After the Battle of Santa Cruz, Shriver was recognized for his courage and calm under enemy fire and for his deadeye accuracy. He was promoted to full lieutenant, senior grade, and placed in charge of his Eighth Division. This was a significant responsibility. It put him in charge of the ship’s forward starboard gun emplacements and placed thirty-two enlisted men, as well as a few junior grade lieutenants and ensigns, under his orders.
Two weeks after Santa Cruz, the South Dakota was pressed back into action. In the second week of November, American intelligence in the Pacific had learned of a massive convoy of Japanese ships in the vicinity of the Solomon Islands. This likely meant one thing: The Japanese were making another push to seize Guadalcanal. So although the American fleet was not in good condition—on the South Dakota, for instance, two big guns in turret 2 were still inoperative from the bomb damage suffered at Santa Cruz—it had no choice but to head northward to guard the island.
Aboard the South Dakota, Captain Gatch himself should have been in no condition to see combat again so soon. Having nearly bled to death during Santa Cruz, he had just been released from the infirmary. Shriver recalls that Gatch’s mere presence on deck, his arm in a sling and his neck in a bandage, rallied his sailors; they would do anything for their commander. On November 11, South Dakota left Nouméa, once again part of a screen for the still-crippled carrier Enterprise. On the morning of Friday the 13th, a “Tokyo Express” consisting of eleven transports and a dozen destroyers was sighted heading in a four-column formation toward Guadalcanal. At eight that evening, Admiral Halsey gave the order for the South Dakota, the battleship Washington, and four destroyers to peel off from the carrier group to head to the battle zone to intercept any enemy bombardment forces coming from the east. Ideally, he would not have risked the navy’s two most powerful battleships so close to the island, but Halsey had decided that losing Henderson Field would be even worse than losing the battleships, so he sent the ships forward as a calculated risk.
Late in the evening of November 14, the South Dakota came around the western tip of Guadalcanal in a single column behind the battleship Washington and the destroyers Walke, Benham, Preston, and Gwin. The ship had been at General Quarters, or full alert, for twenty-four hours straight. Shriver himself, after a brief respite in the afternoon, came on duty at eight o’clock that night. At 10:15 p.m., as the South Dakota followed its destroyer column north into the infamous Iron Bottom Bay, the carcasses of the previously sunken ships that gave the bay its name caused the battleship’s magnetic compass needles to twitch and shudder. Up on deck, Shriver and his men gazed onto the calm waters of the bay, illuminated by a clear quarter moon. As the column of ships swept north and west around Savo Island, just above Guadalcanal’s northwest corner, they could see Japanese transport ships afire in the distance, bombed into submission by American airplanes from Henderson Field.
At 10:55 p.m., radar picked up a Japanese cruiser a few miles away on the starboard bow. Five minutes later, the command came through Shriver’s headphones: “Open fire when you are ready.”
Shriver readied his men, but he felt acutely helpless. They were prepared to fire on the enemy, but the Eighth Division’s guns were far better suited for shooting down aircraft than for shooting at armored ships. The South Dakota and the Washington loosed their big guns on the Japanese light cruiser Sendai. The shots missed their target, and the Sendai doubled back northward. A minute later the South Dakota opened fire on the Shikinami, and when Captain Gatch announced that they had sunk an enemy ship, a great cheering erupted on deck—prematurely, as it turned out. They had scored a hit but not a fatal one. Both Japanese ships turned in the water and disappeared from Shriver’s view.
Still firing at the retreating enemy ships, the South Dakota lost electrical power. At 11:30, Shriver’s headphones went dead, and most of his division’s guns were rendered effectively inoperative. For six agonizing minutes, the great dreadnought drifted impotent and blind, lacking radar and searchlights. “The psychological effect on the officers and crew was most depressing. The absence of this gear gave all hands a feeling of being blindfolded,” Captain Gatch wrote in his official report. When the power came on, the ship fired at the first target in sight—which turned out to be the American destroyer Gwin. Gwin flashed its lights in a coded pattern to South Dakota, and it ceased firing, fortunately without scoring a hit.
Disasters began erupting everywhere. The destroyers leading the American column had run into their Japanese counterparts—with catastrophic results. Japanese torpedoes sped through the waters and slammed into all four of the American destroyers, and enemy gunfire ripped across their decks. Within minutes, the Preston and the Walke were sinking, and the Gwin and the Benham were incapacitated. Still arrayed in a column, the Washington and the South Dakota steamed through the sinking destroyers’ wreckage, “tossing out life rafts to the destroyer sailors as they passed over their ships’ graves.” The Washington passed through the remains of the Walke and “was unable to turn away from the survivors and thus ran over them,” killing many. The South Dakota followed several minutes later. Up ahead, Shriver could see floating piles of steaming wreckage, the remains of the sinking Preston. Looking down, Shriver could see hundreds of sailors from the Preston, flashlights from their lifejackets dotting the sea below. “We were going close to 30 knots,” Shriver recalled,
which is a high speed for something weighing 45,000 tons. I’ll never forget this: The destroyers were sinking, and hundreds of the sailors on those ships were in the water. I was up on the deck and I could see our guys in the water and we cut right through them. We must have killed hundreds of American sailors who were serving on those destroyers. We go right straight through where those guys are. We’ve got four huge propellers on the stern sufficient to propel this 45,000-ton thing. So the force from this propeller killed scores of them. Admiral [Willis] Lee, the commanding officer of the Washington, was not worried about whether we rode over some of our own sailors in the water. He didn’t have ten seconds to think about them. Because he focused on winning the battle, rather than the fate of the men in the water, we defeated the Japanese that night, and turned the tide of the war. That was the right thing to do. And yet still, when I think of it now, I feel sick.
Misfortune bred misfortune. When the South Dakota accidentally fired on the Gwin, the muzzle flash from the battleship’s great guns ignited fuel vapors around the two scout planes stationed just behind the Dakota’s turrets, and the resulting explosion blew both planes into the sea, igniting fires all over the deck. The fires wreaked further havoc with the ship’s electrical system—and, worse, produced brilliant explosions on deck that illuminated the South Dakota’s exact location to the Japanese, who responded by bathing the American battleship in searchlights. Five Japanese ships poured salvo after salvo of shells and a slew of torpedoes down on Shriver’s ship.
In a period of four minutes, the South Dakota was rocked by twenty-seven significant hits. Some of the shells slammed into the battleship’s metalwork without exploding. Unexploded shells rolled around the deck sounding, as one of Shriver’s shipmates would remark later, like a pack of out-of-control bowling balls. Those shells that did explode made “a loud crash, a rolling explosion,” followed by “the sizzling sound that metal fragments make when they crash into cables, guns and the superstructure. All of South Dakota’s radios and all but one of her radar units were knocked out of commission.”
Shriver winced at the noise as the South Dakota fired its eight starboard 5-inch guns at the Japanese searchlights, knocking them out quickly. But even with their searchlights doused, the Japanese continued pummeling the American battleship. The foremast was hit. Electrical fires erupted continuously, all around Shriver. Whole gun crews were killed by flying shells. The ship began to slow down, and more Japanese rounds ripped across the deck, killing an officer in the radar plotting room. Three rounds exploded in another battle station, killing a half dozen more men. Steam lines were severed, and the
hot, hissing steam scalded numerous sailors. Ladders between decks got knocked out, making putting out fires and attending to the growing scores of wounded much more difficult.
Shriver himself was wounded when metal shrapnel from an explosion lodged itself in his shoulder, a wound for which he was later to be awarded a Purple Heart. He paid little attention, however, because many of those in his division had more dire injuries. (More than half of his division would be killed or wounded before the battle was through.) The scene burned itself into Shriver’s memory.
The sight was terrifying. Screaming projectiles, each weighing a half a ton or more, flew flat and red across the sky, trailing flaming tails of fire. Shells flew in both directions by the dozens. Projectiles as long as a living-room sofa hurtled across the deck, landing with explosive impact. Dozens of my comrades died, some of them not 10 feet away from me. I was goddamned scared, lying flat on the deck, praying to God that the night would end with me alive. I didn’t think it would.
In desperation, the South Dakota tried to radio the Washington for help—in vain, because the South Dakota’s radio antenna had been shot off, leaving the ship effectively mute. Just after midnight the command center suffered a direct hit that killed several high-ranking officers and rendered many of the gun batteries inoperable. One of Shriver’s friends was standing several hundred feet away at an officer’s posting. Shriver watched in horror as “a shell came through and chopped this fellow right up to the waist. It severed his body off: his pants, and legs, and shoes all stayed there, while the top half of his body was whisked away by the shell.” About the same time, one of Shriver’s gunners was killed in his gun turret. Another gunner had to climb in and cut out his comrade piece by piece. At this point, Captain Gatch ordered his engineers to make full speed ahead, in hopes of pulling out of enemy fire.
For a few minutes, the US naval command in the Pacific feared the South Dakota lost, but by 1:55 a.m. what was left of the ship’s crew had finally put out the last of the fires on deck and a few minutes later had reestablished radio contact with the Washington. The two battleships rendezvoused a little before 10:00 a.m. on November 15; together they continued south to Nouméa. As morning dawned that day, the waters off Guadalcanal ran thick with fuel and blood. The sun beamed down on burning Japanese transports on the island. The Americans had lost two cruisers and five destroyers and hundreds of sailors at least. But they had won the battle. Guadalcanal was saved.
But there was little celebration on the South Dakota that morning. Thirty officers and crewmen had already died that night, and sixty more were critically wounded. Shriver had slept no more than a few hours in the past two days, and he was bleeding from his shoulder. After the shooting had stopped and the fires had been doused, Shriver recalled, “I got up and looked around the deck, which was covered in blood. I helped some of the wounded to the ship’s mess hall, where our doctors had set up an emergency hospital. Filled with bloody corpses and live bodies undergoing operations to save their lives or their limbs, that room was an unforgettable picture of the price of victory.”
About 6:00 a.m. Shriver went off duty, and he stumbled up two decks to his bunk on the fifth level. As he recalled,
I kept slipping on the stairs, which were slick with the blood of my fellow sailors—from the dead who had been dragged along there and from the wounded who had managed to climb upstairs on their own, dripping blood all the way. Those steps, all that blood, were unforgettable. You’d have thought I’d have never been able to sleep, with such nightmarish pictures floating before my eyes. But I was so goddamned exhausted, I could barely stay awake. The terror wipes you out. I collapsed into bed and fell instantly asleep without even changing out of my bloody clothes.
Two hours later, he was back on deck with all the available crew for the funeral service of his fallen comrades. Shriver was struck by how ruthlessly efficient the proceedings were. A chaplain spoke briefly, and then he and some officers gave a brief eulogy for each of the deceased, whose bodies were lined up in bags on a long plank, ready to be dumped into the sea, one after the other. Watching the bodies of the fallen sailors slide down the plank and into the Pacific was one of the most painful experiences Shriver had ever had to endure. He couldn’t stop thinking about how devastated all the mothers and wives and children would be to know that the bodies of their loved ones had just been jettisoned into the ocean like, as he put it, “a bag of disposable vegetables.”
Shriver helped sift through the body parts, looking for a ring or an ID card or a gold tooth that might identify bloody carcasses destroyed beyond recognition. At one point, he found his friend—or rather, he found the bottom half of him. Pulling the man’s wallet from the back pocket of his still-intact pants, Shriver found the man’s ID card and, utterly revolted, vomited onto the deck.
“This can have quite a lasting impact on you,” Shriver later recalled. “Why wasn’t I in one of those bags? Good friends of mine were in those bags. We were proud to have won the battle, but we were distressed that the destroyers and their men had been lost. And I may have been very selfish, but all I could do was keep thanking God for my still being alive.”
After Guadalcanal, President Roosevelt announced, “It would seem that the turning-point in this war has at last been reached.” And Winston Churchill declared this moment, “the end of the beginning.” It would be three years yet before the guns of war would go quiet, but for the first time since Pearl Harbor, it looked as though the Allies might prevail.
The South Dakota required significant repair work, so it returned to the East Coast of the United States through the Panama Canal. Although it had been not even a month since Shriver had departed Hawaii for the engagement at Santa Cruz, it seemed like years. He had turned twenty-seven just before the battle of Guadalcanal—but he was a considerably older, sadder man than the twenty-six-year-old who had last walked on American shores, in Hawaii, in mid-October.
On December 18, 1942, the South Dakota arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the officers and crewmen were granted shore leave while engineers came aboard to repair the ship. The first thing Shriver did when he got ashore was to call his mother. Years later, Shriver could still palpably recall the pleasure this call gave him. “I put a nickel in the phone and said, ‘Hi, Mom, how are you?’ She damn near dropped dead. For all she knew, I was still in the South Pacific.”
Soon, though, he was called back to the South Dakota. What followed were eight long, cold months operating in the North Atlantic with the British Home Fleet, patrolling Allied shipping lines to protect them from enemy attack by German submarines. The American battleship made regular forays out into the North Sea and patrolled the European coast. These were some anxious days and nights for the men aboard the South Dakota. German submarines had sunk many ships in the area. “Allied ships going to Russia were subjected to a lot of attacks,” Shriver recalled. “Our job was to protect them. Our presence up there was to make the Germans reluctant to make trouble.” Although they occasionally sighted enemy planes, the South Dakota did not see combat during this period. Still, Shriver recalled, “you thanked God every time you returned safely to a friendly port.”
THE SANDLANCE
Shriver was wearying of life on a battleship. He didn’t like getting shot at, for one thing. For another he had always, ever since the Canterbury School, enjoyed being a big fish in a small pond. A battleship is a very big pond. There were more than 2,000 men aboard the battleship, and despite his significant responsibilities as commander of the South Dakota’s Eighth Division, he often felt “like a cog in a machine.” When his ship had put in at Pearl Harbor after Guadalcanal, he had seen the latest US Navy submarines going out for trial runs, and he was intrigued. The crews were far smaller than a battleship’s. Also, he recalled thinking to himself, “being deep under water in one of those steel contraptions looked much more interesting—and safer—than being shot at on the deck of a battleship.” So he applied for a transfer to the submarine corps, and in the late
summer of 1943, when the South Dakota put in at Norfolk, Virginia, he received word that his application to submarine school in New London, Connecticut, had been accepted.
After ninety days of training, Shriver flew with six of his New London classmates out to Mare Island, off San Francisco, to report for his submarine assignment. He was excited about becoming a submariner. Shriver chose the Mare Island assignment strategically: He knew that, as a full lieutenant, he outranked any of the six peers traveling with him from submarine school. He calculated that, once on the West Coast, he would be given important responsibilities, perhaps even partial command of a submarine.
But on the morning that he was supposed to report to the Mare Island base commander, Shriver overslept, arriving in the assignment office at 8:45 a.m. The assignment officer was sitting behind his desk when the young lieutenant walked in. He smiled cheerfully and said, as Shriver recalled it, “Good to see you, Shriver. We’ve been going over assignments. Your classmates were all in here 45 minutes ago, and they’ve all been assigned to our new subs heading out to the South Pacific. I’m sending you down to San Diego, to be an officer on the USS S-40.”
Shriver’s heart sank. S-class submarines were decrepit World War I–era submarines that had been refitted for training. He exploded in anger, demanding an audience with Mare Island’s commanding officer.
“Sir,” Shriver remembered telling the base commander when granted an interview with him, “I had hoped to rejoin the Pacific fleet.”
“We all want that,” Shriver recalled the commander replying. “But your classmates who preceded you have all been assigned to those fleet boats and there’s no more space. You’re going to San Diego.”
“I understand that,” Shriver persisted. “But with all due respect, I’m a full lieutenant. Doesn’t my senior rank entitle me to a Pacific assignment?”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 12