Dart’s letter was written from the YMCA in San Diego!! He’s on home soil at last! The Haggard is stopping there just long enough to give every man on board one liberty. Then they’re off to Norfolk, Virginia where they anticipate a four-month stay in the Navy Yard.

He tried to call Dot last night, but after a two-hour wait for the call to go through he learned she had just left the house and would not return for many hours. Where’s a cell phone when you need one? He had to be content with talking to his parents for a mere five minutes. I imagine they were flooded with a sense of relief that their first-born was home, safe and sound.

After waiting two more hours, he tried Dot again, but by that time, there was a five-hour delay on calls to the east coast, so he sent a telegram instead. How he wishes he could have heard her voice!

“Maybe you guessed it by now, but the Haggard is a pretty sick old girl. I guess anybody’d be sick if he were hit by a couple of Kamikaze warriors. That’s what happened to us, and you’ll be surprised to know how long ago it was. We had our ‘accident’ on April 29! It’s taken us this long to patch up the hole, plug up the boilers, stick chewing gum and friction tape over the leaks, and get this far.”

He tells her that they had been so severely damaged that they’d received the order to stand by to ababdon ship, but then the old girl stopped sinking and the Captain thought maybe they could save her. “It’s been a long, hard grind. We were towed from our rendezvous with the zeros 40 miles off the northeastern tip of Okinawa … to Kerama Retto, a group of small islands which gave shelter to an emergency repair base. There, we sweated out almost daily air attacks until June 19 when we set out for the States. …During the seven weeks in Kerama Retto, we put a wooden patch over a huge hole in our bottom, cut away some of the bent and twisted metal, and pumped out the flooded compartments.”

He continues the harrowing tale. “When a couple of floating dry-docks were smuggled in, we were patched with steel and dried out inside. Finally able to proceed under our own power, but badly crippled, we were sent out to escort some LST’s to Saipan. We stayed two days at that most beautiful island and continued to Guam, where I visited Fred. From Guam we limped…to Pearl Harbor, escorting a pair of banged-up CVE’s.”

After two days in Pearl Harbor, they left with another badly damaged “tin can” and spent a week getting to San Diego. The other destroyer looks to be in much worse condition because all of their damage is topside, which is easier to fix. The Haggard’s damage is below the waterline in the engine and fire rooms and constitutes very heavy damage. They’ve made it this far, but must proceed through the Panama Canal and up the east coast of the US.

He reports that all hands will receive 30 days leave, plus traveling time. A group of men who live near the west coast have already shoved off to begin their leave. Another party will depart as soon as they pull into Norfolk. He’ll be in the third group that will leave as soon as the west coast group returns. He should be starting sometime around September 1 and they can make their plans from there.

He was thrilled to get the long awaited letters from Ruth and Arthur Chamberlain today, and is gratified by their responses.

There was a little subterfuge needed regarding his visit with Fred. It was actually a planned visit, but since Dot knew Fred was in Guam, he couldn’t reveal that the ship was on their way there. It had to look like an impromptu visit.

His 17 letters waiting for him here were much better than the liberty. All he did was walk around, eat, and try to reach his family and family-to-be. Now, it’s back on the ship for the long journey east.

It’s a brief and breathless letter from Dot today, written to Helen Peterson and Dart, Sr. It’s 1:00 AM and she can’t sleep with the excitement of their phone call and the news they gave her.

“Now you have proof that I’m an emotionally unstable individual. I humbly apologize for breaking into tears instead of peals of laughter, but I ask you, considering I was completely unprepared, I didn’t do too badly, do you think? No need in answering that question.”

She tells them there’ll be one very disappointed girl in her house if she awakes to find this was all a dream, but it somehow feels very real. “As I said at least 1,000 times on the phone, ‘Gee!'”

How those two parents must have grinned at her initial reaction during the phone call, and once again when they got her note.