Obituaries : John Bulkeley; Highly Decorated Admiral

Retired Navy Vice Adm. John Bulkeley, one of the most highly decorated combat veterans of World War II and commander of the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo, Cuba, during a tense period in the 1960s, is dead at the age of 84.

He died Saturday at his home in Silver Spring, Md., near Washington.

Bulkeley gained fame as a PT boat commander early in World War II after commanding the boat that rescued Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur from Corregidor in 1942.

On Aug. 4 of that year, in recognition of his feat in the Philippines, President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally awarded Bulkeley the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor.

The award citation credited him with “remarkable achievement in damaging or destroying a notable number of Japanese planes, surface combatant and merchant ships, and in dispersing landing parties and land-based enemy forces during four months and eight days without benefit of repairs, overhauls or maintenance facilities for his squadron.”

MacArthur personally referred to Bulkeley as “that bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes.” A torpedo boat technician said of Bulkeley: “He’s either a man without a nerve in his body or he’s crazy, or a combination of both.”

Bulkeley was portrayed by Robert Montgomery in the slightly fictionalized 1945 film of his exploits, “They Were Expendable.”

The direction finders that were crucial to Bulkeley’s torpedo boats were based on equipment used by Los Angeles engineers to find utility pipes under city pavement and later refined by a Palo Alto scientist.

Later in the war, Bulkeley commanded groups of PT boats and minesweepers that cleared the way for the D-Day amphibious invasion in Normandy and he went on to command a destroyer credited with sinking two German ships.

Among the young officers under his command was John F. Kennedy, who also gained fame as a PT boat commander.

After he became president, Kennedy appointed Bulkeley as commanding officer at Guantanamo in 1961--a time when Cuban leader Fidel Castro was trying to get the United States to abandon the base by, among other things, building machine gun nests outside the U.S. base and shutting off its fresh water supply.

Bulkeley told reporters that the machine gun emplacements were useless and referred to them as “Cuban landscaping.” And when Castro offered to turn the water back on for an hour a day, the admiral told him not to bother; he had already made other arrangements.