Appalachian Figures
A Bell County boy in a world of blue water
Bell County is usually associated with coal seams, timber, and the tight bend of the Cumberland River under Pine Mountain. Yet one of the most influential American naval aviators of the twentieth century first opened his eyes in that narrow valley.
John Madison Hoskins was born in Pineville on 22 October 1898, the youngest of six children of Thomas Jefferson and Lucy Renfro Hoskins. He grew up in town, graduated from Pineville High School, and carried the memory of Bell County’s courthouse square and surrounding ridges with him for the rest of his life.
In 1921 the United States Naval Academy’s yearbook, Lucky Bag, printed the portrait of a young midshipman from Pineville, complete with a joking nickname and a brief character sketch. That entry, together with the academy’s official register for the same year, marks the beginning of Hoskins’s formal naval career and the start of a story that would reach from the Cumberland Gap to Leyte Gulf and the Yellow Sea.
From the mountains to the flight deck
Hoskins graduated from Annapolis in 1921 and spent his first years at sea on surface ships, a standard path for junior officers. By 1925 he had been selected for flight training, earned his wings, and entered the still young world of naval aviation. Official Navy registers through the 1930s show him moving through observation and scouting squadrons, eventually taking squadron command in 1937.
That same year, U.S. naval aviation was pulled into one of the most famous mysteries in modern history. When Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared in the central Pacific in July 1937, the aircraft carrier Lexington and her embarked squadrons formed the backbone of a large search task force. The Navy’s official report on the search and later summaries by the National Archives and the National Naval Aviation Museum place Hoskins among the officers whose aircraft combed the seas around Howland Island for any trace of Earhart’s Electra.
Through the late 1930s and early 1940s Hoskins rose with naval aviation itself. He served as air officer and then executive officer of the carrier Ranger as the Navy learned hard lessons moving aircraft groups across the Atlantic and experimenting with large-scale carrier operations.
Fire on the Princeton
World War II pushed Hoskins from training and staff work back toward the center of combat. By 1943 he was serving in Washington and at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, helping oversee carrier pilot training for American and British aviators. For that work he received the Legion of Merit, but he wanted a seagoing command.
In 1944 the Navy assigned him as prospective commanding officer of the light carrier Princeton (CVL 23), operating with fast carrier Task Force 38 in the Pacific. When he reported aboard in September, his friend Captain William H. Buracker retained actual command through the upcoming Philippine campaign, so Hoskins remained on board as a senior aviator and future skipper.
On 24 October 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a Japanese dive bomber put a single bomb into Princeton’s flight and hangar decks. Fires spread rapidly, igniting gasoline and ordnance. After hours of desperate firefighting, Buracker ordered most of the crew to abandon ship. Hoskins volunteered to stay with the salvage party. At 15:24 a massive secondary explosion tore away much of the stern, killing many of the remaining sailors and severing Hoskins’s right leg just above the ankle.
He later described the amputation and its aftermath in a letter that the Bell County Historical Society published decades later, a raw first person account of being pulled from the water, the onset of gangrene, and the surgeon’s decision that his foot had to go to save his life.
For his actions on Princeton he received both the Navy Cross and the Purple Heart. Yet the story mountain folks kept repeating was his stubborn refusal to let the loss of a foot end his career.
According to later accounts, Hoskins told his friend Admiral William Halsey that “the Navy does not expect a man to think with his feet.”
The new Princeton and the age of jets
Hoskins recovered at the naval hospital in Philadelphia, where he could look out the window and watch steel rise on the ways. The ship under construction was the new Princeton (CV 37), an Essex class carrier. He poured his energy into rehabilitation, learning to walk on a prosthesis and making regular visits to the yard.
When the new carrier commissioned in November 1945, the Bell County boy with the artificial foot stood aboard as her first commanding officer. A year later he pinned on rear admiral and took command of Carrier Division 17. Aviators who had served with him in World War II asked Walt Disney’s artists to design a “Peg Leg Pete” insignia, a cartoon pirate with a peg leg firing shells, in his honor.
Hoskins also became one of the Navy’s loudest voices for jet aviation at sea. In a period when many senior officers doubted that heavy, fast jet aircraft could safely operate from carrier decks, Hoskins insisted they could. The U.S. Navy Memorial’s log and local Bell County accounts credit him as the first man to take off and land a jet on an aircraft carrier, then as the officer placed over the job of adapting the fleet’s carriers and training its pilots for routine jet operations.
“Our Peg Leg Admiral” in Korea
By 1950 Hoskins commanded Carrier Division Three with his flag in the Essex class carrier Valley Forge (CV 45). When North Korea invaded the South on 25 June 1950, Valley Forge was the only U.S. carrier in the Western Pacific. Within days Hoskins had moved his task group from Hong Kong to Subic Bay for fuel and ammunition, then steamed north.
On 3 July 1950, aircraft from Valley Forge launched the first U.S. Navy air strikes of the Korean War, hitting airfields and rail yards near Pyongyang. Navy photographs show Hoskins conferring with Vice Admiral Arthur Struble and British flag officers aboard Rochester as carrier planes pounded North Korean communication lines and later supported the Inchon landings.
For months Hoskins’s carriers and air groups flew close support and interdiction missions, then returned stateside only long enough to take on a new air group and head back across the Pacific. The official Navy history of Valley Forge notes that her squadrons flew thousands of combat sorties and delivered thousands of tons of ordnance during those early campaigns.
Back home, Life magazine devoted a feature and cover to “Our Peg Leg Admiral,” complete with photographs of Hoskins on the flag bridge and on crutches, using his prosthetic foot to keep pace with his able bodied staff. The piece helped cement his national image as both a hard driving combat commander and a symbol of what disabled veterans could still accomplish.
The Military Times Hall of Valor later summarized his decorations for Korea: the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal for his overall command of carrier operations, a Silver Star from the Army for his role in the Inchon Seoul campaign, and additional awards including the Legion of Merit.
MATS, wounded airlifts, and the long flight home
In 1951 Hoskins traded carrier decks for global transport lanes when he took command of the Pacific Division of the Military Air Transport Service (MATS). Official Air Force histories and contemporary newspaper stories describe a system that carried troops and equipment around the world and, critically, brought wounded Americans home from Korea. During his command MATS racked up tens of millions of passenger miles without a single fatal accident, and one widely cited figure noted that the service moved some twenty three thousand wounded men.
After MATS, Hoskins returned to Rhode Island as Commander, Fleet Air Quonset Point, overseeing Atlantic aviation units and presiding over boards of inquiry, including the investigation into the deadly 1954 explosions aboard the carrier Bennington. He retired from active duty in 1957 and, under the rules of the time, was advanced on the retired list to his highest held wartime rank of vice admiral.
The man who decided what stayed secret
Retirement from uniform did not mean retirement from public service. Hoskins became director of the newly created Office of Declassification Policy in the Department of Defense. In that role he tried to balance Cold War secrecy with public access to historical records.
In 1956 he testified before a House Committee on Government Operations hearing on access to Defense Department information. Trade publications like Chemical and Engineering News and newspapers such as the Daily Colonist picked up his comments, including one memorable statement that there was “nothing secret” left in certain controversial nineteenth century Army files, such as the records of the Custer court of inquiry.
From Pineville’s perspective, this was perhaps the most unlikely turn in his career. A mountain born admiral, once known chiefly for flying off rolling decks, ended his working life in a Pentagon office deciding what the public could read about earlier wars.
“The Eternal Sea” and a Bell County premiere
Hollywood arrived before the end. In 1955 Republic Pictures released The Eternal Sea, a black and white war drama built directly around Hoskins’s life. Sterling Hayden played the admiral, Alexis Smith portrayed his wife Sue, and the film followed his story from World War II through Korea, focusing on the loss of his foot and his fight to return to sea duty. Contemporary reviews praised the realism of the carrier flight scenes and the film’s matter of fact approach to disability.
Bell County’s own biography of Hoskins notes that The Eternal Sea played at the Bell Theater during the Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival. For local audiences who had known the Hoskins family or watched young John walk Pineville’s streets, seeing his life dramatized on the hometown screen underscored just how far a Bell County boy had traveled.
Family ties from Pineville to Maryland
Local histories and Waters family genealogies fill in the domestic side of the story. Hoskins married Sue Dorsey Waters of Gaithersburg, Maryland, tying an Appalachian naval officer to an old Maryland family whose genealogy was later published in The Waters Book. Together they had three children: John Madison Jr., Renfro Waters, and Mary Sue.
Bell County sources list his siblings as Bess Williams of Cincinnati, J. K. Hoskins of Pineville, Mrs. Charles Gragg and Mrs. George Hodges of Pineville, and Carl B. Hoskins of Williamsburg, Kentucky. Even after John and Sue settled in Falls Church, Virginia, Hoskins’s extended family remained firmly rooted in the upper Cumberland.
Hoskins died of a heart attack at his home in Falls Church on 30 March 1964. After a funeral with full military honors at Fort Myer, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his tombstone recording his rank, World War II and Korean War service, and highest awards.
Why his story matters in Appalachia
Bell County’s official biography calls him “the Navy’s only peg leg admiral,” which is both a point of pride and a reminder of how easily disability becomes someone’s defining label.
For Appalachian history, Hoskins’s life opens several windows at once.
It shows how a small coal and timber town could send a young man into global service. His road from Pineville High School to Annapolis lines up with broader patterns of mountain youth seeking education and opportunity through the military, especially in the early twentieth century.
It illustrates how Appalachian veterans carried local values into distant conflicts. Hoskins’s stubborn refusal to leave the Navy, his insistence that brains mattered more than intact limbs, and his advocacy for better evacuation and treatment of wounded men all echo mountain traditions of endurance, loyalty, and care for neighbors.
Finally, his postwar work on declassification policy reminds us that the story does not end when the shooting stops. Decisions about what records to preserve and release shape how later generations understand wars, including the conflicts that sent so many young Appalachians overseas.
In short, Vice Admiral John Madison Hoskins was not just a figure in naval history books or a character in a mid century film. He was a Bell County son whose life connected the Cumberland Gap to the broad Pacific, and whose legacy still speaks to questions of disability, service, and memory in the Appalachian region.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Naval Academy, Lucky Bag (1921). Midshipman entry for John M. Hoskins, Pineville, Kentucky.
U.S. Navy, Annual Register of the United States Naval Academy (1922) and Register of the Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps (interwar editions).
Department of the Navy, “U. S. Navy Report of the Search for Amelia Earhart, July 2-18, 1937,” Office of Naval Records and Library. National Archives
National Naval Aviation Museum, “Naval Aviation and the Search for Amelia Earhart.” NNAM
Bell County Historical Society, “Admiral John Hoskins letter re foot amputation after enemy attack on the USS Princeton, 1944,” MD Gateway 18, no. 2 (Fall 2006). Friends of Allen County+1
Richard Matthews, “Vice Admiral John M. Hoskins,” Bell County Library (archived at bellcolib.org, 2014). Wayback Machine
Official U.S. Navy photographs and captions, “Vice Admiral John Madison Hoskins, USN (1898-1964),” Online Library of Selected Images, Naval History and Heritage Command. Ibiblio
U.S. Navy, “USS Princeton (CVL 23) is sunk,” in A Brief History of U.S. Navy Aircraft Carriers. Wikipedia
Naval History and Heritage Command, “Valley Forge (CV-45), 1946-1970” and associated Korean War photo series.
United States Air Force, The Story of MATS (Military Air Transport Service, 1951). Wikipedia+1
House Committee on Government Operations, Availability of Information from Federal Departments and Agencies: Department of Defense, Sixth Section (1956) and contemporary coverage in Chemical and Engineering News. Navy Together We Served+1
Life Magazine, “Our Peg Leg Admiral,” 14 August 1950; summarized in Korean War Educator’s “Life Goes to Korea” feature. thekwe.org+1
Associated Press, “Vice Adm. John Hoskins Dead,” 31 March 1964, and related obituary notices. IMDb+1
Naval History and Heritage Command / HyperWar, “Vice Admiral John Madison Hoskins, USN (1898-1964).” Ibiblio
“John Hoskins (officer),” Wikipedia, with extensive reference list to Navy registers, ship histories, and contemporary newspapers. Wikipedia
Military Times, Hall of Valor entry for “John Madison Hoskins.” Hall of Valor+1
TogetherWeServed, “VADM John Madison Hoskins” profile and photo gallery. Navy Together We Served+1
Curtis A. Utz, Assault from the Sea: The Amphibious Landing at Inchon (Naval Historical Center, 1994). Wikipedia
Harry Popham, “Eyewitness to Tragedy: Death of USS Princeton,” HistoryNet (1997). Wikipedia
FamilySearch and Wikitree entries for Vice Admiral John Madison Hoskins Sr., including linked genealogies of the Waters family. FamilySearch+2WikiTree+2
Contemporary coverage and later summaries of The Eternal Sea (1955), including reviews, Blu ray liner notes, and film reference entries. YouTube+2Amazon+2