Ships
- USS Essex (CV-9) Officer in charge from 19 July 1946 · She was decommissioned on 9 January 1947
John Roberts Strane was born on 8 October 1920 in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, with Cloquet, Minnesota, as his home. He entered the United States Navy in April 1941, finished flight training that fall, and was commissioned before the country entered the war. The Navy then kept him in the training pipeline. Until August 1943 he served as a flight instructor at Naval Air Station Pensacola, teaching new pilots while the carrier air groups in the Pacific were still being filled out.
In August 1943 he joined Fighting Squadron 15. The squadron flew the Grumman F6F Hellcat and embarked in Essex (CV-9) for the Central Pacific campaign. From that deck Strane flew strikes and combat air patrols as the fast carriers worked west, with missions over the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and other islands on the approach to Japan. His first victories came on 19 June 1944, the opening day of the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Escorting a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver on a search, he shot down three Japanese aircraft.
He remained with the squadron through the hard fighting of the autumn. On 13 September 1944 he was in action over the central Philippine Islands, flying later recognized by a Distinguished Flying Cross. On 25 October 1944, during the air battles that accompanied the Leyte operation, he destroyed four Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters in a single day. Japanese fire shot his Hellcat into the sea and left him wounded. The destroyer Cotten picked him up the next day. He added one more victory in November 1944. Thirteen enemy aircraft were credited to him in aerial combat, a score that made him a double ace. For his tour as a lieutenant with Fighting Squadron 15 in Essex, he received the Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross three times.
Strane stayed in the Navy after Japan surrendered. On 19 July 1946, by then a lieutenant commander, he became officer in charge of Essex. The ship he had known as a crowded wartime carrier was being reduced for the peacetime reserve. A smaller crew remained to secure machinery, close living spaces, and make the hull ready to leave active service, and that inactivation was the work under his charge. He was still officer in charge when Essex was decommissioned on 9 January 1947.
Laid-up duty on the carrier was one stretch in a much longer aviation career. He later served in the escort carrier Bogue and in the fleet carriers Philippine Sea and Yorktown. During the Korean War he commanded Fighting Squadron 113. Further assignments made him air officer of Yorktown and commander of the Utility Wing, Pacific Fleet, and he continued in naval aviation units through the years of the Vietnam War. He retired in 1972 as a captain.
Strane died on 7 April 2009 and was buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, California. His naval life had run from a Pensacola flight line in the first years of the war, through a combat cruise in Essex that produced thirteen aerial victories, to charge of that same carrier as she left commission, and then through two later wars in carrier aviation.