Ships
- USS Bennett (DD-473) Captain from 5 November 1944
Jasper Newton McDonald was born in Douglas, Georgia, on 16 May 1913. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1936 and was commissioned ensign on 4 June of that year. He became a lieutenant (junior grade) in June 1939. After the United States entered the Second World War he was made a temporary lieutenant in January 1942 and a lieutenant that June, then a temporary lieutenant commander in May 1943. On 15 March 1944 he was advanced to temporary commander, the grade he held through the last year of the Pacific war.
His first seagoing command was the destroyer escort Andres (DE-45), which he had as a temporary lieutenant commander from 1 June 1943 until 1 September 1943. He next commanded the destroyer escort Neuendorf (DE-200), from 18 October 1943 until 12 October 1944. Those two escort tours ended only weeks before the Navy gave him a fleet destroyer already in a West Coast yard.
On 5 November 1944 McDonald became captain of the Fletcher-class destroyer Bennett (DD-473). He relieved Philip Frederick Hauck. The ship’s first commanding officer had been Edmund Battelle Taylor, who had taken her from commissioning at the Boston Navy Yard in February 1943. When McDonald reported, Bennett was at Hunters Point in San Francisco for an overhaul that had begun late in October, and she was still in the yard in December. He brought her back to the Pacific that month. The crew spent New Year’s Eve at Pearl Harbor, and on 24 January 1945 Bennett ran antisubmarine exercises off the harbor with the submarine Searaven and the destroyer Anthony.
In the first week of the assault on Okinawa, McDonald had Bennett on radar picket duty well out in front of the fleet, serving as a fighter-director ship. From 1 through 7 April 1945 Japanese aircraft struck the picket line in repeated waves. The heaviest fighting came on 6 and 7 April, when Bennett was on Radar Picket Station Number 4, about sixty miles northeast of the Okinawa transport area, and more than fifty enemy planes pressed the attack. McDonald handled the destroyer through the raids, kept her guns firing, and broke up one approach after another. On the evening of 6 April, after two destroyers on nearby stations were left badly damaged and in danger of sinking, Bennett closed them and helped search the water for survivors.
The fight was still going the next morning, with the ship’s ammunition largely used up. At about 8:50 on 7 April a suicide plane struck Bennett. The explosion wrecked the forward engine room and cut off all electrical power. Men were killed and others were wounded. McDonald held the crew to the work of checking the damage. The destroyer made Kerama Retto under her own power. The next day the fleet tug Yuma took her in tow for Saipan, and from there she went on to the Puget Sound Navy Yard for repair.
For his conduct off Okinawa from 1 to 7 April 1945, McDonald received the Navy Cross. The award recognized the way he fought Bennett through the suicide attacks, the losses the ship inflicted on the aircraft, and the way he rallied the crew after the hit so the damage could be controlled and the destroyer brought in. Bennett received the Navy Unit Commendation for the same picket action. After the yard finished with her, she sailed in August 1945 for Adak in the Aleutians and made one run to Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka with weather personnel aboard. She then joined the Magic Carpet lift of servicemen home and was at Sitka, Alaska, with her division for Navy Day 1945.
McDonald stayed in command through the end of her first commission. Bennett was placed in reserve at San Diego and decommissioned on 18 April 1946, with him still her captain. He remained in the Navy after the war and retired as a rear admiral. He died on 27 August 1998 in Delray Beach, Florida, at the age of eighty-five. The destroyer tied to his wartime reputation was transferred to Brazil on 15 December 1959, served there as Paraíba, and was scrapped in 1978.