VADM, U.S. Navy — World War II
John Duncan Bulkeley was born on August 19, 1911, in New York City, grew up on a farm in Mansfield Township, New Jersey, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1933. By 1941 he was a lieutenant commanding Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three in the Philippines — six small wooden PT boats facing the overwhelming weight of the Japanese invasion.
Bulkeley received the Medal of Honor for his squadron’s operations in Philippine waters from December 7, 1941, to April 10, 1942, when his boats — operating for over four months without benefit of repairs, overhaul, or maintenance facilities — damaged or destroyed Japanese aircraft, warships, and merchant vessels and broke up enemy landing parties. His most famous mission came on the night of March 11, 1942, when his PT boats carried General Douglas MacArthur, MacArthur’s family, and his staff out of besieged Corregidor and through more than 600 miles of enemy-controlled seas to Mindanao. “You have taken me out of the jaws of death,” MacArthur told him. “I shall never forget it.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented Bulkeley the Medal of Honor at the White House on August 4, 1942.
Bulkeley later helped recruit a young lieutenant named John F. Kennedy into the PT boat service, led the torpedo boats and minesweepers that cleared the way to Utah Beach on D-Day, and earned the Navy Cross at the Battle of La Ciotat in August 1944, where he charged two German warships with only one gun working and sank both, then rescued sailors from both sides from the water.
His Navy career stretched an extraordinary 55 years. He commanded the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base during the Cuban water crisis of the 1960s, retired in 1975, and then was recalled to active duty to run the Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey, finally retiring as a vice admiral in 1988 as one of the most decorated officers in Navy history. He died on April 6, 1996, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The destroyer USS Bulkeley (DDG-84) bears his name, and his Philippine exploits inspired the book and film They Were Expendable.
Sources: Wikipedia · Congressional Medal of Honor Society