Ships
- USS St. Lo (CVE-63) Captain from 23 October 1943
Francis Joseph McKenna was born in Leicester, Massachusetts, on 19 March 1898. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1917 and graduated in 1920 with the accelerated class of 1921. As an ensign he went to sea in the battleship North Dakota. He earned his wings in April 1926, and about a year later he was a torpedo pilot in the carrier Lexington.
He continued in sea and aviation duty and later served in the Aleutians. In April 1943 he was ordered as prospective commanding officer of an escort carrier building at the Kaiser yard in Vancouver, Washington. The hull had been laid down on 23 January 1943 as Chapin Bay, renamed Midway that April, and launched on 17 August. McKenna placed her in commission at Astoria, Oregon, on 23 October 1943, and was her captain from that day.
Her early work was the ferrying escort carriers had been built for. After shakedown on the West Coast she carried replacement aircraft on two runs to Pearl Harbor and one to Australia. In June 1944 she joined Rear Admiral Bogan’s Carrier Support Group 1 for the Marianas campaign. On 15 June her planes covered the transports and struck Saipan. She fought off air attacks and came through that fighting undamaged, replenished at Eniwetok in mid-July, and supported the Tinian landings on 23 July. Through the rest of the summer she operated off the Palaus and Morotai. The ship’s wartime record brought four battle stars.
On 3 October 1944, off Morotai, the Japanese submarine Ro-41 fired torpedoes at the carrier. McKenna turned her clear. One torpedo hit the destroyer escort Shelton in the stern, and Shelton later sank under tow. The carrier was back in Seeadler Harbor, at Manus, on 7 October. On 10 October the Navy renamed her St. Lo, freeing the name Midway for a large carrier still under construction and commemorating the capture of Saint-Lô in Normandy. St. Lo sailed from Seeadler Harbor on 12 October, arrived off Leyte on 17 October, covered landings on Dinagat and Homonhon at the eastern approaches to the gulf, and flew strikes in support of the assault at Tacloban.
Before dawn on 25 October 1944, St. Lo was east of Samar in Task Unit 77.4.3, the escort-carrier group called Taffy 3, under Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague. The group had launched its morning strikes when a Japanese force of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers was reported closing from the northwest. The escort carriers were slower and much lighter than the ships bearing down on them. McKenna worked St. Lo through the gunfire while her aircraft attacked the Japanese formation and then headed for Leyte to rearm. As torpedoes approached, an Avenger from St. Lo strafed two of them until they exploded, and a round from the ship’s five-inch gun turned a third aside. When the Japanese ships hauled off to the north, St. Lo put a hit amidships into a retiring destroyer, checked fire, and retired south with the surviving ships of Taffy 3. She had come through the surface fight undamaged.
At about 10:50 the unit was attacked by suicide aircraft. At 10:51 one plane crashed through the flight deck of St. Lo and set off bombs and torpedoes stowed below. Heavy explosions turned the carrier into a mass of flame. With most communications gone, McKenna had the order to stand by to abandon ship passed by sound-powered telephone and by voice. After the engines stopped and the ship lay dead in the water, he ordered the crew off, and he was the last man to leave. St. Lo sank at about 11:25. She was the first major American warship lost to a kamikaze, and more than a hundred of her men died. McKenna received the Navy Cross for his handling of the ship under the fire of a superior fleet and for remaining aboard until the crew was clear. St. Lo, her ship’s company, and Composite Squadron 65 were awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for the Battle off Samar.
His decorations also included the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star Medal with combat V. In 1946 and 1947 he was the first commanding officer of the fleet carrier Kearsarge. He retired in 1950 and was advanced to rear admiral. Francis Joseph McKenna died on 29 April 1969.