Faith of My Fathers Read Free Page A

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.
    Upon receiving the court’s report, Secretary Forrestal was prepared to relieve both Halsey and my grandfather. But Admiral King persuaded Forrestal that Halsey’s relief would be too great a blow to the Navy’s and the country’s morale.
    Two months later, my grandfather was ordered to relinquish his command.
    Professional naval officers constitute a small community today. It was a much smaller one in the years when my father and grandfather made their living at sea. Yet I only learned of the episode that closed my grandfather’s career when, many years later, I read an account of the typhoon in E. B. Potter’s biography of Admiral Halsey.
    My father never mentioned it to me.

          CHAPTER 2          
    Slew
    In his memoirs, Admiral Halsey makes brief mention of the typhoon, blaming his task group’s encounter with it on late warnings and erroneous predictions of the storm’s course, but he offers no description of my grandfather’s role in the disaster.
    My grandfather’s request to return home rather than witness the drama of Japan’s surrender was a measure of his despair over losing his command. Halsey did write of his subordinate’s outrage at being relieved of his command, describing him as “thoroughly sore.”
    I once suspected, as my father probably had, that the court’s findings had hastened my grandfather’s death. But as I grew older, it became easier to dismiss my suspicion as the dramatization of the end of a life that needed no embellishment from a sentimental namesake. My grandfather had not been banished into retirement after losing his command. President Truman had ordered him to Washington to serve under General Omar Bradley as the deputy director of the new Veterans Administration to help integrate back into civilian society the millions of returning American veterans, a prestigious and important appointment.
    I doubt any assignment would have eased immediately the indignation he must have felt over losing his last wartime command. But by all accounts, my grandfather was a tough, willful, resilient man who, had he lived, would have resolved to serve with distinction in his new post as the surest way to put a great distance between himself and that fateful storm.
    I was a few days shy of my ninth birthday when my grandfather died. I had seen very little of him during the war, and most of those occasions were hurried affairs. I remember being awakened in the dead of night on several occasions when he dropped in unannounced on his way from one assignment to another. My mother would assemble us on the parlor couch and then search the house for her camera, to record another brief reunion between her children and their famous grandfather. Even before the war, my father’s career often kept a continent or more between my grandparents and me. And the recollections I have of him have dimmed over the half century that has elapsed since I saw him last.
    The image that remains is that of a rail-thin, gaunt, hawk-faced man whose slight build was disguised by a low-timbered voice and a lively, antic presence. It was fun to be in his company, and particularly so if you were the primary object of his attention, as I remember being when we were together.
    He rolled his own cigarettes, which he smoked constantly, and his one-handed technique fascinated me. While the skill was anything but neat (Admiral Halsey once ordered a Navy steward to follow him around with a dustpan and broom whenever he was aboard the admiral’s flagship), that it could be accomplished at all struck me as praiseworthy. He would give me his empty bags of Bull Durham tobacco, which I valued highly, and which deepened my