He puts on a demonstration of their maneuverability and seakeeping capabilities for the senior area commander, Admiral Blackwell (Charles Trowbridge), who remains unimpressed by their diminutive size and lightweight construction.

He becomes disgusted at the admiral's close-minded dismissal and is writing his request for transfer to destroyer duty when news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor arrives by radio bulletin.

After accusing his CO of glory hogging and resisting evacuation to a military hospital on Corregidor, Rusty arrives there still hissing and spitting, only to reluctantly admit to the severity of his life-threatening condition.

Once he does, Rusty begins a romance with strong-willed Army nurse Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed), so attractive, kind, and wholesomely appealing Ohio cracks, "Eleven-thousand men can't be wrong" about her.

The PT Squadron are then assigned to evacuate the commanding general of the Pacific Theatre, Douglas MacArthur, his entourage, and Admiral Blackwell to the Southern-most Philippine island of Mindanao, where they will be flown South to Australia.

As the boats leave in haste ahead of an imminent Japanese assault, Dad refuses to flee, bidding his poignant farewell with a rifle folded in his arms and a whisky jug tucked securely at his feet.

Brick, Ryan and two ensigns are ordered by Navy command to be airlifted out on the last plane, assigned stateside to train PT crews, the small, inexpensive wood-hulled boats having proved their worth in combat.

The surviving enlisted men, led by Chief Mulcahey (Ward Bond), shoulder rifles and march off to continue the resistance with the remnants of the U.S. Army and Filipino guerrillas, as expendable in the fight as their PT boats had been before them.

[9] According to Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, Ford, a notoriously tough taskmaster who had received a commission as a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve in his late 40s during WWII, was especially hard on Wayne, who had a 3-A — family deferment — draft rating.

Lt. Brickley, the character most closely based on the real Commander John Bulkeley, declares at one point in the movie that PT Boats had "sunk two converted cruisers, an auxiliary aircraft carrier, a 10,000-ton tanker, a large freighter, a flock of barges and numerous sons of Nippon!"

[12] Contemporary historians of President John F. Kennedy, William Doyle, and Fredrik Logevall noted that one of the primary problems of the PT boats were the accuracy and relatively slow speed of their Mark 8 torpedoes.

Added to the problem of inaccuracy at reaching target, as many as 50% failed to explode on contact with enemy ships due to faulty calibration by the Navy in the early years of the war.