Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [136]
Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, the commander of the Vanguard Force, would be censured for caution, too. He elected not to pursue Kinkaid’s withdrawing Enterprise task force as night fell on October 26. The decision couldn’t have been for lack of motivation. He had been present at the Battle of Cape Esperance, where his lifelong friend Aritomo Goto had fallen. He had heard tell of Goto’s dying profanities—“Bakayaro!” (idiots!)”—as the cruiser Aoba was smashed by forces he had believed were friendly.
AS THEIR SHIP SLUGGED SOUTH in the company of the battered Enterprise, the crew of the South Dakota turned to the ceremonies by which they honored their dead. After dark, Captain Thomas Gatch ordered the engines slowed and came to a stop so that a proper burial at sea could be conducted for her first two dead. The night was black, and a feeling of gloom pressed down like a weight. The chaplain, Commander James V. Claypool, kept a strong grip on the belt of the nearest pallbearer, lest he stumble and fall overboard as he intoned the words. “Forasmuch as the spirit of the departed has returned to God who gave it, we therefore commit his body to the depths of the sea.… ” Captain Gatch was belowdecks and for all the celebrants knew he might well be next off the slab. Untold hundreds of men lay dead on other ships or were already within the sea’s embrace. As the South Dakota’s attending crew performed the committal, raising one end of the burial slab so that the bodies could slide into the sea, Claypool read the benediction. “May the Lord bless thee and keep thee.… ” As he spoke, the moon shone through a break in the clouds, illuminating the decks of the great ship. Claypool thought it was a signal of immortality awaiting all who believed.
The South Dakota had taken aboard the survivors of the Porter, the destroyer lost that day to the crashing Avenger’s wayward torpedo. The survivors were given clothes, smokes, bedding, and anything else they needed. Several of that ship’s engine room crew, badly burned in the fire from the torpedo, died in the battleship’s sickbay. The captain of the Porter asked Claypool to do the rites as the destroyer’s crew gathered aft. “In their borrowed clothes they stood in a horseshoe on the fantail of our ship, listening to the words of hope and love spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ. They wiped away tears with the sleeves of their dungarees, but they left the burial service with shoulders straightened and heads high. Watching them, I thought I heard a bugle sounding the thrilling Navy call, ‘Carry on!’ ” Claypool wrote.
When the ship returned to Nouméa after the October 26 battle, the wounded men sent away to hospital ships begged to be allowed to return, but only if Gatch remained in command. Was he alive? they wanted to know. All too well, the SOPAC medical corps would tell them. He was said to be a difficult patient. Chaplain Claypool kept him on the straight and narrow. Gatch followed a British tradition that required the captain to read the Scripture lesson at Mass. The captain’s faith no doubt empowered his chaplain, who thought that organized religion was a natural thing for a Navy to promote. “Men have to have something in their heads,” he would write. “If they don’t have religion, superstition rushes to fill the vacuum.… They don’t stand up under fire. In the Navy, we take along religion as we take along ammunition.” The South Dakota had loaded that particular magazine to capacity while en route to the theater. Crossing the International Date Line, Claypool was pleased to find himself with back-to-back Sundays, thanks to the change in time zones.
THE JAPANESE WASTED no time making the most optimistic claims about the performance of their fliers that day. “I wish we had as many carriers as they claim to have sunk,” Nimitz wrote to Catherine