John McCain - Faith of My Fathers

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.”

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.”