Ships
- USS Cabot (CVL-28) Captain from 5 May 1944 · Relieved on 6 February 1945
Captain Stanley John Michael, United States Navy, commanded the light aircraft carrier USS Cabot (CVL-28) from 5 May 1944 to 6 February 1945. In those months the fast carriers moved from the Marianas through the Philippines and into the South China Sea, and Cabot stayed in that line from the day he took her until the day he was relieved.
He succeeded Malcolm Francis Schoeffel. Cabot was an Independence-class ship, finished on a cruiser hull with a short flight deck for fighters and torpedo planes, and she had already seen combat in the Central Pacific. Michael’s work was to keep her aircraft over the next ring of Japanese-held islands as the fleet closed on the Philippines.
In June 1944 Cabot supported the landings on Saipan and the fighting in the Marianas. On 19 and 20 June her fighters flew in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, when American carrier planes broke the Japanese fleet’s air groups in a day and a half of interception and counterattack. Through the rest of the summer her air group struck Iwo Jima and other islands in the Bonins, and it hit targets in the western Carolines as the assault on Peleliu drew near.
September and October carried the ship into the Philippines campaign. Planes from Cabot raided airfields and shipping in the central islands and on Luzon, then joined the heavy strikes on Formosa in the middle of October. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf her aircraft flew with the rest of the fast carrier force against Japanese ships at sea and against the airfields feeding the fight for Leyte. Those attacks were made by many carriers together.
On 25 November 1944, during further strikes on Luzon, two Japanese aircraft crashed into Cabot, one on the flight deck and one on the port side forward. The hits killed and wounded members of the crew and started fires. Damage-control parties put the fires out, the deck was made fit to use, and the carrier remained with the operating force.
Michael kept command through the winter raids. In January 1945 Cabot went with the fast carriers into the South China Sea, where her planes attacked Japanese shipping and airfields along the coast of Indochina, on Formosa, and on the China coast, and struck Okinawa on the way back. He was relieved on 6 February 1945 at Ulithi, before the force sailed for the first carrier strikes on the Japanese home islands.
Under Michael, Cabot passed through the Philippine Sea, the Formosa strikes, Leyte Gulf, the kamikaze attack off Luzon, and the South China Sea raid. She took battle damage and stayed in the operating fleet. The Navy awarded the carrier a Presidential Unit Citation for Pacific service that included these months.