Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [229]
41
Future Rising
IN THIS SEA OF DESTINY, A SPANISH PRIEST HAD ONCE SEEN BOTH THE scale and the pattern of the coming days. Men now living, the survivors of the inferno of 1942, could begin to see the shape of the future, too. It was a wide, islanded oceanic vista cut through now with markers for a trail that would become a path that would become a road. Extended and improved by other ships and other crews, it would lead all the way to Tokyo.
Some would say the victory at Guadalcanal led nowhere. After all, instead of setting sights on conquering Rabaul, the Navy and the Marines would bypass it, jumping north to Tarawa and pouring through the Central Pacific. MacArthur would carry the fight on a line to the west, following a parallel route along New Guinea’s northern coast toward the Philippines. But the rights of way for all these roads were laid by the ships and men of the South Pacific Forces. If they had faltered, Australia and New Zealand would have stood alone and America’s confidence to undertake a serious offensive anywhere at all might have been broken entirely. For the American veterans of the struggle in the South Pacific, another road lay before them, a road home for a brief respite, and then a return to the war that gave no permanent reprieves except to the dead.
For several days after the Atlanta went down, Robert Graff drifted in and out of consciousness in a Lunga Point foxhole. Effectively checked out of the campaign, he was unaware of the final dramas that raged in Savo Sound. The pillars of the earth shook beneath him, but he remained in his own world, bruised body and mind rallying to their own defense.
One night Graff was placed in a small boat and sent to a waiting cargo ship, and along with many other stretcher cases was taken to Espiritu Santo. There, in a series of operations in a medical hut, doctors removed chunks of shrapnel that had riddled him that night. That’s where he first heard the whole story of the loss of his ship, and of the deaths of Admiral Scott and the others on the Atlanta’s bridge under heavy fire from friend and foe. It felt like a story told by a stranger from another world. He walled himself off from the experience, even as he couldn’t quite shake his wonderment that he had survived it. He would reflect on the arbitrary randomness of his luck for the rest of his life. “People were killed all around me. It put me in a very, very deep emotional funk for years.”
Graff was taken to Efate to recover. Most of the other medical evacuees were taken to Nouméa, where they were transferred to the “receiving ship,” which was not a vessel but a transfer facility consisting of a large tent city on a scenic hillside, well populated with survivors of the Hornet, the Atlanta, the Northampton, and various sunken destroyers. In time they were gathered and transferred to the holds of a transport, the President Monroe, which ferried them to Auckland. Graff ended up in Auckland, too.
On arrival in the harbor, Graff heard strains of a military band playing its bouncing repertoire. Recent history started to catch up with him then. “I just cried my heart out,” he said. “I could not get ahold of myself, whatever there was to hold onto.” A nurse came into his hospital room once or twice and lulled, “Shhh, there’s nothing to cry about, old man.” But she couldn’t know and he didn’t tell her. “I just continued to cry.” In time, and with struggle, he was able to rise and lift himself out of bed.
The Atlanta survivors got four days of “free gangway” in New Zealand’s largest city. “This was a privilege seldom afford in the USN. It means ‘beat it and don’t come back until we sail,’ ” Bill McKinney wrote. Strolling the city streets by evening, the sailors were, he recalled, “literally engulfed by girls. It would have taken a leper to have wound up with less than a girl on each arm.