Ships
- USS Suwannee (CVE-27) Commanding officer from 24 September 1942 · Relieved on 21 January 1943
- USS Yorktown (CV-10) Captain, 4 April 1943 – 10 February 1944
Joseph James Clark was born on 12 November 1893 in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, before it became part of Oklahoma. Wikipedia says he was born at Pryor; uboat.net gives Chelsea. One account says he was born in a log cabin on a creek. His father, William A. Clark, was Cherokee, and was one of the first pupils of the Cherokee Orphan Asylum at Salina. Joseph attended Willie Halsell College at Vinita and Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College at Stillwater before he was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1913. He played lacrosse and soccer there, and on one of his first days a classmate in the ranks called out "The Right Reverend J. Jonathan Jockey Clark!" The nickname "Jocko" stuck for life. He was nominally Class of 1918 but graduated with the accelerated class in 1917, the first Native American to graduate from the Naval Academy.
His first ship was the cruiser North Carolina, escorting troop convoys across the Atlantic. After the war he served in the destroyers Aaron Ward, Aulick and Brooks in the Middle East, commanded Brooks on her voyage home, and then commanded Bulmer on American Relief Administration and Near East Relief duty. He taught at the Academy in 1923–24 and then learned to fly at Pensacola, earning his wings on 16 March 1925.
The next fifteen years made him a carrier man. He helped Commander John Rodgers prepare the first West Coast–Hawaii flight in 1925. He was senior aviation officer of the battleship Mississippi and executive officer of NAS Anacostia, and commanded Fighting Squadron 2 in Lexington. He sat on the Board of Inspection and Survey, served as Lexington's assistant air officer, and was executive officer of the Fleet Air Base at Pearl Harbor from 1937 to 1939. He then inspected aircraft at Curtiss in Buffalo and was executive officer of NAS Jacksonville. In May 1941 he became executive officer of Yorktown (CV-5), and he was aboard her for the early raids on the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. He was promoted to captain on 2 January 1942.
Given his choice of a new escort carrier, he took Suwannee (ACV-27), commissioned on 24 September 1942. Within a month he had her off Morocco for the Operation Torch landings. Then Admiral King gave him the new Yorktown (CV-10), commissioned on 15 April 1943 to carry the name of the carrier lost at Midway. Clark drove her and her crew hard and she became famous. The 1944 documentary The Fighting Lady was filmed aboard, with Clark on screen only as "Jocko." Under him she struck Marcus Island on 31 August 1943 and Wake in October, then the Gilberts and, in January and February 1944, Kwajalein and Majuro in the Marshalls. Marc Mitscher, who made Yorktown his flagship in January 1944, came to admire his seamanship and fighting spirit.
Clark was promoted to rear admiral (uboat.net dates the temporary rank 23 April 1943; other accounts say 31 January 1944) and gave up Yorktown on 10 February 1944. He soon had his own task group in Task Force 58, with his flag in the new Hornet (CV-12). His planes struck Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima so often that the sailors called them the "Jocko Jimas." On the night of 20 June 1944, after the long-range strike at the end of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, his aircraft were returning low on fuel in darkness. He ordered his ships to turn on their lights, and most of the planes got down safely.
In the Korean War he commanded the Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 77) and then, as vice admiral, the Seventh Fleet, with the battleship New Jersey as his flagship. He retired on 1 December 1953 as a full admiral. He then chaired Hegeman-Harris, a New York investment firm. He was made an honorary chief by both the Sioux and the Cherokee, inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1952, and given the National Aeronautic Association's Elder Statesman of Aviation Award in 1969. He wrote an autobiography, Carrier Admiral (1967), with Clark G. Reynolds, who later wrote On the Warpath in the Pacific about him. His wife Olga, born Chubarova, was the widow of world chess champion José Raúl Capablanca.
He died at the naval hospital at St. Albans, New York, on 13 July 1971 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 3, Site 2525-B. The frigate Clark (FFG-11) was named for him.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Joseph J. Clark" (citing Clark & Reynolds, Carrier Admiral; Reynolds, On the Warpath in the Pacific).
uboat.net, Allied Warship Commanders: Joseph James Clark (ranks; Arlington).
JackLummus.com, "Rear Admiral J. J. 'Jocko' Clark."
Live Pacific Ships CV-10 page.