For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 3
by Leo Grin
“That bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes.”
– General Douglas MacArthur, describing his savior John Bulkeley –
In March 1942, facing imminent capture by the Japanese, America’s commander in the Far East was ordered to slip away to safety in Australia. The Empire of the Sun controlled both air and sea, and only a precious few Allied planes and ships remained in-theater, skulking through the night fog like pirates to avoid capture and running on little more than spit and baling wire. “Overhauling those motors without any replacement parts was a terrible job,” one of the few to escape that nightmare later remembered. “For instance. Any tank-town garage which overhauls a flivver back in the States always replaces the gaskets with new ones. Only we didn’t have any. Or any sealing compound. So those old gaskets had to be carefully removed, handled as gently as though they were precious lace, and laid back in place when the motors were reassembled.”
When MacArthur arrived at the dock with his family and key commanders, he found waiting for him a trio of tiny, dilapidated motor torpedo boats crewed by dirty, emaciated men with long, unkempt beards and wild eyes. Their skipper was a thirty-year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant named John Bulkeley, who for months had held his disintegrating squadron together by scrounging like a rat among the islands for gasoline, torpedoes, and other basic supplies. His boats were little more than plywood matchboxes, but Bulkeley had kept them active long after the rest of America’s Navy and Air Force had been destroyed or driven off. He made sneak assaults against transports, cruisers, destroyers, airplanes, landing parties — anything to frustrate the pace of the overwhelming Japanese invasion. Every time he attacked it was a fearsome David-versus-Goliath mismatch, but Bulkeley had done so time and again, sinking many enemy vessels.
Now he faced his most important task yet: use his last sputtering, wheezing boats to ferret precious human cargo across enemy-infested waters to the southern island of Mindanao, where MacArthur and his contingent could then be safely flown to Melbourne. To do this, he rocketed his boats across hundreds of miles under cover of night, navigating in the impenetrable darkness by instinct alone while deftly avoiding Japanese patrols. It was a spectacular feat of derring-do. As MacArthur told him when he disembarked several days later, waterlogged and exhausted but safe to fight another day: “You have taken me out of the jaws of death. I shall never forget it.”
For all of this, Bulkeley was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and received the Medal of Honor. His citation reads:
For extraordinary heroism, distinguished service, and conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty as commander of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3, in Philippine waters during the period 7 December 1941 to 10 April 1942. The remarkable achievement of LCDR Bulkeley’s command in damaging or destroying a notable number of Japanese enemy planes, surface combatant and merchant ships, and in dispersing landing parties and land-based enemy forces during the 4 months and 8 days of operation without benefit of repairs, overhaul, or maintenance facilities for his squadron, is believed to be without precedent in this type of warfare. His dynamic forcefulness and daring in offensive action, his brilliantly planned and skillfully executed attacks, supplemented by a unique resourcefulness and ingenuity, characterize him as an outstanding leader of men and a gallant and intrepid seaman. These qualities coupled with a complete disregard for his own personal safety reflect great credit upon him and the Naval Service.
These exploits provided the basis for W. L. White’s 1942 bestseller They Were Expendable. It is a story of heroism, but a particularly grim one. Bulkeley remembered later that he “was very bitter about the thing. We went over there with 111 men and only 9 men came back alive. . . the war plan was totally, utterly hopeless. . . But we had to put up a fight.” An Admiral in John Ford’s 1945 film version of the story explains the brutal rationale for allowing so many Americans to be defeated and captured: “Pearl Harbor was a disaster, like the Spanish Armada. Listen, son — you and I are professionals. If the manager says, ‘Sacrifice,’ we lay down a bunt, and let somebody else hit the home runs.”
The book itself is still a fine read, filled with hard-nosed, first-person reportage and telling anecdotes. Some choice quotes:
“They were burying the dead — which consisted of collecting heads and arms and legs and putting them into the nearest bomb crater and shoveling debris over it. The smell was terrible. The Filipino yard workers didn’t have much stomach for the job, but it had to be done and done quick because of disease. To make them work, they filled the Filipinos up with grain alcohol. . . those staggering Filipinos, maybe dragging a trunk toward a crater, pulling it by its one remaining leg, or else maybe rolling a head along like on a putting green. The Japs must have killed at least a thousand. . . .”
“It seemed to be a Jap reconnaissance patrol. . . one group stopped and ate chow on the road bank opposite us; we were scared stiff they would come over and find us. It was hard for the wounded to lie quiet. Our tank driver had a rivet stuck in his throat — every time he took a drink, the water would come leaking out. . . .”
“Here in Newport maybe you wouldn’t think it was much of a party. But it was a swell night, with a big moon hanging over Manila Bay — peaceful — and best of all, all the girls had broken out with their civilian dresses. That doesn’t sound like much, but one look at them after seeing nothing but uniforms for months was like a trip back home. Make-up too — they looked so goddamned nice you could eat them with a spoon. . . .”
“How slow everybody learns in a war. Nobody knows anything about a war until it begins. Just two years before, the Polish air force had been blown to hell on the ground. The French caught it the following spring. In spite of that, the same things happened to our planes at Pearl Harbor. And yet two days later, in spite of all of it, the Japs catch our air corps on Luzon with its pants down. Only that wasn’t the end. Months later, on my way out through Australia, I pass a big American field, and there they are, bombers and fighters parked in orderly rows, wing tip to wing tip. ‘Hell,’ they told me, ‘The Japs are hundreds of miles away.’ Except that’s where they’re always supposed to be when they catch you with your pants down, and I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, won’t these guys ever learn?”
“The whole crowd started pulling money out of their pockets and piling it on the table. They’d had no pay since the start of the war, but since they’d been down here in Mindanao, they’d had shore leave and a chance to play poker with the army. The government could cut the cost of the war by just paying the army and then giving the sailors a chance to play poker with them.”
“But here were all these brave people on Bataan and the Rock, Peggy among them, realizing more clearly every day that they would never get out. Doomed, but bracing themselves to look fate in the face as it drew nearer, knowing that they were expendable like ammunition, and that it was part of the war plan that they should sell themselves as dearly as possible before they were killed or captured by the Japs. . .”
You would think that John Ford would have jumped at the chance to make a movie about Bulkeley, but it took several years of cajoling to get him to agree to direct Expendable. Unlike many, he was actually enjoying the war in a perverse way: globetrotting around the world, feeling the exhilaration of being shot at and having bombs dropped on you, and getting rigorous exercise at fifty years of age. He relished being a part of the armed services he had admired for so long, and heading back home to make a movie would take him away from it all, perhaps forever. It could also be the case that Ford needed time to think about the movie, to dwell on how important it was to get right, and to plan exactly what he wanted to focus on.
Bulkeley had already lived through the harrowing events depicted in Expendable — and been one of the lucky few to escape — when between missions he went to Ford’s Washington DC hotel room to say hello. As Bulkeley later admitted to Ford biographer Joseph McBride, his first encounter with his country’s greatest film director was memorable, to say the least:
I went to see him and he was bare-tail, absolutely naked in that damn bed. He loved to do that for shock effect, he had men in there and he had women in there, hangers-on trying to get a job or something, he had a big plate of food, eating with his fingers like a Roman emperor.
The opening statement [from Ford] was, “See that closet?” “Yup.” “Open it up.” I opened it up and there was a captain’s uniform with four stripes. He said, “You see that? I’m a captain.” I said [sarcastically], “Yes. What are you captain of?” He picked up that big plate of food and threw it at me, and I just ran out the door! He didn’t even bother getting out of bed, he just reared up and whammo!
It was a match made in heaven. They eventually bonded during some shared days aboard ship during the D-Day invasion, and in October 1944, with the war heavily in our favor and civilian life staring him in the face once again, John Ford changed his status to inactive and went to film the movie while his war experiences (and his impressions of Bulkeley) were all still fresh in his mind.
As for Bulkeley himself, he continued serving in the Navy in various capacities for the rest of his life, eventually rising to the rank of Vice Admiral. Among his chestful of awards were the Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, two Distinguished Service Crosses, two Distinguished Service Medals, and two Legion of Merit Awards.
On April 6, 1996, John Duncan Bulkeley died at the age of 84, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington. All told, the “bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes” had served his country faithfully for some fifty-five years. In June of 2000, a new Navy destroyer was christened USS Bulkeley. May that ship bring as much honor to the name Bulkeley as Bulkeley brought to his country.
Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers: a look at They Were Expendable’s luminous cinematography and graceful direction.
Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable“:
FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
An interesting article reprinted from a postwar issue of Mechanix Illustrated, which focuses on how Bulkeley’s beloved PT Boats were made to roar off the assembly line in unprecedented numbers.
A nice piece describing the real-life tale behind the events of They Were Expendable.
Buy the book They Were Expendable at Amazon. Over sixty-five years later, it is still in print and still a valuable, exciting read. Better yet, hunt down an old used copy from the 1940s, where you can see the advertisements for war bonds on the back cover.
Read a little post-Expendable nugget about how Beulah Greenwalt, the real-life nurse brought to fictional life by Donna Reed in the movie, used her noggin and her nerve to protect and preserve the regimental flag of her unit.
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30 Comments
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Big Hollywood, Michael Chavez. Michael Chavez said: For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 3 http://bit.ly/IIqqX [...]
Thanks for the post. I have always liked this movie (and own the DVD), but this part of the war is so tragic it's hard to comprehend the way the government simply was unprepared to defend the Philippines and largely just left those there to do there best to the bitter end. AND they did. Book recommendation: Ship of Ghosts
http://www.amazon.com/Ship-Ghosts-Houston-Legenda...
Really good read about the opening Naval battle(s) for the Philippines and ramifications for those who fought till sunk and dead or captured.
They Were Expendable was one of my first books. Queens Die Proudly was another. I still have both.
Thank you again, Leo. This is a fabulous series.
In this day of unquestioned American Military superiority, it is easy for some to forget that we only arrived at this pinnacle by "standing on the shoulders of giants" like John Bulkely.
It is maintained today by "bold buckaroos" in our armed services who carry on that tradition.
It is a pity that there is no John Ford among the Hollywood castrati to chronticle them.
Great story. Thanks for sharing.
It must be pointed out that although the claims for damage by the PT boats in the Philippines were honestly made, they were incorrect, but not for want of trying. Rear Adm. S. E. Morison's semi-official naval history, Vol. III, "The Rising Sun in the Pacific," p. 201 notes the PTs destroyed three Japanese troop barges on one occasion, but adds: "The PT's did not accomplish much else in this campaign and on every occasion claimed more damage than subsequent investigation substantiates. Of the two cruisers and two large merchant ships that they claimed, none were actually sunk or even damaged." On p. 203 he calls White's account of the evacuation of Douglas MacArthur "overdramatic."
In my mind that's a fair description of "They were Expendable," which, after all, is a wartime movie made for a country still at war. It's up to history to separate fact from fiction.
I flove this series!
He was one tough MF. He and the others like him with the brass to fight are the reason we're free (for the time being anyway, until Nancy, Harry, and the rest of their ilk bankrupt us) today.
They still make 'em like that; trouble is, too many of the precious, coddled metrosexuals in the MSM don't think they're worth the time to report. It might make their main market out in Berkeley cry.
Thanks for posting this story.
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Thanks for this wonderful series of articles. I keep thinking what if it were me in that situation. Would I measure up? I served in the Navy on Fast Attacks but never fired a shot in anger. I was lucky. These guys not only had to fight but they knew there was no way to win, they could only hurt the enemy. Many refused to surrender and disapeared into the jungle and helped with organizing guerilla actions. They were always without support or supplies until way late in the war. It is fitting in these times that we remember who has gone before.
What a great article…Thanks!
Great series, love it. Here´s something that made me think. Ford was around 50 years old, but his powers as a director were still growing. The majority of his masterpieces had yet to be made; "Liberty Valance" was almost 20 years away. Ford never ceased to make Westerns. He didn´t become cynical, pretentious or a mogul.
I cannot imagine any director having that kind of sustained career today, at least I cannot think of any examples.
This is a great series, with every article very well-written and informative. But I have an honest question: When are you going to move on to the next movie? I thought you were planning to do a new movie every week, but instead you're staying on They Were Expendable for at least 4 weeks. I watched the movie and loved it, and I watched The Battle of Midway, too, I'm just curious how the series is going to be structured. Thanks
Hi Stephen,
The idea is for each film to generate any number of posts covering various facets of interest before moving on to the next one. My analysis of THEY WERE EXPENDABLE is set to run in seven parts. Other movies I expect will require only two or three. All depends on how much I have to say, tempered by how much Saturday afternoon mayhem my esteemed editor will tolerate.
If anyone starts getting bored, by all means speak up, and I'll try harder to rein in the wordcount in future installments. But the plan was to always delve much deeper into each film than a single blog post would allow, for conservative cultural reasons that I trust are becoming increasingly apparent with each post.
And if anyone out there is planning on watching EXPENDABLE, you should wait until the last post in the series has run, allowing you to go in fully armed, as it were.
El Gordo,
Yeah, that's a great observation. To my mind, only Hitchcock and Kurosawa managed comparable levels of quality for comparable periods of time. And none of them were handed their long career on a silver platter, they had to fight to stay relevant and in the game every step of the way. Today's directors, making only a single picture every few years, most of them terrible, can't hope to compete.
Liberals typically argue that Ford did indeed become cynical by the time of LIBERTY VALANCE, but as with so much else in their analysis of Ford they are wrong.
Nothing conservative about calling servicemen expendable. Nothing conservative about buying in to the Military Industrial Complex. Smedly Butler said it best – War is a Racket.
I'm sure there are men like Adm Bulkely out there today in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is, they'd be courtmartialed for trying to do today what Bulkely did 60 odd years ago. Our heroes are there – our leadership just wont let them out of the box to kill the enemy and win the war.
They Were Expendable is one of my all time favorite movies because it showed what the American fighting man and woman were capable of when their backs were against the wall.
God bless'em.
Love this series. Johyn Ford movies are my favorites. History my all time favorite subject. Have watched the movie more times than I can remember . Thank you.
Yeager,
Sherman said it even better — "War is Hell." It is by definition a bloody, nasty business with lots of unfairness and undeserving winners and losers on all sides and at all levels. It sucks.
But hey, why stop there? Religion, family, patriotism, love — when placed in the cold, unforgiving light of morally superior academic theory, all of these things can easily be judged suckers' bets designed to separate gullible people from their money and line the coffers of Big Business. You might as well say, "Nothing conservative about wasting money on diamond rings and Valentine's Day candy. Nothing conservative about buying into the Gyno-Industrial complex. Al Bundy said it best — Marriage is a Racket."
Righteous Utopian pacifism sounds wonderful in theory, but it has never proven itself a viable model for existence in the real world. In the Real World, rendering servicemen expendable is often the least-worst option, and it makes their patriotism and sacrifice all the more noble and worth remembering. In the Real World, the Military Industrial Complex is a necessary ingredient of any healthy society, faults and all. And in the Real World, if someone else with a big Military Industrial Complex comes rolling in to kill your men, steal your land, rape your women, enslave your children, and destroy your way of life, you better be armed with far more than Smedley Butler's WAR IS A RACKET.
We need more men like the men of the PT Boat service and less like Murtha and Democrat company.
The modern Democrat party is an ugly America hating shadow of it's former self.
OK, thanks. That's different than I expected, but it also promises to be interesting in a different way as well. I'll adjust my expectations accordingly.
Boy, if you chose 80-90 movies for this, you must be expecting it to last for several years, huh?
Stephen says: "Boy, if you chose 80-90 movies for this, you must be expecting it to last for several years, huh?"
Yeah…sounds crazy, doesn't it? If you start to notice me glazing over several movies per post, you'll know why.
This remark sounds as though it was issued from a broad base of ignorance about historical realities. Refusing to keep our military strong following WWI, and spending huge piles of dough on social engineering programs during the Great Depression (even though they were economically unjustifiable, but were politically popular) were the reasons our military was too weak to hit back immediately, and why these poor guys were left without reinforcements or immediate support.
Geez! That sounds like the scenario that's going to spin out once Cap and Trade, Socialized Medicine, and the rest of Obama's Grim Society sucks up our tax revenue and future borrowing capacity. One of the big targets for budget cuts will be national security. When that happens, we'll be too economically weak to preserve the Republic. I'm beginning to think that is the great strategic goal of the extreme left that has hijacked our elections and now our government. A race to the bottom and lowest common denominator is not/not what will make for a decent life for all Americans in the long run.
Last night, I watched a PBS program on the US Merchant Marine. One survivor of a Japanese torpedoing of his ship described how he and his shipmates that managed to get into lifeboats were taken aboard the Japanese sub, had their hands tied behind their backs, and were made to run a gauntlet of Japanese submariners who clubbed and whipped them before throwing them into the sea, hands still tied. The sub then machine-gunned their lifeboats leaving these young Americans alone in the sea, hands tied behind their backs, to face shark-infested waters. The lucky ones who were not consumed by sharks and managed to stay afloat were picked up after two days by a British ship.
Continued: Stephen Ambrose, in a televised interview with Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller (a fascinating program if you ever get a chance to watch it) noted that the war in the Pacific was murder. The fanaticism of the Japanese in battle and their hideous treatment of prisoners pushed us to the point of taking virtually no prisoners. Ambrose noted, I think, in "Citizen Soldiers," that the US took only a total of about 5,000 Japanese prisoners in the entire war, an astonishingly low number.
Still continued: War against religious fanatics these days, IMHO, seems to bear very close similarities to our war against the Japanese in the Pacific, also religious fanatics fighting for the earlier day equivalent of the "Mahdi," Emperor and Living God, Hirohito. The restraint and professionalism our troops have demonstrated, despite what the MSM would have us believe by hyping stupid fraternity pranks at Abu Grahib, and hooded prisoners at Gitmo as "torture," should be a tangible and very visible demonstration of how a free republic true to its Constitution deals with fanatics. If the rest of the country and world that expects to have a free future doesn't understand this, then we're in for a rotten run for the next couple of centuries.
The interesting thing is that so many peaked relatively late. Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Capra, Zinnemann, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann, William Wyler, to a lesser degree Howard Hawks – they made lots of movies before they made the ones people remember (then again, Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges did not). What kind of career would they have today? Would they become celebrated 30 year old directors? Would they toil in obscurity forever? Or would they go into a different line of business?
Can't disagree with the most decorated Marine in history. However – look at the wars this man was forced to fight. Mostly wars of choice. Peasant wars in banana republics. The fact is, very often he WAS fighting and killing to advance the business-adventurism of US companies – not in defense of his country or for freedom. For him, war really did seem to be a racket. If he had served in or at least lived through WWII, he might have thought differently. If he had seen the beginning of the Cold War, he might have thought differently.
Nothing conservative about calling servicemen expendable. Nothing conservative about buying in to the Military Industrial Complex.
Of course it is conservative to call troops expendable. That's why we have a standing army instead of raising a militia every time we fight a war. They sacrifice so that the populace can be safe. In fact, the most conservative of all government functions is the provision of physical security. The alternative to having defense industries that develop new weapons is to be caught with our pants down, as we were at Pearl Harbor.
I had the pleasure of getting a tour of the USS Bulkeley 6 years ago while to was docked in Philadelphia. It was an impressive ship with a great crew. Nice to see this write-up and get more background on the impressive career of the namesake for the ship.
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