When Shriver reported for duty in Camden, the South Dakota was still in drydock. The vessel was enormous: 680 feet long and 108 feet wide, with a complement of more than 2,500 men. It seemed to Shriver almost like a small city. Shriver joined the Eighth Division on the starboard side of the ship, consisting of 95 men assigned to operate the 20- and 40-millimeter antiaircraft guns that ran from the bow of the boat about one-third of the way back toward the stern.
Thousands of miles away in the Pacific, the battle was not going well for the Allies. Japan had achieved landings in the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, and by the time the South Dakota was commissioned, the Japanese had not only sealed off China but had also secured almost the entire Pacific west of Midway Island and north of the Coral Sea; by May, the Americans in the Philippines had surrendered.
June 1942 brought some heartening news from the Pacific—in a stunning turnaround, the US Navy had won a decisive victory at the Battle of Midway—but some devastating news from home. On June 16, Shriver received a telegram from his brother: Their father, whose health had been in steady decline since the crash of 1929, had died. Shriver immediately set about trying to get a shore leave so he could attend the funeral. The South Dakota was docked that day at Annapolis, and it was only a short way up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore Cathedral, where his father’s funeral was to be held. But, as Shriver recalled, when he asked his commanding officer for permission to leave the ship, the officer denied it.
Shriver was devastated. For a moment, he entertained the possibility of deserting. But he then banished the thought and proceeded stoically with his shipboard duties. Later, Shriver would concede the wisdom of his commanding officer’s decision not to let him go off duty. Shriver understood the terrible anxiety that drove the navy brass: Most of the fleet’s battleships had been sunk, if not at Pearl Harbor then in subsequent Pacific engagements, and the pressure to get ships into fighting condition quickly was enormous.
Unable to join his family at the funeral, Shriver instead wrote a letter that reveals the depth, and clarity, of his faith. “Dearest Mother,” he wrote on June 16,
I just got Herbert’s telegram about Dad today, the sixteenth, & I can’t be with you right away, desperately as I would like to be. God alone knows what you must be suffering for it is enough for me. For you the loneliness after more than 30 years of your wonderful life together must be indescribable. Our best consolation is the certainty that Dad is at last completely happy & free of all the petty annoyances which a small world forced upon a great man. I am already praying to him, not only for him, & hoping that he is not too disgusted with his youngest son, now that he knows the miserable weaknesses which while he was alive I was able to keep to myself & the Lord.
The sensations you told me you underwent when your father died are now mine, I appreciate them for the first time. But you cannot know how much additional sorrow is caused by the knowledge that you are now alone, & I am helpless to change that immediately & permanently. I think of this—because you have more fortitude & courage than anyone I have ever known. I know you are taking this blow as you have all the others, & I feel if you can, I must, carry on with assurance & even joy. Not everyone has a husband nor yet a father of their own blood in heaven. (And as I write that line, I understand with a new insight what our Lord did for us when He gave us His Son to be our Father who art in heaven.)
Think, too, how pleased your father & the Cardinal [James Gibbons] must be … everyone who really knew Dad must be welcoming him. Saint Paul and Thomas More are rejoicing, & all that multitudinous army of heroes & heroines, all the people who have made and given us our Christian world are happy. We know all this is true. In my mind, so full of doubts & fears about a thousand inconsequential matters great and small, there is no question that Dad is where he belongs,—right in heaven. Even as I am sad, I smile inside to think of Dad meeting Saint Paul for the first time. What a thrill for him, & I’ll bet too that Saint Paul himself was glad to see a man who embodied 1900 years later so many of his own qualities,—enthusiasm, perseverance, courage, highmindedness, devotion, charity, good, kindness, & vision. What a conversation they must have had! And most satisfying of all, they will all be there in the same joyful mood for you yourself some day. Of that I am as certain as I am thankful to God again for the two people who have meant more to me than all others or anything in the world. If I ever join you both in heaven, you will have brought me more than any other human beings. Tonight I am sorrowful, tonight I am rejoicing, tonight I am full of thanks, tonight I send you my deepest love. I shall be with you soon.
Sargent
R. S. Shriver, Jr
Ens, 8th Division
The battle in the Pacific raged on. In early August, the US Navy seized control of the island of Guadalcanal, to the east of New Guinea. Shortly after Guadalcanal was secured, American military intelligence got wind of a Japanese plan for recapturing the island. Admiral Yamamoto’s combined fleet was steaming toward the island. In response, the US Navy immediately dispatched the aircraft carrier Hornet from Hawaii toward the Solomons. And it ordered the South Dakota and the Washington, another newly commissioned battleship—along with the antiaircraft cruiser Juneau and a host of destroyers—to head toward the Pacific.
THE BATTLE OF SANTA CRUZ
On August 16, 1942, the South Dakota began its first war cruise, moving down through Chesapeake Bay to the Atlantic. Heading south along the eastern coast of the United States and Central America to the Panama Canal, the South Dakota led the Washington across the Western Hemisphere and into the Pacific toward the island of New Caledonia, which lay south of the Solomon Islands.
It was not an auspicious entrance into the Pacific theater. In its haste to rendezvous with the Hornet near New Caledonia, Shriver’s vessel tore open its belly on a coral reef east of Fiji, damaging the ship’s hull and spilling oil into the sea. Rather than rendezvousing with the Hornet, the South Dakota went north to Pearl Harbor for repairs.
Now early September, the timing was fortunate: It afforded the South Dakota the opportunity to be fitted with dozens of the new 40-millimeter antiaircraft guns that had just rolled off foundry assembly lines. An American version of a Swedish-made gun called the Bofors, the new “forties” would prove to be extremely effective in combating Japanese airplane attacks.
Although Capt. Tom Gatch was known to be lax about formal aspects of navy protocol, he was a stickler about keeping his men combat ready, and he drilled his gunners—including Shriver’s Eighth Division—endlessly on the operation of the new guns. “No ship more eager to fight ever entered the Pacific” than the South Dakota, wrote the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison in The Two-Ocean War. “The skipper, by constant target practice on towed planes, ignoring lapses in spit-and-polish, and exercising a natural gift for leadership, had welded his green crew into a splendid fighting crew. They ‘looked like a lot of wild men,’ said one of his officers, and they all adored Tom Gatch.” “Gatch may not have had much passion for clean fingernails or white-glove inspections,” another historian has written, “but he did like a bull’s eye. All the way from Pearl Harbor, Gatch had kept his men busy at target practice. Squeegees and buckets lay neglected in South Dakota’s lockers and the big ship became a slattern … she was probably the dirtiest ship in the United States Navy, but also one of the deadliest.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Shriver and many of his shipmates describe this time as one of the happiest in their lives. The varying blues of the ocean and the sky, combined with the lush greens of the South Pacific islands, provided a beautiful tableau for them to gaze upon from atop the deck. They were doing something meaningful, fighting for their country and for the ideal of freedom, aboard the pride of the US Navy, a big, gleaming, new battleship. Captain Gatch’s leadership—and soon, the shared experience and horror of combat—bonded the men, cementing them together in an intense spirit of camaraderie. “The ship was like your wife and your girlfriend both,” recalled on
e enlisted man years after the war; the men on board were “closer than a lot of brothers.”
Even after the anticipation of war gave way to the grisly reality of it, the men of the South Dakota continued to derive a real happiness, or at least an intensity of positive feeling, from life on the ship. In recollecting their time aboard the ship a half century later, many of Shriver’s peers would in one breath lament the friends they had lost and the carnage they had witnessed and, in the next breath, say without any sense of contradiction that the years aboard the South Dakota were “the best time of my life.”
In the wee hours of October 26, Captain Gatch and his slovenly but well-drilled men steamed with a US naval convoy toward the lower Solomons, passing about 125 miles north of the Santa Cruz islands. Serving as part of the “screen” of gunships meant to provide cover for the USS Enterprise, which was the navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the South Dakota cruised in formation with the heavy cruiser Portland, the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan, and eight destroyers. A few miles to the south and east, the Hornet—one of only three seaworthy carriers remaining in the fleet—cruised northward similarly encircled by a protective screen of gunships.
A buzzing noise portended aerial bombardment, and the South Dakota braced itself for its first combat. Shriver, frantically scanning the sky for a target, saw only low-hanging clouds from the still-dissipating squall. Suddenly, dive-bombing Japanese Vals burst forth from behind the cloud cover just above the South Dakota, bearing down hard from the rear. The South Dakota, with a great roiling of its metal guts and a frenzy of activity on deck, cranked into action—and Shriver, from his position in a turret on the starboard side, ordered his gunners to fire at will.
Bullets from the Japanese Zeros, small, light fighter planes, strafed the deck all around Shriver, ricocheting wildly. Hundred-pound bombs rained from the sky, creating titanic splashes in the water when they missed and fearsome explosions, along with the sounds of rending metal and the cries of wounded men, when they hit. Flying low over the bow of the South Dakota, a dive-bomber dropped a 500-pound bomb that landed squarely on the No. 1 turret, the foremost of the battleship’s main 16-inch batteries. Captain Gatch stood alongside the turret not 20 yards away, and he didn’t duck or flinch as the Japanese plane and its deadly tonnage bore in on him. (“I considered it beneath the dignity of a captain of an American battleship to flop for a Japanese bomb,” Gatch would say later.) The turret’s armor plating shuddered and bent but held, and the gunners inside continued to load and fire, shaken but unharmed. Captain Gatch, however, received a shoulderful of shrapnel; it looked as though he would bleed to death.
Shriver and his fellow gunners returned fire. “Attack,” commanded Gatch, before going down with his wound, whereupon “a hundred muzzles flamed and fell, flamed and fell, like lethal pistons, and a cloud of dark-brown powder smoke drifted off [the ship’s] stern.”
As the Japanese planes swooped in low over the water, just a few dozen yards away from the South Dakota, Shriver tracked them in his sights, much as he had once tracked grouse and pheasant in the Maryland countryside. For a moment, he was able almost to forget where he was and the magnitude of what he was engaged in and to concentrate solely on hitting his targets—as many as thirty at a time swooping in and out of view—as they skimmed above the water like stiff metal birds.
But as the planes flew in closer, aiming to drop their deadly cargo, it was impossible not to think about how the difference between hitting his target and missing it could spell the difference between victory and defeat, and between his own life and death. As the first plane drew in close, Shriver recalled, he could see the Japanese man inside his cockpit, could make out the insignia on his helmet—he could even see his face. Years later, Shriver would swear that he actually locked eyes for a moment with the enemy. Staring at each other for a few seconds, each knowing that in a moment one or the other of them would likely be dead, Shriver imagined that a glimmering of understanding passed between them: Nothing personal, each was thinking, it’s just that I’ve got to kill you before you kill me. This mutual understanding, Shriver believed, almost amounted to a form of respect.
Or maybe that was simply what he needed to think to himself in order to pull the trigger. “Fire,” Shriver ordered. His station, operating in tandem, locked onto the target and shot, and bullets ripped into the cockpit and fuselage of the Japanese plane. Through his aiming scope, Shriver saw the pilot’s eyes widen and his mouth grimace in a rictus of fear as he realized he had been hit. And then the plane dipped violently downward, plunging into the Pacific not 15 yards from the South Dakota, trailing black smoke behind it. He had made his first kill.
Shriver had no time to celebrate or lament this fact, because dozens more planes were circling above, each promising to unleash deadly havoc on the battleship and the other vessels in the convoy if the antiaircraft gunners relaxed even for a moment. So the Eighth Division, along with the other antiaircraft divisions aboard the ship, continued to fire away amid all the noise and smoke and flashes of light—and amid the blood that had begun to trickle across the battleship’s deck, and which was now swirling red in the water, a beacon for sharks.
Each time it seemed the American ships had beaten the Japanese planes back, another wave would appear. In front of the South Dakota, the Enterprise was being bombarded. The carrier’s power went out; fires raged on deck; torpedoes rent the hull asunder; for a time, it even seemed as if the men might have to abandon ship. Meanwhile, to the starboard side of the Enterprise, a Japanese Kate, a torpedo bomber, had flown directly into the forward gun mount of the Smith, an American destroyer, and had turned its bow into a blaze of fire. The Smith had to fall behind the South Dakota and bury “her flaming nose in the battleship’s high foaming wake to put her fires out.”
The South Dakota had problems of its own. The bomb that wounded Captain Gatch had pitched the ship into chaos, and “for a single, confused minute, South Dakota spun out of control and made straight for Enterprise.” The Enterprise quickly granted the battleship right of way, narrowly averting collision. Order was restored aboard the battleship, but other American ships were going down. The South Dakota had to break formation to avoid smashing into the sinking San Juan. Meanwhile, a few thousand yards to the east, the commander of the Hornet gave the order to “abandon ship.”
By noon, the Battle of Santa Cruz was effectively over. Less than three hours had elapsed since the first Japanese dive-bombers had appeared. But in that time the US Navy had lost one of its three carriers, the Hornet, to the depths of the sea and had seen another, the Enterprise, badly damaged. It had also suffered grievous wounds, some of them mortal, to its fleet of carriers and destroyers. Although there was rejoicing in Tokyo at the apparent victory, the Japanese had also suffered significant damage. US bombers from the Hornet and Enterprise had incapacitated two Japanese cruisers and, more important, the Shokaku, a flagship carrier. The battle had also bought American forces on Guadalcanal precious time with which to prepare for the looming fight. Moreover, the battle had cost the Japanese 100 aircraft (and some of their best pilots); after Santa Cruz the role of Japan’s carrier-based aircraft in the struggle for Guadalcanal would be insignificant.
The force most directly responsible for the reduction in Japan’s carrier-based aircraft were the antiaircraft gunners of the South Dakota. As Samuel Eliot Morison was later to recount, the first Japanese air strike at Santa Cruz would have destroyed the Enterprise were it not for the “magnificent shooting by the ‘wild men’ of South Dakota. She in this action secured for battlewagons the place of honor that they occupied during the rest of the war—defending carriers from attack.” Shriver and his fellow gunners on the battleship shot down thirty-two Japanese planes that day by their own count (the navy officially gave them credit for only twenty-six; in the chaos of battle, no one could credibly claim a precise accounting). Even from the vantage point of a half century later, when the quest for world peace had become one of his most treasured i
deals, Shriver could not help swelling a bit with pride at what he and the other men of the South Dakota had accomplished that October day in the Pacific.
GUADALCANAL
By October 27, 1942, the South Dakota had retreated south to the island of New Caledonia, where it sought refuge in port at Nouméa for damage assessment. Captain Gatch had nearly died: only the quick action of a seaman who stanched his commanding officer’s bleeding amid all the pyrotechnic activity on deck had kept Gatch alive. Some of Shriver’s fellow American sailors had perished in the battle, but there was little time to mourn the dead.
Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field, although it remained tenuously in American hands, was still clearly the principal object of Japanese forays into the Solomon Islands. Retaining control of the airfield was of paramount strategic importance for the US naval effort in the Pacific. The Pacific front had seen an almost unrelenting string of victories for the Japanese: Through the first ten months of 1942, as one historian has put it, “Every confrontation with Japanese warships had been a humiliating defeat.” For the Americans to lose Henderson Field now would be devastating; their one land-based airfield in the region would be gone.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 11