Faith of My Fathers (2 page)

I

Faith of our fathers, living still,

In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;

O how our hearts beat high with joy

Whenever we hear that glorious word!

Faith of our fathers, holy faith!

We will be true to thee till death.

—Frederick William Faber,

“Faith of Our Fathers”

         
CHAPTER
1
         

In War and Victory

I have a picture I prize of my grandfather and father, John Sidney McCain Senior and Junior, taken on the bridge of a submarine tender, the USS
Proteus,
in Tokyo Bay a few hours after the Second World War had ended. They had just finished meeting privately in one of the ship's small staterooms and were about to depart for separate destinations. They would never see each other again.

Despite the weariness that lined their faces, you can see they were relieved to be in each other's company again. My grandfather loved his children. And my father admired my grandfather above all others. My mother, to whom my father was devoted, had once asked him if he loved his father more than he loved her. He replied simply, “Yes, I do.”

On the day of their reunion, my father, a thirty-four-year-old submarine commander, and his crew had just brought a surrendered Japanese submarine into Tokyo Bay. My grandfather, whom Admiral Halsey once referred to as “not much more than my right arm,” had just relinquished command of Halsey's renowned fast carrier task force, and had attended the signing of the surrender aboard the USS
Missouri
that morning. He can be seen in a famous photograph of the occasion standing with his head bowed in the first rank of officers observing the ceremony.

My grandfather had not wanted to attend, and had requested permission to leave for home immediately upon learning of Japan's intention to capitulate.

“I don't give a damn about seeing the surrender,” my grandfather told Halsey. “I want to get the hell out of here.” To which Halsey replied, “Maybe you do, but you're not going. You were commanding this task force when the war ended, and I'm making sure that history gets it straight.” In his memoir, Halsey described my grandfather “cursing and sputtering” as he returned to his flagship.

To most observers, my grandfather had been as elated to hear of Japan's decision to surrender as had the next man. Upon hearing the announcement, he ordered the doctor on his flagship to break out the medicinal brandy and passed cups around to all takers. He was a jocular man, and his humor could at times be wicked. He told a friend, as they prepared for the surrender ceremony, “If you see MacArthur's hands shaking as he reads the surrender documents it won't be emotion. It will be from too many of those mestiza girls in the Philippines.”

In the days immediately following the announcement that Emperor Hirohito had agreed to surrender, a few of the emperor's pilots had either not received or not believed the message. Occasionally, a few Japanese planes would mount attacks on the ships of my grandfather's task force. He directed his fighter pilots to shoot down any approaching enemy planes. “But do it in a friendly sort of way,” he added.

Some of his closest aides sensed that there was something wrong with the old man. His operations officer, Commander John Thach, a very talented officer whom my grandfather relied on to an extraordinary extent, was concerned about his health. Thach went to my grandfather's cabin and asked him if he was ill. In an account of the exchange he gave many years later, Thach recalled my grandfather's answer: “Well, this surrender has come as kind of a shock to all of us. I feel lost. I don't know what to do. I know how to fight, but now I don't know whether I know how to relax or not. I'm in an awful letdown.”

Once on board the
Missouri,
however, he was entirely at ease. Rushing about the deck of the battleship, hailing his friends and reveling in the moment, he was the most animated figure at the ceremony. He announced to Admiral Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific, that he had invented three new cocktails, the July, the Gill, and the Zeke, each one named for a type of Japanese plane his task force had fought during the war's last hard months. “Each time you drink one you can say ‘Splash one July' or ‘Splash one Zeke,'” he explained.

After the surrender, Halsey reports, my grandfather was grateful for having been ordered to join the others on the
Missouri.
“Thank God you made me stay, Bill. You had better sense than I did.”

Immediately after father and son parted company that day, my grandfather left for his home in Coronado, California. Before he left, he issued his last dispatch to the men under his command.

I am glad and proud to have fought through my last year of active service with the renowned fast carriers. War and victory have forged a lasting bond among us. If you are as fortunate in peace as you have been victorious in war, I am now talking to 110,000 prospective millionaires. Goodbye, good luck, and may God be with you.

McCain

He arrived home four days later. My grandmother, Katherine Vaulx McCain, arranged for a homecoming party the next day attended by neighbors and the families of Navy friends who had yet to return from the war. Standing in his crowded living room, my grandfather was pressed for details of the surrender ceremony, and some of the wives present whose husbands were POWs begged him for information about when they could expect their husbands' return. He responded to their inquiries courteously, seemingly content, as always, to be the center of attention.

Some of the guests remembered having observed that my grandfather seemed something less than his normally ebullient self; a little tired from his journey, they had thought, and worn out from the rigors of the war.

In the middle of the celebration my grandfather turned to my grandmother, announced that he felt ill, and then collapsed. A physician attending the party knelt down to feel for the admiral's pulse. Finding none, he looked up at my grandmother and said, “Kate, he's dead.”

He was sixty-one years old. He had fought his war and died. His Navy physician attributed his fatal heart attack to “complete fatigue resulting from the strain of the last months of combat.” Halsey's chief of staff, Admiral Robert Carney, believed he had suffered an earlier heart attack at sea and had managed to keep it hidden. According to Carney, the admiral “knew his number was up, but he wouldn't lie down and die until he got home.”

My grandfather had made his way to the
Proteus
to join my father immediately after the surrender ceremony. During a luncheon aboard ship hosted by the commander of U.S. submarines in the Pacific, father and son retreated to a small stateroom for a private conversation. In an interview my father gave thirty years later for the Naval Institute's Oral History Project, he briefly described their last moment together. Nothing in my grandfather's manner gave my father reason to worry about the old man's health. “I knew him as well as anybody in the world, with the possible exception of my mother. He looked in fine health to me,” my father recalled. “And God knows his conversation was anything but indicative of a man who was sick. And two days later he died of a heart attack.”

Little else is known about their last conversation. To the best of my knowledge, my father never talked about it to anyone except the Naval Institute interviewer. And the only detail he offered him, besides the description of my grandfather's apparent well-being, was a remark my grandfather had made about how dying for your principles and country was a privilege.

His obituary ran on the front page of the
New York Times
as it did in many major metropolitan papers. My grandmother received condolences from the nation's most senior military and civilian commanders, including President Truman, General MacArthur, and Admirals Nimitz and Halsey. Navy Secretary Forrestal wrote her that “the entire Navy mourned.”

In the Naval Academy yearbook for 1906, the year my grandfather graduated, the editors chose quotations from the classics to describe each member of the class. For my grandfather, the choice was prophetic, a line from Milton: “That power which erring men call chance.”

He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery following a Washington funeral attended by Forrestal and the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Ernie King. Among his pallbearers was General Alexander Vandergrift, who had commanded the Marines on Guadalcanal, and Vice Admiral Aubrey Fitch, the Superintendent of the United States Naval Academy. He was awarded a fourth star posthumously.

My father, who had left for the States immediately upon receiving word of the admiral's death, arrived too late to pay his respects. My mother found him standing on the tarmac at San Diego when she returned from Washington. He was in the throes of deep grief, a grief that took years to subside. He told my mother he was relieved to have missed the funeral. “It would have killed me,” he explained.

There was, however, an event near the end of my grandfather's life that no one discussed. In none of the published accounts of my grandfather's death nor in any of the many tributes offered by his contemporaries was mention made of the incident that had cost my grandfather his command just one day before the war's end.

Less than three months earlier, he had been ordered by Nimitz to resume command of Task Force 38, which at that time constituted almost the entire Third Fleet as it provided air support to the American invasion of Okinawa. One week after he resumed command, my grandfather and Halsey received the first reports from search planes of a tropical storm south of Okinawa that was fast becoming a typhoon.

When the first reports of the June typhoon were received, the fleet meteorologists advised Halsey not to move the fleet. But Halsey, fearing that the typhoon would drive him westward and in range of Japanese planes based in China, ordered his task groups to sail southeast in an attempt to get around the storm. My grandfather was aboard his flagship, the
Shangri-La.
Puzzled by his instructions, he turned to his friend, a war correspondent for the Associated Press, Dick O'Malley, and said, “What the hell is Halsey doing, trying to intercept another typhoon?” His observation was a reference to Halsey's actions during a typhoon that had struck the fleet in December 1944, sinking two destroyers. According to John Thach, my grandfather had recommended a heading for the fleet that would have avoided the earlier storm, as had Admiral Nimitz. But Halsey had insisted on another course, a course that tragically failed to take his ships out of harm's way.

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.