Biuku Gasa

Patrol area
Solomon Islands

Biuku Gasa (born July 27, 1923 in Madou / Solomon Islands , † November 23, 2005) was a coast guard during World War II . Together with Aaron (Eroni) Kumana he rescued the stranded future US President John F. Kennedy in 1943 .

Gasa attended the Methodist Mission School in Munda ( New Orgies ). After the Japanese occupation of Munda on November 24, 1942, he fled back to Madou to avoid being recruited by the Japanese . He volunteered for the British Armed Forces in Gizo as a scout . Disguised as fishermen, they controlled the movements of the Japanese in the Solomon Islands with their dugout boats. If a Japanese position was discovered, they rowed to an American secret post on the island of Kolombangara . His reports reached Honiara by radio and were used by the American Air Force for immediate attacks on the positions of the Japanese army . Gasa served as a coast guard until the end of the war. After the war he tried to make a living from growing coconut. Only six of his ten children survived poverty.

The then 26-year-old Kennedy was the captain of the US Navy speedboat PT-109 . On August 1, 1943, his boat was rammed and sunk in the west of the Solomon Islands by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri . Two crew members were killed in the attack. During one of their inspection trips, Biuku Gasa and Aaron Kumana discovered the stranded John F. Kennedy, who was alone searching for water, and the remaining ten surviving sailors on a small island off the Vonavona lagoon . This lagoon is now named Kennedy Island after the captain of the ship . Two war correspondents from the New York Times were among those rescued . In the following cover story, however, it was not Kumana, for whom a memorial was later built, and Gasa were celebrated as rescuers, but the Australian coast guard Lieutenant Arthur Evans - he had observed the explosion of the boat and sent Gasa and Kumana to search for survivors as local experts .

Kennedy, who led the survivors through the region on a day-long ordeal, became a war hero and later President of the United States . He invited Gasa and Kumana to his inauguration ceremony - however, they only got as far as the capital of the Solomon Islands , where they were stopped by an official because they did not speak English. In May 2002, Kennedy's nephew Max, the son of Robert F. Kennedy , visited Kumana as part of an expedition aimed at divers to track down the wreck of the Kennedy boat. He promised the two lifeguards “a new house and a new boat”. Kumana died on August 2, 2014 at the age of 93.

Web links

• JFK's Island Rescuers Honored at Emotional Reunion - National Geographic , November 20, 2002

literature

• Rheinisches Journalistinnenbüro / Recherche International eV (Ed.) (2005): “Our victims don't count” . The Third World in World War II. Association A, Berlin / Hamburg ISBN 3-935936-26-5