Beyond the Call: Medal of Honor Stories

The sea is black and crowded with threat. A handful of wooden patrol torpedo boats slide across the water off the coast of Bataan, their engines straining, their wakes glowing faintly with phosphorescence. Above them, Japanese aircraft own the sky. Around them, enemy ships control the sea. At the head of this little formation stands a thirty-year-old lieutenant named John Duncan Bulkeley, wrapped in a pea coat against the spray, watching the dark horizon and knowing that the fate of generals, and of thousands of men ashore, now depends on plywood, gasoline, and nerve.

Before we continue, I want to mention the Medal of Honor book series that accompanies this work. These books tell the stories of America’s Medal of Honor recipients in a serious, readable, and historically grounded format, with each volume focused on a specific campaign, battle, or part of the war. They are available in color paperback, Kindle ebook, and matching audiobook editions. You can find them at Military Author dot me.

Welcome to Beyond the Call: Medal of Honor Stories, from Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine and Trackpads dot com. Today we follow John D. Bulkeley from a New Jersey farm, to the gunboats of the Asiatic Fleet, and into the desperate fight for the Philippines, where his tiny squadron of patrol torpedo boats became the last offensive surface force the United States Navy had in those waters.

John Bulkeley did not grow up around big ships or naval bases. He was a farm boy from Mansfield Township, New Jersey, where chores came before school and the day’s work rarely ended with the sunset. That early life built habits he would carry forever: getting up when things were hard, improvising when tools were scarce, and trusting sweat more than talk. After high school in Hackettstown, he earned an appointment to the United States Naval Academy and graduated in the early nineteen thirties, part of a class that would see the Navy transformed from interwar austerity to global war. His first tours looked like any other young officer’s: time in destroyers, time learning the craft of engineering and seamanship, time standing the long watches that make up a junior officer’s life.

Then the Navy sent him to Asia. Bulkeley reported to the Asiatic Fleet, the small American naval force based in China and the Philippines. He served aboard the old gunboat Sacramento and other ships that patrolled rivers and coasts in a region already sliding toward war. In those years he saw Japanese expansion at close range: warships in Chinese waters, bombers overhead, and finally the attack on the American river gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River. Those experiences stripped away any illusions about Japanese intentions and showed him how brutal modern war in Asia could be. At the same time, he became fascinated by a new kind of naval weapon: the small, fast patrol torpedo boat, built of wood, armed with torpedoes and light guns, meant to dart in, strike, and vanish into darkness.

Many senior officers dismissed the patrol torpedo boat concept as a sideshow. The boats were small and fragile, their gasoline engines were temperamental, and early torpedoes could be unreliable. Bulkeley saw something else. In narrow seas and coastal waters, a handful of fast craft might threaten convoys and landings in ways big ships could not. When the Navy began forming its first squadrons of these boats, he volunteered, trained, and pushed for command. On the eve of war with Japan, he got his wish: Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, a small unit of six seventy-seven foot boats, based in the Philippines, with Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley in charge.

The context could not have been worse. When Japan struck Pearl Harbor in December nineteen forty-one, it also attacked airfields and bases in the Philippines. American aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The main naval base at Cavite went up in flames. The Asiatic Fleet, outgunned and outnumbered, began to pull back or go down fighting. In weeks, the United States went from a forward-deployed peacetime force to a battered remnant clinging to the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor. In that wreckage, Bulkeley’s six plywood boats suddenly became the only fast surface force still available to strike the enemy at close quarters.

From the first days of the war, Bulkeley and his crews were in constant motion. At night they went out in ones and twos, hunting Japanese landing craft and supply ships. They would run in at high speed, launch their torpedoes at silhouettes on the horizon, then twist away as enemy searchlights and guns swept the water. By day, when enemy aircraft prowled the skies, the boats hid in coves or hugged the shore under camouflage. They also took on tasks never written into their manuals. They ferried ammunition and medicine to cut-off units on Bataan. They evacuated wounded and key personnel from beaches under fire. They carried messages when radio silence or broken equipment made other means too risky.

Conditions were miserable. When Cavite was destroyed, the squadron lost its main repair base and much of its support. Engines that should have been carefully overhauled after short bursts of combat use were instead run hard for months, held together by cannibalized parts and ingenuity. Fuel was precious. Food was short. The crews fought heat, disease, and exhaustion alongside the enemy. Yet night after night, the plywood hulls of Squadron Three sliced through black water, because there was simply no one else left to do the job.

As the siege of Bataan tightened, then shifted to Corregidor, the importance of those tiny craft grew. On maps in faraway headquarters, the war in the Pacific was beginning to spread to Midway, to the Coral Sea, and to Guadalcanal. On the ground and in the water around Manila Bay, the war was a grinding, local catastrophe. Artillery pounded American and Filipino positions. Malnutrition and disease hollowed out units. There was little hope of relief. In that setting, the continuing presence of the patrol torpedo boats became a symbol as much as a tactical asset. Wherever rumour said that a convoy had taken a torpedo hit in the night, or that a cut-off group of soldiers had been brought off by boat, people talked about Bulkeley’s squadron.

In early nineteen forty-two, a new and dangerous mission landed on his chart table. The United States government had decided that General Douglas MacArthur, his family, and key members of his staff had to be withdrawn from the Philippines so that he could direct further operations from Australia. Submarines were considered for the evacuation, but there was a real fear that a single torpedo or depth charge might doom the entire party. The job instead went to Bulkeley and his patrol torpedo boats. They would have to slip into Corregidor, take on the general and his entourage, then run hundreds of miles through enemy-controlled waters to reach the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines.

It was an enormous ask for a force that had already been bled white by months of combat. Engines were tired. Hulls were worn. Crews had been living on the edge of exhaustion. Fuel and spare parts had to be staged along the route wherever they could be hidden. Any mechanical breakdown on the open sea could leave a boat dead in the water within easy reach of enemy search planes and patrol craft. Bulkeley accepted the mission without flinching. For him, this was what the boats were for: to go where larger ships could not, and to do what larger ships dared not risk.

The evacuation run unfolded over several nights. The boats shoved off from Corregidor in darkness, overladen with passengers and supplies. They hugged coastlines where possible, then sprinted across open stretches at maximum speed when the risk of detection seemed lower. Spray lashed the decks. Rain and darkness made navigation a constant challenge. Men squinted at dim shorelines and the pale glow of phosphorescence, trying to pick out reefs before they tore open the thin wooden hulls. Japanese ships and aircraft were never far away. Yet somehow, through a combination of skill, luck, and the sheer stubbornness of their crews, the patrol torpedo boats got the general and his party to Mindanao, from where they could continue the journey toward Australia by air.

For the soldiers still holding out on Bataan and Corregidor, news of that escape brought mixed emotions. Some felt abandoned, knowing that they would not be leaving with him. Others took it as a sign that the fight would continue elsewhere, and that their sacrifice would not be the end of the story. For Bulkeley and his men, there was no time to dwell on it. Once the MacArthur mission was complete, they went back to the same grim cycle of patrols, supply runs, and evacuations until the last defenses in the Philippines collapsed.

The official Medal of Honor that Bulkeley later received covered his actions from the surprise attack in December through the final days in April. It spoke of repeated engagements against enemy ships and aircraft, of damaging or sinking hostile vessels, of supporting doomed land defenses, and of completing his missions without the support and maintenance normally considered essential. Behind those formal words lay months of nights where a wooden boat rushed at high speed toward the muzzle flashes of enemy guns, and days when half-broken engines were coaxed back into life with scrap metal and hope. The medal recognized not just a single act of bravery, but a sustained campaign of courage and improvisation by a commander who refused to quit.

When Bulkeley left the Philippines at last, his war was far from over. He would go on to serve in other theaters, bringing the same aggressive instincts to cold northern waters. In the English Channel, he commanded a mix of American and British patrol craft and destroyers that hunted German convoys and torpedo boats along the occupied French coast. The setting was different. The seas were rougher, the nights colder, and the enemy warships flew different flags. The patterns were familiar. Close in fast under cover of darkness, hit hard at close quarters, and never let the enemy’s larger guns or heavier armor dictate your will to fight.

In one well-known action off the French coast, his forces tangled with a German convoy near the island of Le Verdon. His flagship destroyer closed with a larger enemy vessel as smaller craft probed at the flanks of the formation. Gunfire stitched the water. The battle was fought at short range in the dark, where quick decisions and steady nerves mattered more than elegant plans. Once again, Bulkeley showed that he was most at home where the margin for error was thin and decisive action mattered most. The decorations he collected in European waters did not change the man. They simply extended the story that had begun around Bataan.

After the guns fell silent in nineteen forty-five, Bulkeley stayed in uniform. He commanded ships. He served in staff positions. Eventually he took on a role that might sound dry to outsiders but carried immense weight: president of the Board of Inspection and Survey. That board is responsible for examining Navy ships and systems to determine whether they are truly ready for war. In that job, Bulkeley was known for being blunt and uncompromising. If a system failed, he said so. If a ship was not fit for combat, he did not hesitate to send it back for further work. For him, this was not bureaucratic nitpicking. It was a moral obligation to future crews who might someday stand where he had stood, relying on their equipment to bring them home.

The phrase often tied to him, “You engage, you fight, you win,” captured his view of what the Navy owed its sailors. The point was not just bravery in the moment of contact. It was preparation beforehand: ships maintained honestly, training grounded in reality, officers and crews who knew that their gear had been tested by someone who had seen combat and refused to cut corners. Bulkeley’s Medal of Honor drew attention to his leadership in the Philippines. His long postwar career quietly helped shape the standard of readiness for generations who followed.

John D. Bulkeley retired as a vice admiral in nineteen eighty-eight and died in nineteen ninety-six. Today he rests at Arlington National Cemetery. His story can be summarized in a line or two on a headstone: farm boy, patrol torpedo boat skipper, Medal of Honor recipient, admiral. Yet the real power of his story lies in the pattern that runs through it. Given small means, he found ways to hit above his weight. Given responsibility for others, he took risks with his own life while working to protect theirs. Given authority in peacetime, he used it to demand honesty about whether ships and systems would truly stand up under fire.

For students of military history, Bulkeley’s patrol torpedo boats in the Philippines show how a handful of small craft can complicate a stronger enemy’s plans, buy time, and keep hope alive even as a campaign collapses. For today’s sailors, soldiers, airmen, and marines, his later work on inspections offers an example of quiet courage: the courage to say that something is not ready, even when it is inconvenient to admit it. And for all of us who look back on the Medal of Honor, his life reminds us that the decoration often represents not a single flash of heroism, but months and years of hard choices taken in the dark, when outcomes are uncertain and the easiest path is to quit.

This has been Beyond the Call, from Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine and Trackpads dot com, telling the story of Vice Admiral John D. Bulkeley and the patrol torpedo boats that fought a losing battle with winning hearts in the waters off Bataan and beyond. Join us again as we explore more moments when ordinary Americans faced impossible odds, and chose to keep going.