Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [237]
As Graff went to sea in the Monterey, the Aaron Ward’s radar officer, Bob Hagen, reported to Seattle-Tacoma to become the gunnery officer of a new destroyer, the Johnston, whose captain, Commander Ernest E. Evans, was a combat veteran who had been similarly recycled from a previous assignment. Jesse Coward and Roland Smoot, commanders of the Sterett and Monssen, respectively, would take command of destroyer squadrons and play important tactical roles in later campaigns, too. Tested and seasoned by adversity, all would acquire varying degrees of naval legend in the Leyte Gulf campaign in the Philippines in 1944.
The epic of the Pacific war found new chapters for everyone. The endless game of personnel-rotation musical chairs saw the continuous replacement of the experienced by the inexperienced, until, by the end, only the experienced remained.
JOE JAMES CUSTER, the war correspondent, had served in the South Pacific campaign’s earliest days and witnessed the destruction firsthand. On board the Astoria, and later, recovering from eye surgery at Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, he had become close with men who had served in the inferno. He had looked into their eyes and seen right through into their minds and souls, and found reflections of pain in a blackness that he called “something new the psychiatrists were working on.” Experience was important. It delivered benefits, and took a price, too. “They were ill, physically, mentally, spiritually; they had undergone agonies of body and mind that were impossible to contemplate except by those who had actually been there.” The scale of violence was impossible to reckon with.
Custer’s articles detailing the loss of the Astoria, published near the end of October in The Seattle Times and elsewhere, awakened in the families of many servicemen an urgency to understand what their loved ones had been through. Letters soon began arriving in Room 232 at Queen’s Hospital. Until his eyes healed and he could read them himself, the nurses on duty had to do the honors for him.
One correspondent’s brother, a lieutenant, had gone missing. “We have received news from Wash. of his reported death. I guess it’s natural that I should wish to repudiate this, but I just don’t feel Tom is gone. You say a cruiser was lost—was anybody on board saved? If I could come to you personally to talk it over with you I’m sure I could readily make you see how much the truth means to me, to all of us. My mother hasn’t even been told as yet what we’ve heard. We’re afraid what the shock might do to her.… In the name of Christian charity, and as a fellow countryman, can you see fit to write and answer me?”
“You may not care to bother with this letter but please do as it will probly relieve the heartaches of seven people who morn the loss of a dear Boy just 20 years old, who was on the ship Astoria in battle. this is his grandfather writeing you for more information. He was dearly loved by me and his grandmother who passed away on the night of August 9th 42.” (All typos in quotations are sic.)
Another correspondent had a son on the Quincy, now missing in action. Could he have swum to land or been taken prisoner? “If he is in a hospital would they let him write home and tell me where he is? My son’s wife is to have a baby some time this month.… We grasp at any opportunity to contact someone who may have known our boy.… We shall never tire of listening to anything connected with the last days of the life of the Astoria.”
Someone in the War Department got the idea to send veterans of America’s first victorious campaign around the country to factories, bolstering morale. By 1943, absenteeism was becoming a serious problem in the war industries. With