by John McCain
A little over three months after my grandfather brought the crippled cruisers safely to port, Admiral Halsey decorated him with the Navy Cross. Had the enterprise turned out differently, my grandfather might have been relieved of his command.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf began on October 23, 1944, when two U.S. submarines patrolling waters off Palawan Island in the southeastern tip of the Philippine archipelago encountered elements of an enormous Japanese battleship force under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. Over the next three days, four separate battles would be fought pitting a Japanese carrier fleet and two battleship forces against elements of the U.S. Third and Seventh fleets. When the last battle ended, the Japanese Navy was finished as an effective fighting force for the remainder of the war, but not before the United States Navy had nearly suffered a defeat of catastrophic dimensions.
On October 20, under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur, the Sixth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, had staged amphibious landings on the beaches of Leyte Island in the middle of the archipelago, escorted and protected by the Seventh Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid. The operation was hugely successful. By the end of the day, seventy to eighty thousand troops were ashore.
Halsey’s Third Fleet, under the overall command of Admiral Nimitz, was ordered to cover and support the Seventh Fleet. Nimitz had added a clause to Halsey’s orders instructing his subordinate to seize an opportunity to destroy a major portion of the Japanese fleet if one arose in the course of the battle, giving Halsey, who had dreamed all his life of commanding an epic battle at sea, leave to fulfill his lifelong ambition. Nimitz’s failure to place both U.S. fleets under one naval command inevitably led to poor communications between the two fleets. When Halsey perceived an opportunity to take offensive action against the enemy and seized it, the dual command structure nearly resulted in strategic disaster.
On October 22, Halsey ordered my grandfather’s task group, the strongest carrier force in his fleet, to detach from the fleet and sail 660 miles to Ulithi Island to refuel. Even after the two American submarines discovered Kurita’s force in the Palawan Passage and destroyed three of its heavy cruisers, Halsey still saw no reason to order my grandfather to return. It was a decision that both Halsey and my grandfather would soon regret.
The Japanese knew that the loss of the Philippines would destroy any hope that Japan could yet prevail against its vastly superior enemy. They devised a desperate gamble to destroy the invading American force, risking virtually all that remained of the Japanese Navy in the attempt. A Northern Force with four carriers serving as a decoy was ordered to entice the offensive-minded Halsey into giving chase, leaving the Seventh Fleet exposed in Leyte Gulf.
Meanwhile, two Japanese battleship forces, Kurita’s powerful Center Force and a Southern Force, sailed for the central Philippines. The Southern Force would enter south of Leyte through the Surigao Strait. If Halsey fell for the decoy and left his station off the San Bernardino Strait, Kurita’s Center Force would force the unprotected strait from the north, sail down the coast of Samar Island, converge with the Southern Force, and destroy the unsupported American invasion fleet.
On the 23rd, Third Fleet aircraft located the Center Force, and Halsey prepared to do battle. The next day, he recalled my grandfather, but it was too late for him to get within range of the enemy, and Halsey was deprived of 40 percent of his air strength as he fought what is known as the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea.
In Leyte Gulf, Admiral Kinkaid was readying his Seventh Fleet to do battle with the small Japanese Southern Force. Lacking the big carriers of the Third Fleet, the Seventh Fleet had only eighteen small, unarmored escort carriers to provide airpower with lightly armed planes and poorly trained pilots. Nevertheless, Kinkaid knew his fleet, 738 ships in all, was more than a match for the enemy force approaching from the south.
The Japanese Northern Force had gone undetected until seventy-six of its aircraft attacked one of Halsey’s carrier groups late in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea. Now aware that Japanese carriers were in the area, Halsey’s blood was up; he believed that “an opportunity to destroy a major portion of the enemy fleet” was at hand. He broke off the attack on Kurita’s force and ordered all of his carrier groups north to seek and annihilate Ozawa’s carriers. The decoy had succeeded. Halsey left the Seventh Fleet unguarded, vulnerable to and unaware of the threat approaching from the north.
Halsey had not even bothered to inform Kinkaid that he had left the strait. Before he ordered his forces north, he had signaled Nimitz that he intended to form three groups of his fast battleships into a new, powerful surface task force, Task Force 34. Kinkaid had intercepted the signal and assumed that the “three groups” were carrier groups that would be left behind to guard the strait. In fact, Halsey’s decision to attack the decoy force had preempted the formation of Task Force 34, and all the ships that would have constituted it were now steaming away from the strait.
As Kinkaid had expected, the Seventh Fleet’s cruisers, destroyers, and battleships quickly and effectively destroyed the Japanese Southern Force. But a few minutes after the last shots were fired, at dawn on October 25, Kurita’s ships began shelling one of the Seventh Fleet’s three escort carrier groups operating just north of the entrance to Leyte Gulf. This group, known by its radio call sign, “Taffy Three,” was seriously overmatched by the powerful enemy force now descending upon it. Nevertheless, the unit fought valiantly, losing one carrier, two destroyers, and one destroyer escort in the ensuing Battle of Samar Island.
As he raced toward the Northern Force, Halsey finally formed Task Force 34, and ordered the battleships to steam ahead of the carriers. Third Fleet aircraft began attacking the Japanese carriers at eight o’clock on the morning of the 25th, and continued until evening.
When the second strike of the day was under way, Halsey received an urgent message from Kinkaid informing him that the Seventh Fleet’s small carriers were under attack off Samar Island by a superior enemy force and pleading for assistance from Halsey’s carriers. Halsey ignored the message and continued north. He received several successive messages from Kinkaid, the last warning that Kinkaid’s battleships were running out of ammunition. At nine-thirty, Halsey signaled back, informing Kinkaid that my grandfather’s task group was on the way.
At ten o’clock, Halsey received a message from Admiral Nimitz: WHERE IS, REPEAT, WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR? THE WORLD WONDERS. The message infuriated Halsey, who interpreted the sentence “The world wonders” as an insulting rebuke. He threw his cap to the deck after reading it.
Clearly, Nimitz was alarmed about the Seventh Fleet’s precarious situation and wanted Halsey’s battleships to defend the battered escort carrier units off Samar Island and prevent the enemy from entering Leyte Gulf. The success of the invasion hung in the balance. But the message to Halsey had been a mistake. The last three words had been included as padding to confuse enemy decoders. The signal clerk who received the message before it was handed to Halsey should have deleted them. The irate Halsey considered his response for an hour before signaling Nimitz, I HAVE SENT MCCAIN.
My grandfather was already on the way before Halsey recalled him to the battle. He had intercepted Kinkaid’s messages to Halsey and had made the decision to render whatever assistance he could to the outgunned escort carriers without waiting for orders from the fleet commander. He turned his task group around and raced downwind at a speed of thirty knots toward the battle.
At the time, he had two squadrons of dive-bombers in the air that had not returned from scouting patrols. Carriers have to turn into the wind before aircraft can land on them. In order not to slow down the entire task group while the returning scouts landed, he ordered his carriers to race ahead of the rest of the task group at a top speed of thirty-three knots. When six or more of their planes returned they approached upwind to begin their landing patterns. The carriers whipped around into the wind and took them aboard. Once the planes landed,
the carriers turned sharply downwind again and resumed their thirty-three knots until the next planes returned, and the maneuver was repeated. Thus, the carriers were able to take on their planes without impeding the forward movement of the entire task group, which maintained an overall speed of thirty knots. It was a very difficult maneuver that had never been attempted before, nor since to the best of my knowledge. It required split-second timing on the part of the carrier skippers and the returning pilots, and steel nerves on the part of the commander who ordered its execution.
Halsey had also dispatched his battleships and one of his carrier groups to join the fight. But Halsey’s response had come too late to inflict much additional damage on the main Japanese force.
My grandfather was now steaming toward the battle, but he was still nearly 350 miles to the east. He went to his cabin for a few minutes to consider the situation and decide what to do. A short time later, at ten-thirty, he emerged from his cabin, gave the order for his carriers to “turn into the wind,” and launched his aircraft. He knew that at such a distance from their targets, they would burn all their fuel reaching the battle and would have to land on other carriers or in the Philippines if they didn’t run out of fuel while striking the enemy force. It was a daring move, and one of the longest-range carrier strikes of the Pacific war.
By the time Task Force 34 and the accompanying carriers arrived off Samar Island, Kurita had broken off his attack and turned north, fearing that he faced a much larger fleet than the greatly outnumbered Taffy Three. At the time of his withdrawal, his ships were within forty miles of the invasion force. He initially intended to reassemble his disorganized force and resume the attack on Leyte Gulf. But the Japanese commander suddenly lost his nerve and made for the San Bernardino Strait. The commander of Taffy Three, Vice Admiral Clifton Sprague, who had commanded his ships with courage and resourcefulness during the fierce attack, credited the battle’s abrupt end to divine intervention.
John Thach credited Kurita’s unexpected retreat to intelligence the Japanese commander had received that warned him of the approaching strike from my grandfather’s planes. Thach had read an interview Kurita had given after the war. The old admiral explained his decision to withdraw from the battle by recalling information he had received of a large air strike coming from an unknown location. Kurita’s chief of staff gave the same explanation for the force’s withdrawal.
According to Thach, until Kurita received the intelligence that precipitated his decision to run, he “thought the whole task force was up there, and he didn’t know about McCain. As a matter of fact, neither did Halsey and Mitscher know what McCain was doing at the time.”
Kurita’s forces escaped through the strait, despite being harried by my grandfather’s planes. In several accounts of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, historians praised my grandfather for understanding the predicament confronting Kinkaid’s carriers and the stakes at risk in the battle better than had the other commanders of Task Force 38. They also judged him a much better tactician than his old friend and commander, Halsey.
Halsey had glimpsed the prospect of a moment of glory and hurried recklessly toward it. He had not fought at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, and he was hell-bent to seize this opportunity to destroy the last of the enemy’s once mighty carrier force. In fact, he managed to sink four carriers and one destroyer. But his disregard for the Seventh Fleet’s situation had jeopardized the entire invasion and had allowed the main Japanese battleship force to escape.
My grandfather, grasping the size of the threat that Halsey had so badly underestimated, had risked his planes in a desperate attempt to fill the gap left by Halsey’s run for glory.
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 coul
d 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.”