John Duncan Bulkeley was born in New York City on 19 August 1911 and grew up on a farm in Mansfield Township, Warren County, New Jersey. He finished Hackettstown High School in 1928 and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1933. In December 1936 he joined the Asiatic Fleet as engineering officer of the gunboat Sacramento in China, where he saw the Japanese take Shantou and Shanghai and witnessed the Panay incident.
When war came to the Philippines in December 1941, Lieutenant Bulkeley commanded Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, six PT boats based in the Philippines. For four months he kept them fighting with no repair yard, and no overhaul. His Medal of Honor citation, covering 7 December 1941 to 10 April 1942, credits the squadron with damaging or destroying a notable number of enemy planes, warships and merchant ships and breaking up landing parties, and calls its record "without precedent in this type of warfare."
His most famous night came in March 1942. General Douglas MacArthur had been ordered to leave Corregidor, and on 11 March Bulkeley took him, his family and his staff aboard PT-41 and the other boats of the squadron. They ran more than 600 nautical miles of open sea to Mindanao. On landing MacArthur told him, "You have taken me out of the jaws of death. I shall never forget it." In the last days of the campaign Bulkeley himself was flown out to Australia in a B-17. The squadron's story became William L. White's 1942 book They Were Expendable and John Ford's 1945 film, in which Robert Montgomery played a lightly fictionalized Bulkeley.
Back home in 1942 he toured for war bonds, met Joseph Kennedy in New York, and helped bring young John F. Kennedy into PT training at Melville, Rhode Island. In 1944 he went to Normandy, leading PT boats and minesweepers that cleared lanes to Utah Beach, held off German E-boats, and picked up survivors from Tide, Rich and Corry. He then got his first big ship, the destroyer Endicott. In August 1944, off La Ciotat in southern France, he charged a German corvette and an armed yacht with only one gun working and sank both, then pulled British and German sailors alike from the water. "What else could I do?" he said later. "You engage, you fight, you win."
After the war he commanded Destroyer Division 132 in Korea in 1952, was chief of staff of Cruiser Division Five, and in the early 1960s commanded Clarksville Base in Tennessee. Promoted to rear admiral by President Kennedy, he took command at Guantanamo Bay and, when Cuba threatened to cut off the base's water, had desalination plants installed to make it self-sufficient. He retired in 1975 but was recalled to head the Board of Inspection and Survey. In 1986 his inspectors found the battleship Iowa deficient and recommended she be taken out of service; three years later a turret explosion killed 47 of her crew. He finally retired as a vice admiral in 1988, after 55 years of service.
Bulkeley died at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland, on 6 April 1996 and is buried at Arlington. The destroyer USS Bulkeley (DDG-84), commissioned in 2001, carries his name.
Sources
Wikipedia, "John D. Bulkeley" (incl. Medal of Honor citation; accessed 2 Nov 2026).
Live Pacific Ships page for this officer (MacArthur evacuation, PT-41).