by John McCain
My parents kept a house on Capitol Hill, where they entertained leading political and military figures. My mother’s charm proved as effective with politicians as it was with naval officers. The political relationships my parents forged during this period contributed significantly to my father’s future success. Among their friends was Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Forces Committee. At my father’s invitation, he ate his breakfast, prepared by my mother, at my parents’ home on many if not most mornings when Congress was in session.
My father was not, however, a political admiral—a term of derision accorded to successful officers whose records lacked combat experiences comparable to those of the war fighters who disapproved of them. Moreover, my father, who surely valued the patronage of civilian commanders as necessary to his single-minded pursuit of four stars, nevertheless harbored a little of the professional military man’s dislike for the sail-trimming and obfuscation of politics.
He was, as his father had been, a man of strong views who spoke his mind bluntly. This is as risky a habit in Navy politics as it is in civilian politics, and it often caused him trouble. Both McCain Senior and Junior believed war to be a ruthless endeavor, the purpose of which was to annihilate your enemy. A wise combat commander keeps a wary respect for his enemy’s abilities, but neither my father nor my grandfather let his prudence temper his contempt for his country’s enemies.
My grandfather’s frequent insulting references to the personal qualities of the Japanese enemy were in accord with the conventions of the time, although when I read them today I wince at their racist overtones. I don’t believe they were intended as racist screeds. But war, which occasions much heroism and nobility, also has its corruptions. That’s what makes it so terrible, a thing worth avoiding if possible.
My grandfather, as combatants often do, needed to work up a powerful hate for his enemy. He once recommended of the Japanese “killing them all—painfully.” Hate is an understandable reaction to the losses and atrocities suffered at the hands of the enemy. But hate also sustains the fighter in his devotion to the complete destruction of his enemy and helps to overcome the virtuous human impulse to recoil in disgust from what must be done by your hand.
My father rose to high command when communism had replaced fascism as the dominant threat to American security. He hated it fiercely and dedicated himself to its annihilation. He believed that we were locked inescapably in a life-and-death struggle with the Soviets. One side or the other would ultimately win total victory, and seapower would prove critical to the outcome. He was outspoken on the subject.
When he attained commands that required diplomatic skills, his candor occasionally lacked the rhetorical courtesies that attended the first attempts at détente. This often caused anxiety in the State Department, prompting complaints in cable traffic about Admiral McCain’s indiscretion. It concerned some of his civilian and military commanders in the Pentagon as well, but it won him both admirers and detractors, despite the prominent antiwar sentiment in 1960s America. I imagine it also fortified that sense of himself that, as a boy, he derived from flouting conventions. Addressing the Naval Academy Class of 1970, he commented on the popular antiwar slogan “Make love, not war” that naval officers “were men enough to do both.”
Few successful naval officers crest the heights of command without making enemies as well as friends along the way. My grandfather and father had their detractors in the Navy, some of whom may have disliked their highly personalized style of leadership, others their grasping ambition. But they were well respected by most of their fellow officers as resourceful, resilient, and brave commanders.
It was, however, the regard in which they were held by the enlisted men who served under them that gave them the greatest satisfaction. They both had great empathy for the ranks and went out of their way to show it.
An aide to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, once recounted many years later an incident that typified my father’s concern for his sailors. My father, who was Zumwalt’s boss at the time, was in Vietnam on one of his regular visits to the field. Zumwalt decided to host a dinner for my father and several other senior American officials and ordered his young aide to arrange it. During the dinner, a Navy steward who was serving my father tipped a platter of roast beef au jus, and the juice spilled onto my father’s head and shirt. “I got up in great embarrassment,” the aide remembered, “to try to help Admiral McCain.” But the admiral politely refused the young man’s assistance as well as his offer of a clean shirt. “If I use your shirt, you’ll just frame it,” my father joked, “and tell everybody that this is a four-star admiral’s shirt that you’ve been wearing. I can wear my own.”
The next morning, as my father was preparing to leave the country, he called Admiral Zumwalt to instruct him not to punish the steward. “That was an accident last night and absolutely no fault of his. I know you won’t let anything happen, but I just wanted to affirm my intent in the matter.” The aide, who monitored Zumwalt’s calls, never forgot the concern my father showed that morning for the welfare of a worried Navy steward. “It takes a very large man,” he observed, “to remember something that small at six-thirty the next morning and to make sure that people didn’t overreact. I was impressed.”
To some of his most senior subordinates, my father could be a difficult and demanding boss. He kept his own counsel and would sometimes leave his subordinates in the dark about matters that directly concerned them. A few of them felt, perhaps with cause, that he did not treat them fairly. But his closest aides, men who worked with him and for him more than once during his career, loved him. And he was almost universally revered by those whose rank was the farthest beneath his own. They knew he held them in high esteem, and they returned the compliment.
To this day, several times a year I receive letters from men who once served in the ranks under my father’s or grandfather’s command. Some are from aides, who closely observed them for long periods of time under conditions of great stress. Others are from men who write to tell me of an occasion when my father or grandfather had boarded a ship commanded by a subordinate, and had ignored the welcoming party of ship’s officers to walk immediately over to them and inquire after their welfare and that of their shipmates. I value these testimonials as much as my father and grandfather did. They are from men who at one time risked death at the order of the John McCain they wrote to praise.
CHAPTER 7
The Gunnel
The day the Japanese sank the fleet in Pearl Harbor is one of my earliest memories. I was five years old. We were living in New London at the time. It was a Sunday morning, and my entire family was—for reasons I cannot recall—standing in the front yard of our small house. A black car passing our house slowed down and the driver, a naval officer, rolled down his window and shouted, “Jack, the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor.” My father left for the base immediately. I saw very little of him for the next four years.
He commanded three submarines during the war. The first command he held just briefly before being ordered on his first combat patrol. The second, the USS Gunnel, served as a reconnaissance and beacon ship for Operation Torch, the American invasion of North Africa. The Gunnel was ordered to leave New London at midnight on October 18 and proceed to waters off Fedala, French Morocco, about fifteen miles north of Casablanca, arriving there five days in advance of the invasion. Under strict orders to remain undetected at all costs, the Gunnel was to make landfall submerged, a dangerous and exacting maneuver, and, once there, to reconnoiter and photograph the beaches to determine the best landing sites.
By means of infrared searchlights invisible to the unaided eye, the Gunnel served as a lighthouse for the invading armada, keeping the ships on course for the landing beaches. An hour before midnight on November 7, the Gunnel’s signalman sighted the huge fleet cresting the horizon exactly on schedule. The Gunnel began flashing its designated signal, and throughout the night American ships took up their positions
off the Moroccan coast and lowered their landing craft.
At dawn, the Gunnel’s secret mission complete, my father was ordered to fly the American flag, illuminate it with a spotlight, and proceed on the surface at top speed out of the congested area to safer waters near the Canary Islands.
Friendly fire, a misfortune of war today, was a much more frequent occurrence in earlier wars. In their first combat patrol, the crew of the Gunnel had a number of close calls when friendly ships and planes, in the fog of war, mistook my father’s submarine for a German sub, as American submarines in war zones were an unfamiliar sight in 1942.
On their passage out of the invasion area, my father allowed his crew to stand topside in shifts to watch the naval barrage directed at the fortifications at Fedala and Casablanca. As my father and some of his crew stood mesmerized, watching the spectacular assault, the booming guns of American battleships firing one-ton shells toward the outgunned enemy, an American P-40 plane dropped out of the clouds and began strafing the Gunnel. My father ordered the sub to dive, and he and the other men on deck scrambled down the conning-tower hatch.
Fifteen minutes later, the Gunnel surfaced and was signaled by an American seaplane. “Good morning, sallow face, I am here to protect you.” The plane escorted the Gunnel to safety for some time until it broke off to chase an approaching French plane away from the sub.
A little after noon that same day, an American bomber was spotted approaching the Gunnel. When the plane ignored the sub’s signal, dipped a wing, and turned as if preparing for a dive-bombing, the executive officer, standing on the Gunnel’s bridge, ordered a crash dive. The sub descended at a dangerously steep angle as the bomb exploded so close that some of the crew were struck by flying paint chips knocked loose from inside the sub’s conning tower by the force of the blast.
When the Gunnel reached its assigned station and patrolled waters off the Canaries, it was hunted for four days by German subs. On November 13, my father was ordered to make for a British submarine base at Roseneath, Scotland. En route three days later, the Gunnel was spotted and chased by a U-boat. Later that same day, one of the Gunnel’s four main engines broke down. Over the next nine days, the three remaining main engines stopped working.
When the last of its four engines gave out, the Gunnel was still a thousand miles from Scotland and sailing in extremely hazardous waters infested with German subs and patrolled by German aircraft. My father ordered his engineers to convert the auxiliary engine, normally used to power the sub’s lights and air-conditioning, for propulsion.
Under full power, the Gunnel could make twenty knots on the surface and nine knots submerged. Powered by its auxiliary engine, the sub could make only five knots at best as it limped slowly toward Scotland, submerged by day and on the surface by night.
My father radioed his condition to naval authorities, and the Gunnel was redirected to a closer naval base, at Falmouth in southern England. The British offered to send an escort or a tug to tow the Gunnel to safety. According to the Gunnel’s torpedo officer, “Both offers were promptly and unequivocally declined by Captain McCain as he chomped down hard on his cigar.”
Were the overworked auxiliary engine to break down, the Gunnel would be dead in the water. Use of the sub’s lighting and fans was reduced to bare minimum. One of the machinist’s mates placed a small statue of Buddha in front of the small engine and ordered passing crewmen to bow respectfully.
On November 19, still a week’s voyage from Falmouth, my father sighted through the sub’s periscope several ships’ masts on the horizon. As three ships, antisubmarine escorts serving as a screen for an advancing convoy, drew closer, my father ordered battle stations. The Gunnel’s communications officer searched the ship recognition manuals but could find nothing that would identify the approaching ships as friendly.
At about three thousand yards, the three ships detected the Gunnel, and they advanced toward her. My father prepared his crew to fight. One of his officers recalls him declaring, “If those bastards drop depth charges we are going to give it to them.” But just before the fight commenced my father recognized a British ensign flying on the closest ship.
My father ordered a red smoke-signal rocket launched from an underwater tube. The lead British warship ordered my father to surface with the Gunnel’s torpedo tubes pointed away from the ships. When he did so, the Gunnel found itself in the center of a triangle with the guns of all three British ships pointing at it. One of the British commanding officers hailed my father through a megaphone and announced, “Good thing you fired that red smoke. We were about to blast you out of the water.”
Six days later, on Thanksgiving Day, the Gunnel reached Falmouth. After repairs, the sub proceeded to Roseneath. After further repairs, the Gunnel returned to the States, where it was outfitted in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for combat duty in the Pacific.
Upon completion of his first combat mission, the thirty-one-year-old submarine skipper was commended by the Atlantic Fleet Commander in Chief. “Commander John S. McCain, by extremely skillful and daring handling of his ship, performed special missions which contributed materially to the successful execution of an extremely difficult landing of a large expeditionary force on a strange and poorly charted coast.”
Although he had initially wanted to be an aviator, in later years my father would remark that his disqualification as a pilot had been a lucky twist of fate. He was proud to be a skipper in a service that was then and is now a select branch of the Navy. The submarine service places a high premium on the individual initiative of its commanders, especially in war. Long patrols, inconsistent communications with base command, battles often fought alone, fateful decisions left entirely to the skipper—the service suited my father’s personality completely. “It’s a unique life in submarines,” he gratefully recalled. “You’re on your own…completely detached from the world.”
He was a resourceful skipper, adept at devising imaginative improvements to his sub’s war-fighting capabilities. He worked out a formula for targeting torpedoes at unseen enemy ships while submerged. He did it by taking sound bearings of the other ship and comparing his sub’s course and speed to his estimate of the target’s speed, thereby deriving the enemy’s range and course. It was a remarkably accurate system, and my father credited a great many sunken enemy ships to its effectiveness.
He invented an electric firing device for the ship’s guns. Until he improved the firing mechanism, the firing pin of submarine guns was released by depressing a foot pedal on the gun mount. The gunner had to apply a considerable amount of pressure to the pedal to get it to release the pin and fire a shell. Often the exertion by the gunner threw his aim off. My father rigged up a handheld firing button. All the gunner had to do was press a button held in his right hand, enabling him to keep a steadier aim while firing.
The officers and crew of the Gunnel called him Captain Jack. In the words of his executive officer, and friend of many years, retired Rear Admiral Joe Vasey, the men of the USS Gunnel “would do anything for their skipper.”
My father made a point of knowing all about the personal lives of the men under his command. He daily wandered through the submarine’s compartments, greeting and joking with his subordinates. He paused here and there to have a cup of coffee with the men, and to have them bring him up to date on the details of their lives back home.
There were eight officers and seventy-two enlisted men on board the Gunnel. My father knew the first names of every one of them. He knew who was married and who was single; how many kids they had; whose wives were pregnant and whether they were hoping for a boy or a girl. He knew what sports they favored; what they had done for a living before the war; what they wanted to do when they returned home. He knew what scared them and what made them angry. After the war, when any one of them contacted him for assistance, he did all he could to provide it.
Admiral Vasey, who worked for my father again when he reached the pinnacle of his career as Commander in Chief, Pacific, ca
lls him “the greatest leader of men I have ever known.”
My father and a few of his officers returned to the Gunnel one morning much the worse for wear after a long, raucous night ashore in Freemantle, Australia. The Gunnel was to leave on combat patrol that day. As they boarded the sub, my father turned to his exec and said, “Joe, muster the crew. I want to talk to these guys.”
My father paced in front of the assembled crew, an unlit cigar protruding from the corner of his mouth, and exhorted them to martial glory. “Fellows, we’re going off to fight the goddam Japanese. We’re gonna find ’em and fight ’em wherever the hell they are. We’re gonna fight these bastards, and we’re gonna lick ’em. We’re not gonna let these Japs hide from us. We’ll fight ’em even if we have to go into their harbors to find them, and they’re gonna be goddam sorry we did, I’ll tell you that. Now, every man who wants to go with me, take one step forward, and anyone who doesn’t, stay right where you are.”
Laughing and roaring approval, every man of the Gunnel stepped forward and signaled his pride in following Captain Jack wherever he chose to lead him.
Many years later, in a commencement address he gave at the Naval Academy, he spoke of the all-important relationship between a skipper and the enlisted men under his command, the bluejackets, who were, he often said, the “backbone of the Navy.” “When you step aboard ship and stand in front of your first division of bluejackets,” he said, “they will evaluate you accurately and without delay. In fact, there is no more exacting method of determining an officer’s worth. Furthermore, you can’t fool bluejackets. They are quick to recognize the phony. If you lose the respect of these men, you are finished. You can never get it back.”
