The Wounded Return

Into San Francisco Bay, through the mists of a grey Christmas morning, steamed a somber little convoy. Aboard were women and children bombed out of their homes in Honolulu, boys and men of the Navy wounded and burned in Pearl Harbor before they ever had a chance to fight back.

From hillsides bordering the harbor, San Franciscans saw the convoy slide under Golden Gate Bridge, the ships' black and grey daubed sides barely distinguishable from fog and water. Word spread quickly. Down to the docks, as close as armed guards would let them approach, rushed hundreds of eager, worried men and women: parents whose sons had been in the battle of Pearl Harbor, relatives of families left stranded in Hawaii when the attack came. They stood in the chill drizzle, waiting.

For those aboard, it had been a long and despondent trip. On one of the ships were two funny little pandas (see p. 32). There were scores of children to whom Christmas week should have been a time of wide-eyed wonder and squeals of delight. But also on board, four to a cabin, far below deck, were 125 of the Navy's officers and men, some ripped by bomb fragments, some with arms or legs amputated, some burned from head to foot by the blazing oil that covered Pearl Harbor.

The passengers contributed a bale of magazines and books, a phonograph for the wounded. Every morning the women rolled bandages and dressings, at card tables lined up as a workbench.

The afternoon before Christmas, while the convoy zigzagged slowly toward harbor, the passengers got up a little party for the wounded men who were in good enough shape to care about such things. They improvised presents: cartons of cigarets, razor blades, tooth paste, socks, candy, ties, handkerchiefs, anything they could find. All afternoon they worked wrapping them, in fancy Christmas papers removed from packages they had done up, in happier days, for their own families.

When they went belowdecks to deliver their gifts, they learned that one sailor, worst burned of all, had died 20 minutes before.

The wounded were brave and angry men, and it filled the passengers with bravery and anger to talk to them. In one cabin a sailor, whose right leg had been amputated at the knee, gazed across the room at another lad, with his left leg gone, lying morose and silent, too unhappy even to speak. The sailor wrote a note, with the grim humor of the valiant: "How about a dance?" The lad grinned, began to talk.

All the wounded men had the same burning wish. Said one sailor: "Before this we didn't want to fight anybody. But now all we want is to get well enough to get our crack at those bastards." He did not yet know that a wound from a bomb splinter on his spine would never let him fight or walk again.

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