Ships
- USS Saratoga (CV-3) Captain from 15 August 1946 · Paper command after she sank, until 19 August 1946
John Lewis Landreth was born on 19 May 1917 in Whittier, California. As a teenager there he wrestled and acted. California appointed him to the United States Naval Academy, and he graduated with the Class of 1941. At Annapolis he kept on with wrestling and edited the Lucky Bag, the midshipmen’s yearbook.
His first sea duty was in the battleship Nevada. He reported in the spring of 1941 and joined the anti-aircraft battery. Five men from the Class of 1941 went to Nevada together. Landreth was aboard on 7 December 1941, when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor. Nevada got underway during the attack, took heavy damage, and was beached in the harbor.
Gunnery remained his work for the rest of the war. He stayed with Nevada through her repair, then served while the battleship Alabama was under construction. After that he went to the North Atlantic with a task force on the search for German capital ships. He later joined the destroyer escort Borum for escort duty in the Atlantic in the months before the Normandy landings.
On 15 August 1946 the Navy listed Lieutenant Commander Landreth as commanding officer of the aircraft carrier Saratoga (CV-3). He held that place until 19 August 1946. The duty was a paper command, entered after Saratoga had already sunk. She had come through the Able air burst at Bikini on 1 July 1946. The underwater Baker burst on 25 July sent her to the bottom of the lagoon, and she was still there when his name went on the books. Commander Daniel McElroy Entler, Jr., had been carried in the same duty from 6 August until Landreth replaced him.
The carrier whose command he was given had a long record behind those four days. Saratoga was commissioned in November 1927 under Harry Ervin Yarnell. Before the Pacific war her commanding officers included Kenneth Whiting, William Frederick Halsey, Jr., and John Henry Towers, officers who used the ship to work out how American carrier aviation would fight. Landreth’s turn came at the end of that life, when Saratoga lay sunk at Bikini and the command existed on paper. He later held the rank of commander and was living in 1990.