Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [230]
The Helena, now under a new captain, Charles P. Cecil, was ordered from Nouméa to Sydney for some R&R. Entering the harbor, the light cruiser was saluted by the deep groans of tugboat whistles and cheering well-wishers waving from sailboats and pleasure craft. The city’s iconic Harbour Bridge, silhouetted in a rosy red at twilight, was the backdrop for a celebration that spilled ashore into the oyster bars and Red Cross–sponsored dances and cocktail parties.
Such pleasures were a superficial salve. Graff’s shipmate Jim Shaw wrote to his wife, Jane, of the new perspective on life the experience of battle had given them. “We hate the petty bickering of politics.… We hate the disunity between labor and capital. We look with a sort of contemptuous tolerance on such organizations as the USO. We eye askance and critically the opinions aired by the press. As for the ‘military commentators’ who learn their strategy out of books, we writhe in disgust at their positive statements as to how the actual combat should be carried on.… After the war is over the fighting man is going to demand a kind of peace and a kind of government that will be some slight remuneration for the blood and toil and anguish of the war.”
For Leonard A. Joslin, a survivor of the Quincy, nighttime was forevermore a haunted place. “Years later I’d have nightmares, and dreams at night, and I would see the ship coming into port. I’d see men waving. I could see the signal bridge. I knew that I was supposed to be up there. But the ship would fade away. And I’d try to catch it at another port, and the same thing. I could see the men waving, the signal bridge; I knew I was supposed to be up there. But the ship would leave me, and the dream would fade. Many times, years later even, I would dream of this ship, and the men. And they’re waving at me.”
On the eleventh of December, Joslin’s vision unfolded in real time for the survivors of Dan Callaghan’s old flagship arriving in her namesake city. As the crew manned the rail, thousands of Bay Area residents greeted them, jamming the hillsides and promenades to have a look at the battered San Francisco entering the harbor. Eugene Tarrant remembers the cool weather that welcomed their homecoming, and the fog that held the Golden Gate Bridge like a midnight pall off Savo. It was a publicist’s dream: the veterans of a hero ship, returning to the city where she had been built (Vallejo), right next door to the hometown (Oakland) of the admiral who had died in battle on her bridge.
When the ambulatory survivors were flushed out of the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital and bused downtown for a ticker-tape parade six days later, “They gave this city a strange feeling of humility and sadness, and at the same time its greatest thrill in many a year,” a San Francisco Chronicle reporter wrote. The procession of survivors stretched out for more than a mile, attended by a crowd of seventy-five thousand lining the street. However, the mood of the celebration was peculiar. “It was the quietest parade this city has ever seen. There was some cheering and applauding, but it didn’t stick. For the most part, the thousands on the streets stared as they would at a sacred procession.” Some of the marchers proceeded with canes and crutches, wearing hospital robes. None of them stayed thirsty for long on Market Street that week.
Admirals Nimitz and King were on hand to give medals. They decorated Bruce McCandless with the Medal of Honor in front of an audience that included his parents and his wife. The father of Dan Callaghan drove over from Oakland, but the late admiral’s mother and widow stayed home. “They didn’t think they could face it. They didn’t think they could stand it,” Dan Callaghan, Sr., told a reporter. In Washington, President Roosevelt himself had just given the same award to family representatives of Callaghan