A few days after the Battle of Leyte Gulf, my grandfather relieved Admiral Mitscher and assumed command of the entire Task Force 38. He directed its operations until the Philippine Islands were retaken, and then, after a four-month interval, until the war’s end. In that command he directed assaults against Japanese strongholds in Indochina, Formosa, China, and the Japanese home islands. By the war’s end, his ships were “steaming boldly within sight of the Japanese mainland.”
At his death, he was a leading figure in naval aviation, credited with devising some of the most successful innovations in the use of attack carriers. “Give me enough fast carriers,” he said, “and let me run them, and you can have your atom bomb.”
Near the end of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese introduced their last desperate offensive measure to prevent the inexorable Allied advance to the Japanese homeland—the kamikaze attack. Throughout the rest of the Philippines campaign, kamikaze assaults wreaked horrible damage on the Third and Seventh Fleets.
In December, my grandfather and John Thach devised an innovation to keep Japanese planes based on Luzon from attacking the invasion convoy or joining the terrifying suicide missions. He called it the “Big Blue Blanket.” He had his planes form an umbrella that flew over Luzon’s airfields twenty-four hours a day, destroying over two hundred Japanese planes in a few days. In a series of Japanese raids on ships participating in the invasion of Mindoro, not one plane had flown from Luzon. My grandfather’s pilots had kept them all grounded.
He increased the striking power of his carriers by reducing the number of dive-bombers by half and doubling the number of fighters, fitting them with bombs so that they could serve, as circumstances warranted, as both fighter and bomber.
He also concentrated his antiaircraft fire by reducing his four task groups to three. He dispatched “picket” destroyers to patrol waters sixty miles from the flanks of his force to warn him of an approaching strike. He assigned his pickets their own patrol aircraft. When his planes returned from a strike they were ordered to circle designated pickets so that the patrol aircraft could identify them as friendly and pick out any kamikazes that had attempted to slip past the force’s defenses in company with the returning planes.
In a strike on Saigon, his pilots attacked four Japanese convoys and destroyed or damaged sixty-nine enemy ships in a single day, a record that endures to this day. During a three-month period, in preparation for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, my grandfather’s task force sank or damaged 101 cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts and 298 merchant ships. During that same period they destroyed or damaged 2,962 enemy planes. Japanese ships were no longer safe even in the waters off the Japanese mainland. Throughout this last campaign, which ended when atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my grandfather lost only one destroyer.
He was awarded his second Distinguished Service Medal for his “gallant command” of fast carriers from October 1944 through January 1945. The citation praised his “indomitable courage” as he “led his units aggressively and with brilliant tactical control in extremely hazardous attacks.” He received a third DSM, posthumously, for his service in the last three months of the war, when he “hurled the might of his aircraft against the remnants of the once vaunted Japanese Navy to destroy or cripple every remaining major hostile ship by July 28.”
Under my grandfather’s command, TF 38 was considered the most powerful naval task force ever assembled for combat. Following his death, Secretary Forrestal stated: “His conception of the aggressive use of fast carriers as the principle instrument for bringing about the quick reduction of Japanese defensive capabilities was one of the basic forces in the evolution of naval strategy in the Pacific War.”
An officer who served with him said it more succinctly: “When there isn’t anything to be done, he’s the kind of fellow who does it.”
The night after my grandfather died, Paul Shubert, a radio network commentator, talked about the controversial wartime decision allowing men of advanced years like Halsey and my grandfather to hold strenuous combat commands, while younger, fitter officers remained in subordinate roles. Shubert took no side in the dispute, but he spoke of my grandfather, of his age and “frail physique.” Despite his condition, my grandfather “had his will,” Shubert allowed. Whether younger officers could have accomplished what he had or not, “John Sidney McCain did what his country called on him to do—one of those intrepid seafarers who refused to accept the traditional devotion to the past… who learned to fly when he was past fifty, and went on to high rank in the Navy skies—one of the world’s greatest carrier task force commanders, an outstanding example of American manhood at sea.”
Eight years after my grandfather’s death, I watched Admiral Halsey deliver the main address at the commissioning of the Navy’s newest destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, in Bath, Maine. Halsey was an old man then. I remember he wore thick glasses and appeared very frail as he stood to make his remarks. As he began to talk about his friend of so many years, his eyes welled up with tears, and he began to sob. Barely a half minute had passed before he announced he was unable to talk anymore, and sat down.
Plainly, Halsey deeply mourned my grandfather’s loss. But the audience sensed that the old admiral was overcome that day by more than sadness at his friend’s passing. Many years had passed since my grandfather’s death, and surely Halsey had gotten over his grief by then. I suspect that the commissioning had prompted a great tide of memories that overwhelmed the admiral. As old men do, Halsey could not think of a departed friend without evoking the memory of all they had gone through together. For Halsey, the memory of my grandfather’s friendship conjured up all the grim trials and awful strain of combat, the losses they had endured, and the triumphs they had celebrated together as leading figures in a great war that had changed the world forever. The recollection had stunned the old man and left him mute.
I met Halsey that evening, at a reception after the ceremony. He asked me, “Do you drink, boy?”
I was seventeen years old, and had certainly experienced my share of teenage drinking by then. But my mother was standing next to me when the admiral made his inquiry, and I could do nothing but nervously stammer, “Well, no, I don’t.”
Halsey looked at me for a long moment before remarking, “Well, your grandfather drank bourbon and water.” Then he told a waiter, “Bring the boy a bourbon and water.”
I had a bourbon and water, and with his old commander watching, silently toasted the memory of my grandfather.
–– CHAPTER 4 ––
An Exclusive Tradition
In 1936, while commanding the naval air station in Panama, my grandfather was introduced to me, his first grandson and namesake. My father was stationed in Panama at the same time, serving aboard a submarine as executive officer. He had brought his young, pregnant wife with him. I was born in the Canal Zone at the Coco Solo air base hospital shortly after my grandfather arrived there. My father was transferred to New London, Connecticut, less than three months later, so I have no memory of our time in Panama.
My mother has fond memories of the place despite the rough living conditions that junior officers and their families suffered in prewar Panama. Among those memories is an occasion when my parents left me in my grandfather’s care while they attended a dinner party. My mother, mindful of my father’s concerns about coddling infants, instructed my grandfather to put me to bed in my crib, and not to mind any protest I might make. When they returned they found me sleeping comfortably with my grandfather in his bed. Admonished by my mother for pampering me, he gamely insisted that the privilege was only fitting. “Dammit, Roberta, that boy has the stamp of nobility on his brow.” Had he lived longer, he might have puzzled over my adolescent misbehavior, lamenting the decline of his once noble grandson.