by John McCain
A little less than six months later, at one o’clock on the morning of June 5, Halsey received a late report from an amphibious command ship that this latest storm was too far to the south for the fleet to get safely around it. Halsey attempted to get out of its way by reversing course from southeast to northwest, greatly surprising the commanders of his task groups, who were now in imminent peril.
At four o’clock, one of those commanders, Admiral J. J. Clark, signaled my grandfather (to whom Halsey had given tactical command of the fleet’s race to safer waters) that their present course would bring his task group directly into the storm. A few minutes later he signaled, “I can get clear of the center of the storm quickly by steering 120. Please advise.”
My grandfather consulted Halsey, who advised against a course change. He then signaled Clark for an updated report of the position and bearing of the storm’s eye before ordering Clark to use his best judgment. After communicating with Halsey and Clark, my grandfather could have spent only a few minutes considering the matter before deciding to reject Halsey’s advice. But it was a few minutes too long. His order came twenty minutes after Clark signaled for advice and too late for his task group to escape the worst of the storm.
Although none of Clark’s ships sank, many of them were damaged, including four carriers. One hundred and forty-two aircraft were lost. Six men from Clark’s task group and a nearby fueling group were swept overboard by the storm-tossed seas and drowned. Four others were seriously injured.
A few days after Task Force 38 resumed operations off Okinawa, my grandfather and Halsey were ordered to appear before a court of inquiry on June 15. In the court’s opinion, the fleet’s encounter with the typhoon was directly attributable to Halsey’s order to change course and my grandfather’s failure to instruct Clark for twenty minutes.
Upon receiving the court’s report, Secretary Forrestal was prepared to relieve both Halsey and my grandfather. But Admiral King persuaded Forrestal that Halsey’s relief would be too great a blow to the Navy’s and the country’s morale.
Two months later, my grandfather was ordered to relinquish his command.
Professional naval officers constitute a small community today. It was a much smaller one in the years when my father and grandfather made their living at sea. Yet I only learned of the episode that closed my grandfather’s career when, many years later, I read an account of the typhoon in E. B. Potter’s biography of Admiral Halsey.
My father never mentioned it to me.
CHAPTER 2
Slew
In his memoirs, Admiral Halsey makes brief mention of the typhoon, blaming his task group’s encounter with it on late warnings and erroneous predictions of the storm’s course, but he offers no description of my grandfather’s role in the disaster.
My grandfather’s request to return home rather than witness the drama of Japan’s surrender was a measure of his despair over losing his command. Halsey did write of his subordinate’s outrage at being relieved of his command, describing him as “thoroughly sore.”
I once suspected, as my father probably had, that the court’s findings had hastened my grandfather’s death. But as I grew older, it became easier to dismiss my suspicion as the dramatization of the end of a life that needed no embellishment from a sentimental namesake. My grandfather had not been banished into retirement after losing his command. President Truman had ordered him to Washington to serve under General Omar Bradley as the deputy director of the new Veterans Administration to help integrate back into civilian society the millions of returning American veterans, a prestigious and important appointment.
I doubt any assignment would have eased immediately the indignation he must have felt over losing his last wartime command. But by all accounts, my grandfather was a tough, willful, resilient man who, had he lived, would have resolved to serve with distinction in his new post as the surest way to put a great distance between himself and that fateful storm.
I was a few days shy of my ninth birthday when my grandfather died. I had seen very little of him during the war, and most of those occasions were hurried affairs. I remember being awakened in the dead of night on several occasions when he dropped in unannounced on his way from one assignment to another. My mother would assemble us on the parlor couch and then search the house for her camera, to record another brief reunion between her children and their famous grandfather. Even before the war, my father’s career often kept a continent or more between my grandparents and me. And the recollections I have of him have dimmed over the half century that has elapsed since I saw him last.
The image that remains is that of a rail-thin, gaunt, hawk-faced man whose slight build was disguised by a low-timbered voice and a lively, antic presence. It was fun to be in his company, and particularly so if you were the primary object of his attention, as I remember being when we were together.
He rolled his own cigarettes, which he smoked constantly, and his one-handed technique fascinated me. While the skill was anything but neat (Admiral Halsey once ordered a Navy steward to follow him around with a dustpan and broom whenever he was aboard the admiral’s flagship), that it could be accomplished at all struck me as praiseworthy. He would give me his empty bags of Bull Durham tobacco, which I valued highly, and which deepened my appreciation of the performance.
In today’s slang, he lived large. He was called Sid by his family and Slew by his fellow officers, for reasons I never learned. He liked to take his shoes off when he worked and walk around the office in his stocking feet. He smoked, swore, drank, and gambled at every opportunity he had. His profile in the 1943 Current Biography described him as “one of the Navy’s best plain and fancy cussers.”
Rear Admiral Howard Kuehl served on my grandfather’s staff as a young lieutenant during the campaign for the Solomon Islands, when my grandfather commanded all land-based aircraft in the South Pacific. In an article he wrote about his wartime experiences, he affectionately recounted an example of his boss’s colorful idiosyncrasies.
In addition to his other duties, Kuehl served as the wine mess treasurer, an assignment that obliged him to maintain a meager inventory of liquor for the officers’ recreational use and to obtain from my grandfather and his staff officers adequate funds for that purpose. When an officer received transfer orders, he was entitled to a refund of his wine mess share. In September 1942, after my grandfather had received orders reassigning him to Washington, Kuehl visited him on the afternoon before his scheduled departure. Dutifully attempting to return my grandfather’s share of the kitty, he was momentarily taken aback when my grandfather ordered that it be returned “in kind.” Summoning considerable courage, Kuehl informed his boss that because liquid spirits were a precious commodity aboard ship it was an unofficial but scrupulously observed custom that an officer returning to the States would not take any with him. Assuming no further admonishment was necessary, Kuehl then handed over to my disgruntled grandfather the money owed to him.
The next morning, my grandfather’s staff lined up at the gangway to shake his hand and bid him an affectionate farewell. When he reached his intrepid wine mess treasurer, he shot him a look of affected displeasure and said, “Kuehl, goddammit, you’re a crook.”
My mother often recounts the occasions when her father-in-law would order her to accompany him on a long night of carousing in his favorite gambling den of the moment. He seemed to have one in every place he was stationed. He also managed to spend considerable time at horse tracks, where his enthusiasm for the sport was evident in the sums of money he spent to make it interesting. As commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, he would order his yeoman into the first boat headed ashore whenever the Ranger came into home port, tasking him with the urgent business of placing his bets with the local bookie.
A young ensign, William Smedberg, fresh from the Naval Academy, reported for duty to the USS New Mexico, where my grandfather was serving as executive officer. An hour after he arrived he was summoned to my grand
father’s cabin. Apparently, the ship’s home port hosted a rowing regatta among the officers and enlisted men of the various ships stationed there, and my grandfather, being a sporting man who enjoyed a good wager, had taken a keen interest in the event. He had examined Ensign Smedberg’s record at the Academy and discovered he had been coxswain on an Academy crew. Smedberg recounted their exchange:
“Young man, I understand that you were a coxswain at the Naval Academy?”
“Yes, sir, I was coxswain of the hundred-and-fifty-pound crew.”
“Well, that’s good, because you’re going to be coxswain now of the officers’ crew and the enlisted crew. You’re to take them both out every morning we’re in port at five o’clock. And you’re to win both those races.”
They won both races, making my grandfather a happy and somewhat more prosperous man. (Ensign Smedberg would eventually reach flag rank, serve as Superintendent of the Naval Academy when I was a midshipman there, and retire a vice admiral.)
My grandmother once informed my grandfather of a new treatment for ulcers she had just read about in a magazine. Pounding his fist on a table, he shouted, “Not one penny of my money for doctors. I’m spending it all on riotous living.” My grandmother was reported to have given him an adequate allowance for that purpose while retaining unchallenged control over the rest of the family’s finances.
While serving as a pallbearer for one of his Naval Academy classmates on a cold, rainy day at Arlington National Cemetery, my grandfather listened to a young officer suggest that he button up his raincoat to protect himself from the elements. The old man, raincoat flapping in the wind, looked at his solicitous subordinate and said, “You don’t think I got where I am by taking care of my health, do you?”
My mother, who was enchanted by him, keeps in her living room a large oil portrait of the admiral, distinguished and starched in his navy whites. In reality he was a disheveled-looking man with a set of false teeth so ill-fitting that they made a constant clicking noise when he moved his jaw and caused him to whistle when he spoke.
Admiral Halsey and he were such good friends that even in the strain of war, when my grandfather was Halsey’s subordinate, theirs was a relaxed and open relationship marked by mutual respect and candor. They delighted in ribbing each other mercilessly and playing practical jokes on each other. On the evening before a trip to Guadalcanal together, my grandfather had spent the night in Halsey’s quarters. He had absentmindedly left his teeth sitting on a bureau in Halsey’s bathroom. Halsey saw the teeth sitting there and, delighted by an opportunity to discomfit his old friend, slipped them into his shirt pocket. One of my grandfather’s aides recalled the scene that followed as the party was departing for Guadalcanal, my grandfather frantically searching for his missing teeth while Halsey badgered him to hurry up.
“Can’t go, I can’t go. I’ve lost my teeth,” he implored. To which the much-amused Halsey responded, “How do you expect to run naval aviation if you can’t take care of your own teeth?”
After another fruitless search, and a few more minutes of Halsey poking fun at him, and my grandfather hurling insults right back, my grandfather resigned himself to going to Guadalcanal toothless. At the plane, a grinning Halsey handed the teeth back to him, and caught, I am sure, a torrent of abuse from my grandfather.
When in combat, he dispensed with all Navy regulations governing the attire of a flag officer. Disheveled, stooped, weighing only 140 pounds, and looking many years older than his age, he was, nevertheless, unmistakably Navy. Sailors who served under him called him, behind his back but affectionately, “Popeye the sailor man.” He wore a ratty, crushed green cap with its frame removed from the crown and an officer’s insignia sewn onto the visor. Halsey once described it as “unique in naval costume.” Like most sailors, my grandfather was a superstitious man, and he treasured his “combat cap” as a good luck talisman. So did everyone else on his flagship, fearing that any misfortune that befell the old man’s hat was a sign of approaching calamity. Whenever the wind blew the hat from its perch, men would dive to the deck and frantically scramble for it lest it be blown overboard. My grandfather, who was aware of the crew’s shared regard for the supernatural powers of his unorthodox headgear, watched in amused silence and grinned broadly when a relieved sailor handed it back to him.
The cap was a gift from the wife of a naval aviator. My grandfather was much admired by the aviators under his command and by their families, who knew how deeply he grieved over the loss of his pilots. I have heard from colleagues of my grandfather that he would cry routinely when he received casualty reports. “Whenever a pilot was lost,” John Thach said of him, “it was not just a sad thing, but it seemed like a personal loss to him and it took a lot out of him.” He loved life, and lived his as fully as anyone could. It is easy to understand how greatly it must have pained him to see any man, especially someone under his command, lose his life prematurely.
Commander Thach recalled how my grandfather liked to talk to the pilots just after they returned from a strike. Thach would select those pilots whose experiences he knew would most interest the old man and bring them immediately to the admiral’s cabin. My grandfather would give them a cup of coffee and listen intently as his young flyers described the details of their mission, always asking them at the end of the interview, “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
The pilots loved these exchanges, recognizing in my grandfather’s genuine interest in their views a regard for them that was not always apparent in the busy, distracted mien of other senior commanders. My grandfather valued the interviews as well. He believed an able commander profited from the insights of the men under his command and should always take care to see that his own decisions were informed by the assessments of those who were charged with executing them. “He never quit learning,” Thach observed. “He didn’t have complete and abiding faith in his own judgment, and I don’t think anyone should.”
Cecil King, a retired chief warrant officer, had served under my grandfather’s command at the naval air station in Panama in 1936. My grandfather had ferociously chewed him out once for writing false dispatches as a practical joke, one of which reported a Japanese attack on an American embassy. Although he gave the young sailor the tongue-lashing of his life, he didn’t have him court-martialed or even seriously discipline him. Eight years later, when my grandfather was commanding the fast carriers in the Pacific in the last year of the war, King happened to be standing in a crowd of sailors in New Guinea when my grandfather and several of his aides walked by. A few paces after he passed King and his buddies, my grandfather stopped and turned around. Pointing his finger at King, he said, “You’re the son of a bitch who almost started World War Two by yourself,” and laughed.
That he would remember so many years later, with his mind preoccupied with the demands of a wartime command, one of the tens of thousands of sailors he had commanded over his career is a remarkable testament not only to his memory, but to his devotion to his men. Certainly King thought so. “Every skipper’s a legend to his people. And he was a legend to us. The fact that he smoked Bull Durham cigarettes, rolled them himself; the fact that he didn’t wear shoes; the fact that he was just a giant of a guy. Everything he did was first-class.”
An aviator under my grandfather’s command was believed to have been drunk when he crashed his airplane and died. According to King, for the benefit of the dead man’s family, my grandfather kept the suspected cause of the accident from coming to light in an official inquiry. “I was so struck by his compassion and understanding,” King remarked. “The common conception was that he would go the last mile and some more too [for his men].”
James Michener knew my grandfather, and wrote briefly about him in the preface to his famous work Tales of the South Pacific: “I also knew Admiral McCain in a very minor way. He was an ugly old aviator. One day he flew over Santo and pointed down at the island wilderness and said, ‘That’s where we’ll build our base.’ And the base
was built there, and millions of dollars were spent there, and everyone agrees that Santo was the best base the Navy ever built in the region. I was always mighty proud of McCain, for he was in aviation, too.”
My father believed him to be the most exemplary leader in the United States Navy. “My father,” he said, “was a very great leader, and people loved him…. My mother used to say about him that the blood of life flowed through his veins, he was so keenly interested in people…. He was a man of great moral and physical courage.”
In pictures of him from the war you sense his irreverent, eccentric individualism. He looked like a cartoonist’s rendering of an old salt. As a boy and a young man, I found the attitude his image conveyed irresistible. Perhaps not consciously, I spent much of my youth—and beyond—exaggerating that attitude, too much for my own good, and my family’s peace of mind.
Of more lasting duration, and of far greater consequence, was the military tradition he bequeathed to my father and me; the tradition he was born to, the latest in a long line of my ancestors who had worn the country’s uniform.
He was the first McCain to choose the Navy. Until he entered the Academy in 1902, the men of his family had served in the Army; his brother, William Alexander, a cavalry officer who was known in the Army as “Wild Bill,” was the last. Bill McCain had chased Pancho Villa with Pershing, served as an artillery officer in World War I, and later been a brigadier general in the Quartermaster Corps. He was the last McCain to graduate from West Point.