Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [236]
With the Atlanta left to be honored in memory only—and by a new homesake, the CL-104, serving with the fleet in 1945—the public never deeply registered the name. As Guadalcanal’s naval veterans found other ships to fight the war in, they would find that few other vessels or crews would withstand any comparison with the past.
No sooner had Robert Graff returned fully to the world at Oak Knoll than he was surrounded by inquisitors. “As soon as I could talk, people would gather around my bed. What they wanted to know was, what was it like to fight? What are the particulars that make battle different from civilian life? How do we prepare? The people back in Washington, what did they know?
“The first thing I told them was to try to do their part in making the ship’s company a fighting team. If you can do that, you’ve got half the battle won. That means that everybody feels a responsibility for everybody else. Everybody has a job to do and his task is to do his job correctly and well. Talk to the shipmates in your division as much as you can, not only to learn your job but to build up a sense of confidence, little by little, that if you get hurt, another guy’s going to know how to help you. If you do those two things, you’re a long way along.”
Lloyd Mustin was appalled that it should take exposure to actual combat for the Navy to develop rudimentary tactical competence. “The requirement to be ready to execute simple tactics in the dark while engaging the enemy, I suppose, is one of the things that you’d expect naval officers would be taught from the time they become midshipmen.
“You could adduce a lot of crocodile tears and a lot of clichés that all these poor guys didn’t have any time to train together, and so forth, and it’s essential that they be working as a team and so on. Well, that’s just so much balderdash.… They should be able to work together as a team on no advance notice whatsoever by virtue of working to a single uniform common U.S. Navy doctrine, a single common signal book which, of course, we’ve had for years and years.”
Graff didn’t believe books could ever teach a man to respond effectively to the sensation of a bulkhead shattering or a keel buckling underfoot. “Think creatively, imaginatively, about what combat is really like,” he told his inquisitors, “and what would you do if you lost control over your survival. You have to talk like that with your shipmates.
“There are no secrets here, but what you find is that some people are constitutionally unable to perform that way. So then the game is to make sure that they’re put in positions where they can use the talents they have when circumstances are horrific.” Unless everybody does his job, and learns to do it under duress, “there can be no fighting ship.”
After Graff had healed well enough to be reassigned, he reported to Philadelphia, where a new aircraft carrier, the Monterey, was preparing to get under way for the Pacific. When her captain, a naval aviator, heard that an Atlanta survivor was joining his wardroom, he appreciated what he had and was smart enough to ask him to a private lunch. “He wanted to know everything,” Graff said. “He really just probed me and probed me.” Combat veterans tended to be resilient and adaptable. One way or another, Graff adapted to being in high demand.
The way America handled its “first team” differed markedly from Japan’s. The Americans brought them home after their inaugural experience under sustained fire and employed them to train the next wave. The Japanese left them on the front to fight until the inevitable happened, and saw their human assets waste away. It was a gilded luxury that the Marine Corps could send home its first fighter ace, the commander of one of the most decorated squadrons in the Solomons, Captain John L. Smith, give him his Medal of Honor, and refuse his