Lieutenant (j.g.) John D. “Buck” Bulkeley ignored Japanese signal challenges and probing machine gun fire as he idled his battle-worn, 77-foot PT boat through the blackened waters off Port Binanga on the Philippine island of Luzon. It was shortly after midnight on 19 January 1942. The day before, Army observers on Bataan reported “three transports and two war vessels effecting a landing at Binanga Bay [in Subic Bay on the Japanese-held northwest coast of Bataan] and shelling the coast in the vicinity of Bagac [behind the hard-pressed American lines].”1 Bulkeley was there to investigate and, if possible, put a stop to the harassing fire.
The pugnacious, irrepressible young lieutenant had two boats, PT-31 and PT-34. After PT-31 failed to rendezvous, he crept in alone, firing two torpedoes at what was eventually believed to be a 5,000-ton Japanese transport carrying 5.5-inch guns. One of the torpedoes made a hot run in its tube and failed to clear, but he saw the other explode about a minute after being fired. As he fled at top speed, Bulkeley also observed a fire and two large flashes in the direction of the port, a seemingly sure indication his lethal “fish” had found its mark.2
The Binanga Bay attack, though doing little to postpone an inglorious U.S. defeat in the Philippines, was a seminal moment in the wartime history of the U.S. PT boat. For openers, it marked the first time since the Civil War that a small torpedo boat of the U.S. Navy had gone into action against an enemy vessel. More immediately, the raid demonstrated how difficult it was—and would continue to be—for PT crewmen, attacking at night from a low, pitching deck, to authenticate their handiwork. Was the transport sunk? No one seems to know for sure. Though the Army later reported that its observers on nearby Mariveles Mountain had seen the unidentified transport sink, postwar research of Japanese records fails to confirm this.3
The attack had a more significant impact: It got the attention of the national wartime media. This should be expected; the event certainly was newsworthy.4 Of greater importance is that the PT’s stealthy, derring-do performance at Binanga Bay—and in subsequent operations—captured not only the media’s attention but their imagination. For the rest of the war journalists and admen alike saw the spunky little PT as a dashing, mysterious surface warrior that not only made news but did so in a very compelling way. Did the media, in their zeal to report and otherwise promote the PT boat’s dramatic wartime exploits, do justice to the PT’s legacy as a small combatant?
Without a doubt, the U.S. media always expected a lot from the U.S. Navy’s one and only motor torpedo boat (MTB, the PT boat’s designation), in terms of its ability both to face down enemies abroad and to drive up circulation back home. Even during the boats’ developmental years immediately before World War II they made good copy. Though the PT was experimental—mainly viewed as a harbor defense craft—the press on the Eastern seaboard still managed to hype its potential value, largely because of celebrated sinkings by European MTBs in the Great War. Yet journalists also found homegrown parallels, lauding the small, stealthy PT as heir to the heroic tradition of American torpedo-boat pioneers like William Cushing of Civil War spar-torpedo boat fame. In all, the media regarded the PT as a welcome addition to Uncle Sam’s national defense effort in the looming war.5
When that war arrived with a vengeance in December 1941, the press dynamic governing the coverage of the U.S. war machine changed dramatically. From the beginning, the American public maintained an insatiable appetite for war news. The national media, driven by the triple motives of profit, the desire to inform, and a sacred duty to keep the public’s morale from flagging even when tidings were bad, were eager to satisfy that hunger. The majority of stories published tended to be overoptimistic, showing American servicemen and women, and the weapons produced by U.S. industry, in the most efficacious, war-winning light possible.6 As a result, the armed forces were subjected to a goodly amount of sensationalistic media coverage. After Binanga Bay, the media found the tiny, fleet-footed PT not only susceptible to this wartime hype, but downright predisposed to it.
Twin elements explain the PT’s propensity to hype: risk and reward. Without risk there are no heroics. PTs were small, unarmored, and defensively equipped initially with little more than light infantry weapons. A well-placed bomb or shell could, in a single hellish instant, reduce the boat to matchwood. The PT boat’s potential for bringing a daring commander great reward also contributed to its desirability as a media star. Because of their small size in relation to the torpedoes they carried, PT boats and other MTBs packed more lethal punch pound for pound than any other warship afloat during World War II. They attacked warships and merchant vessels far larger and more heavily armed than themselves, and often sank them, lending a Hollywoodish air to everything they did.
The Hype Heats Up
Soon after news of Binanga Bay, PT hype began to rear its many-faceted head. On 1 February 1942 the Sunday Star in Washington, D.C., assured its readers:
Hardly had the first bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor when whole swarms of [PTs] . . . were speeding out from ports on both our coasts . . . every single man [on board] . . . praying for a crack at the enemy.7
Nevermind that there were only 29 PT boats in the entire U.S. Navy at the beginning of the war, mostly guarding bases overseas. Naturally, the Navy was not about to advertise this fact, so if the public—or the enemy—wished to believe both coasts of the continental United States were awash in mosquito boats out to sting the enemy, so be it.
The Navy’s desire to keep the enemy “in the dark on every aspect of operations that might be helpful to them” also gave the media wide latitude to play up the boat’s technical capabilities far beyond those they actually possessed.8 Though the PT’s top speed was around 40 knots (about 46 land miles an hour), it made more dramatic copy—and helped better confuse and demoralize the enemy—to grossly inflate that figure. It was not uncommon to read that PTs “literally hop from wave to wave at speeds up to 70 miles an hour.” Some articles even boasted speed figures as high as 84 land miles an hour, or 73 knots.9
The media played up the PT’s combat potential as well. According to one article, PT boats possessed not only the “speed of an express train” but “the wallop of Superman.” This coverage had some common themes. They were “the deadliest thing afloat,” “. . . equal in variety of armament to most destroyers, yet cost only a tenth as much to build and require[d] one- twentieth the crew.”10
The unrealistic comparisons to destroyers dovetailed with the sensationalistic portrayal of PTs as lethal to virtually everything they came up against—ships, submarines, and aircraft alike. In truth they virtually were useless against all but surfaced submarines, their efforts against planes were purely defensive (and often desperate), and they were too small to accompany the blue-water fleet cross-ocean in any type of escort capacity. As far as some journalists were concerned, however, the PT could do just about anything except win the war single-handedly.11
The media’s efforts to hype the PT’s value as a small combatant reached a climax in early 1943 when they reported that PT boats were engaged fully in the desperate naval battle for Guadalcanal. The chief fault of the media’s wartime coverage lay not with reporters at the front, but with the headline writers back home. For instance, a (Washington D.C.) Times-Herald report on 25 January 1943 boasted: “PT Boats Bag 250,000 Tons of Ships [off Guadalcanal].” The basis for this headline was a Navy report indicating that from October 1942, when PT boats were first introduced into the Solomons, to the end of December 1942, PTs “sank or damaged ... a battleship, two cruisers, and 13 destroyers. . . .” Not even in the fine print did the article question the accuracy of the tonnage figures used, or the number of ships actually “bagged.”
As might be expected, the reality behind PT operations at Guadalcanal was far more complicated than portrayed. The “hits” reported by many sincere PT skippers in these confused nighttime melees, primarily with Japanese destroyers, often were enemy gun flashes or the result of defective Mk 8 torpedoes exploding in the wakes of enemy ships. For all the torpedoes fired (111), postwar records confirm that only three actually hit, sinking one submarine and one destroyer.12 The damage may have been more extensive, and the press can be forgiven much beacuse of fog-of-war uncertainties. Still, even if the ships the PTs supposedly hit had been hit, and truly sunk or damaged, the tonnage would have totaled closer to 75,000—less than a third of that claimed.
This tonnage disparity was completely lost on at least one wartime advertiser. During the conflict companies often sought to keep their trade name or product in front of the public by associating it with heroic front-line images—no matter how tenuous the link. An August 1943 ad for “Canned Florida Grapefruit Juice” showed a rampaging PT and asked consumers to think of “those mighty midgets strewing a quarter-million tons of precious Jap shipping along the ocean’s floor. Just tiny plywood rascals . . . but not too small to carry supplies of ‘VICTORY VITAMIN C!’” boats were the subject of many such frontline association ads, a common staple of the World War II years.13
By the end of the war, that much-touted 250,000-ton figure magically had doubled. A recap article in the Chicago Tribune on 9 September 1945 reported that “All told, the mighty little PTs destroyed more than 1,000 enemy vessels totaling some 500,000 tons.” The article did point out that the “exact toll is unknown because most operations were at night and . . . the crews had to ‘hit and run’ to survive.” Still, the piece failed to take into account that those same conditions might seriously threaten the base assumption, namely that the tonnage actually had been “sent to the bottom,” as opposed to just being damaged or possibly damaged.14
Other errors consist of largely unchallenged assumptions. A persistent one is the designation “PT” itself. Prewar and wartime reporters understood the term to mean “patrol torpedo,” a reasonable assumption, but wrong. “PT” designates a “motor torpedo boat” in the U.S. Navy’s nomenclature system.1S Still, given the wild assortment of colorful names wartime journalists also gave the boats, such as “mighty midgets,” “sea mosquitoes,” “little thunder boats”—or even “PT” itself as “Plenty Tough”—one can forgive their failure to observe this nicety of official Navy parlance.
Another fallacy is the assumption that Douglas MacArthur originated the PT concept when he called for MTB-type craft for the nascent Philippines Navy in 1935. Actually, budget constraints forced the two MTB programs to develop along mutually exclusive lines. PT boats were an invention of the U.S. Navy’s bureau system, in response to prewar European MTB developments.16
Homing in on the Truth
Given the wartime hype and the persistence of these reported “facts,” it is fair to ask whether the media’s overall portrayal of the PT did justice to its actual combat record. If we look beyond the hyperbolic headlines and dramatic imagery, the answer is yes. After comparing press reports to official documentation, and taking into consideration fog-of-war uncertainties, deadlines, and the obvious wartime need for military secrecy, it is evident the wartime media did a pretty good job portraying the PT boat as it was.
A best-selling book called They Were Expendable (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), written by U.S. war correspondent W. L. White, set the high reporting standard right off. The book, based entirely on interviews with Bulkeley and three of his officers, overdramatized MTB Squadron Three’s role in the futile defense of the Philippines and MacArthur’s forced flight. Yet it also was an unsparing testament to the desperate, real-life conditions Bulkeley’s PTs faced in the early weeks of the war. So compelling was They Were Expendable that the government’s Council on Books in Wartime selected it as an “Imperative” book—one so crucial to the war effort that the council deemed it should be promoted to the utmost.17 In 1978, Robert B. Kelly, one of the four PT officers White interviewed, called the book “accurate.” A vivid book by Hugh B. Cave, Long Were the Nights (Washington, D.C.: Zenger Publishing Co., Inc., 1943), similarly held true to the salty, terrifying nature of the PT’s nocturnal forays against Japanese warships off Guadalcanal.18
These and other books written by war correspondents tended to be more sensible and sober than typical radio and newspaper accounts of the fighting. Still, there were many front-line reporters—Ernie Pyle being the most famous example—dedicated to accurately portraying the genuine wartime exertions and sacrifices of their fellow citizen soldiers. Judging from the “great write ups” often given PT exploits in newspapers and magazines (the entire November 1943 issue of Yachting is a laudable example), PT boats and their hard-fighting crews enjoyed a lot more factual coverage of their gritty day-to-day activities than they did hype.19
The twin elements of risk and reward made PTs a genuinely compelling media subject in addition to making them hypeable. This is why, if one sifts out the more tabloidish efforts of stateside writers and editors, the wartime media got it largely right in their PT reporting: Why embellish when everything the PT did—from rescuing General Douglas MacArthur from the beseiged island of Corregidor in March 1942 to battling formidable Axis ships and barges around the globe—was so genuinely heroic and fascinating?
The wartime media, despite their natural propensity to hype the efforts of Uncle Sam’s fighting arsenal, generally captured the essence of the PT boat’s wartime operations, both in their on-the-scene reporting and their observations of the PT’s changing tactical roles. The media were, however, handicapped in their ability to judge ultimately the PT’s effectiveness as a small combatant. One big reason was the media’s standard wartime practice of using tonnage sunk as a gauge of a war vessel’s effectiveness. This worked for the submarine, but not for the PT. In reality, the PT’s value was not dictated by the amount of tonnage sunk but by the type of tonnage sunk—mainly the nocturnal, coast- hugging Japanese barge traffic only they were equipped to tackle effectively.
Another big reason was the media’s failure to note that, for mostly technical and logistical reasons, the PT actually was unsuccessful as a torpedo boat, the role it so glorified in the first two years of the war.20 This conclusion, though, had to await postwar damage assessments; the press had no way of knowing that the action reports submitted by honest PT skippers claiming hits would generally prove to be overoptimistic. These handicaps, however, should not detract from the view that, when it came to reporting the PT’s war, journalists also did a commendable job.
1. Entry for 18 January 1942, Sixteenth Naval District War Diary, 8 December 1941 to 19 February 1942, Motor Torpedo Boat Materials, Box 20, Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C.
2. Lieutenant Bulkeley report of attack on enemy vessels in Port Binanga, 19 January 1942, to Commandant, Sixteenth Naval District, dated 20 January 1942, Sixteenth Naval District War Diary. Though Bulkeley escaped, he later learned that PT-31 had grounded due to engine trouble and had to be burned to prevent capture. Most of the crew returned safely through enemy lines.
3. PT Claims, No. 1 (of 5), Motor Torpedo Boat Materials, Box 13, Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C.
4. “Torpedo Boat Gets Jap Ship; Cruiser Sunk,” New York Mirror, 20 January 1942, p. 1.
5. Frank D. Morris, “Skeeter Fleet,” Colliers, 22 March 1941, pp. 16, 55-56.
6. Richard R. Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On?: The American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: Paperback Library Edition, 1971), pp. 330-70.
7. ”The Navy’s Mighty Midgets,” (Washington, D.C.) Sunday Star, 1 February 1942, This Week Magazine.
8. Julius Augustus Furer, Administration of the Navy Department in World War II (Washington D.C.: Naval History Division, Government Printing Office, 1962), P. 77.
9. "The Navy’s Mighty Midgets,” Sunday Star. For an example of the 84-mph figure used in relation to PT boat speeds, see photo caption for “Jap Ship Felt Deadly Sting of Mosquito Like This,” New York Mirror, 20 January 1942, p. 1.
10. For some of the more tabloidish examples of PT hype, see “Here’s How a PT Boat Sinks a Ship,” unidentified magazine article from June 1943; see also Walter McCallum, “Saga of the Navy’s PT Boats,” unidentified magazine article from 1943; and Robert Parrish, “Lightning on Water,” unidentified magazine article from 1942. Wartime Media Collection, PT Boats, Inc., Memphis. PT Boats, Inc., a nationwide nonprofit PT veterans organization, maintains an extensive collection of documents related to wartime media coverage of PT operations. Many of the “clippings” contained in this archive were submitted by PT veterans with an interest in preserving PT history. Unfortunately, in many cases they did not document specific sources and dates. PT Boats, Inc. can be reached at 901-755-8440; fax 901-751-0522; email: [email protected].
11. To be fair, civilian newspeople left it to John Bulkeley himself to make that extravagant claim. Two months after Binanga Bay, Bulkeley’s PTs again made national headlines when they rescued Philippines war hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur from the besieged island of Corregidor. Later on, Bulkeley went around the country on a recruitment drive for the PT service. He reportedly was a magnificent orator, at one point getting 1,024 young ensigns to volunteer for 50 PT officer vacancies. During his speeches, he promised that “500 PT boats could give the United States mastery over all the Pacific, and that a sufficient force could stop any kind of land invasion.” See Nigel Hamilton, JFK, Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, Inc., 1992), pp. 500-03; and Capt. Robert J. Bulkley, Jr., At Close Quarters: PT Boats in the United States Navy (Washington D.C.: Naval History Division, Government Printing Office, 1962), pp. 16-18. See also Curtis L. Nelson, Hunters in the Shallows: A History of the PT Boat (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1998), pp. 136-49, for details on the famous PT leg of MacArthur’s escape from Corregidor to Australia in March 1942.
12. Bulkley, At Close Quarters, pp. 97-105.
13. Lingeman, Don't You Know There’s a War On? pp. 356-62. The full-page ad for “Canned Florida Grapefruit Juice” appeared in the August 1943 issue of Better Homes & Gardens.
14. Laurence Burd, “Hard Hitting PT Boats Play a Big Role in Victory,” (Chicago) Sunday Tribune, 9 September 1945, part 1, p. 10.
15. Misuses and creative variations of the term “PT” abound in wartime media stories. For more recent examples, see Dick Keresey, PT-105 (Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 1996), p. 48; see also Capt. Richards T. Miller, USN, “Sup Ships Annapolis,” Naval History, May/June 1999, pp. 51-55. Capt. Miller defines “PT” as “torpedo patrol” boats, still another variation on the misuse of this naval term. According to the Naval Vessel Register, PT boats are considered as follows: Type: Patrol Vessel; Class: Motor Torpedo Boat; Symbol: PT. “PT” is therefore a letter designator like “BB” for battleship and “CV” for aircraft carrier; the letters do not necessarily correspond to the first letters of the words describing the vessel class. “Patrol torpedo” is a popular, not official, designation.
16. Evidence the wartime media viewed MacArthur as the originator of the PT can be found in Burd, “Hard Hitting PT Boats Play a Big Role in Victory,” (Chicago) Sunday Tribune. See Keresey, PT-105, p. 49, for evidence this view persists. See Nelson, Hunters in the Shallows, pp. 72-81, for a discussion of MacArthur’s mostly illusory role in the genesis of the American PT boat; chapters 4 and 5 describe the Navy’s prewar efforts to design and build the PT.
17. W. L. White, They Were Expendable (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942). See also Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? p. 339.
18. Shelley Rolfe, “As Played by John Wayne,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 September 1978. John Wayne played Robert Kelly’s equivalent in the 1945 John Ford movie They Were Expendable, loosely based on White’s book. See Hugh B. Cave, Long Were the Nights: The Saga of a PT Boat Squadron in World War II (Washington D.C.: Zenger Publishing Co., Inc., 1943).
19. Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? pp. 338, 367-70. Cover title “PT’s In Action,” Yachting, November 1943. See also Lt. Cdr. Edgar D. Hoagland, USNR (Ret.), “PT Boats Raid Bongao Island,” Naval History, May/June 1999, pp. 42-45.
20. Nelson, Hunters in the Shallows, pp. 203-07.