by John McCain
My father never lost the respect of the men who sailed under his command. He taught them their duty, as they taught him his, and made them proud to carry it out. And he looked after them.
Heading for Fremantle, Australia, for fuel during one patrol, the Gunnel’s officer of the deck sighted a bomber overhead. Knowing it was either an American or Australian plane, the officer exchanged prescribed recognition signals with the bomber indicating they were friendly.
A few moments after the plane passed overhead, it turned and made a run on the Gunnel. My father was on the bridge. As the plane menacingly approached, my father gave the order to dive. As his ship submerged, the plane released two bombs, which fell close by, shaking the Gunnel violently.
A few hours later, the Gunnel reached port. After the Gunnel tied up to the dock, my father asked the officer of the deck if he was sure he had given the bomber the right recognition signal. The young officer replied that he had. Angrily, my father had Joe Vasey bring him the two largest ensigns on board, one of whom had been an intercollegiate heavyweight wrestling champion. “Men, I want you to go find the bastards who did this to us, and take care of them. You got that?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the two hulking ensigns shouted, and then took off at a brisk pace to execute their skipper’s order.
Some hours later, my father heard some kind of commotion on the dock and came up on deck to see what was happening. There he found the two ensigns he had ordered to avenge the Gunnel’s honor stumbling toward the ship, amid a crowd of Australian Army officers, all of whom were drunk, carrying beers in their hands and singing “Waltzing Matilda” loudly and off-key.
The two ensigns had apparently inquired of the Australians who were now escorting them back to ship where they might locate the offending bomber crew. Judging that the two men might come to more harm than good, the Australians pleaded ignorance about the crew’s whereabouts, but promised to look into the matter if the ensigns would join them for a drink. The ensigns decided they surely had enough time to suspend their search briefly for a quick beer, and a good many beers later they found themselves part of the roving, boisterous chorus that now stood in the gaze of the much-amused skipper of the Gunnel.
My father was never one to begrudge any man under his command a much-deserved respite from war, and he gladly wrote off the ensigns’ failure to carry out his orders to the greater good of improving Allied relations. No one laughed harder than he did at the drunken spectacle on the Fremantle dock. Long after the event, he would still joke with the wayward ensigns about how they had let their Australian brothers-in-arms get the better of them.
Patrolling the waters between Midway and Nagasaki on their second combat patrol, the crew of the Gunnel had their greatest success under my father’s command as well as their first encounter with Japanese depth charges, one of the most harrowing experiences in naval warfare.
In the early evening of June 18, while hunting on the surface in the East China Sea just south of the Korean peninsula, the Gunnel sighted the masks and smokestacks of seven large Japanese freighters and two smaller vessels. The smaller boats, one a fishing trawler and the other probably a small destroyer, were serving as escorts. The ships were making full speed and changing course by forty to sixty degrees every ten minutes. By plotting their base course, the Gunnel’s navigation officer determined that the convoy was heading for Shanghai.
Unable to close with the fast-moving convoy while his submarine was submerged and making a top speed of only nine knots, my father decided to surface and, traveling at seventeen knots, get ahead of the convoy during the night. Over the next several hours the Gunnel raced to cut off the Japanese ships. By midnight it had reached its intended patrol site but had lost sight of the convoy.
Around five-thirty the morning of the 19th, the sub’s radar picked up an enemy plane patrolling eight miles away. My father gave the order to submerge. When the Gunnel surfaced an hour later, the convoy was on the horizon, now steaming slowly. The Gunnel dove again and proceeded to close with the enemy at full speed, taking periscope observations every five minutes.
An hour and a half later, the Gunnel was within firing range of the freighters. My father fired three torpedoes from his bow tubes at the nearest ship, an old freighter of about eight thousand tons. A minute later, he fired three more from the bow at a second freighter. The first freighter was hit, and it sank within a few minutes while the Gunnel reached for the bottom.
At eighty feet the men of the Gunnel heard another torpedo explode. It had missed the second freighter but struck a third ship two thousand yards on the port side of the intended target. A moment later one of the convoy’s two escort ships dropped the first of seven depth charges, each one detonating closer than the preceding one.
Joe Vasey described what it was like to be depth-charged: “You usually first heard the click of the detonator through the hull. But the explosion was the worst. It was like being in a steel container with someone hitting a giant sledgehammer against it. It can shake the whole bloody sub.” Submarine crewmen prepared by bending their legs to absorb the impact. As Joe Vasey explained, many a submariner “had fractured legs from the shock of the deck plates and standing too rigidly.”
The Gunnel had submerged 150 feet when the last of the seven depth charges exploded. One of the escorts, probably the trawler, was directly overhead. It dropped a grapnel over the side to try to hook the sub, a favorite tactic of commercial fishing vessels that were pressed into war service. The grapnel’s chain dragged along the port side of the Gunnel, “rattling slowly and excruciatingly,” my father recorded in his log, adding that “the chains of Marley’s ghost sounded very much like that to old Scrooge.”
My father ordered the Gunnel to descend to a depth of three hundred feet. The sub ran at that depth for four hours. Twice my father heard the enemy escort pass directly overhead. After an hour had passed without hearing anything from the enemy ship that was searching, its depth charges ready, for the Gunnel, my father came up to periscope depth. He sighted a Japanese warship about three thousand yards to his starboard, and immediately submerged again to three hundred feet.
A large Japanese naval base was located at Sasebo, less than a hundred miles to the east of the Gunnel’s position. In response to the Gunnel’s attack on the convoy, three destroyers had been sent out of Sasebo to hunt down and destroy the American sub. The approaching ship was one of them.
During its deep dive, it was necessary for the Gunnel to allow some water to flood in, making the sub heavier and enabling it to remain submerged at such a great depth. The Gunnel ran in this heavy condition for several hours, while the three destroyers hunted the sub with their sonar. When they were close, my father and his crew could hear distinctly through the sub’s hull the destroyer’s sonar pinging incessantly. The air was growing foul and the crew’s nerves were strained to the breaking point. One of the Gunnel’s signalmen, Charles Napier, recalled fifty years later: “The Catholics were fingering their rosaries, other religious sailors were praying, and some were simply trying to figure how to get out of the situation.”
Around nine o’clock that night, the Gunnel, its batteries dangerously low and its air banks nearly depleted, surfaced. The weary and frightened crew gasped clean air for the first time in sixteen hours.
Water from a leak in the conning tower had flooded the pump room and grounded out an air compressor and the air-conditioning plant. Intending to run on the surface while the crew made repairs, my father took the sub close to the area where he had sunk the freighter.
It was a cloudless night with bright moonlight and calm seas. At nine-thirty, a lookout spotted one of the Japanese destroyers 5,800 yards away. My father put the destroyer astern of the sub and gave the order for battle stations. He ordered every man off the bridge except for the quartermaster and himself and told the crew to make ready two of the stern torpedo tubes. He ran the Gunnel at full speed, making eighteen knots, but the destroyer made thirty knots, and closed rapidly.
At a little less than three thousand yards, the destroyer’s guns opened up on the Gunnel, firing fused projectiles that passed over and on either side of the sub.
My father had ordered Joe Vasey, the Gunnel’s torpedo officer, to work out a firing solution for all four of the stern torpedo tubes. With shells fired from the destroyer’s guns “getting uncomfortably close,” exploding overhead and missing barely to the Gunnel’s port and starboard sides, my father yelled, “Goddammit, shoot, Joe, shoot.” Vasey fired the two operable torpedoes “down the throat” of the destroyer as my father sounded the diving alarm.
When the Gunnel reached thirty-five feet, the first torpedo hit the destroyer. A few seconds later, five depth charges detonated simultaneously off the Gunnel’s stern. My father recorded the moment in his log, breaking his usual habit of restricting his official record to a dry recitation of the facts and avoiding dramatic embellishment: “The awesome sounds of exploding depth charges and collapsing bulkheads as the warship rapidly sank close astern of Gunnel was an unforgettable experience for all hands.”
My father leveled the sub off at two hundred feet. When he picked up the two remaining destroyers on his sonar rapidly approaching, he took the Gunnel down to three hundred feet and commenced evasive tactics. The destroyers dropped eight more depth charges off the sub’s stern. After six hours, the Gunnel surfaced very briefly to charge its batteries and air banks. Spotting the destroyers, my father took it down again. He remained submerged for the next eighteen hours with all auxiliary engines turned off, keeping the sub’s noise at a minimum to avoid detection by sonar.
Running silent for such a long period was a perilous predicament for a submarine crew. You ran the risk of losing all power as the batteries, which could be charged only when the submarine was surfaced, ran down completely. The air grew unbreathable as the submarine’s carbon dioxide absorbent was used up. This was the situation my father and his crew faced on the evening of June 20.
The air became so foul that crew members not needed at battle stations were ordered to rest in their bunks, where they would consume less oxygen. Earlier, the crew had felt a sense of hopelessness when the grapnel chain had scraped against the Gunnel’s side, knowing that if the hook grabbed onto something, depth charges would immediately be dropped directly onto the sub. Most of the crew, terrified, soaked with perspiration, had managed to control their emotions, and they responded to their skipper’s orders. Some of the younger crew members had wept, facedown in their bunks. Fear and poor air made a few men delirious, and one of them had to be strapped down.
The anxiety of those who were still in possession of their faculties after many hours submerged was growing into frantic desperation. Over the last two days they had endured the excitement of the chase and attack on the convoy, a hair-raising close call in a surface battle with an enemy destroyer, and the terror of repeated depth charge attacks. Now they were sweating out endless hours fathoms down, exhausted, slowly suffocating while their sub faced the imminent prospect of lying dead in the water.
The temperature inside the sub had reached 120 degrees. The humidity was 100 percent. Above them, two destroyers constantly patrolled, determined to locate and destroy the American submarine that had sunk their sister ship.
At eight-thirty that night, my father called all his officers to the wardroom. There the chief of the boat and chief electrician’s mate informed them that the batteries would last only thirty to sixty minutes more, and that all the sub’s good air was gone. The Gunnel would have to surface as quickly as possible. After receiving this discouraging report, my father informed his officers of his intentions.
The sub would surface slowly to reduce the likelihood that the blowing of its ballast tanks would be detected by the enemy’s sonar. As soon as it surfaced, the ship’s guns would be immediately manned and readied for battle. If either of the destroyers was in range, the Gunnel would shoot it out, and charge its batteries and air banks on the run.
My father offered one other course of action to his officers, a course he strongly opposed. If his officers did not unanimously concur with his decision to fight, he would order all classified information and materials destroyed, surface the sub, and scuttle her. All hands would jump overboard and hope for rescue, a remote hope at best, given that the Japanese skippers whom they would rely on for rescue were undoubtedly bent on vengeance and unlikely to be sympathetic.
To a man, my father’s officers shouted their preference for a fight.
When they surfaced, they sighted the destroyers at a considerable distance and steaming away from the Gunnel. They gave no indication that they spotted the sub. My father reversed course and hurried away. The batteries for two of his diesel engines were recharged, and fresh air filled the ship.
Ten days after my father’s submarine eluded the destroyers, it reached Midway. I suspect the men of the USS Gunnel were never so happy to see that desolate, uninteresting island.
My father received the Silver Star for this action. The citation praised his “conspicuous gallantry,…bravery under fire and aggressive fighting spirit.”
After five combat patrols aboard the Gunnel, my father, now Commander McCain, took command of the USS Dentuda, which completed one patrol in the South China Sea before the war’s end. During its only patrol, the Dentuda fought a gun battle with two Japanese patrol craft and an inconclusive submerged battle with a Japanese submarine.
It was as commander of the Dentuda that my father entered Tokyo Bay, exhausted from the strain of command in one of the more terrifying forms of combat, to enjoy his last reunion with the father whose example had led him to this life.
CHAPTER 8
Four Stars
In 1965, my father reported for duty in New York, to serve as vice chairman of the delegation to the United Nations Military Staff Committee and as Commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier and the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.
He had distinguished himself in other commands since the Second World War and had enjoyed a notably successful career. He had commanded two submarine divisions. During the Korean War, as a captain, he served as second in command on the destroyer USS St. Paul. He was well regarded by influential leaders in Washington and had been given several important commands, the last being command of the Atlantic Fleet’s Amphibious Force, when he directed the American invasion of the Dominican Republic.
In 1965, violent clashes between warring factions, one of which was believed to be a Communist front, had brought the Dominican Republic to the verge of civil war. President Johnson ordered my father to command the amphibious assault of Operation Steel Pike 1, the invasion and military occupation of the Caribbean nation. The operation was controversial. Critics judged it, with good reason, to be an unlawful intervention in the affairs of a sovereign nation. My father, typically, was undeterred by domestic opposition. “Some people condemned this as an unwarranted intervention,” he observed, “but the Communists were all set to move in and take over. People may not love you for being strong when you have to be, but they respect you for it and learn to behave themselves when you are.”
The operation was a success, and, at the time, it constituted the largest amphibious operation ever undertaken in peacetime. After its completion, he was awarded the Legion of Merit for attracting “worldwide attention to the highly mobile and devastating might” of the Navy and Marine Corps.
His subsequent assignment at the United Nations, however, was regarded by the Navy as a dead end and was expected to be his last. He was a three-star admiral, and the prospects for a fourth star were remote. But two years later he was ordered to London to assume command of all U.S. naval forces in Europe. A fourth star came with the job. He relieved the renowned Admiral John Thach, my grandfather’s old operations officer and friend.
Within a year, he was given command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, the largest operational military command in the world. The dominion of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC) is geographically immens
e, encompassing 85 million square miles, extending from the Aleutian Islands to the South Pole and from the west coast of North and South America to the Indian Ocean.
CINCPAC, Admiral Nimitz’s wartime command, remains the U.S. Navy’s second most prestigious office. Only the office of Chief of Naval Operations is a greater privilege, and, if truth be told, a good many officers would prefer running the Pacific Command to running the entire Navy. My father had achieved prominence in his beloved Navy that surpassed his father’s storied career. The Washington Post reported his triumph under the headline NAVY CHEERS APPOINTMENT OF MCCAIN.
Shortly after his new assignment was made public, my father received a letter from a retired sailor who had known my grandfather during the war. He wrote of how highly regarded my grandfather had been by the enlisted men under his command.
Dear Admiral,
Maybe I shouldn’t be sending this to you, but I had to when I saw your name in this morning’s paper. Commander of United States Forces in the Pacific. I am an ex–carrier man, 1943–1946. Was Admiral John S. McCain your dad? I was a plank owner on the Wasp, and Admiral McCain was at our commissioning…. We had admirals on board before and after but Admiral McCain was liked by all the ship’s company. It was a privilege to have served under him. They all speak of Admirals Halsey, Nimitz, Sprague, Spruance, Mitscher, and Bogan. But Admiral John S. McCain was tops with us. Every night about 8 P.M. he would walk around the flight deck with that salty-looking admiral’s cap of his in his hands. He would stop and talk to us on our gun mount. Maybe you won’t have time to read this. I don’t send letters at all but when I heard of you and your command I just had to.
I imagine the old sailor’s note, rejoicing in the professional triumph of the son of a Navy legend, must have moved my father very much. Though I was not privileged to witness his change-of-command ceremony, I have always believed that for that one moment, my father, so hard driven by his often oppressive desire to honor his father’s name, looked on his career with tranquillity and satisfaction. He must have felt the old man’s pride as he took his first salute as commander of the greatest military force in the world, with dominion over the waters where the answer “I’ve sent McCain” had once relieved an anxious predecessor.
