Ships
- USS Intrepid (CV-11) Captain from 30 May 1944 · Relieved on 15 February 1945
Joseph Francis Bolger was a captain in the United States Navy. He commanded the fleet carrier Intrepid (CV-11) from 30 May 1944 until 15 February 1945, the stretch of the war in which the ship finished a long repair, returned to the fast carriers, and fought through the opening of the Philippines campaign.
He took command while Intrepid was still on the West Coast. On her first combat cruise, under Thomas Lamison Sprague, she had operated in the Marshalls and in the February 1944 raid on Truk. On 17 February 1944 a Japanese aerial torpedo damaged her badly enough that she had to leave the forward area for months of repair. Bolger's first task was to see that repair through and to work the ship back up for sea during the summer of 1944.
In September 1944 Intrepid rejoined the fast carrier force, then designated Task Force 38, in the western Pacific. Under Bolger she took part in the strikes that covered the landings in the Palau Islands and in the early heavy attacks on Japanese bases in the Philippines. In October her aircraft hit Formosa, the Ryukyu Islands, and Luzon as the fleet cleared the way for the landing at Leyte. She was one carrier among many, and the damage her planes did was part of that wider effort.
At Leyte Gulf her air group flew on 24 October 1944 in the repeated attacks on the Japanese Center Force in the Sibuyan Sea. Those attacks were shared across the task force, and together they sank the battleship Musashi. The next day aircraft from Intrepid joined the strikes off Cape Engaño that overwhelmed the Japanese carrier force sent south as a decoy. Through the rest of October and into November, Bolger kept the ship on the line off Luzon, sending planes against airfields and coastal shipping while the fight for the beachhead went on.
Suicide aircraft hit her twice on that cruise. On 29 October 1944 a kamikaze struck Intrepid and killed several of her men, and the carrier stayed in formation and kept operating. On 25 November 1944, east of Luzon, two suicide planes struck the flight deck within a short time of each other. Fire spread into the hangar. Dozens of the crew were killed and many more were wounded before the ship's company brought the flames under control. Intrepid remained afloat and steamed back across the Pacific under her own power to a shipyard in the San Francisco area. Bolger saw her into that repair. He was relieved on 15 February 1945, and the officers who succeeded him took the carrier back out for her 1945 strikes off Okinawa and Japan.