Faith of My Fathers (6 page)

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.”

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.