by John McCain
No one in my family is certain if we are descended from an unbroken line of military officers. But you can trace that heritage through many generations of our family, finding our ancestors in every American war, in the War for Independence, on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War. One distinguished ancestor served on General Washington’s staff. Camp McCain in Grenada, Mississippi, is named for my grandfather’s uncle Major General Henry Pinckney McCain, a West Pointer, and reputedly a stern autocrat who was known as the father of the Selective Service for organizing the draft in World War I.
We trace our martial lineage through two families, the McCains and the Youngs. My great-grandfather, yet another John Sidney McCain, married Elizabeth Young in 1877. Both were descendants of Scots Presbyterians who, in the aftermath of Queen Mary’s death at the hands of her royal English cousin, suffered the privations that were the fate of those who had remained loyal to the Scottish crown.
The McCains, bred to fight as Highland Scots of the Clan McDonald, arrived in the New World shortly after America gained her independence, when Hugh McCain settled his wife and six children in Caswell County, North Carolina, and built his estate, Lenox Castle.
Hugh’s grandson, William Alexander McCain, died while serving in the Mississippi cavalry during the Civil War. William’s oldest son, Joseph Watt McCain, also fought for the Confederacy. In his first battle he passed out at the sight of blood and was mistakenly left for dead by his comrades. William’s third son, the aforementioned father of the Selective Service, Henry Pinckney McCain, was the first to serve the flag of the restored Union.
William McCain’s second son, my great-grandfather, barely fourteen years old at the end of the Civil War, offered to enlist as well, giving his age as eighteen. He was rejected, but later in his life would express his patriotism by serving as sheriff of Carroll County, Mississippi, and inspiring his sons, my grandfather and great uncle, to pursue careers as professional officers. His wife’s family, however, claimed a more distinguished and ancient military history.
The Youngs, of the Clan Lamont from the Firth Cumbrae Islands, arrived in America earlier than the McCains, having first fled to Ireland during England’s “Great Rebellion.” In 1646, Mary Young Lamont and her four sons crossed the Irish Sea in open boats after her husband and chief of the clan, Sir James Lamont, and his clansmen were defeated in battle by the forces of Archibald Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyle.
The long-feuding clans had fought on different sides in the civil war, the Campbells for Cromwell, and the Lamonts loyal to Charles I. After surrendering to the Campbells, two hundred Lamont men, women, and children had their throats cut by the villainous duke, and Sir James and his brothers spent five years in a dungeon.
Fearing further reprisals, Sir James’s wife and sons wisely fled their hostile native land, adopted Mary’s maiden name, Young, and settled quietly in County Antrim, Ireland. Two generations later, the family immigrated in the person of Hugh Young to Augusta County, Virginia.
In 1764, Hugh’s sons, John, a captain in the Augusta County militia, and Thomas, fought a brief skirmish with Indians in the Battle of Back Creek. Thomas was killed and scalped. Like his descendants, Captain Young was not one to suffer such an insult quietly. He tracked the killers for three days, fought them again, killed a number of them, and recovered his brother’s scalp, burying it with Thomas’s body.
It was John Young who, as a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, caught the attention of George Washington, joined the infantry, and was welcomed to the general’s staff. Valorous and exceedingly diligent about safeguarding his family’s honor, John Young set an example emulated by generations of Youngs and McCains who eagerly reinforced the family reputation for quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform.
John Young’s three elder sons all died in childhood. His fourth son, David Young, held the rank of captain in the United States Army and fought in the War of 1812. David’s son, Samuel Hart Young, moved the family to Mississippi, where Samuel’s eldest son, Dr. John William Young, fought for the Confederacy.
The fifth of Samuel Young’s eight children, Elizabeth Ann, united the McCain and Young families by her marriage to my great-grandfather, and their union gave life to two renowned fighters, my great-uncle Wild Bill and my grandfather Sid McCain.
Wild Bill joined the McCain name to an even more distinguished warrior family. His wife, Mary Louise Earle, was descended from royalty. She claimed as ancestors Scottish kings back to Robert the Bruce. But her family took their greatest pride in their direct descent from Emperor Charlemagne.
Although it was his brother’s children who extended the Charlemagne line, I suspect my grandfather felt justified in borrowing the distinction for the rest of the family. He took considerable pride in the McCains’ association with the distinguished conqueror, thinking it only fitting that his descendants share in the reflected glory.
As a boy and young man, I may have pretended not to be affected by the family history, but my studied indifference was a transparent mask to those who knew me well. As it was for my forebears, my family’s history was my pride. When I heard my father or one of my uncles refer to an honored ancestor or a notable event from our family’s past, my boy’s imagination would conjure up some future day of glory when I would add my own paragraph to the family’s legend. My father was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of direct descendants of General Washington’s officers. His evident pride in claiming such distinguished ancestry gave me the sense not only that I had a claim on my country’s history, but that it would fall to me to represent the family when the history of my generation was recorded. As a teenager, I would occasionally show my closest friends the picture of the surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri and point with pride to the McCain who stood among the conquerors.
At a point early in my own naval career, I was stationed as a flight instructor at McCain Field, an air station in Meridian, Mississippi, named for my grandfather. One day, as I made my approach to land, I was waved off. Radioing the tower, I demanded, “Let me land, or I’ll take my field and go home,” earning a rebuke from the commanding officer for disrespectfully invoking the family history.
It is a formidable history, not easily escaped even today by descendants who might wish to pursue some interest outside the family business.
My grandfather was born and raised on his father’s plantation in Carroll County, Mississippi. The property had been in our family since 1848, when William Alexander McCain moved there from the family estate in North Carolina. My great-grandmother had named the place Waverly, after Walter Scott’s Waverly novels, but it was always called Teoc, after a Choctaw Indian name for the surrounding area that meant “Tall Pines.”
I spent some time there as a boy and loved the place. The house, which had once belonged to a former slave, became the family’s home after their first manor burned down, and was a more modest structure than the white-columned antebellum mansions of popular imagination. But I spent many happy summer days in outdoor recreation on the property in the congenial company of my grandfather’s younger brother, Joe, who ran the plantation. The house still stands, I have been told, uninhabited and dilapidated, with no McCain in residence since my Uncle Joe died in 1952.
I have been told that the McCains of Teoc were clannish, devoted to one another and to their traditions. They never lamented the South’s fall, although they had been loyal to its flag, nor did they discuss the war much, even among themselves. Neither did they curse the decline in the family’s fortunes, the lot they shared with many plantation families in the defeated South. By all accounts, they were lively, proud, and happy in their world on the Mississippi Delta. Yet my uncle and grandfather left the comfort of the only world they knew, never to be rooted to one location again.
I am second cousin to the gifted writer Elizabeth Spencer. She is the daughter of my grandfather’s sister and was raised in Carrollton, Mississippi, near the fami
ly estate. In her graceful memoir, Landscapes of the Heart, she wrote affectionately of her two uncles and the first stirring of their lifelong romance with military adventures.
What could they do around farms and small towns in an impoverished area, not yet healed from a civil war? The law? The church? Nothing there seemed to challenge them.
I wonder if their dreams were fed by their reading. They favored bold adventure stories and poems—Kipling, Scott, Stevenson, Henty, Macaulay, Browning. Stuck away in trunks in the attic in Carrollton, school notebooks I came across when exploring were full not only of class notes but also of original verses that spoke of heroism and daring deeds. Their Latin texts with Caesar’s Gallic Wars were in our bookshelves. They were cavalier….
I thought of my uncles years later, when I read in Henry James’ The Bostonians how Basil Ransom of Mississippi had gone to Boston in the post–Civil War years because he was bored sitting around a plantation.
After two years at “Ole Miss,” my grandfather decided to follow his older brother to West Point. At his brother’s urging, my grandfather prepared for the exacting entrance exams by taking for practice the Naval Academy exams that were given some weeks earlier at the post office in the state capital. His scores were high enough to earn him an appointment to Annapolis, which, with little reflection, he accepted.
He was a popular midshipman but a less than serious student, graduating in the bottom quarter of his class. That rank, however, exceeded the grasp of his son and grandson, who graduated well beneath it and were lucky to receive their commissions at all.
In his third year at Annapolis, he failed his annual physical. In a report to the Academy Superintendent, the examining medical officer rejected him for further service “on account of defective hearing.” The superintendent responded by noting the “great need of officers at the present time, and the fact that this Midshipman has nearly completed his course at the Naval Academy at great expense to the Government,” and recommended to the Surgeon General that “this physical disability be waived until the physical examination, prior to graduation, next year.” The Surgeon General approved the waiver.
Whether or not his hearing recovered by the time he graduated is unknown. I can find no record of his last physical examination at the Academy. I can only assume that if the hearing defect persisted the following year, the examining physician overlooked it. In his quarterly fitness report of June 30, 1906, all that is noted on the single line describing the midshipman’s health is “very good.”
My grandfather’s undistinguished record at the Academy did not affect his subsequent career in the Navy. In those days, an Academy graduate was not immediately commissioned an ensign, but was required to serve for two years as a “passed midshipman.” Following graduation, he saw action on the Asiatic Station in the Philippines, serving first on the battleship Ohio and then on the cruiser Baltimore.
He caught the approving eye of his first commanding officer, Captain L. G. Logan, skipper of the Ohio, who filed laudatory quarterly fitness reports, remarking that “Midshipman McCain is a promising officer, and I commend him for favorable consideration of the Academic Board.” Six months later, a more skeptical CO, Commander J.M. Helms, skipper of the Baltimore, reserved judgment about the young officer, noting, “I have not been acquainted with this officer long enough to know much about him.”
By his next fitness report, my grandfather had apparently run afoul of his new skipper, who had by that time become acquainted enough with him to fault him as “not up to the average standard of midshipmen” and to advise that he “not be ordered to any ship as a regular watch officer until qualified.”
While giving him mostly good marks for handling the various duties of a junior officer, Commander Helms apparently found my grandfather’s discipline wanting. He noted that he had suspended him “from duty for three days for neglect of duty.” While standing as the officer of the watch, he had allowed officers who had attended a party in the navy yard to return to ship and continue to “get drunk.” The next quarter, Commander Helms again reported that my grandfather was “not up to the average standard of midshipmen.”
Shortly thereafter, my grandfather was spared further reproaches from the disapproving Commander Helms. He was ordered to serve on the destroyer Chauncey, where he was highly regarded by his new commanding officer. Six months later, he reported for duty as executive officer to the great Chester Nimitz, then a young ensign, on a gunboat captured from the Spanish, the USS Panay, and had, by all accounts, the time of his life sailing around the southern islands of the Philippine archipelago.
Their mission allowed them to sail virtually wherever they pleased, call on whatever ports they chose, showing the flag, in essence, to the Filipinos at a time when the United States feared a Japanese challenge for control of the Philippines. The Panay was less than a hundred feet long and had a crew of thirty, handpicked by Nimitz. They cruised an immense expanse of the archipelago, putting in for fresh water and supplies at various ports, arbitrating minor disputes among the locals, and generally enjoying the exotic adventure that had come their way so early in life. Both Nimitz and my grandfather remembered the experience fondly for the rest of their lives. Nimitz once said of it, “Those were great days. We had no radio, no mail, no fresh food. We did a lot of hunting. One of the seamen said one day he ‘couldn’t look a duck in the beak again.’”
His tour in Asia ended in late 1908, when, after being commissioned an ensign, he sailed for home on the battleship USS Connecticut, the flagship of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, then en route home from its famous world cruise.
In the First World War my grandfather served as an engineering officer on the armored cruiser San Diego, escorting wartime convoys across the Atlantic through schools of German U-boats and learning how to keep his composure in moments of great peril and stress.
In 1935, Captain McCain enrolled in flight training, complying with a new Navy regulation that required carrier skippers to learn to fly. Unlike many of his contemporaries, whose flight training was more verbal than practical, my grandfather genuinely believed that flight instruction would be indispensable to him if he was to command a carrier competently. Recognizing its potential importance, he had begun to study naval aviation as early as 1926. “I was stubborn about it,” he said. But that did not mean he felt it necessary to become a skilled pilot. Cecil King remarked that in Panama, “the base prayed for his safe return each time he flew.”
He would never enjoy the reputation of an accomplished pilot. According to the superintendent of training at the naval flight school in Pensacola, Florida (where I would learn to fly twenty-three years later), in the last two weeks of his training, my grandfather “cracked up five airplanes.” Reportedly, before he soloed for the first time, he told his instructor, “Son, the Bureau of Navigation sent me down here to learn to fly. Now, you do it.” Nevertheless, he did solo, and he completed a full course at the naval flight school. He was fifty-two years old when he earned his wings, among the oldest men ever to become Navy pilots.
If he never felt obliged to learn how to fly well, he did love the sensation of flying. He had interrupted his training to spend time on the carrier Ranger, to observe how the ships he longed to command worked. He told the skipper that he wanted to spend all his time flying in the backseat of the carrier’s planes. The pilot designated to fly him on these excursions recounted the experience many years later, admitting the Ranger’s skipper had mischievously told him to give the old man “the works.”
At fifteen thousand feet, the pilot began a simulated dive-bombing run on the Ranger. He threw the plane into a vertical dive, straight down and at full throttle, toward the pitching carrier. By the time the pilot pulled out of the dive they had approached the carrier so closely and at such a high speed that they “blew the hats off the people on the Ranger bridge.”
As they began their ascent, the pilot turned around to see how his passenger was doing. Instead of finding a frightened old
man in his backseat, the pilot was pleased to see my grandfather with “a grin up around both ears and shaking his hands like a boxer.” Taking this as an indication that my grandfather wouldn’t object to a repeat performance, the pilot dove on the carrier again. This time, however, my grandfather’s ears failed to pop during their steep descent, and when the pilot turned to check on him after pulling out of the second dive he saw that my grandfather was suffering considerable pain from the pressure in his head. The pilot signaled that he wanted to come in, and landed the plane safely on the carrier deck. The ship’s doctor rushed to attend my grandfather and in short order managed to equalize the pressure in my grandfather’s ears.
The pilot didn’t know what kind of reception he would get from my grandfather after the doctor had finished treating him. He worried that the pleasure my grandfather had expressed in the thrill of their first dive might have been replaced by annoyance at having been put through the rigors of a second dive without giving his express consent. The concern was unnecessary. My grandfather simply thanked him “for a very swell ride.”
“I liked the old boy from then on. So did most of the rest of the gang. They weren’t worried about him. He could take it.”
CHAPTER 3
Gallant Command
For five months, early in the Second World War, my grandfather commanded all land-based aircraft operations in the South Pacific, and he was serving in that capacity during the first two months, August through September 1942, of the battle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
Lasting from August 1942 to February 1943, the Guadalcanal campaign, in the words of historian Samuel Eliot Morison, was “the most bitterly contested in American history since the Campaign for Northern Virginia in the Civil War,” comprising “seven major naval engagements, at least ten pitched battles, and innumerable forays, bombardments and skirmishes.”
On August 7, in the first amphibious operation conducted by American forces since the Spanish-American War, the 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal to prevent the Japanese from using a nearly completed airfield for their land-based bombers. Simultaneously, three thousand Marines landed on nearby Tulagi Island to seize its harbor and the Japanese seaplane base there. Despite being harried by Japanese bombers, the landings were astonishingly successful. The Marines, encountering ineffective opposition on the ground, had secured all beachheads on the two islands as well as the air base on Guadalcanal by the evening of August 8. They renamed the captured base Henderson Field.