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Just before dawn, the San Francisco’s senior enlisted men reported topside to join a grim detail, conducting what was known as a body parts sweep. Such an effort was necessary following any battle action in which casualties occurred. Its purpose was to cleanse the ship of human remains. The crew picked up body parts and threw them overboard, and washed down the ship’s steel surfaces of drying blood. As with abandoning ship, it wasn’t something that could be realistically rehearsed ahead of time.

“The ship was just absolutely a shambles,” said Joseph Whitt, a San Francisco sailor. “It was just like you were opening up your eyes in a nightmare. I walked amidships and the five-inch guns that I passed had been hit, just wrecked. I looked at the stack—and this is a sight that I shall never ever forget. There were holes in the stack from the shrapnel from those explosions, and there was blood from the top of that stack running down the side of it, where the body parts had been blown up there and splattered down the side of it. The way that smelled … it was just something that no one should ever go through.”

Few new sailors were equipped to handle it. “Detailing the senior rates for this gruesome task was a good call,” Don Jenkins wrote. All around the ship, the growling of handy-billy pumps swelled. Hoses were dropped overboard and streams of water set flowing against all surfaces. Slowly the stubborn knots of flesh clotting the ship’s thousands of crooks and crevices, the drying splashes of blood, were washed away. All hands received a “ditty bag” and were ordered to identify the dead, remove their dog tags and personal effects, place a five-inch dummy shell down the front of their dungarees, cinch their belt tight, and ease the body over the side. The San Francisco had no chaplain aboard, so there was no ceremony to any of this. Lieutenant James I. Cone, who supervised the gathering of personal effects, collected far too many Annapolis class rings for his liking. Through this grimly determined effort, the ship returned to a tolerable state of habitability.

Littering the deck everywhere were small tubes of phosphorous, detritus of the incendiaries fired by the Japanese battleships. “Fellows were picking them up and putting them in their pockets as souvenirs,” Joseph Whitt remembered. It was a bad move. Some of the dud incendiary elements were still doing a slow burn. “One guy had one in his hip pocket, and before he tore his pants off, this thing really blistered him,” Whitt said. “Water wouldn’t put the fire out.”

The sickbay was too small to handle all the wounded. They had to be carried to the hangar deck. Don Jenkins recalled, “I never will be able to erase from my mind the utter feeling of helplessness and sorrow one feels as each time you deliver another wounded to the hangar. The moans and screams of pain, and many of the badly wounded calling out to their mothers.” In the admiral’s cabin, the doctor from the Juneau, Lieutenant O’Neil, donned a mask to assist in emergency surgery on Captain Cassin Young. His wounds were mortal, and there was no saving him.

As the ships passed through Torpedo Junction, it was clear to everybody, most of all Captain Hoover, that they were a vulnerable group. The crews of Wasp, the North Carolina, the O’Brien, and the Saratoga had been no less diligent than they were, and had enjoyed far more protection than Hoover’s threadbare destroyer screen offered now. The O’Bannon’s sonar was out of commission. The Sterett’s stack was working, but the ship had no depth charges, having jettisoned them as the fires raged aft. She was able to steer only with her engines. The Fletcher was in good shape. But a single fully functional destroyer was a weak deterrent to submarine attack. Hoover called SOPAC air command to request aerial coverage and hoped for the best.

In the Helena’s pilothouse, all talk was of the battered flagship, steaming on the port quarter. The helmsman, George A. De Long, thought the San Francisco would