by John McCain
Whatever relief American commanders may have felt over the initial success of the operation was soon forgotten in the disaster that occurred forty hours after the first Marines had waded ashore. Shortly after midnight on August 9, a task group from the Japanese Eighth Fleet surprised the divided Allied naval force protecting the landings. The ensuing Battle of Savo Island, named for a small volcanic island several miles off Guadalcanal, ended in what Morison accurately termed “the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States Navy in a fair fight.” By the time the Japanese admiral in command of the enemy force called off the attack for fear of being counterattacked by American carrier planes, his ships had sunk four heavy cruisers and one destroyer, killing 1,270 men.
Fortunately, the Japanese, having gained by their victory command of the sea, failed to land adequate reinforcements on the islands. Thus the Allied defeat was not a decisive event in the battle for the Solomon Islands. It was, however, a bloody defeat, giving a name to the water between Savo and Guadalcanal islands—Ironbottom Sound. Worse, the surviving Allied ships that had been forced from the area had not completed off-loading the landing force’s food and arms. Sixteen thousand Marines were left stranded with only half their weapons and supplies on the densely forested, mountainous island. They were forced to live on reduced rations and whatever rice they could scrounge. Consideration was given to withdrawing them, but the value of the easily taken Henderson Field, with sufficient space and level ground for large bombers and poorly defended by a small Japanese garrison, motivated Allied commanders to continue the campaign.
On August 15, my grandfather ordered the first Marine Corps planes to land at Henderson. Supplies and reinforcements arrived the same day by sea. On August 18, the Japanese landed a small, inadequate force of a thousand men. The Marines destroyed them two days later. More Japanese reinforcements were under way, arriving almost nightly. By mid-September, six thousand Japanese were ashore, still not a sufficient number to dislodge the Marines, but battles raged daily throughout most of the month. In the Battle of Bloody Ridge a thousand Japanese were killed at a cost of forty Marines. Nevertheless, the Japanese managed to continue reinforcing their garrison, and the most serious land battles for Guadalcanal would not begin until October, after my grandfather had been ordered to Washington by President Roosevelt to serve as Chief of the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations.
In the early weeks of the campaign, Japanese planes and ships made up for lack of progress on the ground by pounding Guadalcanal daily with shells and bombs. My grandfather rushed planes, fuel, and ammunition to the island and organized air strikes against the enemy. Gasoline was in terribly short supply on the island, and extraordinary heroics were performed by the skippers and crews of seaplane tenders, their ships overloaded with drums of fuel, who sailed through exceedingly dangerous waters and under skies thick with enemy planes to carry gasoline to Guadalcanal. He spoke often and gratefully of the courage of the crews that brought gasoline to his dry planes at Henderson.
He also became emotional, often crying, when he recalled the faces and spirit of the Marines and pilots defending the airfield in those exhausting, dangerous early weeks of the campaign. He spoke of his young pilots who “took a beating unequaled in the annals of war. Without relief, they fought day after day, night after night, for weeks.”
In September he twice flew to Guadalcanal in a B-17, leading large contingents of fighter planes to Henderson, “slipping them in at dusk when the Japs couldn’t see us.” He stayed ashore, under fierce bombing from Japanese aircraft.
He later told one of his air commanders that the pilots he met there had resigned themselves to die for their country and had shaken his hand with the attitude of men “taking a last farewell.” For the rest of the war, the loss of a single pilot would distress him terribly. I suspect every casualty report he read must have summoned up the faces of those fatalistic pilots on Guadalcanal who were ready to die at his command.
There was one story from his experiences on Guadalcanal that he always delighted to tell. One night after he had gone to sleep, a wave of Zeros attacked, and a Marine lieutenant escorted him to a trench, where he took cover with a crowd of tired Marines. One sergeant, particularly weary of this nightly ritual, expressed his displeasure by shouting a string of profanities over the noise of the attacking planes. The lieutenant yelled at him, “Pipe down! We’ve got an admiral in here.” The offending Marine paused for a moment and then loudly sighed, “I’ll be good and almighty damned,” causing the admiral in question to laugh heartily, grateful to be so amused at a moment of peril.
My grandfather was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his leadership during the early days of the Solomon Islands campaign. The citation commended his “courageous initiative,” “judicious foresight,” and “inspiring devotion to duty.”
As Chief of the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics, he made one last visit to Guadalcanal in January 1943. Halsey, Nimitz, and my grandfather flew to Guadalcanal together to inspect the airfield and the condition of the men still fighting what remained of the enemy garrison.
Bull Halsey had assumed command of the South Pacific fleet in October. After a series of legendary sea battles during which Halsey had secured his reputation as a daring and determined commander, culminating in the Battle of Guadalcanal from November 12 to the 15th, Japanese hopes of retaking the island became futile. Over a period of six days beginning on October 20, significantly reinforced Japanese troops were defeated in fierce jungle fighting by the now battle-hardened Marine defenders. Their grim, bloody battles ensured Guadalcanal’s vaunted place in American military lore. By the middle of November, Japan’s defeats on land and sea had guaranteed that the island would remain in American hands. Yet they fought on for nearly three more months.
My grandfather, returning to the island in the last days of the campaign, was impressed by what he found, relieved to see fit, vigorous, well-supplied, and confident Marines mopping up the last of the enemy. The valiant 1st Marine Division had by this time been relieved by fresh reinforcements. And he went to sleep that night in a small hut near the airfield, happy and confident that the long, difficult struggle was nearly won.
Halsey’s biographer, E. B. Potter, wrote: “There were few wiser or more competent officers in the navy than Slew McCain, but whenever his name came up, somebody had a ridiculous story to tell about him—and many of the stories were true.” Potter was right. Even today, I receive letters from men who served with my grandfather and want to share an anecdote about him. Among my favorites is the story of his last night on Guadalcanal.
After he, Halsey, and Nimitz had retired for the night, at about ten-thirty, Japanese bombers attacked. The admirals had just survived an attack the day before, while they were conferring at the naval base on Espíritu Santo. With the evening attack at Henderson, it was clear that Japanese intelligence had learned of the presence of three admirals in the field, and that they were the target of the attack. Halsey and my grandfather left their huts as the first bombs struck, each diving for cover into a different trench. As legend has it, my grandfather’s trench was a latrine ditch—the latrine had been moved that morning, but the trench had not yet been filled in with dirt. My grandfather is said to have spent the rest of the raid there shivering in foul conditions and the mosquito-infested night air.
As the Chief of the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics, he coordinated the design, procurement, and maintenance of naval aircraft. Coming late to naval aviation made him suspect in the eyes of career aviators, who would have preferred one of their own in command. But his success at Guadalcanal convinced Roosevelt and Forrestal that he was the right man for the job. He would rather have stayed in the Pacific. Administrative work did not suit his restless nature. A subordinate remarked that he was “an excellent fighter, but a poor planner and administrator.” Whenever he could, he avoided the interminable meetings of the various production boards he served on, Allied conferences, and other plannin
g discussions, designating a subordinate to attend in his place. He was, it was said, a frequent figure at the Army-Navy Club, where he indulged his love of pinochle. But if deskwork and its attendant bureaucracies bored him, he was, nevertheless, a man who took pride in accomplishing the objective of his mission. He showed, if not great attention to detail, his usual abundant energy in pursuit of his chief objective, to procure the world’s greatest naval air force.
His experiences at Guadalcanal had taught him what the Navy needed in the Pacific. Too few planes and too few men to fly them had forced the pilots under his command to fly constantly, and they had been reduced to a state of near lifelessness by the strain. When he arrived in Washington, he declared, “I want enough planes for the United States Navy and enough pilots to fly them.” He wanted two crews for every plane in the Navy. And he charged ahead procuring aircraft and personnel at a lightning pace. One observer likened him to a “little fighter plane trying to get at the enemy, darting and sweeping through the rambling Navy building.”
He ordered the production of Wildcats and Avengers accelerated, confident of the planes’ value as indispensable new instruments of war. “[They] prevented the invasion of Australia. They stopped the enemy at Guadalcanal and destroyed his airplanes at a ratio of several to one. They helped to drive him off at Midway and thus prevented the invasion of the Hawaiian Islands.” My grandfather knew how to fight the Japanese, and he outfitted the Navy for the task.
An approving Roosevelt appointed him to a newly created post, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air. He was the Navy’s air boss, responsible for every aspect, human and material, of naval aviation (often catching hell from a quarrelsome Halsey for his personnel decisions). He served in that command until the pace of war in the Pacific accelerated as the war in Europe approached its end.
In August 1944, he returned to the Pacific to temporarily command Task Group 38.1, one of the fast carrier groups in the Third Fleet’s powerful Task Force 38, in preparation for assuming command of the entire task force a few months later. This was the command my grandfather had aspired to above all others; the moment, I suspect, he had waited for all his life. An obituary writer for the New York Herald Tribune wrote of my grandfather’s return to the Pacific, “In September, 1944, a minor newspaper item revealed that Admiral McCain was off to sea again. The assignment was undisclosed, but the Japanese, and then America, had not long to wait before they knew.”
He was a born leader, fit for command not because of an imposing physical presence, but because he possessed an easy, natural authority with his men, whom he seemed to understand as if he had known them all their lives. Dick O’Malley, a veteran war correspondent, considered him one of the finest, most effective leaders in the Pacific Theater. With his reporter’s practiced eye for character details, Dick was struck by the unaffected qualities that made my grandfather such a gifted commander. “Admiral John S. McCain was a very quiet-spoken man but when he gave an order in his soft, clear voice, there was never any doubt there was command in it. I always remember that Admiral McCain seemed to get his orders carried out more promptly than others and there was a puzzling feeling that those doing his bidding didn’t feel pushed by authority so much as persuaded by reason…. I remember a day when we had a hell of a time with both kamikazes and land-based fighter planes. We were on the bridge after it was over and he smiled at a young lieutenant. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I’m putting you in for a citation. It was a very busy day.’ That was his style: relaxed, muted and soft-voiced, but when you heard it, it made your heart beat a little faster.”
He had been in command of the task group for barely two months when the long-awaited campaign to liberate the Philippine Islands began, leading to the largest naval battle of World War II, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. A week before the campaign began, my grandfather would prove himself as brave and resolute a fighter as any of his illustrious forebears had been. And although circumstances kept him away from most of the action during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, before the guns were silent he would demonstrate again that like his old friend Halsey, he was a daring and resourceful commander, and perhaps the better tactician of the two.
In preparation for the assault, my grandfather’s fast carriers launched strikes against Japanese airfields on Formosa on October 12. Their mission was to destroy the enemy’s airpower available to defend against an attack on the Philippines. This they accomplished quite successfully, although they met with stiff resistance. Over the next two days, 520 Japanese planes were destroyed and considerable damage was inflicted on Japanese installations ashore.
The Japanese did manage a counterstrike, fiercely attacking the ships of Task Group 38.1. On October 13, an enemy torpedo plane penetrated the task group’s defense screen of fighter planes and hit the cruiser Canberra. The torpedo hit flooded the Canberra’s engine rooms, rendering her dead in the water. Rather than sink the wounded cruiser, my grandfather ordered another cruiser, the Wichita, to take her in tow while two destroyers circled them. He then assembled a covering force composed of destroyers and cruisers from three task groups to protect the Canberra as she was towed to port.
The next day and night, Japanese planes attacked in large numbers. The cruiser Houston was torpedoed. Badly damaged, without power, and listing seven degrees to starboard, the cruiser was in dire straits. The Houston’s skipper believed she was breaking up, and many of her crew jumped overboard. My grandfather told him to abandon ship, and ordered several destroyers to help rescue her crew. He gave orders to sink the cruiser once her crew was safe, but when he received word that her skipper thought she could be salvaged he ordered the cruiser Boston to tow the crippled Houston to safety.
Admiral Mitscher commanded the task force at the time. He had ordered my grandfather to save the cruisers if he could. In Commander Thach’s words, “Mitscher took the other task groups and got the hell out of there, leaving McCain with Task Group 38.1 alone to do the job.”
Using most of the entire task group as a protective screen, my grandfather had his ships steam ahead of the “crippled division,” which included the two damaged cruisers and their cruiser and destroyer escorts. They endured repeated fierce attack from enemy sorties, but ships’ guns and fighters from two of the task group’s light carriers managed to destroy most of the attackers. My grandfather wrote in his battle action report that until seven o’clock that evening “there were almost always bandits overhead.” All the while, planes from his heavy carriers continued to strike their targets on Formosa.
On the 15th, enemy planes again attacked, and one managed to hit the Houston with another torpedo. My grandfather had risked much to salvage the cruisers. It had taken almost eight hours to get the two ships under tow, and once that was accomplished the task group had been able to make a top speed of only two or three knots as it ran a gauntlet of Japanese air attacks. Wave after wave of Japanese planes were determined to make my grandfather’s decision to save the ships cost him dearly. Had they succeeded in finishing off either of the two cruisers, or worse, had they sunk any of his other ships, the decision to save the ships would have been regarded as a terribly costly mistake.
Battle action reports, with their dry, matter-of-fact recitation of successive events, portray little of the intense anxiety my grandfather must have felt during those five October days. An action of this complexity requires the commander to make hundreds of instant decisions, anticipating the extent and location of enemy assaults, positioning his ships accordingly, evaluating reports from anxious subordinates, and answering their urgent requests for instructions. Whatever strain he felt throughout this arduous battle was not apparent in my grandfather’s report.
In one sentence he notes a second hit on the Houston and the damage it inflicted. In the sentence below he reports “little activity on 17 October, routine Combat Air and anti-submarine patrols being maintained.” In the next sentence he signals the success of his venture and the relief he must have experienced by reporting simply, “At the
end of the day, Task Group 38.1 turned to course 250, and headed back toward the Philippines on a high speed run at 25 knots.”
The author of a book on the fast carrier battles in the Pacific disparaged my grandfather, dismissing him as nothing more than a deputy to Halsey who was never given tactical command of his task force. Furthermore, the author alleged that my grandfather had relied completely on John Thach for tactical innovations. My grandfather did give enormous responsibilities to his operations officer and had always taken care to credit Thach with many of the task force’s innovations. When he hired Thach for the job, having never met him prior to that, Thach had asked him why he had selected him. “I’ve heard you’re not a yes man,” my grandfather answered, “and I don’t want any yes man on my staff.”
Thach, who admired my grandfather greatly, strongly disputed the author’s harsh criticism and insisted that “he had command all the time.”
He was a brave man, and he commanded with courage. Dick O’Malley, who observed him closely in the last, strenuous days of his command, said, “There wasn’t anything that could put the wind up in him.” In a letter Dick wrote to me, he recalled my grandfather’s courage under fire. “One day a kamikaze came out of the sun heading either for us or the Essex, which was close behind. [McCain] just stood leaning on the rail, watching. ‘They’ll get him with those five-inchers,’ he said calmly. They did.”