Kelly's Boat example essay topic

The novel They Were Expendable by W.L. White is the story of four MTB officers told in their own voices and from their own experiences, only a short while after the war ended. They were the all that was left of a squadron that sailed for the Philippines. These men were singled out to return to America by General MacArthur because he believed that they had proved their worth in warfare and that they could bring back to America their actual warfare experience, by which trainees could benefit. The four men who tell this story are Lieutenant John Bulkeley, Lieutenant Robert Kelly, Ensigns Anthony Akers, and George E. Cox Jr. The men start their story by explaining that they were, in fact, expendable, just as any piece of equipment used during the war is expendable. They tried to explain by giving a theoretical situation.

"Suppose you " re a sergeant machine-gunner, and your army is retreating and the enemy advancing. The captain takes you to a machine gun covering the road. 'You " re to stay here and cover this position' he tells you. 'For how long?' you ask. 'Never mind,' he tells you, 'just hold it.

' Then you know you " re expendable. In a war, anything can be expendable - money or gasoline or equipment or most usually men" (White 3). They are what is left of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three. The past fall there had been six little boats and about a dozen men to each boat. The boats would go at outrageous speeds, so fast in fact, that the motors had to be changed every few hundred hours. But what happens in a war is that you lost spare parts and some of the boats had to do quadruple their allotted time before the boats were lost.

There wasn't any armor on the boats, they were designed to roar in, start a little action, and then get out. In the late summer they snuck through the Panama Canal one night, and went up Manila Bay in the early fall. They were under the command or Admiral Hart, who was commander in Chief of the Far Eastern Fleet that was based there. On the night of December 8, 1941 while they were asleep in the officer's quarters, Bulkeley's phone rang at about three in the morning and that was when they learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were told by Admiral Rockwell, who was commander at Cavite, to prepare the six boats for war stations. They were going to be sent over to Bataan at the naval base in Mariveles Harbor.

On the first day they arrived, they spent the whole day fully manned, waiting for a bombing attack. The first planes were sighted at noon, but they were only used for a reconnaissance raid to feel the troops out. At about three o' clock orders came from Squadron Commander Bulkeley to send three boats, over to Mariveles on Bataan and report to the submarine tender there for food, water, and torpedoes, and to remain on the ready. They cast off by five. They made it through the rough waters and tied up alongside the sub tender, and then it's skipper told them that he had orders to get under way just before daylight, out to sea, and that he didn't know where they were sending him. So they were stranded there, no base, rations only for ten days, and the problem of how to stay alive and what they would do when the Jap planes and boats came over.

They soon found some answers for these problems. For instance they found an abandoned native village around the coast and moved into it. But for the most part they lived in their boats because they never knew when they would have to haul out into the bay in case of a dive-bomber attack Next, they found that their barges were loaded with gasoline in drums and if they got hit by bombs, they didn't want them burning near the wharves. Each boat held two thousand gallons, and it was a difficult job to pour it through a funnel and dangerous as well.

But unfortunately they did not know that their gas had been sabotaged. Someone had dissolved wax in it which clogged the filters so that sometimes they'd have to stop and clean them out after only an hour's run. Then they started to figure out the food situation. The navy had already realized a food shortage was coming and had cut the men down to two rations a day. The big alarm came on December 10. They pulled out away from the tender, out into open water, and finally saw about twenty-seven to twenty-nine planes.

The Japs passed on out of sight over the mountains and it was then that they began to hear the rumbling of bombs. They knew some place was being devastated but they did not know where. Bulkeley knew though, because he was there, at Cavite. They had pulled their boats out into the bay when the heard the alarm. They saw the planes above them, and they were flying with their fighters on top to protect them from the Americans, but the American fighters never showed. In the end, they only hit a few boats.

After the Japs left, they went into Cavite to see what damage had been done. They had flattened Cavite. There wasn't much to do except start loading the wounded into boats to take them to Cana cao hospital. There was a half an inch of blood on the landing platform at Can cacao and the aprons of the hospital attendants were so blood-splattered that they looked like butchers (White 19). Only a piece of the dock at Cavite was left, and through the flames all you could see was jagged walls. So the men picked up from the gutters and streets a lot of cans of food they knew they needed, stacked them in their boat, and set out.

Kelly admitted that this raid was his first big shock of the war (White 21). It was a shock to him because of the fact that the American air force had never shown up to fight the Japanese air force. The next morning Bulkeley received a call to report to the Admiral in Manilla. Kelly and Bulkeley headed for Manilla and reported to Commander Slocum. When they got there they were told that Slocum was planning a rain off Linga yen.

They told the Commander that they were raring to go, and they then proceeded to load files and records onto the boats because they were going to be moving headquarters. The mission didn't get underway for several days, and while they were waiting, Kelly developed an infection in his arm. He was told to go the hospital. When he arrived at the hospital in Corregidor, he found that it had been abandoned, and the patients had been moved to beds in the tunnel of the Rock which was protected from aircrafts. The thing that impressed Kelly most about the Rock was the army nurses. There were fourteen of them on the Rock.

The one girl that caught Kelly's eye was named Peggy, and the two would come to develop a very close relationship. Around the time of his arrival at the Rock, he began hearing rumors that the entire air force had been knocked out, but Kelly could not believe this. The first influx of patients came from the interisland steamer Corregidor. Bulkeley said that he had his boats out there about a half hour after the ship sunk. The survivors were numerous and they just sailed straight ahead and ended up with sore shoulders from pulling them up the sea ladder until finally they couldn't lift them. Bulkeley's boat managed to save 196 men.

The next time the skipper dropped in to the hospital to see Kelly he said that they only had six P-40's left. Soon it got down to two; they were called the Phantom and the Lone Ranger. Then Kelly asked the skipper how the infantry was holding out. "Not worth a damn", he said (White 39). Not only that, but the Japs were landing tanks. The night Peggy got a few minutes off to come and talk with Kelly.

She said a bunch of tank boys had just been brought in, and she didn't see any harm if he went in and laid down on an empty cot next to them and listened to their stories. Turned out they had walked two hundred kilometers barefoot. Four tank loads of them had been sent in to head off a Jap landing near Batangas. The Japs had waited until they got in good range, and then opened up with an anti-tank gun that knocked the doors off the lead tank, and then, because the road was too narrow for the rest to turn around on, they knocked the treads off all except one. At the end of five minutes, three of the tanks ended up in the rice paddy.

The boys who were in the hospital were lying in the rice paddy in the only tank that hadn't been seriously damaged. They played possum there all day. In the afternoon a Jap officer had looked in on them, but they were all lying still, holding their breath, and the Jap officer said in English "They " re all dead", (White 42). But the boys figured it was a trick so they kept right on playing possum, and about an hour later they came back for another look. But the boys were lying in exactly the same positions. This time the Japs gave a few disgusted grunts and walked off.

Kelly then enquired what had happened to their shoes. One boy replied by telling him that it had been very hot inside of the tank, and they were all hot and sweaty, so they decided to take a bath in the creek across from the rice paddy. But they had to go through mud to get there, so they kept their clothes on until they got to the water hole but they took off their shoes and hid them in the grass. When they got back, they hunted for hours but could not find their shoes. Eventually they gave up, and continued on their journey barefooted.

Meanwhile, when Kelly was in his bunk, he was constantly being pestered by young troops because he was the only naval officer in the hospital. They all wanted to know where the navy was, and why weren't they bringing tanks and planes and more men? They told him that it only took two weeks to get there from Pearl Harbor, but they did not know what had happened at Pearl Harbor. Kelly would tell them that they would be along, any day now, but no one really believed him. In fact, ammunition and provisions were so short at the Rock that it would be a stretch for it to hold out another three months.

The next day while Kelly was on a walk to get some fresh air, the air-raid alarm went off. He looked up and saw nine Jap planes going overhead, and the anti-aircraft opened up, when all of a sudden the whole Rock seemed to jump, and everyone made a dive for the tunnel because they were finally being bombed. A few minutes later the wounded began to come in. All the nurses pitched in and took care of the minor surgery- cleaning wounds, digging for shrapnel, bandaging, etc. There was no time for anesthetics except a small amount of morphine. This was a rough time, but with all the bravery of the nurses and doctors, they managed to get through it.

It was around this time that bad news came up from Manila: the Japs were closing in. Twelve hours before the Japs entered the town Akers was sent into Manila to pick up the remnants. A curious thing happened during those closing hours; nobody had given orders to blow up the oil reserves (White 55). Finally, a little junior grade naval lieutenant noticed it. He had no authority, but he gave orders he had no right to give, and the oil was set ablaze. He got a Navy Cross for doing it (White 55).

Meanwhile Bulkeley was reporting to the Admiral daily and was formulating a plan - which he would talk over with Kelly because he was second in command - about what they would do when they ran out of gas. Their first plan was, when they got down to their minimum, to get out to Australia. The navy patrol bombers had planted caches of gasoline among the islands like steppingstones, and the Admiral gave them their location. But this plan fell threw because the first steppingstone was Singapore, and Singapore fell to the Japanese. Then Bulkeley thought of another plan: when the gas was down to just what they could carry on their decks, they would take their boats to China to continue the war (White 63).

The Japs were at that time closing in on Hong Kong. They would make their dash, shoot a few remaining Jap ships when they were least expecting an attack, and then head north to the region of Swatow. It was said that the Japs held Swatow thinly. So at an agreed time, and at an agreed rendezvous on the coast, Chungking would send a raiding party down to fight its way to the beach and meet them. There they would burn their boats.

Their trucks would take them to the nearest airfield, they would fly to Chungking, and from there an American plane would take them back to the states (White 64). After a few trying battles, the plan for making a run to China still stood, and Bulkeley had even managed to get a hold of some landing gear which would be useful on the Chinese coast if they missed their connections with Chungking and had to fight their way through the Japs. They then began drilling their men in landing force-procedure. The food situation was also getting tough. Breakfast was always hot cakes made without eggs, and the syrup was just sugar and water. They hadn't even seen butter since the war started.

Then for dinner it was always canned salmon and rice (White 92). On Bulkeley's boat they got so tired of salmon that they ate a tomcat (White 93). Kelly's diet, however, was a little better than the others because of Peggy. She was entitles to buy one item per day from the canteen - a package of gum, a candy bar maybe, from the little supply they had left on the Corregidor. Every time he went to see her, she would slip him a pocketful of treats.

This was one of the many reasons that Kelly began to feel guilty about their plan to break-through to China. Here were all these brave people on Bataan and on the Rock, Peggy among them, realizing more and more everyday 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 captured or killed by the Japs. And the more that Kelly like Peggy, the guiltier he felt (White 95). It soon became obvious that if they were going to make their run to China they would have to do it soon; Bataan was on its last legs. There were a lot of men fighting in Bataan but the front-line soldiers consisted, first, of about two thousand Americans, well seasoned and good fighters.

Then, about twelve hundred Filipino Scouts - equally well trained and equally good fighters. Lastly, they had in the fighting line about twenty-seven thousand Filipino trainees (White 100). They couldn't hit anything they shot at; if their guns jammed they didn't know how to fix them; and the Japanese could scare them with firecrackers and sometimes did (White 101). The officers were equally untrained. Tough, experienced American Regular Army privates would be giving orders to Filipino generals. Those two thousand Americans and the twelve hundred Scouts were the only real fighting men on Bataan (White 101).

Then there was the item of equipment; they had no spare parts. They had few tanks left, and these had their treads falling off (White 101). But on Bataan, even when they knew in their hearts it was hopeless, they'd say "Damn it, we " re not backing up - we " re going to hold them here!" (White 102) They kept on fighting even down to the last ditch, when they were so tired they staggered, and when they finally surrendered, it was with their arms in their hands. On March 1, Bulkeley took a boat ride with General Macarthur, he told Bulkeley of a new plan, the China plan was out.

This was because Macarthur had been declared the Commander in Chief for all the Pacific and he wanted Bulkeley to sail with him to his new post. They were going to be leaving Bataan soon. Because of this, they got to work fixing up four old boats that were now making half their original speed. Naturally the crews got curious about these preparations, so they said that maybe, after they had used all their gas on Bataan, they were going to head down to Cebu in the southern islands. They made Cebu seem like a golden spot, but in reality Cebu was a doomed location. Meanwhile Macarthur had told Bulkeley that Bataan would fall shortly, and Corregidor soon after, if it didn't get help from the states immediately.

No help would come. Macarthur was the brains of the organization - the only general that could take the territory back. The whole allied defense depended on getting him to Australia (White 107). Their departure date was set for March 15. On March 10, Bulkeley made one of his usual trips to see Macarthur; this time he brought along all his plans and charts for the trip. On March 11, Bulkeley called in Kelly and the other officers, Akers, Cox, and Schumacher, and for the first time showed them copies of the secret orders and the charts that had been worked out for their route.

He then told them that they were leaving that very night (White 114). Kelly had some other things on his mind. Mostly it was how he was going to get a hold of Peggy to tell her good-bye. She had said she would phone him that evening, but he was worried that he would might leave before she had a chance to call, so he decided to write her a letter and express his feelings toward her. After he had finished writing it, Peggy called him. She wanted to discuss plans for a date they had set for March 15.

It was then that Kelly told her he would not be able to attend. She asked for another date, but he said that no day would be good. Kelly told her that this was good-bye. She asked for more information, but he could give her none. "Then I guess this really is good-bye", she said to him, "but it's been awfully nice hasn't it?" (White 117). Then their connection was lost, and Kelly would never speak to Peggy again.

They ended up with twenty passengers in all four boats, and rank made no difference. Washington had ordered Macarthur to bring out the most valuable of his men, and so they were all specialists, while thirty some-odd generals were left behind in Bataan. The trip started out pretty well, but the boat that Kelly was traveling in was going much slower than the other boats, and then at four o' clock in the morning the engines stopped. They lost sight of their lead boat and got to work getting the engines back up and running. All the while, they were on a continuous lookout for Japs. They managed to make it to their rendezvous location, but when they arrived, there were no other boats from their party there.

Bulkeley's boat, which contained General Macarthur, his wife, and his child, managed to make it to the rendezvous location much later in the day. The reason for this was the Bulkeley had figured that the morning would be the dangerous time for bombers, if they knew that their boats had slipped out, so by two o' clock he felt it was safe to get under way, and they threaded down through the little channels between the islands, approaching their last one, which was the general rendezvous. They spotted two other boats already tied up, and one of them was Kelly's (White 130). The commanders then got together to talk about the night's plans. There was at first, the problem of what to do with a 32 boat that had dumped most of her gasoline over the side in an effort to outrun what they thought was an enemy boat. Bulkeley decided that the generals aboard this craft would be transferred to Kelly's boat.

The rest were to wait there until the next morning when a submarine was scheduled to arrive. They would tell the submarine that everything had gone well, the General had gone on to Mindanao and would go to Australia by plane, as planned. Having delivered this message, the boat was to go to Iloilo and get repairs and enough gas to bring her down to Cagayan to join the rest of their party and they would finish the war together in the southern islands. The boat's commander, Lieutenant Schumacher, must have decided that it wasn't in condition to follow these orders. When the submarine arrived, he had it shell his boat so it would not fall into Japan ses hands, and boarded the submarine, which dropped his crew off at Corregidor and took him safely to Australia (White 133). The other three boats went on as planned, but the weather was bad and the sea was rough, and those not in the navy got terribly seasick; General Macarthur and his family included.

After traveling a while, they were supposed to make a landfall - an island about half a mile square, at which point they would turn to make the final landfall that would bring them into port. But they missed the island entirely in the dark, and from then on Kelly was forced to change course and he though necessary. When dawn came, they saw land ahead and it turned out it was their correct destination (White 141). After Macarthur was awakened, he told Bulkeley that he was giving every officer in the caravan the Silver Star for gallantry.

And later in the afternoon he said to Kelly: "If the boats never accomplish anything more and were burned now, they'd had earned their keep a thousand times over. If possible, when I get to Melbourne I'll get you and your key men out" (White 143). After many trying battles, the men were split up, and Kelly found himself alone in his travels. One night he stayed in a sympathetic American's home.

He turned on the radio to hear that Bataan had finally fallen. All he could think about was Peggy. He thought: "Right now Peggy was probably standing in the tunnel entrance on Corregidor, where she and I sat so many evenings, looking across the narrow waters to the tip of Bataan where the Japs now were, and back up from the water in the hills would be bright pin-points of rifle fire, where the Japs were hunting down like rats those few brave, silly expendables who still wouldn't admit they were expended, who still had a little fight left and so kept fighting even after the generals had said it was done" (White 181). Then Kelly got word that Bulkeley wasn't dead, as he had previously thought, and that he was in Mindanao. So he started off for the other coast hoping he could get to some island where the Japs hadn't come yet. He joined up with some civilians who were going the same way.

The second day they heard planes in the sky and looked up incredulously to see American planes. These were the first American bombers they had seen since before the start of the war. This was the big American offensive that they had heard about, but it was three days too late. In the time that they should have arrived Bataan had fallen as well as Cebu. It took Kelly days to get to Mindanao around through the islands begging for rides in cars, hiring small boats to cross little island channels. His objective was to join Bulkeley who was supposed to be in Mindanao.

When he arrived there, he heard that Bulkeley's boat had been there but only for a few hours and had gone on to an unknown place. Kelly hopped a ride on a truck to I ligan where he found Bulkeley's boat! The first person he saw was Ensign Cox who was shocked to see him. Cox told me Bulkeley had gone home, and thinking the Kelly was dead had made Cox squadron commander. So Kelly decided to get up to Del Monte and report to Commander Sharp so he could tell Bulkeley he was alive.

When he arrived he was greeted by an army colonel who said he was going to put him to work. When the time came for him to do this work, he had just finished packing his things when he got a phone call telling him to report to General Sharp at the landing field and bring everything with him. This meant that he was getting out. It was grim waiting at the airport.

The priority list was made up in Melbourne and each man had a number. A plane would not hold more that thirty, but more then two hundred were waiting there. Because perhaps, two, maybe even three, planes might come. After chatting briefly with someone he knew from the Rock, they heard the sound of plane engines. They looked up to see only one plane circling the field. At 10: 30 the list was called, Kelly, Cox, and Akers were all called.

They climbed aboard. Each person who was leaving unstrapped their guns and handed them out the windows to the men who were staying behind. They would be needing them badly and the men who were leaving would not be needing them at all. Someone asked Kelly what became of Peggy.

He said: "There were seaplanes sent out from Australia to Corregidor at the very last, which, among other people, were to bring out the nurses. The plane Peggy was on cracked up on the take-off. So now we won't ever know" (White 204). This was depressing to think about, but suddenly Kelly remembered the last words that Peggy said to him, "Well", she had said, "it's been awfully nice, hasn't it?" (White 205).

Her voice had sounded clear and brave, but seemed to come from far away (White 205). Text Comparison / What I Learned The textbook, ah, what a fickle creature. It seems so large in magnitude and seemingly so full of information, but at the same time, it contains only a small amount of information. In no way can the text even begin to compare with this novel because they are written in two completely different ways. They Were Expendable is more like a narrative because the whole book in written in dialogue, and its story is told by the men whom it is about, who experience the whole ordeal first hand.

It is, in essence, the epitome of a primary source. The textbook is a prime example of a secondary source, and a shanty one at that. It gives brief summaries of the events described in this novel and in no way can one every truly understand what happened to these men simply from reading the blurbs provided by the text. It was amazing to learn what these men had to go through, and how lucky they were to be four of the thirty out of two hundred selected to be saved. How one must feel knowing that you are leaving behind comrades who went through the same hardships as you, but were not lucky enough to be chosen. How one must feel to be left behind, watching your peers, men whom you fought and bled beside, men who were in the hospital bed beside yours, fly away to safety.

The thing that I found most intriguing about this book, however, was the relationships displayed between the nurses and the wounded men the nurses cared for. It is amazing how being away from your home can make a person so needing of a companion, and how easy it was for the men in the hospitals to find that they had some affection for the hard-working women that were taking care of them. It saddens me to think that Lieutenant Kelly and Peggy never got to live their lives together, and I wonder if he though about her after he returned to the states. About the Author This book was written by William Lindsay White.

He was from New York, and spent about half of his time in the town of Emporia. He had received a Harvard education, and at one point, was selected to the legislature where he worked hard for the presidential nomination of Richard Nixon. For a time he was even listed as the best-dressed man in America. For these reasons, and well as others, he and his wife stood out in Emporia, and to some extent agitated the townspeople. His wife was named Katherine, and to her fellow Emporia ns, she was a New York sophisticate, and seemed to have an aloof air and imperious manner about her.

She was not the type to stitch up a quilt or gossip around a table with other women; she was a hard worker, and was a member of the original staff of Time magazine. Despite the fact that some did not like William, or his wife for that mater, he is still remembered with a bronze bust and a sample of his writing in White Memorial Park. In fact, after his death in 1973, a memorial was set up in his name to plant more trees in Emporia. To date, there have been over 300 trees planted with money that friends gave to that fund..