Foreword
How does one human being love another? How does a son love a father? As Elizabeth
Barrett Browning tells us in her famous Sonnet 43, “Let me count the ways.”
All Came Home is a touching tribute from a son to his father, and it asks and answers
both of these questions; it is a meticulously researched effort by a son and a scholar
who implicitly asks, “What was my father like before I came to know him?” How could
life produce such a stern but loving father?” What crucible could have brought forth
such a man, gentle and caring but still a man of steel?” This is not a story imagined by
a clever author. It is the story of a life that really happened. It is the culmination of a
son’s life of admiration and respect and most of all of wonder. Much of it is told in the
father’s own words, which are skillfully interwoven into the events which molded the
father’s life, the ordeal of World War II and the part in it played by Joe McDevitt and
by his ship, the USS Leon APA 48. But it is more than that. It actually is the story of a
generation of young American men and women, millions of them, who fought and won
WWII, and who did this in the face of formidable personal and financial hardships that
it put them through.
I, too, knew, respected and admired Joe McDevitt. He was a valued mentor of mine. I
first met him soon after this narrative ends, so I knew only the older one. I now know
how the man I knew and served came to be. Paul McDevitt has described for me the
foundation of a life which I saw blossom as Joe McDevitt became part of a coterie of
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Navy lawyers who gave legal substance—and the name—to the Cuban Quarantine of
October 1962, and who later became the chief uniformed lawyer in the Navy. He was
one who earned not only Paul McDevitt’s tribute but ours as well and who deserves the
honor and respect accorded to an American hero.
As I read these pages, I could not help but remember the final words of a famous poem
penned by Captain, later Vice Admiral, William G. Beecher, Jr., as he surveyed the great
armada of American men-of-war assembled in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, as the
formal Japanese surrender took place. That poem, “By Nimitz - - and Halsey - - and Me,”
warns the Japanese never to attack us again and concludes:
“For we have a country with millions of men
Like Nimitz--and Halsey--and me”
Yes. And, one of those “millions of men” was Lieutenant Junior Grade, later Rear
Admiral, Joseph B. McDevitt. And, yes, too, says Paul McDevitt, “Let me count the ways.”
Respectfully submitted,
William O. Miller, Rear Admiral, JAGC, U.S. Navy (Ret)
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