Ships
- USS Bennington (CV-20) Captain from 6 August 1944 · Relieved on 30 June 1945
James Bennett Sykes was born in Rochester, New York, on 27 August 1895. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1919 and began his sea duty in submarines. In 1924 he commanded O-11, and from 1924 into 1925 he commanded R-27. Over the years that followed he served in the submarine force, on surface ships, and in naval aviation.
He was promoted to commander on 1 November 1938 and appointed a temporary captain on 17 June 1942. On 8 November 1942 he took command of the escort carrier Card (CVE-11) at her commissioning and remained in command until 17 April 1943. That tour was his first wartime command of a flight deck.
On 6 August 1944 Sykes commissioned the new Essex-class carrier Bennington (CV-20) at the New York Navy Yard. Trials, a shakedown cruise, and a shipyard availability filled the autumn. The ship left New York on 14 December, passed through the Panama Canal on 21 December, and called at San Diego before continuing west. Bennington reached Pearl Harbor in early January 1945 and spent the rest of that month on air and gunnery training in Hawaiian waters.
On 1 February 1945 Bennington sailed from Pearl Harbor in company with Belleau Wood, Bunker Hill, Randolph, Saratoga, and Alaska. She entered Ulithi on 8 February and joined Task Group 58.1. Through the late winter and spring Sykes took her into the first carrier strikes on the Japanese home islands, the support of the Iwo Jima landings in the Volcano Islands, and the long air campaign around Okinawa. On 7 April her aircraft joined the attacks on a Japanese surface force in the East China Sea, a battle in which the battleship Yamato, the light cruiser Yahagi, and four destroyers were sunk.
For his command from 10 February through 19 May 1945 he received the Navy Cross. In that stretch the ship and her air group were credited with 174 enemy aircraft destroyed, with damage to important units of the Japanese fleet and to shore installations, and with the destruction of enemy shipping. Under repeated air attack he handled Bennington so that her guns could be brought to bear. Several enemy planes were shot down, and the carrier came through those attacks undamaged. On 5 June a typhoon off Okinawa damaged the ship. Sykes took her to Leyte for repairs, and she arrived on 12 June. He was relieved as commanding officer on 30 June 1945, as that repair period was drawing to a close.
In August 1945 he became commanding officer of the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern, California. He retired in 1953 as a rear admiral while serving as commandant of the station. Sykes died at his home in Willis, Texas, on 9 October 1981, at the age of 86. He was survived by two daughters, Margaret Maurogordato and Mary Sykes Cahan, four grandsons, and three great-grandsons.