At 1 hour 38 minutes into John Ford's 1946 film "They were Expendable", the "34 boat" (probably USS PT139 or PT141, 80-foot Elco boats from the Rhode Island based training squadron standing in for the earlier design 77-foot Elco boats used by Squadron Three in the Philippines) is launched from a marine railway with an aged concrete foundation. This was unlikely to have been constructed just for the movie. It was most likely filmed at an existing shipyard facility. Most of the filming of this movie was done within about 20 miles of Miami in late 1945. Does anyone familiar with Florida history have any idea where this marine railway was located?

PC

Not at all answering your question but possibly of interest - There is a 1949 film noir "Port of New York" (starring Yul Brynner with hair) which includes some shots of a boat yard alleged to be on Long Island Sound which has a marine railway with an armstrong turntable.
GME
(Who has sailed the Sound enough times to believe that the scene was really shot in California...)

Interesting, I will have to watch both films. Hope you get some answers to the question PCook. Like a lot of "boomers" I have had a thing for PT boat history not to mention just about any RR/military history. Regards, John.

"They Were Expendable" left a number of mysteries in its wake that are still being discussed with the curators of several military museums and memorials. For example, many sources list USS PT139 and PT141 as the featured Elco boats in the movie (the other four in the movie "squadron" were Huckins-built training boats PT98, PT100, PT101, and PT102) but they sometimes fail to mention another Elco boat, PT315, which carried the film crew and also appeared in the towing sequence to the shipyard (All three boats in the towing scene at 1 hour 30 minutes in the movie are Elco 80-footers). All three of these boats were sold to private owners between one and three years after their movie service.

Like the destruction of a B-17 Flying Fortress in the movie "Twelve O'Clock High", an Elco PT boat was demolished in the making of "They Were Expendable", in the scenes where aircraft destroy PT34. Note that after this boat blows up at 1 hour 46 minutes in the movie, her fake wooden torpedo tubes float in the water next to the wreckage. Records of the training squadron Elco boats dispositions do not disclose what PT boat this might have been. Perhaps one of the few returned from combat in Europe? Most of the Pacific theater boats were beached and burned at the end of the war. There were many PT boats with the disposition "written off" in 1945 (indicating they were destroyed intentionally) so we may never know which one.

Note Added: The destruction of PT31 by shore batteries 40 minutes into the movie appears to have been done with a large scale floating model, deck details and supports of the torpedo tubes look different from other scenes.

Photo below of PT315 with PT139 at Melville, RI by Jerry Gilmartin, MMC(SW), USN, Ret. Note the 37mm and 40mm, the torpedo launching racks and radar mast were all removed for the movie. By 1944 torpedo tubes were replaced by roll-off torpedo launching racks, only one PT in the movie was retrofitted with functional torpedo tubes for the filming. The tubes on all the other boats were hollow wooden replicas.

PC

Could it have been somewhere like Naval Air Station Key West? Seaplane bases sometimes had similar systems for removing and launching flying boats into the water in pre-amphibian days.

While trying to look up "They Were Expendable," I ran into this account of what actually happened with Squadron 3. It looks like something that might be of interest to readers in this thread, and is notable for some construction footage for these wooden boats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulG5u-x6W8

From an article on the NPS site https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/pt-boats.htm : "In 1938 the US Navy sponsored a design competition to small boat builders with a challenge to create a highly mobile attack boat. Prizes were awarded for the winning PT boat designs. Not long after the U.S. entry into the war, there were roughly a dozen separate manufacturers of PT boats from the United States, Canada and Great Britain supplying the US Navy. Eventually Elco (Elco Motor Yachts) with a factory located in Bayonne, New Jersey and Higgins Industries in New Orleans, Louisiana were the dominant two builders with Elco producing the largest number. In the later years of the war the U.S. Navy standardized the design and construction of the PT boat. Two basic and distinctly different types of PT Boats were built for combat with the predominant PT, the 80-foot long "Elco" boat, and the slightly smaller 78-foot long "Higgins” boat. By the end of World War II, 399 Elco PTs had been built. Higgins built 199 or 205 PTs, depending on which figures are used."

It doesn't directly answer the question, as there may have been a smaller builder in S. Florida w/a marine railway, but hopefully it will help in finding the right answer.

**After I posted this, I found another PT boat site with more pix, one of which, PT-69, was built at Huckins Yacht Co. in Jacksonville FL, which Preston mentioned above. See http://www.navsource.org/archives/14/31106.htm for the PT-69.

Annnd, PT-2 (a prototype), was built at Fogal Boat Yard in Miami.

Only eight of the Huckins Yacht Company 78-foot "PT95" class boats were built (PT95 through PT102). Four of them appear as the background boats in "They Were Expendable". They were considered inferior to the Elco and Higgins designs, and had a reputation for being wet and poor sea boats, plowing through waves while the Elco and Higgins boats rode over them. You can compare the ride characteristics of the Huckins boats in "They Were Expendable" with the earlier 77-foot Elco PT boats in much rougher water in the movie "Crash Dive" and see why so many Elco and so few Huckins boats were built. The Navy destroyed most of the Huckins boats immediately at wars end, which would have been shortly after the movie was filmed. In contrast, Elco and Higgins boats from the training squadron (Ron4) were mostly sold to commercial buyers in 1946-1948.

Doing some more research today I found that filming activities were based out of the Subchaser Training School in Miami, which served as the "Cavite" Philippines base, and actors stayed at hotels in Miami. The PT boats were used each day as commuter launches to ferry the film crew and actors to less populated locations within about 25 miles of the city for outdoor filming. Indoor scenes were mostly shot at MGM facilities in California.

The marine railway may have been a support facility for the Subchaser School, the cradle and foundation look like they could take a 110-foot Subchaser as easily as a PT boat.

And Subchasers finally give us a link to EMD, which built their 184A pancake engines.

PC

The USN production PT boats were powered by three marine modified derivations of the Packard 3A-2500 V-12 liquid-cooled, gasoline-fueled aircraft engine. These were not the Packard-built versions of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, which were used in the P-51B and later.

In the 1960's, USN was looking for a more modern PT boat with diesel power and procured 20 Nasty-class PTF boats, and 4 larger Osprey class PTF's. All were powered by two Napier Deltics.

An experimental WWII PT boat had Allison engines {which is the GM connection) but the WWII production PT's had Packard engines. It was the Vietnam era PTF's that had Napier Deltics, which is the connection to another thread about a British Class 55 Deltic that's returning to service.

And we didn't save any FM 2400 hp TrainMasters.

Phil Mulligan

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one operational PT boat left, PT658 in Portland, OR. I was in Portland for temporary duty assisting with military brass during the Rose Festival. My Admiral, an aviator, got to ride PT658 from its Swan Island moorage to the Oregon Maritime Museum's steam sternwheeler "Portland". The only time I have heard three synchronized Packard V12s and it was music to my ears! https://www.savetheptboatinc.com/index.htm
http://www.oregonmaritimemuseum.org/
and to keep this post railroad related, they also have some trains in Portland.
https://orhf.org/

Additional note that some may find interesting. In the movie sequences where the PT boats negotiate a course of marked (by fishing bouys) explosive charges that simulate aircraft bombs or shell splashes, you notice actor Robert Montgomery at the helm.

Lt. Cdr. Robert Montgomery USNR served on, in succession, PT114, then PT68, then PT107 in Squadron 5 in the Southwest Pacific campaigns during World War Two. As the Commanding Officer of PT107 he fired four torpedoes at a squadron of Japanese Destroyers during a battle in Blackett Strait on the night of 1-2 August 1943. This was the same action where John Kennedy's PT109 was rammed by a Japanese Destroyer and sank. He also served on a Destroyer (USS BARTON DD722) and a Light Cruiser (USS COLUMBIA CL56) later in the war.

PT107 (left) is shown refueling underway around the time Montgomery was CO.

PC

Off Topic:

Did not John Wayne convert a PT into a pleasure yacht?

John Wayne's yacht ia a converted Minesweeper, USS YMS-328. Propulsion is two GM Cleveland 8-268A inline diesels.

She's still active, owned and operated by Hornblower Cruises out of Newport Beach CA.

Phil Mulligan