Ships
- USS Kitkun Bay (CVE-71) Captain from 15 December 1943
Captain John Perry Whitney, the officer carried in the record as J. P. Whitney, took command of the escort carrier Kitkun Bay when the United States Navy commissioned her at Naval Air Station Astoria, Oregon, on 15 December 1943. The Casablanca-class ship, hull CVE-71, had been laid down at the Kaiser yard in Vancouver, Washington, on 3 May 1943 and launched on 8 November. She drew her name from a bay on the southeast coast of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, and Mrs. Francis E. Cruise sponsored her at the launching.
Whitney spent the rest of December and the first days of January fitting the new carrier out at Astoria. On the morning of 3 January 1944, while Kitkun Bay lay moored at a pier, an aircraft that failed to answer the recognition signal passed over the river mouth. The crew went to general quarters. The plane was American. Whitney then took her through shakedown in the Puget Sound area, loading bombs and ammunition, fueling, calibrating the compass, and deperming the hull so magnetic mines would have less to lock onto.
She reached San Diego late in January and sailed on 28 January 1944 with passengers, aircraft, and cargo for the New Hebrides. Lookouts raised the islands off Espiritu Santo on 14 February, and she entered Pallikula Bay that evening. Kitkun Bay started home on 18 February by way of Pearl Harbor and was back at San Diego on 6 March. The aircraft of Composite Squadron 6 came aboard for training and assignment. On 1 May, with the flag of Carrier Division 26 embarked, she left for Pearl Harbor to finish working up.
On 31 May her task unit sortied to escort the bombardment ships and transports of Task Group 52.17 toward Saipan, the opening of her share in the Marianas campaign. Through the summer of 1944 Whitney kept Kitkun Bay with the escort-carrier forces covering the advance across the central Pacific, including the Palau operation, and then into the Philippines. Her planes flew strike and cover missions while the ship herself stayed with the thin-skinned carriers that moved behind the assault convoys.
The morning of 25 October 1944, off Samar, put that duty to the hardest test of Whitney's command. Kitkun Bay was one of six escort carriers in the formation known as Taffy 3, screened by three destroyers and four destroyer escorts, when a Japanese force of battleships, heavy and light cruisers, and destroyers came over the horizon during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Whitney launched the aircraft that were ready, made smoke, and took the ship south while shells fell around her. A salvo landed a short distance astern. He swung her through sharp changes of course, and the 5-inch gun nearly used up the ammunition at hand as he held the remaining rounds for a destroyer attack he expected to follow. Avengers from Kitkun Bay went for the heavy cruiser Chokai, and one of them put a bomb into the cruiser's stern. The Japanese column broke off later that morning. The carrier came through the gun action with her hull intact.
The same forenoon brought suicide aircraft. Kitkun Bay shot down a Betty making a deliberate crash attempt, and a Zeke then struck the port catwalk. One man was killed and sixteen were wounded. The ship remained with the formation. For his seamanship and leadership in the surface fight, Whitney received the Navy Cross. The citation credited the cool handling that kept Kitkun Bay in action under fire from a force far heavier than anything an escort carrier was armed to meet, and the example he set for a crew that kept launching aircraft while shells were falling.
Taffy 3 withdrew toward Manus for repair and replenishment at the end of October. On 4 November 1944 Captain Albert Handly relieved Whitney. The first commanding officer had taken Kitkun Bay from the builder's yard through shakedown, a ferry run into the South Pacific, the Marianas, and the battle off Samar, the action for which the task unit later shared a Presidential Unit Citation. The carrier went on under later captains through Lingayen Gulf and the last months of the war. Whitney's year in command is the year tied to her commissioning and to that morning east of Samar.