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By Root 2051 0

day Hashimoto got under way on a third evacuation run, this time with eighteen destroyers. The persistence of the Japanese destroyermen in withdrawal and retreat was as gallant as anything they had done in battle. This last effort yielded a diminishing but significant return, 1,796 men. The rescue of 10,652 souls from Starvation Island was a boost to morale and a gift of grace that no member of that ferociously Spartan Army had any reason to expect. Hitler gave his 6th Army no such reprieve, insisting they hold their position on the Volga River until, drained of fuel, food, and fighting will, they had no choice but to surrender, which they did on January 31.

Operation KE cost the IJN one destroyer sunk and three more badly damaged, as well as fifty-six aircraft. Weighing this with the American losses of the Chicago, the destroyer DeHaven, three PT boats, and fifty-three planes, the equivalent of two divisions of Japanese troops, it could be said, departed Guadalcanal with their dignity intact.

The Americans on Guadalcanal had long known their enemy was withering away. Now he seemed to vanish before their weary eyes. General Patch was deprived of the pleasure of a final rout of his foe. But on February 9, 1943, he had the satisfaction of sending a dispatch to the headquarters of the commander, South Pacific Forces, and Admiral Halsey had the equivalent satisfaction of reading it.

TOTAL AND COMPLETE DEFEAT OF JAPANESE FORCES ON GUADALCANAL EFFECTED 1625 TODAY.… AM HAPPY TO REPORT THIS KIND OF COMPLIANCE WITH YOUR ORDERS.… ‘TOKYO EXPRESS’ NO LONGER HAS TERMINUS ON GUADALCANAL.

1 The Helena would be sunk in the Solomons, a victim of torpedoes, in the Battle of Kula Gulf, on July 6, 1943. That event seems to live more powerfully in the memories of her veterans than the Guadalcanal battles do.

42

Report and Echo

THE MEN CAME HOME, AS THE LUCKY ONES DO. THE WAR RAGED ON.

On New Year’s Day, the President Monroe arrived in San Francisco with her complement of Atlanta survivors. It was just as well they missed the hoo-hah over the San Francisco’s arrival three weeks before. An Atlanta veteran, Robert Chute, was “full of the usual horror stories and equally full of scathing remarks for the San Francisco,” Bettsy Perkins, the wife of one of the ship’s officers, wrote. “Mind you, Mrs. Perkins,” he said, “I ain’t talking about this ship to no one but you, but a guy’s gotta blow off some steam to someone and all this Hero Ship stuff is bunk.”

Perkins was tearfully reunited with her husband, Van Perkins, but the reunion was short-lived. When his leave was up, the war still beckoned. He was reassigned to the light cruiser Birmingham. In the Philippines in 1944, Perkins was serving as the cruiser’s damage-control officer when she went to the assistance of a damaged ship, the light aircraft carrier Princeton, struck by a bomb. Commander Perkins was supervising the Birmingham’s firefighters as they played their streams into the burning carrier. His ship was so close alongside, and the sea so heavy, that her superstructure took a beating from the overhang of the carrier’s flight deck. When the Princeton’s magazines detonated, Perkins was killed instantly. He was buried at sea quickly and summarily, and not a shipmate from the Atlanta was there for him. They had gone to fight their own wars.

After the war, Bettsy married one of the few men on earth who would understand her loss, another officer from the Atlanta, Jim Shaw, himself a widower. In her memoirs, published decades later, her outlook on the romance of naval service would acquire a bittersweet complexity, torn between romantic reverie and cold-eyed pragmatism.

I now see that I had a love for the Atlanta like that you afford a human being and that ships are after all just floating offices and as warm as a dead fish. I will never forget the Atlanta. She taught me a lesson. I won’t ever try to love another ship. I’ll just take them for what they are worth which is nothing. The Atlanta is dead and buried. She got buried in my heart which was perhaps the wrong place for