to be towed by the 107 back to base.

There were no more daylight raids.

They had plugged the 268 holes in the 108 by the time Wight picked her as his command. He and his crew spent some time adding weapons. He salvaged a 60mm mortar launcher from the Army and tried to mount it on the bow. He forgot to account for the recoil (he had failed physics at Dartmouth), and nearly blew a hole in the deck. Feeling resourceful, he salvaged springs from the landing gear of a plane to protect against the recoil…but he forgot to account for the counter-recoil and the mortar launcher bounced over the bow and into the bay, where it had to be fished out. Eventually he got it to work, though he said it was never very accurate.

Occasionally Kennedy would stop by. Bob’s sister Midge would send the comics from the Boston Herald and JFK and RAW would read them on the fantail of the 108. Just before Christmas, JFK left for home.

The average PT Boat captain saw 80-90 armed engagements during his stint. Bob had arrived just in time for the last big push in the Solomons, and he soon took part in the invasion of Treasury Island in October and the invasion of Green Island in November.

Then it was on to Green Island in February ’44 and Emirau Island in March, where he would stay for the rest of his stint.

Bob told his young sister Ann that Jack Kennedy - who was well-connected, being the son of the Ambassador to England - might have an idea of when Bob might be coming home. So Ann staked him out at one of JFK’s first public appearances in the US, at a Lincoln’s birthday war bond rally at Jordan Marsh in Boston. JFK was treated like a movie star at the event, so it’s not surprising Ann was unable to ask him her question. But the high school sophomore did get invited up on stage by Bobby Kennedy to meet his grandfather, former Mayor Honey Fitzpatrick.

Wight would remain stationed at Emirau Island for the rest of the year.

He saw many different engagements on many different patrols. They worked at night, idling on one of the three engines and trying not to disturb the plankton that made the water glow phosphorescent. They navigated with WW I era maps of dubious accuracy.

They would sneak up behind a transport ship, then pull alongside and open fire, and try to start a fire on the transport with an incendiary grenade. The transport, of course, fired back. They attacked ground forces as well. There were rumors of torpedoes running up on a beach to hit a truck. The 108 conducted a series of patrols where it waited offshore from a bend in a coastal road and destroyed trucks and other equipment night after night by aiming at the headlights. But the 108 tried this once too many times - one night the headlights started firing back. The Japanese had gotten wise and sent a tank around that bend. The 108 tucked tail and fled.

It is easy to forget the horror of the situation. Of having to make moral decisions at 23 that most of us never make our whole lives. Survivors of Japanese shipwrecks often refused to surrender and be rescued. The only recourse was to drop a depth charge in the water and kill them. I’m glad I didn’t face such decisions at 23.

Because the fighting took place at night, it was often difficult to tell who you were up against. At one point young Mr. Wight found himself in a shootout with a destroyer, a very bad place for a PT Boat captain to be. Destroyers could go almost as fast as PT’s, and had really big guns. But, “we had big guns too.” What saved the 108’s hull on that night, though, was the fact that PT Boats had a much tighter turn radius and could run circles around destroyers.

…I’m not sure when it became clear that the PT Boat and the destroyer were both US Navy ships, but Bob later met the Gunner’s Mate who was shooting at them that night. There were no hard feelings and our family rented their cottage on Lake Caspian in Vermont for several summers.

Friendly fire could happen during the day as well.

He told me a vivid story of being attacked by a US plane on his way back to port at Emirau. Caught off-guard, he had to dive into the .50 caliber gun turret as the plane strafed the boat. Recently, on the internet I met and became friends with Earl Richmond, the cook on the 108 under Bob’s command. He remembered that incident very well - in fact he had gotten hold of the report my grandfather had submitted in the investigation of the incident. He sent me a copy.

Finally, on Christmas Eve 1944, Bob and Dee got their orders home. Bob would become captain of PT 611 in New York, a brand new boat armed with rockets as powerful as a destroyer’s guns. The boats of Squadron 41 never saw action, as the war ended while they were in shakedown at Miami. Which is just as well, because Bob had fallen in love with one Nancy Knox Cooper, a debutante from Pittsburgh working in the new television industry in New York City. Her father was an MIT graduate who’d piloted a submarine chaser. Bob let her take the helm of the 611 on a short run from the Navy Yard.

The 108 was grounded on a reef by Bob’s successor, requiring major repairs in early 1945. She went on to the Phillipines, survived the war, and eventually the Navy burned her at Samar.

I also wanted to share the thoughtful words of Earl Richmond, the 108’s cook, upon hearing of what PT Boaters call the Last Patrol:

“I am very sorry to hear that Mr. Wight (my former skipper) passed away. Especially from Alzheimer’s. My wife also has it and is going into another stage of it. Please accept my condolences. Mr. Wight was a fine skipper and treated his crew very well. Your grandfather was a great skipper and a fine man. It makes me feel good knowing he remembered me. Thank you. I not only lost a skipper, I lost a good friend. I will always remember your grandad in my prayers.”

He is and will be well-remembered.

He was a perfect grandfather. But it is also important to remember that he was also a national hero, who fought so I wouldn’t have to. He faced danger as a young man, and he lived through many joyous times and difficult times as a father and grandfather and great-grandfather.