Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [216]
But the difference between draft and publication is interesting as an illustration either of the state of Halsey’s memory, of the genuineness of his regret, or of his candor regarding his approach to leadership. The sympathetic concern Halsey professed for the captain’s well-being was not borne out by the severity of his remedy. Halsey would regret that remedy soon enough.
WHEN THE JUNEAU’S LAST RAFT was finally located on the open sea, it contained but a single survivor, Allen Heyn. He was built like a weight lifter, a strapping young man with a broad face and black hair and a gap between his front teeth. Brought aboard the seaplane tender Ballard, he didn’t need long to regain his senses and tell his grim story, though a shark had done its best to remove all witnesses, taking a fist-sized bite out of his left buttock. Three more survivors, Joseph Hartney, Victor James Fitzgerald, and Lieutenant (j.g.) Charles Wang, found by a seaplane, had the good fortune to reach San Cristobál under propulsion of a heavy squall that had foiled several attempts by Catalina flying boats to land and retrieve them.
With Wang severely wounded and delirious, Hartney and Fitzgerald had sustained themselves with good seamanship, by singing Irish folk songs, and by the imperative to tend faithfully to their gravely wounded shipmate. When their raft entered a lagoon on San Cristobál, they scarcely had the strength to paddle ashore. At ebb tide they grounded themselves on a coral ledge, and slept. When they awoke, the tide was carrying them the rest of the way in, and on the white sand beach where they landed was a freshwater stream that literally saved their lives. Found by natives, they passed into the care of a German-born copra planter who had no love for the Japanese.
On the nineteenth, a Catalina pilot reported ten men in a raft at 11–13 South, 11–59 East. Several ships were sent for them, and six men were rescued from rafts that originally held thirty. The final tally of Juneau survivors stood at ten after the sinking, not including O’Neil and the three corpsmen transferred to the San Francisco. Killed or forever missing were 683 men of a crew of almost seven hundred. As a Navy Department official would explain to a bereaved relative, “Efforts consistent with the paramount tactical necessities of the time were made to rescue as many survivors as possible. That these efforts were not successful in the case of many gallant officers and men is deeply regretted by the Navy.”
FOR THE JAPANESE, it was becoming increasingly clear that Guadalcanal had become their Stalingrad. That was the opinion of Matome Ugaki, and though all such comparisons are inexact, there was no denying that in their zeal to advance the Japanese had stretched themselves beyond the nourishment of their supply train and exposed themselves against an enemy who was proving to be absolutely implacable in defense. The extent of the disaster of the previous two nights was now in full view.
When Kondo’s procession of cripples returned to Truk harbor on November 17, Ugaki was watching from the decks of the Yamato. “It was lonely indeed that we couldn’t see Hiei and Kirishima among them,” he wrote in his diary. When Hiroaki Abe came on board the Yamato, he looked crestfallen. With a bandage swathing his lower jaw, he sorrowfully reported the loss of two ships. As Ugaki saw it, “He seemed to suffer especially for his sunken Hiei. He even confided that he thought he would have been better to have gone down with Hiei. I can well appreciate how he felt.” A fiction, however, was concocted