Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [231]
For the rest of the San Francisco’s crew, there was acclaim to go around, though many of them understood it was excessive. “In the press we were lauded beyond all reason,” Clifford Spencer wrote. Almost everyone knew that other ships, including the Sterett, Monssen, Barton, Juneau, and Atlanta, had suffered far heavier proportions of casualties but weren’t able to return for ticker tape and free beer. Whenever he heard the San Francisco referred to as the Navy’s “fightin’est ship,” McCandless would insist that “polishing off a battleship is a community job.”
The homecoming of damaged warships was a rare thing for the public. The lack of a fair perspective on their accomplishments was inevitable. The way Mike Moran’s Boise was feted in Philadelphia would forever irk many Helena sailors, who had thrown at least as much ordnance the enemy’s way and were now rewarded with obscurity for having taken less in return.1 The New York Times reported as fact that the Boise “sank six Japanese warships in twenty-seven minutes.” To the lasting chagrin of the Washington’s men, the South Dakota was immortalized in the press as “Battleship X,” used out of concern for security. When the mask was finally lifted, the ship’s name was cast in lights that her dubious battle performance did not seem to merit. Nevertheless, Captain Gatch announced that his ship “sank three Jap cruisers and demonstrated there’s no match for a battleship, except equally good battleships.” When the San Francisco entered harbor, she was in the company of a fellow veteran of Ironbottom Sound, the Sterett. As the cruiser prepared for a public reception at Pier 16, the humble tin can went, unheralded as those expendable ships often are, to the yard at Mare Island.
None of these small injustices matched what Eugene Tarrant and his fellow steward’s mates and cooks suffered when they went ashore. Cameramen from the Fox Movietone News Agency dwelled on the San Francisco’s crew until Tarrant’s turn came. When he and his S Division shipmates began filing past, the motion-picture crews turned their cameras on other subjects.
AS THE SAN FRANCISCO was approaching the West Coast for her grand reception, an Imperial Army colonel returned to Tokyo from Rabaul after a fact-finding mission to the Southern Area front. Across all services at Japan’s forward-most base, he told high command, there was a wholesale lack of confidence. With the destruction of their reinforcement convoys in November and their faltering hold on New Guinea, both naval and Army high command saw that the end of the struggle was near. The colonel’s report urged the unthinkable: abandonment of Guadalcanal, and the evacuation of its garrison. In the discussion that followed, the concern arose that if word of an evacuation reached the island, the soldiers might take their own lives.
The Americans had their own setbacks to explore, and their own fact-finding missions to launch. Though victory was within its grasp, the Navy was looking back on the disaster that had nearly derailed it in the beginning with the losses of the Vincennes, Quincy, and Astoria. An old saying later popularized by a veteran of the Solomons naval campaign, John F. Kennedy, went, “Victory has a hundred fathers. Defeat is an orphan.” What then of the parentage a defeat suffered within the context of a larger victory? The Navy seemed bent on isolating it like a cancer.
On December 20, Ernest King ordered an “informal inquiry into the circumstances attending the loss of these vessels.” Its purpose, he would write, was “to find out exactly what caused the defeat, and second, to determine whether or not any responsible officers involved in the planning and execution of the operations were culpably inefficient.” Three days later, the man who would conduct the investigation reported to King’s headquarters in Washington. His name was Arthur J. Hepburn. The chairman of the Navy’s General Board, a panel of senior