Saving MacArthur

A photo in the New York Times on June 10, 1942 depicted a young naval officer, John Duncan Bulkeley, and his wife in the back of an open touring car as they were being treated to a New York ticker tape parade. Hundreds of thousands of people were cheering him in a hero’s welcome not seen since Charles Lindbergh returned from his solo flight across the Atlantic. The 30-year-old Bulkeley was just back from the Philippines, where he had pulled off one of the most spectacular rescues in U.S. naval history by taking General Douglas MacArthur out of the besieged islands aboard a PT boat. MacArthur’s escape from the Philippine death trap was front-page news not only in the United States but all over the world. America’s most illustrious soldier had been a hair’s breadth away from being killed or captured by the Japanese. Both MacArthur and Bulkeley were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and commentators nationwide joined in the adulation. But no mention was ever made of the nearly 80 officers and men of Bulkeley’s squadron who were left behind, a tragic sacrifice that no one at the time, or even later, would admit was totally unnecessary. Saving MacArthur is the story of the fateful friendship of two otherwise very different men who shared an unquenchable thirst for fame and a willingness to turn history into myth, a story that is as much about the nature of human beings as it is about a glorious moment in our past. But above all it is the story of the men history has forgotten—the crews of the PT boats whose extraordinary courage gave us that glorious moment, and whose only reward was to be abandoned and left at the mercy of the Japanese—some to face imprisonment and death, others, forgotten by the outside world, to fight a lonely war of their own as they worked to uphold the honor of their country in a land their country had pledged and utterly failed to defend. Saving MacArthur captures their incredible hardships, close escapes and ultimate triumph.