Ships
- USS Shangri-La (CV-38) Captain from 16 July 1945 · Relieved on 26 November 1945
Captain Richard Francis Whitehead of the United States Navy commanded the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La (CV-38) from 16 July 1945 until 26 November 1945. His months in the ship covered the last carrier strikes of the Pacific War, the Japanese surrender, and the first season of the voyage home.
Shangri-La was an Essex-class fleet carrier. The name recalled the answer President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave reporters after the April 1942 raid on Tokyo, when he said the bombers had come from Shangri-La. She had been in commission since the autumn of 1944 and had already reached the western Pacific, including the Okinawa campaign, under James Duke Barner. Whitehead assumed command on 16 July 1945, while that cruise was still underway.
He took the ship in the middle of the fast carriers' summer campaign against the Japanese home islands. From mid-July into mid-August, Shangri-La operated with the force commanded by John Sidney McCain, and her aircraft joined the attacks on airfields, coastal shipping, and the naval bases of the Inland Sea. Those strikes continued until 15 August 1945, when Japan's government agreed to surrender and offensive sorties were stopped.
The hours around the cease-fire remained uneasy, as crews at sea tried to tell surrendering aircraft from aircraft that were still attacking. Shangri-La stayed with the occupation forces off Japan. On 2 September 1945 Allied representatives accepted the formal surrender in Tokyo Bay. Under Whitehead the carrier's work shifted from raids to patrols and to the wider effort to locate and supply Allied prisoners along the coast.
He remained in command through September, October, and November, as the fleet began carrying servicemen back across the Pacific. On 26 November 1945 he was relieved. His time in Shangri-La is the record of a captain who joined a fighting carrier off Japan and left her in the first months of peace.