Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [238]
“This young man could be any of your sons or husbands,” the executive who introduced him at one event said. “He’s going to tell you about a battle you just heard about on radio.” The speeches were made as bloody as the mores of public presentation would allow. For three months Harrison traveled to the manufacturing plants of the Midwest and Northeast, doing four or five speeches a day, always hitting the shift changes when the audience was double. “Guys would walk up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes, shake my hand, and not say a word. Everybody knew somebody in the Army or Navy,” he said.
One morning in early 1943, before a speech at the Cadillac plant in Cadillac, Michigan, he was escorted to a railroad siding behind a large building and asked to paint his name on a large piece of steel on a flatcar. Then he was invited to follow it through every manufacturing phase on the assembly line, until, three hours later, it was driven off the end of the line, part of a finished Sherman tank.
Tom and Alleta Sullivan, gold-star parents of the five boys from the Juneau, began a speaking tour in February that took them to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Hartford, and through the heartland, slated to end with the launching in San Francisco of a new destroyer named after their sons. At a whistlestop in Chicago several weeks along, a survivor from the ship, Allen Heyn, confided to them what had really happened to George, their oldest, during his ordeal at sea.
They would inspire untold thousands of people in more than two hundred appearances nationwide before they returned to Waterloo and the public eye wandered elsewhere. Back home, they would be left to contend with the smaller minds of their community who suspected the couple of cashing in on their sons’ loss. They would never feel at home in Waterloo again. And it finally became too much. In San Francisco the first week of April, at the launching of the USS The Sullivans, Alleta broke a champagne bottle against the hull and smiled graciously for the cameras. Before the ceremony could end, however, her strength gave out. She buckled and fell to the ground sobbing.
EARLY 1943 WAS A TIME of many reckonings. Foremost among them, in the echoing halls of the Navy’s culture of reputation at least, was Admiral Hepburn’s inquisition into the failures that decided the Battle of Savo Island.
After recovering from his illness in Hawaii, he went quickly to work, inspecting Admiral Nimitz’s files and then interrogating Commander H. B. Heneberger, the senior surviving officer of the Quincy, and Commander Elijah W. Irish, the navigator of the Chicago. He boarded the next available ship for Nouméa, where he met with Admiral Halsey. Then, on February 16, he took his inquiry to Australia.
Interservice niceties were needed to gain an audience with Admiral Crutchley, still serving under U.S. command but now with Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Forces. Hepburn found the British officer’s account of the battle, filed in Brisbane, “the most complete and lucid report of the entire operation,” though of course Crutchley was miles away when it took place. Perhaps out of the respect thus gained, Hepburn would write that he “conferred with” (rather than “interrogated”) Crutchley in Melbourne, on board the vessel that had been excused from disaster on August 9, the cruiser Australia. At Canberra, Hepburn was received by Australia’s governor-general and attended a meeting of the War Council. He returned to Nouméa to interrogate Admiral Turner, then flew home to Pearl Harbor to examine Captain Greenman and begin work on his report to Admiral King.
Only then, on April 2, did Hepburn fly back to the mainland to interrogate the two officers whose culpable inefficiency he was beginning