Read Online Faith of My Fathers by John McCain - Free Book Online Page A

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