Includes bibliographical references and index.

Samurai in the mist -- Give me a fast ship -- Summit meeting on Fifth Avenue -- Into the labyrinth -- The front line -- The raid -- The Battle of Blackett Strait -- Lost at sea -- Land of the dead -- The hand of fate -- The rescue -- Life and death at the Warrior River -- The winged chariot -- Mission to Tokyo -- The greatest actor of our time -- The rising sun -- Appendices : A. JFK's lost 1946 narrative of the sinking of PT 109 ; B. 1952 letters between JFK and Kohei Hamami ; C. JFK's 1957 narrative index.

In the early morning darkness of August 2, 1943, during a chaotic nighttime skirmish amid the Solomon Islands, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri barreled through thick fog and struck the U.S. Navy's motor torpedo boat PT 109, splitting the craft nearly in half and killing two American sailors instantly. The sea erupted in flames as the 109's skipper, John F. Kennedy, and the ten surviving crewmen under his command desperately clung to the sinking wreckage; 1,200 feet of ink-black, shark-infested water loomed beneath. 'All hands lost,' came the reports back to the Americans' base: no rescue was coming for the men of PT 109. Their desperate ordeal was just beginning -- so too was one of the most remarkable tales of World War II, one whose astonishing afterlife would culminate two decades later in the White House. Drawing on original interviews with the last living links to the events, previously untapped Japanese wartime archives, and a wealth of archival documents from the Kennedy Library, including a lost first-hand account by JFK himself, William Doyle has crafted a definitive account of the sinking of PT 109 and its shipwrecked crew's heroics. In the story's second act, Doyle explores in new detail how this extraordinary episode shaped Kennedy's character and fate, proving instrumental to achieving his presidential ambitions: 'Without PT 109, there never would have been a President John F. Kennedy,' declared JFK aide David Powers.