Update: Daniel Galvin passed away January 28, 2016, and was given a full
military funeral. We owe a debt of gratitude to Daniel, his family, and all who served.
Dan Galvin’s story, from August 2009, was discovered through an e-mail from the
daughter of a crew member of the USS Ellet DD-398 — the ship whose crew rescued the
survivors of USS Quincy CA-39 after she was sunk by Japanese forces at the Battle of Savo
Island. Dan Galvin lost three hundred eighty-nine of his shipmates that night.
THE SALUTE OF A SURVIVOR
By Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe Columnist — August 10, 2009
When he was 19 years old, Dan Galvin joined the Navy because he wanted to see the world.
A year later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and he got to see the world at war.
He was 21, aboard the USS Quincy, when she sailed into the Battle of Guadalcanal.
Sometime after midnight, August 8th turning into August 9th, the Quincy and two other
cruisers were sailing off Savo Island. Galvin was at his battle station in Sky Forward when
he saw shapes in the darkness.
He realized they were Japanese warships just as the sky exploded. “Their first
salvos were star shells. They illuminate the target.”
The eerie beauty gave way to deafening shelling. The bridge blew up and he knew his
captain was dead. Torpedoes slammed into the hull. A life preserver materialized in his
hands in the dark. He ran down the hull on the starboard side as the ship listed 45 degrees
and rolled over. The Quincy sank in less than 10 minutes.
After five hours in the water, Galvin struggled up a rope ladder onto the USS Ellet,
so exhausted he had to be dragged the last few feet. He learned later that nearly half of
the 800 men on the Quincy were killed.
“Survivor’s guilt, whatever you want to call it. I shouldn’t be here.”
Yesterday, 67 years to the day that Dan Galvin lived while so many around him died,
he did what he does every Aug. 9. He put on his sailor’s uniform from 1942, stepped
onto his front porch, and read the names of each of the 389 men who went down with
the Quincy.
“I worry,” Dan Galvin said. “I worry that when I’m gone, no
one will remember these men.”
Story and video originally found on the
Facebook page of USS Ellet DD-398
and leatherneck.com.
