42
THE MEN CAME HOME, AS THE LUCKY ONES DO. THE WAR RAGED ON.
On New Year’s Day, the President Monroe arrived in San Francisco with her complement of Atlanta survivors. It was just as well they missed the hoo-hah over the San Francisco’s arrival three weeks before. An Atlanta veteran, Robert Chute, was “full of the usual horror stories and equally full of scathing remarks for the San Francisco,” Bettsy Perkins, the wife of one of the ship’s officers, wrote. “Mind you, Mrs. Perkins,” he said, “I ain’t talking about this ship to no one but you, but a guy’s gotta blow off some steam to someone and all this Hero Ship stuff is bunk.”
Perkins was tearfully reunited with her husband, Van Perkins, but the reunion was short-lived. When his leave was up, the war still beckoned. He was reassigned to the light cruiser Birmingham. In the Philippines in 1944, Perkins was serving as the cruiser’s damage-control officer when she went to the assistance of a damaged ship, the light aircraft carrier Princeton, struck by a bomb. Commander Perkins was supervising the Birmingham’s firefighters as they played their streams into the burning carrier. His ship was so close alongside, and the sea so heavy, that her superstructure took a beating from the overhang of the carrier’s flight deck. When the Princeton’s magazines detonated, Perkins was killed instantly. He was buried at sea quickly and summarily, and not a shipmate from the Atlanta was there for him. They had gone to fight their own wars.
After the war, Bettsy married one of the few men on earth who would understand her loss, another officer from the Atlanta, Jim Shaw, himself a widower. In her memoirs, published decades later, her outlook on the romance of naval service would acquire a bittersweet complexity, torn between romantic reverie and cold-eyed pragmatism.
I now see that I had a love for the Atlanta like that you afford a human being and that ships are after all just floating offices and as warm as a dead fish. I will never forget the Atlanta. She taught me a lesson. I won’t ever try to love another ship. I’ll just take them for what they are worth which is nothing. The Atlanta is dead and buried. She got buried in my heart which was perhaps the wrong place for her, but she got there, and now I realized that she was unique and that I must not try to hold up other ships to her standards which means that I must become more tolerant towards other ships because I cannot judge all by the exceptional.
With the Atlanta left to be honored in memory only—and by a new homesake, the CL-104, serving with the fleet in 1945—the public never deeply registered the name. As Guadalcanal’s naval veterans found other ships to fight the war in, they would find that few other vessels or crews would withstand any comparison with the past.
No sooner had Robert Graff returned fully to the world at Oak Knoll than he was surrounded by inquisitors. “As soon as I could talk, people would gather around my bed. What they wanted to know was, what was it like to fight? What are the particulars that make battle different from civilian life? How do we prepare? The people back in Washington, what did they know?
“The first thing I told them was to try to do their part in making the ship’s company a fighting team. If you can do that, you’ve got half the battle won. That means that everybody feels a responsibility for everybody else. Everybody has a job to do and his task is to do his job correctly and well. Talk to the shipmates in your division as much as you can, not only to learn your job but to build up a sense of confidence, little by little, that if you get hurt, another guy’s going to know how to help you. If you do those two things, you’re a long way along.”
Lloyd Mustin was appalled that it should take exposure to actual combat for the Navy to develop rudimentary tactical competence. “The requirement to be ready to execute simple tactics in the dark while engaging the enemy, I suppose, is one of the things that you’d expect naval officers would be taught from the time they become midshipmen.
“You could adduce a lot of crocodile tears and a lot of clichés that all these poor guys didn’t have any time to train together, and so forth, and it’s essential that they be working as a team and so on. Well, that’s just so much balderdash.… They should be able to work together as a team on no advance notice whatsoever by virtue of working to a single uniform common U.S. Navy doctrine, a single common signal book which, of course, we’ve had for years and years.”
Graff didn’t believe books could ever teach a man to respond effectively to the sensation of a bulkhead shattering or a keel buckling underfoot. “Think creatively, imaginatively, about what combat is really like,” he told his inquisitors, “and what would you do if you lost control over your survival. You have to talk like that with your shipmates.
“There are no secrets here, but what you find is that some people are constitutionally unable to perform that way. So then the game is to make sure that they’re put in positions where they can use the talents they have when circumstances are horrific.” Unless everybody does his job, and learns to do it under duress, “there can be no fighting ship.”
After Graff had healed well enough to be reassigned, he reported to Philadelphia, where a new aircraft carrier, the Monterey, was preparing to get under way for the Pacific. When her captain, a naval aviator, heard that an Atlanta survivor was joining his wardroom, he appreciated what he had and was smart enough to ask him to a private lunch. “He wanted to know everything,” Graff said. “He really just probed me and probed me.” Combat veterans tended to be resilient and adaptable. One way or another, Graff adapted to being in high demand.
The way America handled its “first team” differed markedly from Japan’s. The Americans brought them home after their inaugural experience under sustained fire and employed them to train the next wave. The Japanese left them on the front to fight until the inevitable happened, and saw their human assets waste away. It was a gilded luxury that the Marine Corps could send home its first fighter ace, the commander of one of the most decorated squadrons in the Solomons, Captain John L. Smith, give him his Medal of Honor, and refuse his requests to return to combat, “not until you have trained 150 John L. Smiths.” A less dramatic case, but more typical of the system, was Edgar Harrison, a fire controlman from the San Francisco. He took his battle experience to the Navy’s technical schools, becoming the first instructor on the new Mark 56 fire-control system, developed to repel attacks by kamikaze aircraft.
As Graff went to sea in the Monterey, the Aaron Ward’s radar officer, Bob Hagen, reported to Seattle-Tacoma to become the gunnery officer of a new destroyer, the Johnston, whose captain, Commander Ernest E. Evans, was a combat veteran who had been similarly recycled from a previous assignment. Jesse Coward and Roland Smoot, commanders of the Sterett and Monssen, respectively, would take command of destroyer squadrons and play important tactical roles in later campaigns, too. Tested and seasoned by adversity, all would acquire varying degrees of naval legend in the Leyte Gulf campaign in the Philippines in 1944.
The epic of the Pacific war found new chapters for everyone. The endless game of personnel-rotation musical chairs saw the continuous replacement of the experienced by the inexperienced, until, by the end, only the experienced remained.
JOE JAMES CUSTER, the war correspondent, had served in the South Pacific campaign’s earliest days and witnessed the destruction firsthand. On board the Astoria, and later, recovering from eye surgery at Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, he had become close with men who had served in the inferno. He had looked into their eyes and seen right through into their minds and souls, and found reflections of pain in a blackness that he called “something new the psychiatrists were working on.” Experience was important. It delivered benefits, and took a price, too. “They were ill, physically, mentally, spiritually; they had undergone agonies of body and mind that were impossible to contemplate except by those who had actually been there.” The scale of violence was impossible to reckon with.
Custer’s articles detailing the loss of the Astoria, published near the end of October in The Seattle Times and elsewhere, awakened in the families of many servicemen an urgency to understand what their loved ones had been through. Letters soon began arriving in Room 232 at Queen’s Hospital. Until his eyes healed and he could read them himself, the nurses on duty had to do the honors for him.
One correspondent’s brother, a lieutenant, had gone missing. “We have received news from Wash. of his reported death. I guess it’s natural that I should wish to repudiate this, but I just don’t feel Tom is gone. You say a cruiser was lost—was anybody on board saved? If I could come to you personally to talk it over with you I’m sure I could readily make you see how much the truth means to me, to all of us. My mother hasn’t even been told as yet what we’ve heard. We’re afraid what the shock might do to her.… In the name of Christian charity, and as a fellow countryman, can you see fit to write and answer me?”
“You may not care to bother with this letter but please do as it will probly relieve the heartaches of seven people who morn the loss of a dear Boy just 20 years old, who was on the ship Astoria in battle. this is his grandfather writeing you for more information. He was dearly loved by me and his grandmother who passed away on the night of August 9th 42.” (All typos in quotations are sic.)
Another correspondent had a son on the Quincy, now missing in action. Could he have swum to land or been taken prisoner? “If he is in a hospital would they let him write home and tell me where he is? My son’s wife is to have a baby some time this month.… We grasp at any opportunity to contact someone who may have known our boy.… We shall never tire of listening to anything connected with the last days of the life of the Astoria.”
Someone in the War Department got the idea to send veterans of America’s first victorious campaign around the country to factories, bolstering morale. By 1943, absenteeism was becoming a serious problem in the war industries. With women pressed into full-time service in the workforce, adding to their responsibilities as homemakers, many found the dual commitments difficult to sustain. Edgar Harrison of the San Francisco was called to duty in this effort. A speech was written for him, and he went out to testify to his experiences.
“This young man could be any of your sons or husbands,” the executive who introduced him at one event said. “He’s going to tell you about a battle you just heard about on radio.” The speeches were made as bloody as the mores of public presentation would allow. For three months Harrison traveled to the manufacturing plants of the Midwest and Northeast, doing four or five speeches a day, always hitting the shift changes when the audience was double. “Guys would walk up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes, shake my hand, and not say a word. Everybody knew somebody in the Army or Navy,” he said.
One morning in early 1943, before a speech at the Cadillac plant in Cadillac, Michigan, he was escorted to a railroad siding behind a large building and asked to paint his name on a large piece of steel on a flatcar. Then he was invited to follow it through every manufacturing phase on the assembly line, until, three hours later, it was driven off the end of the line, part of a finished Sherman tank.
Tom and Alleta Sullivan, gold-star parents of the five boys from the Juneau, began a speaking tour in February that took them to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Hartford, and through the heartland, slated to end with the launching in San Francisco of a new destroyer named after their sons. At a whistlestop in Chicago several weeks along, a survivor from the ship, Allen Heyn, confided to them what had really happened to George, their oldest, during his ordeal at sea.
They would inspire untold thousands of people in more than two hundred appearances nationwide before they returned to Waterloo and the public eye wandered elsewhere. Back home, they would be left to contend with the smaller minds of their community who suspected the couple of cashing in on their sons’ loss. They would never feel at home in Waterloo again. And it finally became too much. In San Francisco the first week of April, at the launching of the USS The Sullivans, Alleta broke a champagne bottle against the hull and smiled graciously for the cameras. Before the ceremony could end, however, her strength gave out. She buckled and fell to the ground sobbing.
EARLY 1943 WAS A TIME of many reckonings. Foremost among them, in the echoing halls of the Navy’s culture of reputation at least, was Admiral Hepburn’s inquisition into the failures that decided the Battle of Savo Island.
After recovering from his illness in Hawaii, he went quickly to work, inspecting Admiral Nimitz’s files and then interrogating Commander H. B. Heneberger, the senior surviving officer of the Quincy, and Commander Elijah W. Irish, the navigator of the Chicago.He boarded the next available ship for Nouméa, where he met with Admiral Halsey. Then, on February 16, he took his inquiry to Australia.
Interservice niceties were needed to gain an audience with Admiral Crutchley, still serving under U.S. command but now with Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Forces. Hepburn found the British officer’s account of the battle, filed in Brisbane, “the most complete and lucid report of the entire operation,” though of course Crutchley was miles away when it took place. Perhaps out of the respect thus gained, Hepburn would write that he “conferred with” (rather than “interrogated”) Crutchley in Melbourne, on board the vessel that had been excused from disaster on August 9, the cruiser Australia. At Canberra, Hepburn was received by Australia’s governor-general and attended a meeting of the War Council. He returned to Nouméa to interrogate Admiral Turner, then flew home to Pearl Harbor to examine Captain Greenman and begin work on his report to Admiral King.
Only then, on April 2, did Hepburn fly back to the mainland to interrogate the two officers whose culpable inefficiency he was beginning to see most clearly: Captain Riefkohl of the Vincennes and Captain Bode of the Chicago. Shrewd interrogators will often save the most difficult sessions for last. Armed with deep knowledge of the facts, and with his report largely already drafted, Arthur J. Hepburn arrived in Corpus Christi and prepared for the final stage of his inquest.