BOOKS: Honoring the heroic Intrepid

THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA’S MOST LEGENDARY WARSHIP

By Bill White and Robert Gandt, Foreword by Sen. John McCain

Broadway Books, $26.95, 348 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN R. COYNE JR.

Bill White, president of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, and Robert Gandt, former fighter pilot and author of “Bogeys and Bandits,” pack the first half of their story of Intrepid, an Essex-class aircraft carrier, with vivid World War II sea and air battle descriptions - destruction of a superior Japanese fleet with daring bomb and torpedo raids, dogfights, kamikaze attacks, invasion support for Marines.

Intrepid, which entered the war in 1944, survived five kamikaze attacks and one torpedoing. In its year and a half of active duty, “Intrepid’s aircraft had destroyed 301 Japanese airplanes and helped sink 122 enemy ships, including shared credit for the super-battleships Yamoto and Musashashi.”

Among its postwar assignments, Intrepid served as a Cold War attack carrier, a recovery ship for the space program’s early astronauts (Scott Carpenter, Mercury 7; Gus Grissom and John Young, Gemini 3), returned to battle for three tours in Vietnam. She was decommissioned in 1974, opened as a museum in New York City in 1982. In 2006, after several somewhat embarrassing attempts to leave its moorings in the muck of New York Harbor, it floated free, departed for renovations, returned to New York in October 2008, and officially reopens as a museum on Nov. 11.

In all, a long and storied career, although some might question the authors’ designation of Intrepid as our “most legendary warship.” When we think of World War II, for instance, the Arizona may come to mind first - not only for the loss of life at Pearl Harbor but its service as the official memorial. Also, the Battle of Midway is considered the turning point of the Pacific war, and Yorktown and Enterprise were the keys to victory.

Nevertheless, Intrepid has the advantage of longevity, and there are historic echoes in the name. The first incarnation was a 64-ton ketch built in France in 1798 for Napoleon, sold to Tripoli, captured by the first USS Enterprise, taken into the U.S. Navy in 1804 and named Intrepid. Under the command of Stephen Decatur, she sailed into battle in Tripoli harbor - hence, in part, the second line of the best of the service songs - “to the shores of Tripoli.”

But this is a digression that only ex-Marines may be interested in pursuing. Suffice it to say that Mr. White and Mr. Gandt make a strong case - especially in the action sections of this book - for their ship’s pre-eminence. Nor are the book’s strengths limited to action scenes. There are also well-drawn sketches of the young men - many in their teens - who so efficiently and effectively managed this warship (with a crew of 3,300 really a small city).

And then there are the pilots: “These Grummans are beautiful planes,” declared a Hellcat pilot after coming back from a mission. “If they could cook, I’d marry one.”

These pilots, the authors tell us, were a very special breed. “In their secret hearts they were a cut above other mortals … they were fighter pilots, a status that in World War II had become a stereotype. In movies, comic books and newsreels, fighter pilots grinned down from cockpits that displayed rows of swastika and rising sun victory symbols. Fighter pilots were supposed to be flamboyant, cocky, and aggressive both in the air and on the ground.”

And indeed they were - and still are. As a friend recently observed of John McCain (whose first ship was Intrepid) and his unpredictable and asymmetric campaign: “He shares many of these characteristics. Once an attack pilot, always an attack pilot. McCain was and is an attack pilot, while his opponent was and is a community organizer.”

But this is not a political book, and in his foreword Mr. McCain, for whom “the story of the USS Intrepid is a personal journey,” engages in no partisan strafing. His relationship with Intrepid, he tells us, spans three generations. Intrepid fought under the command of his grandfather in the Philippines in 1944, and two decades later served under his father during its third deployment to Vietnam. “Under his [Adm. John S. McCain Sr.] command, Intrepid’s aircraft flew hundreds of combat sorties and bombing runs over North Vietnam, while I, coincidentally, resided in a Hanoi prison.”

He recalls his own experiences a newly minted pilot and what it felt like to be launched by catapult from Intrepid and to make his first arrested landing on the ship’s “postage-stamp-sized deck.”

” ’Famous warships,’ he tells us, ’have the power to capture our imaginations… A great ship such as Intrepid also has the power to educate. From her dramatic story, our citizens learn [of] the sacrifices made by their fathers and grandfathers in the most cataclysmic of all wars … how ordinary Americans like themselves were sent into the smoke and chaos of battle and rose to greatness, achieving a victory that changed the course of humankind.’ ”

Intrepid, Mr. McCain writes, is a visible tribute to the greatest generation. But it is also “a stage from which we honor today’s heroes,” those young men and women, “our present generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coastguardsmen, those brave Americans who risk everything on our behalf.”

In its incarnation as a museum, he tells us, “Intrepid stands as a living connection between our heroes of the past and those of the present.”

Just so.

• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author with Linda Bridges of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement,” published by Wiley.