Medal of Honor Day: The Navy Chaplain Who Helped Save an Aircraft Carrierhttps://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2026/03/25/medal-of-honor-day-the-navy-chaplain-who-helped-save-an-aircraft-carrier-n4951066It was March 1945, and a Japanese bomber strike had turned the USS Franklin aircraft carrier’s flight deck into a blazing inferno. A middle-aged man with a cross on his helmet was organizing firefighting crews, tending to the wounded, and finding sailors skilled in bomb disabling all at once. As Sam Rhodes worked feverishly on pitching a bomb overboard, as directed by the man with the cross, he thought, “Well… if I go up with a bomb, at least I go with a priest.”
Today is Medal of Honor Day, commemorating those who received America's highest military honor. I highly recommend reading the stories of men who recently received the Medal of Honor from President Donald Trump. But in this piece, I'm going to focus on a Catholic Navy chaplain later described by his non-religious captain as "the bravest man I have ever seen."
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Fr. Joseph Timothy O’Callahan, U.S. Navy chaplain, was eating in the wardroom on March 19, 1945 (the feast day of his namesake St. Joseph), when the semi-armor piercing shells hit the Franklin's flight deck. At the time, dozens of planes were either in the hangar or actually on the flight deck, their tanks filled with fuel. Or, in other words, they were now part of the reason the enemy strike turned the Franklin into an inferno.
A minor correction ... the USS Franklin was hit by a "Judy" dive bomber with two 250 Kg (~550 lb. each) semi-armor-piercing bombs. The last USN fleet carrier lost in WW2 was USS Hornet, in 1942. A couple of light carriers and escort carriers were lost later in the war. The Yorktown and Essex class carriers were really robust, and USN damage control saved ships that the IJN would have lost.
