Notwithstanding a distinguished career in the US Navy, which included combat sorties as an aviator during the Second World War and the Korean War, command of an aircraft carrier and service as a force commander in the Vietnam War, George Morrison will perhaps inevitably be remembered in the annals of rock music for his difficult relationship with his son Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors. Quoted more than 30 years after his famous son was found dead in his bath in a Paris hotel in 1971, Morrison said ruefully: “He knew I didn’t think rock music was the best goal for him.”

Yet Morrison senior’s career of active service earned him his own niche in naval annals. It had begun at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and included carrier-borne operations in the Pacific and over Japan. He was decorated during the Korean War and subsequently commanded naval forces during what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which led to the escalation of the Vietnam War. He was at one time the youngest admiral in the US Navy.

George Stephen Morrison (generally known as Steve) was born the son of a railway worker in Rome, in a remote part of western Georgia, in 1919. At school in Leesburg, Florida, where he grew up, he worked hard to gain a cadetship to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, which he was able to enter with the help of a relative who was a senior naval officer. From Annapolis he graduated in February 1941, and was posted to the minelayer Pruitt in the Pacific.

She was under going a refit in the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard when the Japanese launched their air attacks on the American base on December 7, 1941, and Morrison had his first taste of action stations as the minelayer’s crew manned their guns and damage control stations. Fortunately Pruitt was across the harbour from the main focus of the Japanese attacks, the US heavy ships, and her crew sustained no fatalities.

Times Archive, 1971: Jim Morrison obituary

Morrison's writing often flirted with quasi literary imagery, and his stage appearances contained a strong element of theatre

Volunteering for naval aviation, Morrison was sent to Florida for training and qualified as a combat pilot in time to undertake operations towards the end of the war, when he carried out sorties over the Japanese island of Honshu. His career after the war included work on nuclear projects at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and further air operations during the Korean War, in which he was awarded the Bronze Star. He also served as operations officer on the aircraft carrier Midway and in 1963 was given command of the carrier Bonhomme Richard.

Almost one of his first acts as captain was to have to announce to his ship’s company over the carrier’s broadcast system the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

He was overseeing naval operations in the Gulf of Tonkin when, on August 2, 1964, the destroyer Maddox opened fire on three North Vietnamese torpedo boats which had approached the US warship. There is some confusion about what followed. Two days later (Maddox having been joined by another destroyer) a second engagement between the American ships and North Vietnamese craft was reported. Subsequent checks suggested that these reports were erroneous. They nevertheless induced President Lyndon B. Johnson to order air strikes on North Vietnam, and to seek from Congress the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”, enabling him to deploy US forces without declaring war. It was a pivotal moment in the intensification of the conflict.

Morrison was promoted to rear admiral in 1967. By this time his elder son, Jim, had burst upon public notice as the Doors’ lead singer, with the group’s first album, The Doors. One of its numbers, Light My Fire, whose sexually provocative lyrics must certainly have scandalised Morrison père, reached the top of the US charts that year. After graduating from UCLA’s film school in 1965 Jim Morrison had broken off contact with his family, though it seems unlikely that he was as traumatised by what he always liked to describe as an authoritarian, unfeeling upbringing as he pretended to be. Some of his tales of emotional deprivation appear to have lost nothing in the telling.

As he prospered in senior posts, George Morrison confessed to finding it strange to see his son’s iconic image — one representing a moral culture defiantly at odds with his own precepts of service and duty — on the bedroom walls of his friends’ teenage children. By the time he reached the last stages of his career, Jim was dead. He had split with the Doors, who had increasingly found his drug-fuelled contributions to their recording sessions difficult to accommodate, and had gone to Paris to write poetry. He was found dead on July 3, 1971.

From 1972 George Morrison commanded US naval forces in the Marianas, organising the relief effort for the tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees sent to Guam in 1975 after the fall of Saigon to the forces of the Communist North.

Morrison retired from the Navy in 1975 and lived with his wife Clara in California. Besides being a keen golfer he also learnt Italian and Ancient Greek. In 1990 the pair visited Jim’s grave in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in eastern Paris, one of the city’s most visited tourist attractions. There Morrison installed a tablet he had created, with a Greek inscription of his own devising, signifying “True to his own genius”.

Clara died in 2005, and Morrison is survived by a son and daughter.

Rear-Admiral George Morrison, American naval aviator, was born on January 7, 1919. He died on November 17, 2008, aged 89