Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [55]
At Nouméa, Greenman forgot his own wounds and checked on his orphaned crew, asked after them, concerned himself with their mental state. He attended many of their burials at sea. As a chaplain intoned the Lord’s Prayer, two men would lift the cot with crisp ceremony. The hiss of the shroud sliding over canvas was “a sound that I felt go through my bones,” Joe Custer wrote. “This was the memory, I knew then, that I would never forget: the sound of bodies sliding on canvas.… The battle itself didn’t convey the despair, the hopelessness of this sound, for in the turmoil and the thunder of that battle night there were sounds of life all about, of men’s voices, of leather pounding steel decks: There was Life—and here was Death.”
The Astoria’s junior chaplain, Matthew Bouterse, was haunted ever afterward by one corpse in particular: the one he had seen suspended in the mainmast, cooking above the flames. “That body burned in my dreams for weeks and it was almost completely consumed both in my dreams as it was in reality, and it came near consuming me with it.”
Army personnel were generous, giving rescued sailors new shoes and olive drab fatigues. The crew of the transport American Legion would raise a fund to provide each survivor with a carton of cigarettes with matches, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a dollar’s worth of coupons to the ship’s store.
One of the high-ranking naval officers in the area paid a visit to the hospital ship Solace. Walking between bunks, he talked quietly with every sailor he saw, many of them from his old ship. “When he got to me,” said Keithel P. Anthony, a water tender, “he knelt down and asked, ‘What ship, sailor?’
“I said, ‘Astoria.’
“And he asked, ‘Were you on there when I was captain?’
“Then I saw his name and said, ‘Oh, Captain Turner. My God, yes. You were the captain when we went to Japan.’ ”
The Savo disaster struck him personally. He grabbed Anthony by the hands, tears rolling down his cheeks, and said, “This should never have happened. If I had been aboard that ship it would never have happened.” And Anthony believed him.
The Navy would do its best, for a time, to pretend it hadn’t. When transports carrying survivors of the Battle of Savo Island finally returned home, the men were sent to quarantine, removed from public circulation. They had stories to tell that Admiral King would be quite happy not to see in the newspapers. Some five hundred survivors of the Astoria, Vincennes, and Quincy were held under virtual house arrest in a barracks that had been constructed on Treasure Island for the 1939 World’s Fair. Marines were detailed to prevent the sailors from leaving. “Don’t you say one word about the battle,” they were told.
When rumors reached the detainees that their officers had been allowed to go home, they rioted. After the sacrifice they had given, it was intolerable to be treated as security risks. And so the chairs flew. According to Astoria survivor John C. Powell, it took more than a hundred guards to settle them down. Stories about the August 9 defeat would not hit the papers until the middle of October. It could be said that the naval high command was still learning how to calculate its risks.
THE UNITED STATES finally drew blood in the opening chapter of the Guadalcanal naval campaign when the submarine S-44 torpedoed the heavy cruiser Kako as she was returning to Kavieng.1 The loss of the ship did nothing to dim the mood at Truk. Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki, was filled with a sense of prideful vindication. He would write in his diary that “the conceited British and Americans who regard the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway as supreme victories cannot say anything now.… The enemy must be feeling the autumn in the fortunes of war.” Such verdicts were always debatable. By leaving the area, Mikawa would allow the U.S. Navy to say that the defeated American cruisers