Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [243]
“I am sure that the affairs of the Station will progress smoothly and effectively as long as necessary for the arrival of a relief,” Bode wrote to Hepburn. “With assurance of my deep gratitude for your uniformly courteous consideration and the pleasure of my brief service under you. I am sincerely, Howard Bode.”
“It is the opinion of the convening authority,” the commandant of the 15th Naval District would conclude, “that although all of Captain Howard D. Bode’s conduct up to his last act indicated that he was entirely rational, his reaction to criticism of his professional judgment and conduct as commanding officer of the USS Chicago during the first night action off Savo Island, resulted in a depression and unbalanced mental condition which was the direct cause of his death.”
The chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery supported that conclusion in its endorsement to Admiral King. “This Bureau concurs with the opinion of the Convening Authority and the Judge Advocate General that the death of Captain Bode occurred as a direct consequence of a severe mental illness characterized by depression, and accordingly is of the opinion that it should be considered not the result of his own misconduct.”
A notation at the end of his personnel file indicates, apropos of nothing in particular, “Not a war casualty.”
44
Ironbottom Sound
“THE MAGNITUDE OF THE SOLOMONS CAMPAIGN HAS NEVER BEEN fully realized,” Joe Custer wrote. “Some day its detailed, barbaric history will awe the civilized world. The clock had been turned back thousands of years, back to the primitive, on Guadalcanal.”
That history was quickly in the writing. The surrender ceremony on board the USS Missouri was barely two weeks past when recriminations were flying in the papers. The Marine Corps, it seemed, was working to shape its preferred narrative of the campaign. By that account, the marines had been left high and dry by the Navy and had to make do on their own.
In the fall of 1945, with the war just two weeks over, The New York Times ran an article in which “senior Marine Corps operations officers” claimed that Ghormley’s secretiveness had been costly at Guadalcanal, early on. “The Australian government, which might have moved to aid Admiral Ghormley, was alienated by his refusal to disclose the nature of his operations, it is said.… If Admiral Ghormley had been less secretive his original force might have been at least doubled, it is said here, and the tremendous tax upon the Marines would have been materially diminished.” Ghormley made an easy target. But with Nimitz strongly allergic to public displays of interservice discord, no one rose to dispute the criticism.
Out of concern for decorum, Nimitz would long conceal the real reasons for Ghormley’s relief. When Ghormley’s son wrote Nimitz after the war to inquire as to CINCPAC’s rationale, the admiral wrote back: “Your father was relieved by Admiral Halsey because of my belief that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown during the early days of our attempt to capture Guadalcanal from the Japanese. The dispatches he sent to me from his headquarters in Nouméa so alarmed my operations staff officers by their panicky and desperate tone that I decided to replace him with Admiral Halsey—who had been sent to the area for a lookaround.… We parted the very best of friends—and when he was returned to me for employment after he had had some leave at home he served most satisfactorily as Commandant of the 14th Naval District and Commander, Hawaiian Sea Frontier, and we were always on most friendly terms and I admired him and considered him to be my friend.”
The war’s psychological casualties, from Robert Ghormley to Howard Bode to Alleta Sullivan and on through the years, would never