The U.S. Naval Institute lost a good friend in mid-August with the passing of Rear Admiral Robert W. McNitt at age 97. Tall, slender, friendly, and invariably gracious, the retired Navy officer was the personification of the word “gentleman.” George Van served on board the destroyer Taylor (DDE-468) during the Korean War, when McNitt was the commanding officer. Van remembers his skipper as “the finest naval officer I ever met.” George was a longtime Naval Institute volunteer transcriber, and I gratefully accepted his suggestion to do an oral history with McNitt, who was a truly admirable admiral.
In the 1960s, as a captain, McNitt was a member of the Naval Institute’s board of control, which provided governance for the organization and also reviewed articles for publication in Proceedings. He was a strong supporter of the Institute’s open forum for the betterment of the profession. One article that stuck in his memory was critical of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral David McDonald, who was the board’s president, had concerns about the piece, but the panel approved it with few changes.
McNitt was an experienced seaman, starting even before he became a U.S. Naval Academy midshipman in 1934. He had a lifelong interest in sailing. Among his achievements was serving as a crew member of the Navy’s Vamarie during the Newport-to-Bermuda yacht race in 1938. Indeed, it was Ensign McNitt who really provided the impetus for the Academy to get into competitive ocean sailing. In 1996 the Naval Institute Press published his book Sailing at the Naval Academy: An Illustrated History.
A striking example of applied expertise came during World War II, when Lieutenant McNitt was executive officer of the submarine Barb (SS-220), commanded by noted Commander Gene Fluckey. In his Naval Institute oral history, McNitt recounted the Barb receiving a radio dispatch in September 1944 that reported a Japanese ship filled with Allied prisoners of war had been torpedoed and sunk four days earlier, about 450 miles from the Barb’s position.
McNitt, as part of assembling his seabag of professional knowledge, had filed away a Proceedings article written by a Coast Guard officer. It explained how to calculate the drift of objects at sea when there was a lapse of time. McNitt used the information in the article to navigate the Barb into position to find and rescue 14 of the prisoners—Britons, Australians, and New Zealanders.
By then they were so weak that McNitt and other swimmers had to jump into the sea to pull them out. One of the POWs, Jack Flynn, maintained his wit throughout the ordeal. His reaction on being rescued: “I’ll write home and tell the old lady, ‘Kick the Yanks out. I’m coming home.’”
When McNitt was a new flag officer in 1964, his duties carried him to a NATO billet on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. There he absorbed a great deal of the local history and tradition and fit in so well that he learned to play polo. He had learned about the sport from a book written by revered Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, whom he met during the course of a visit.
In 1967, as commander of a cruiser-destroyer flotilla, McNitt provided the 8-inch heavy cruiser Newport News (CA-148) with predeployment maintenance, testing, and upgrades the ship needed to fire effectively when she deployed to Southeast Asia. I remember having seen the cruiser fire off the coast of Vietnam. Years later, in talking with the admiral, I learned that it was his efforts that had enabled her to shoot so well.
In the early 1970s, as a rear admiral, he was superintendent of the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California. His wife, Barbara, was tragically killed in 1971 in a road accident when the family was en route to his next duty station. (He married his second wife, Pat, in 1973.) Very likely, the admiral was headed for promotion and more responsible jobs in the Navy, but that would have meant going to sea, which he could not do with a family of small children who already had lost their mother.
Instead, McNitt took billets ashore and then retired from active duty to serve for many years as the dean of admissions for the Naval Academy, the school he loved. He oversaw a system that devised various tools to measure the attributes that would be most likely to identify an individual man or woman who would have the best chance for success as a midshipman and, later, as an officer in the Fleet.
Rear Admiral Robert McNitt embodied naval professionalism and passed the trait of excellence on to the thousands of midshipmen he brought to the Academy and then monitored their efforts to become successful career officers.
Despite the wealth of achievement he piled up, I always found him down-to-earth and most approachable. Our interviews were enlivened with a sense of humor that was always one of his appealing qualities. I remember a story he told about being on the bridge of the Taylor when he was skipper: “I would listen to the signal searchlight, and I could read the code, of course, from the sound of the handle opening and closing the shutter. We tried to keep a little control of the signalmen, so they wouldn’t send too much unofficial raunchy stuff out at night. So I’d wait until they told some raunchy joke, and when I got to the punch line I’d burst out laughing on the bridge. And once they heard that, they’d cool it.”