Margaret Mitchell and the USS Atlanta

From Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal by James D. Hornfischer.

The USS Atlanta (CL-51) of the United States Navy was the lead ship of the Atlanta class of eight light cruisers, launched just three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and commissioned barely two weeks afterwards.

The salad days of her prewar launching in New York were a dimming memory. The ceremonial flourish that attended the launch of the ship had been spectacular. The country’s most popular purveyor of heavily freighted romance, Mrs. John R. Marsh, better known by her pen name, Margaret Mitchell, had been on hand in Kearny, New Jersey, on September 12, 1941, to celebrate the launching. With a quick two-handed swing, the author of Gone with the Wind smashed a bottle of champagne over an after turret housing and christened the lead ship of a new class of cruiser. Moored in the finishing basin at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, their decks fouled with electrical cabling and acetylene hoses and pneumatic hardware, unfinished fixtures and unfixed weaponry, two of the new type stood as sisters: the Atlanta and the Juneau.

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Three months later, on the day before Christmas, the ship was finished and ready for commissioning into the fleet. Under overcast skies at the New York Navy Yard, Margaret Mitchell was on hand again. As soon as she finished her remarks, the sun broke through over Brooklyn, catching sharply on the swords of officers and flashing on the gray sides of all those gun turrets. “A rather dull tableau suddenly was a scene of splendor,” Edward Corboy said. For the plankowners on the first U.S. warship commissioned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was an auspicious sign.

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A footnote from The Margaret Mitchell Encyclopedia by Anita Price Davis.

In November of 1942 Margaret learned of the sinking of the USS Atlanta off the coast of Guadalcanal and of the loss of many of its men. She recalled christening the cruiser and shaking hands with the crew. She admitted that the news made her stomach feel sick. She grieved to find out what had happened.

The USS Atlanta bond-raising events. The saddened Margaret went to work thereafter. She gathered the Red Cross women around her. Together, they began a campaign to raise $35 million in bonds to replace the Atlanta.

Margaret Mitchell even accepted an invitation to speak at a large event — a task she normally would have declined. The fact that a father of a wounded crewman on the USS Atlanta made the request influenced her acceptance. She boarded a train for Blue Ridge, Georgia, to deliver her presentation despite the fact that she was suffering with back problems; in fact she would have spine surgery at Johns Hopkins in late March after the war-bond campaign had ended. She found herself making many public appearances and public speeches to achieve her goal of replacing the USS Atlanta.

In February 1943 Margaret Mitchell and the other women of the local Red Cross held an out-door bond sales event at Five Points. It just happened that the event was on the coldest day that Atlanta had ever seen. Guards from the Atlanta Marines were present; they made sure that the currency, bonds, and certificates did not blow off the table. They fired cannon each time they received a donation of $1,000 (Walker, pages 455-456). Margaret Mitchell summed up the day in a letter: "We were deafened and frozen but we had a wonderful time and raised $500,000" (Harwell, Letters, page 308).

In a matter of six weeks, Margaret Mitchell and her friends had raised $65 million. This was enough to replace the USS Atlanta and to purchase two destroyers also.