Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [215]
“It was damned good to be walking on solid ground again. You went slowly, appreciating every step, almost tasting the earth with your feet through the soles of your shoes. All those days, weeks, months of ocean, and now something brown and firm that you could pick up in your fingers and look at—that you could feel and smell. And because it wouldn’t last, you have the most aching desire to keep walking, walking, walking, just to feel it under your feet.
“The flowers were lovely. The little cottages with their gay little yards were lovely. The sun and the warmth and even the sight of the sea from the top of the hill were lovely. We soaked it up in silence.”
Morris thought of a girl in Boston and his folks in New Hampshire. He then found a small Catholic church high on a hilltop. He wasn’t a deeply religious man, but as he studied how the sun played on an old stained-glass window, he was moved to go inside.
The sanctuary was dimly lit, barely revealing the cobwebs in the hand-hewn wooden rafters. The basso tones of an old wheezing organ gently vibrated in the floor. An old lady knelt praying at the altar, where candles burned. Morris took a seat in a pew and lost track of time. “Down below in the harbor our ship lay quietly at anchor after slugging her way through a large part of the Japanese fleet, and we owed it to her and ourselves, I felt, to kneel for a moment and say thanks.
“How long I stayed there I don’t remember. Not long, probably. I prayed, I think. I knelt and thought of guns thundering in the dark, of ships burning and men shouting as they leaped into the oily water. A prayer of thanks and gratitude was hidden somewhere in those thoughts, if not put into words. And I was on my knees, whether praying or not, when I became aware of the sunlight again.
“The sun had fingered a row of windows which before had been in darkness, and now in bright golden bars it filled the church with warmth and light. I looked up at the windows, and one in particular held my attention. You looked at it because you had to—because in a strange way it beckoned.” From where Morris sat, “the streaming sunlight clearly illuminated the inscription on the glass, beneath a haloed figure whose face and outstretched hands shimmered with light. It read: ‘St. Helena.’ ”
MEN LIKE THIS WOULD win the war, and Admiral Halsey appreciated it. But as he reviewed the circumstances of the Juneau’s loss, he found his anger rising: Why hadn’t Captain Hoover stopped to rescue survivors? Halsey was arriving at some severe conclusions about the Helena skipper’s suitability to command. He ordered him to report to his headquarters.
Hoover’s decorations included two Navy Crosses, with a third (a second gold star) to follow after the events of Friday the thirteenth were duly considered. His destroyers had braved massive explosions at Coral Sea to save survivors of the sinking Lexington. His ship had been instrumental in two naval victories. But when Halsey got wind of what had happened, not even the sympathy and concurrence of Admiral Nimitz himself would save him.
“Despite this officer’s magnificent combat record … I questioned him very thoroughly in the presence of Miles Browning and a VA [vice admiral] and my opinion that he had made an error in judgment was strengthened. I later visited his ship and thought I sensed a deterioration of morale. I called a conference of a VA and RA [rear admiral] and my chief of staff and discussed this matter. They concurred in the opinion I had formed, in that this cruiser skipper was no longer fit for command in his then condition. I accordingly detached him from his ship and ordered him to report to CinCPac.”
So wrote Halsey in a manuscript draft of his memoirs, at least. In the eventual published version, he took less ownership of this decision. In the revised and published