Thomas C. Kinkaid
Thomas Cassin Kinkaid was an admiral in the United States Navy, known for his service during World War II. He built a reputation as a "fighting admiral" in the aircraft carrier battles of 1942 and commanded the Allied forces in the Aleutian Islands Campaign. He was Commander Allied Naval Forces and the Seventh Fleet under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific Area, where he conducted numerous amphibious operations, and commanded an Allied fleet during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of World War II and the last naval battle between battleships in history.
Born into a naval family, Kinkaid was ranked in the lower half of his class on his graduation from the United States Naval Academy in June 1908. His early commissioned service was spent aboard battleships. In 1913, he began instruction in ordnance engineering and served in that field for many years. He saw action during the 1916 United States occupation of the Dominican Republic. During World War I, he was attached to the Royal Navy before serving as gunnery officer aboard the battleship. After the war, he was assistant chief of staff to the Commander U.S. Naval Detachment in Turkey. Kinkaid received his first command, the destroyer, in 1924. He was executive officer of the battleship when the 1933 Long Beach earthquake struck, and participated in relief efforts. He received his second command in 1937, the heavy cruiser.
From 1938 to 1941, Kinkaid was a naval attaché in Italy and Yugoslavia. In the months prior to U.S. entry into World War II, he commanded a destroyer squadron. Promoted to rear admiral in 1941, he assumed command of a U.S. Pacific Fleet cruiser division. His cruisers defended the aircraft carrier during the Battle of the Coral Sea and during the Battle of Midway. After that battle, he took command of Task Force 16, a task force built around the carrier, which he led during the long and difficult Solomon Islands campaign, participating in the Battles of the Eastern Solomons and the Santa Cruz Islands. Kinkaid was placed in charge of the North Pacific Force in January 1943 and commanded the operations that regained control of the Aleutian Islands. He was promoted to vice admiral in June 1943.
In November 1943, Kinkaid became Commander Allied Naval Forces South West Pacific Area, and commander of the Seventh Fleet, directing U.S. and Royal Australian Navy forces supporting the New Guinea campaign. During the Battle of the Surigao Strait, he commanded the Allied ships in the last naval battle between battleships in history. Following the demise of Japanese naval power in the region, the Allied navies supported the campaigns in the Philippines and Borneo. Kinkaid was promoted to admiral on 3 April 1945. After the Pacific War ended in August 1945, the Seventh Fleet assisted in operations on the Korean and China coasts. Admiral Kinkaid was Commander Eastern Sea Frontier and the Sixteenth Fleet from 1946 until his retirement in May 1950. He was a member of the National Security Training Commission for much of the rest of the decade. He also served with the American Battle Monuments Commission for 15 years.
Early life
Thomas Cassin Kinkaid was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on 3 April 1888, the second child and only son of Thomas Wright Kinkaid, a naval officer, and his wife Virginia Lee née Cassin. At the time, Thomas Wright Kinkaid was on leave from the U.S. Navy and employed at the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. When Thomas was only a year old, his father was posted to, and the family moved to Sitka, Alaska, where a third child, Dorothy, was born in 1890. Over the next few years the family successively moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Norfolk, Virginia; Annapolis, Maryland, and Georgetown, Washington, D.C.Thomas attended Western High School for three years before entering a U.S. Naval Academy preparatory school. He sought and secured an appointment to Annapolis from President Theodore Roosevelt, and was asked to take the admission examination. The Navy was undergoing a period of expansion, and the intake of midshipmen was double that of two years earlier. Of the 350 who took the examination, 283 were admitted. The class was the largest since the Academy had opened in 1845.
Kinkaid was admitted to Annapolis as a midshipman in July 1904. His instructors included four future Chiefs of Naval Operations: William S. Benson, William V. Pratt, William D. Leahy and Ernest J. King. In 1905 he took an instructional cruise on. He also spent six weeks on, his only experience of a warship under sail. In subsequent years, his training cruises were on and which, while much newer, were by this time also obsolete. He participated in sports, particularly in rowing, earning a seat in the Academy's eight-oar racing shell. He graduated on 5 June 1908, ranked 136th in his class of 201.
Early career
Kinkaid's first posting was to San Francisco where he joined the crew of the battleship, part of the Great White Fleet. During the next year, he circumnavigated the globe with the fleet, visiting New Zealand and Australia. The fleet returned to its home port of Norfolk, Virginia in February 1909. In 1910, Kinkaid took his examinations for the rank of ensign but failed navigation. While his classmates were promoted in June 1910, Kinkaid remained a midshipman, pending the result of a makeup examination in December 1910. In July, he developed pleurisy and was hospitalized in New York, New York, before being sent to Annapolis to recuperate. At the time, his father was in charge of the Naval Engineering Experiment Station there, which allowed Kinkaid to stay with his parents while studying for his navigation examination. In October, he was posted to the battleship whose skipper, Commander William Sims, an Annapolis classmate of his father's, encouraged Kinkaid's early interest in gunnery. Kinkaid passed his navigation examination on 7 December and was promoted to ensign on 14 February 1911, backdated to 6 June 1910. While still at Annapolis, Kinkaid met Helen Sherburne Ross, the daughter of a Philadelphia businessman. The two were married on 24 April 1911 in the Silver Chapel of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in a ceremony attended by a small number of guests. Their marriage produced no children. They enjoyed playing contract bridge and golf, and Helen was the women's golf champion for the District of Columbia in 1921 and 1922.In 1913, Kinkaid, now a lieutenant, commenced a course in ordnance at the Naval Academy Postgraduate School. This consisted of four months of classroom instruction followed by tours with the leading naval ordnance manufacturers, and concluded with a tour of duty at the Indian Head Naval Proving Ground. Students had to commit to remain in the Navy for at least eight years. After completing the four months in the classroom at Annapolis, Kinkaid commenced a three-month assignment at Midvale Steel, but this was interrupted after two months by the United States occupation of Veracruz. Kinkaid was ordered to report to the gunboat for duty in the Caribbean, during which the ship participated in the 1916 United States occupation of the Dominican Republic. Kinkaid came under fire for the first time when the ship was fired upon from ashore. Machias replied with its machine guns. When one jammed, Kinkaid exposed himself to fire to assist in clearing the weapon. He fired it in response to gunfire against the ship. Machias returned home in December, and in February Kinkaid resumed his ordnance studies and went to Bausch & Lomb in Rochester, New York, where he studied the manufacture of spotting and fire control systems. In March he reported to the Washington Navy Yard, where he wrote a pamphlet on fire control. He also created a design for a human torpedo, but the Bureau of Ordnance decided that his concept was unsound. He completed his ordnance studies with tours at Bethlehem Steel, the Indian Head Naval Proving Ground and the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn.
In July 1916, Kinkaid reported to, the navy's newest battleship, as a gunfire spotter. He was promoted to lieutenant in January 1917. In November 1917, seven months after the American entry into World War I, he was ordered to supervise the delivery of a newly developed rangefinder from the Norfolk Navy Yard to the Grand Fleet. On reaching London, Kinkaid reported to Sims, now a vice admiral, who then ordered Kinkaid to deliver secret documents to Admiral William S. Benson at a meeting with Allied naval leaders in Paris. Afterwards, Kinkaid returned to the United Kingdom and tested the rangefinder at on Whale Island, Hampshire. He visited optical works in London, York and Glasgow to study the British Royal Navy's rangefinders, and the Grand Fleet at its anchorages. On returning to the United States in January 1918, he visited Sperry Gyroscope and Ford Instruments to consult with them on fire control systems. Promoted to lieutenant commander in February 1918, he was posted to Pennsylvanias sister ship,. In May 1919, Arizona was sent to cover the Greek occupation of Smyrna. For his services from September 1918 to July 1919, Kinkaid was recommended for the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, but it was not awarded.
Between the wars
Following the normal pattern of alternating assignments afloat and ashore, Kinkaid was posted to a shore billet as the Chief of the Supply Section of the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, D.C. During this time he published two articles in the United States Naval Institute magazine Proceedings. The first, on the "Probability and Accuracy of Gun Fire", was a technical article arguing for more rather than bigger guns on battleships and cruisers. The Washington Naval Conference would prevent these ideas from being put into practice, by restricting the number and size of warships and their guns. The second, entitled "Naval Corps, Specialization and Efficiency", argued for increasing the specializations of line officers rather than creating separate corps of specialists, a more controversial topic at a time when naval aviators were agitating for the creation of a new specialist branch of their own.In 1922, Kinkaid became Assistant Chief of Staff to the Commander U.S. Naval Detachment in Turkish Waters, Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol. This tour saw the end of the Greek occupation of Smyrna. The ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne by Turkey resulted in a draw-down of U.S. naval forces in the region, reducing Bristol's post to a primarily diplomatic one. In 1924, Kinkaid, whose father had died in August 1920, requested a posting back to the United States owing to his mother's ill-health. The ship taking him back, the light cruiser, had to sail by way of Iran in order to collect the body of Vice Consul Robert Whitney Imbrie, who had been killed by an angry mob in Tehran.
Kinkaid received his first command, the destroyer, on 11 November 1924. Since its home port was the Philadelphia Navy Yard and ships' captains did not have to spend their nights on board, Kinkaid was able to live with Helen at her parents' residence in Philadelphia. In July 1925, he was assigned to the Naval Gun Factory. He was promoted to commander in June 1926. For the next two years, he served as Fleet Gunnery Officer and aide to the Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, Admiral Henry A. Wiley. In 1929 and 1930, Kinkaid attended the Naval War College. This was followed by duty on the Navy General Board. He was then seconded to the State Department as a Naval Advisor at the Geneva Disarmament Conference.
Kinkaid next became executive officer of, one of the navy's newest battleships, in February 1933. By coincidence the ship was at anchor in Long Beach, California, when the 1933 Long Beach earthquake struck. Over the next few days thousands of sailors and marines participated in relief activities. Kinkaid convinced the captain to allow homeless families of crew members to stay on the ship, and erected tarpaulins on the quayside to create family areas. He sent medical and relief supplies ashore from Colorado.
In 1934, he returned to Washington for a tour of duty with the Bureau of Navigation, in charge of the Officers' Detail Section. During this time, Kinkaid came up for promotion to captain. Classmates including Richmond K. Turner and Willis A. Lee were selected in January 1935, but Kinkaid was passed over for promotion. However, with the help of strong fitness reports from his superiors, Rear Admirals William D. Leahy and Adolphus Andrews, he was selected in January 1936 and, after passing the required physical and professional examinations, was promoted on 11 January 1937. Kinkaid was then given his second seagoing command, the heavy cruiser. He assumed command from Captain Henry K. Hewitt on 7 June 1937.