When Moichiro lay dying, he called his six-year-old grandson to his bedside, handed him his treasured samurai sword, and whispered that the weapon was now his. He reminded Hara of the many samurai tales he had shared of men “who suffered great hardships to achieve their missions. Try to do likewise. Always be on guard, and redouble your efforts to better yourself.” Then, near death, Moichiro said, “Tameichi Hara! You are the son of samurai and you will remember that,” and repeated to his grandson the ancient adage “A samurai lives in such a way that he is always prepared to die.”28
Tameichi followed his grandfather’s words. In 1918 he entered the Japanese naval academy at Eta Jima. After graduating four years later, Hara served aboard two destroyers and forged a friendship with his squadron commander, Captain Chuichi Nagumo. The brilliant destroyer expert urged Hara to study both his tactics as well as the United States, considered by many in naval circles as Japan’s next enemy, and shared books he had obtained during a visit to the United States.
The intelligent officer excelled at the mechanics and tactics of the destroyer’s main offensive weapon, the torpedo attack. The navy published a new torpedo manual based on Hara’s studies, which transformed the torpedo assault into a formidable weapon that wreaked havoc in the Solomons for MacDonald and other American skippers.
A second development complemented Hara’s work: in 1933, the Japanese navy introduced torpedoes propelled by oxygen rather than the compressed air that had long fueled torpedoes, including those used by the United States. The dramatic change, which was introduced two years after MacDonald graduated from the Naval Academy, eliminated the long white track created at the water’s surface by the compressed air, and replaced it with a nearly imperceptible track. In combination with the longer ranges and faster speeds Japanese torpedoes already possessed, the new fuel source gave Hara and other Japanese destroyer captains operating in the Solomons the best torpedo yet devised.
As his friend Nagumo guided his carriers and escorts to Pearl Harbor for the December 7, 1941, attack, Hara, then the captain of the new 2,500-ton destroyer Amatsukaze, took his ship southward as part of the invasion force against the Philippines. In January 1942 he participated in the invasion of the Netherlands East Indies, and fought in the February Battle of the Java Sea, June’s momentous Battle of Midway, and August’s Battle of the Eastern Solomons. He emerged from the operations convinced that the Japanese navy was more than a match for the United States, but believed that his nation had to defeat their foe before the American factories and shipyards began operating at peak efficiency. O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas had already reached the region, and more warships were certain to follow.
Hara hoped that the November surface engagement would help settle matters.
“It’s a Showdown in the Solomons”
At Pearl Harbor, Nimitz received signs of imminent action in the Guadalcanal area. “There are some indications that the enemy will attempt to resume his all-out attack on Guadalcanal in the near future,” concluded his daily summary for November 3. “We believe that he has superior sea power in the area, but may not know it.” The Japanese continued to push in reinforcements and supplies over the next three days, and Nimitz added on November 8, “There is strong indication of a grand scale offensive aimed at Guadalcanal to be undertaken by the enemy in the very near future.”29
On November 9 Nimitz alerted Halsey that all signs pointed to a major enemy offensive “assisted by carrier striking forces slated to support movement of Army transports to Guadalcanal.” He added that “this is expected to be a major effort to recapture Guadalcanal,” and that the attack was expected to occur on November 13. “While this looks like a big punch I am confident that you with your forces will take their measure.”30
Their suspicions were confirmed on November 10 when a coastwatcher on Bougainville reported sixty-one enemy vessels in the region and Halsey’s reconnaissance aircraft spotted increased enemy activity near Truk and Rabaul. Halsey canceled the orders sending exhausted crews and damaged ships to Pearl Harbor for rest and repair and ordered every ship to Guadalcanal, as he faced a moment when “even half-ships counted.”31
“This was the tightest spot that I was ever in during the entire war,” Halsey wrote after the conflict. He worried that even if he turned back the Japanese warships, his naval forces might be so weakened that they would be unable to prevent future Japanese attempts to reinforce the island. If he failed to engage the enemy at sea and allowed them to bombard Vandegrift’s exhausted units ashore, the morale of those Marines would be adversely affected. He had promised Vandegrift action, and he refused to renege on his pledge the first time the enemy gathered in strength. “If I have any principle of warfare that is burned within my brain,” he wrote, “it is that the best defense is a strong offense. Lord Nelson expressed this very well, ‘No captain can go wrong who places his ship alongside the enemy’s.’”32
Halsey expected the crews of every ship, including O’Bannon and Fletcher, to display the same aggressiveness. Fortunately the crews, especially those of the newer destroyers, were young and lacked the experience to be frightened. “We knew it was desperate,” said Seaman Whisler, the youngest member aboard O’Bannon, “but we were pretty confident back then. There wasn’t much fear of the Japanese. Being young, though, helped.”33
Halsey organized four naval groups under Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner. Two groups, one commanded by Turner and the other by Rear Admiral Norman Scott, would escort transports containing six thousand troops and supplies to Guadalcanal. Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, an old friend of MacDonald’s, would screen and be ready to engage any Japanese surface force that appeared. A fourth group, built around the damaged carrier Enterprise, was still at Noumea awaiting departure as soon as the carrier was repaired. Not counting the Enterprise group, Turner commanded two battleships, four heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and twenty-two destroyers, including O’Bannon and Fletcher, both serving under Callaghan.
Late in the afternoon of November 12, Callaghan and Scott escorted troop transports to Guadalcanal, where they deposited their reinforcements. While the men and matériel moved shoreward, search aircraft spotted the enemy force 335 miles north. Callaghan waited until dusk before shutting down the transports and pulling away. When he had taken the transports a safe distance from the island, Callaghan detached his flagship, San Francisco, a second heavy cruiser, Portland, and three light cruisers, including Helena, Juneau, and Scott in Atlanta. Escorted by eight destroyers, the ships steered north to intercept the Japanese approaching Guadalcanal.
The crews of O’Bannon and Fletcher were about to face a Japanese surface force for the first time, but despite their inexperience, they approached battle with more confidence than could be justified. “We didn’t worry about going head-to-head with the Japanese,” said Machinist’s Mate 1/c Donald Holmes of the Fletcher. The crew trusted Cole, whom Holmes called “the best skipper we ever had,” and “Wylie was very good, too. The Japs were ready for war and we weren’t, but it didn’t bother us.”34
Those officers Holmes trusted, as well as Wilkinson and MacDonald on O’Bannon, had doubts about Callaghan’s decision to form the ships into one long column. Instead of collecting the eight destroyers as one unit, Callaghan placed four destroyers, including O’Bannon, at the column’s van and the other four, with Fletcher, bringing up the rear. Nestled in the middle steamed the five cruisers. The quartet of destroyer officers believed that by separating the ships, Callaghan had reduced their effectiveness, and that he employed tactics that seemed straight from the days of sail.
They were especially concerned with the stations of the two newest destroyers. Like most warships, both destroyers possessed search radar, model C (SC radar), which detected targets attacking from above, but they also carried search radar, model G (SG radar), installed on only the newest ships, such as O’Bannon and Fletcher. The SG radar swept twenty-five to thirty miles out and spotted surface targets on a complete 360-deg
ree circle about the ship, differentiated ships from landmasses, and made it easier for gunnery officers to hit their targets. Rather than placing Fletcher and O’Bannon in the lead, where Callaghan could benefit from that enhanced radar, he assigned three destroyers lacking that device ahead of O’Bannon and placed Fletcher in the final slot of the column.
As far as Wylie was concerned, Callaghan’s move was akin to placing a blind man in the lead while a person with perfect vision had to follow behind. “I can’t figure out any rhyme or reason why we were so formed or allocated,” he said after the war. “We had no idea what we were going to do if we met some Nips. No battle plans, no coherence to the formation. It was just one bloody long column. That dates back, last time anybody tried that was before Trafalgar. Well,” Wylie added exasperatedly, “even Nelson did not do that.”35 In the coming fight, Callaghan would have to turn to what was certain to be a heavily used TBS to call on O’Bannon for the enemy’s ranges, course, and bearing, each call delaying decisions at a time when every second could mean the difference between being the first to launch an attack and being the first to be hit.
“Again it’s a showdown in the Solomons,” wrote the perceptive correspondent Hanson Baldwin. He claimed that the Japanese had assembled what was probably the largest fleet they had yet gathered to make a “major effort to expel us from the Solomons.” With the United States committing vast resources to the recent landings in North Africa, thereby shrinking the number of ships it could dispatch to the Solomons, the Japanese “no longer fear surprise” from Halsey. “The issue in the Solomons is again in doubt,” concluded Baldwin.36
“They Didn’t Know Hell”
As transports poured supplies shoreward on November 12, radar operators aboard O’Bannon and Fletcher scoured the surface and the skies above Ironbottom Sound, the appellation Americans gave the waters between Guadalcanal and Florida Island because of the alarming number of vessels sunk in those waters. At the same time, sonarmen swept the depths for submarines, ready to take action against any contact.
Three waves of Japanese torpedo planes, each approaching from different sectors, interrupted the unloading in the early afternoon. “At last we were in action!” MacDonald later said. “This was our first actual contact with the enemy.”37 Since he and the crew had arrived in the Pacific a month earlier, O’Bannon had escorted transports and hunted enemy submarines, but they had not been in what MacDonald considered a combat encounter with the Japanese. Young sailors such as Bob Whisler, who didn’t know what to expect, and veterans such as Wilkinson and Cole, who wondered how the young crews would fare against the Japanese navy, would soon have their answers.
Crews on all ships buttoned their shirts to the neck and rolled down their sleeves to prevent flash burns should a shell strike. At his post deep in the ship’s bowels, engineering officer Lieutenant Carl F. Pfeifer glanced at the young men in the engine room who were about to risk their lives in battle for the first time. He had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7, but few among the crew could claim battle experience. Those boys standing at their stations far below the main deck, cut off from their shipmates above and blind to what was about to occur, “were representative of the entire ship’s company. The ship was green, they were green and so were most of the officers.” Pfeifer liked that their executive officer, MacDonald, was “a seasoned veteran of London air raids,” and he knew the crew had performed well in shakedown and gunnery practice. “But now we were playing for keeps and I wondered how we would take it.”
Pfeifer observed no outward manifestations of fear. If they were anything like him, Pfeifer concluded that their insides must be churning at top speed, because every sailor in the Black Gang, the crews that worked below in the engine and firerooms, knew what to expect “if an enemy torpedo strikes—an explosion, flame, live steam and sudden death.”38 Happily, concluded Pfeifer, his crew seemed to be handling matters well.
The sound of muffled thunderclaps above snapped Pfeifer out of his musings. The big guns had jumped into action. For Pfeifer and his boys, the time for thinking was over.
As the torpedo planes raced in, O’Bannon, Fletcher, and the other escorts formed a tight circle about the transports. Wilkinson zigzagged his ship to present a more elusive target, and while a handful of enemy aircraft evaded the fire and launched their torpedoes, most burst into flames and spiraled seaward, where they momentarily skidded along the surface before exploding. “The air seemed to be filled with crashing and burning planes and bullets,” said MacDonald, who had made certain that the St. Christopher medal Cecilia had given him rested in his left breast pocket. “This was our first opportunity to see at close hand what an enemy plane looked like.”39
At Lieutenant Pfeifer’s side in the engine room far below the action, Fireman 2/c Charles H. Hagy Jr., connected to the bridge as Pfeifer’s telephone talker, listened to what occurred and relayed it to the group. “We just shot down a Jap plane! We just got another!” Hagy shouted. The men in the room grinned—even the tiny bits of information Hagy conveyed were treasured, for they made the engine room crew feel a part of the fighting above. “The engine room gang never sees a gun fired, but these boys wear the results,” said Pfeifer. “Now their faces glistened and their dungarees were dark and wet from profuse sweating under the 120-degree heat. They were black and grimy from cork dust and burned powder being sucked in from the decks above.”40
O’Bannon gunners, busy loading clips of ammunition or aiming guns, directed more than eight hundred rounds at the attacking aircraft in the forty-three-minute action. Wilkinson reported afterward that their stout defense had shot down two aircraft for certain, with two probables.
Fletcher gunners claimed an even more impressive tally, splashing five of the ten torpedo planes that attacked. On his forward 20mm gun Seaman 1/c D. H. Dahlke directed such accurate fire that, according to Wylie, he “literally cut pieces out of the nose and cockpit of one plane,” while on another 20mm gun close by, Seaman 1/c E. G. Walker “opened up on the nose of a dive bomber and continued to hit until after the plane crashed in the water.”41
One bomber passed along Fletcher’s starboard, a second astern, and a third to port in the eleven-minute duel, including one that starboard side gunners shredded from nose to tail, but none succeeded in breaking through the thick antiaircraft blanket to harm the Fletcher. “Enemy’s aircraft was a complete failure,” concluded O’Bannon’s war diary for that day. “No casualties in this vessel.”42 The Japanese damaged only one ship, the cruiser San Francisco.
Both Wilkinson and Cole were pleased with how their men responded to their initial battle test. In the ship’s recesses, Pfeifer gave high marks not only to the young men sweating and laboring in the engine room but also to the crew as a whole. “We knew now that she [O’Bannon] could take it and dish it out, and so could her crew. This crowd of boots and feather merchants [reserves] had performed like veterans in the first battle.”43
As daylight blended into dusk, the screen escorted the transports eastward. Wilkinson would have liked to give his men time to relax, but mid-November off Guadalcanal was not the time for a break. If this torpedo attack was the harbinger of a stronger surface assault, his men needed to be ready.
MacDonald had hoped to return to Espiritu Santo for at least a day’s respite, but instead Wilkinson, as part of Callaghan’s task force, received orders to return to the Guadalcanal area to intercept an enemy surface force steaming southward from Rabaul to bombard Henderson Field and land infantry reinforcements. “We were very happy when that day was over,” recalled MacDonald, “thinking we were going back to port to sort of relax a little bit, and then we were turned around and ordered back.” He knew the sailors were already exhausted from the earlier air attack and from guarding the transports; “hadn’t they just had a battle?”44
At headquarters, Admiral Halsey regretted the need to send smaller destroyers such as O’Bannon into action against Japanese battleships and cruisers, but he had no alternative. Should
the Japanese succeed in destroying the airstrip on Guadalcanal and landing those reinforcements, his ability to hold the line in the South Pacific would be tenuous at best. Should his ships triumph, Halsey would gain both a reprieve while the Japanese pulled back to regroup and additional time to rush more men, ships, and equipment to Guadalcanal. Halsey was playing a high-risk game, but the old destroyerman wagered that the destroyer crews would come through for him.
O’Bannon and Fletcher steamed westward, two destroyers in a long column that comprised five cruisers and eight destroyers. Wilkinson placed O’Bannon in her assigned fourth slot, behind the destroyers Cushing, Laffey, and Sterett, while astern followed the cruisers Atlanta, San Francisco, Helena, Portland, and Juneau. Four destroyers formed the rear section, with Aaron Ward, Barton, Monssen, and Fletcher steaming in that order. MacDonald, Cole, and Wylie hoped that Callaghan’s decision to form a single column, which the admiral believed would enable the ships to better navigate the tricky waters off Guadalcanal, would not boomerang and cost the lives of their officers and sailors.
A gentle breeze in the moonless sky wafted off the riggings as the unit sliced through calm seas. The pitch-black night challenged the eyesight of on-deck observers, who after a few moments gazing into the void felt as if they were staring through dark velvet. As Callaghan’s force steamed through the narrow waters off Guadalcanal, sonar and radar crews aboard O’Bannon and Fletcher kept a close watch for submerged outcroppings and reefs as well as for enemy ships.
At midnight on November 13 the ships entered the eastern end of Lengo Channel and moved westward along Guadalcanal’s northern coastline. An hour later O’Bannon lookouts spotted a bright light coming from Guadalcanal on the port bow. At the same time an announcement over the loudspeaker alerted the crew to a possible air raid against Henderson Field. Tension mounted when half an hour later reports came that a torpedo had passed ahead of the ship from starboard to port.
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