Grandpa in the Navy

Grandpa's ship was the USS Mt. McKinley, AGC-7. It was also nick-named the "Mighty Mac" or "The Admiral's Go Cart". (AGC) The crew and captain's primary duty was to transport the Admiral and his staff to their destination(s) and to do it safely. The captain controlled the ship and the admiral went through the captain for orders. To see some more cool info on the USS Mt. McKinley, click here.

According to my grandpa, the ship was made to comfortably hold 1800 crew members. While Grandpa was a crew member there were roughly 2100 sailors.

Here are some more WW2 pictures that will give you an idea of what my Grandpa may have seen while in the war.

See if you can count all the planes in this picture. This is a procession(?) of the U. S. navy after the Japanese surrendered. After doing some research, I learned that at the "Battle of Leyte Gulf", there were nearly 1000 aircraft and 280 ships involved in the battle; Japanese and American combined. It must have been quite a sight to see.

Anti-aircraft guns. 40mm pom-pom cannons.

Grandpa had these guns on his ship and witnessed them in action also. Grandpa remembers that if you were under-deck you could determine the distance away an enemy plane was by the sound of the guns up on deck. The 5 inchers would be the first to fire at an enemy plane(s). These sounded big but slow and the plane would still be far away so you had nothing to worry about. If the plane(s) got closer the pom-poms would open up. These fired about the speed that a man could load 4 shells at a time. Sometimes, when things got hot, there would be 2 loaders. These had a steady pom-pom sound; firing about 3-4 shells every second. You would start to pay attention when you heard these guns open up. Then, if the plane(s) got past those, the 20s (mm) would open up. The planes generally didn't get past these guns. They would either get shot down or turn aside. If the planes got past these guns, the 20 caliber machine guns would open up. That's when you would jump for cover or something.

A downed kamikaze. My Grandpa saw kamikazes and witnessed the damage they could do.