“At this time the sky was quite dark,” Wilkinson later recorded in his action report, the “moon had become hidden behind dark clouds, a limited number of stars were visible, and there was a slight breeze from north northeast. The sea was smooth.”45
Radar pips at 1:30 a.m. indicated enemy units ahead and on O’Bannon’s starboard bow. At the same time Fletcher’s radar spotted ships southwest of Savo Island, where a few months earlier a handful of Japanese cruisers had outclassed a numerically superior American force. One group crossed ahead of the American column from port to starboard, another steamed on the column’s port bow, and a third barreled in on the port beam. The sightings indicated that the Japanese were out in force.
Callaghan turned his column northward to meet the enemy’s triple threat. Crews snapped into action as general quarters sounded on all ships. Seaman Whisler raced to his station on the O’Bannon’s fantail five-inch gun, heard the gun turret doors slam shut, and prepared for a mighty explosion as the gun’s shells raced toward their targets. Aboard Fletcher, Machinist’s Mate Holmes slid down ladders to man the steam pump in the forward engine room, while not far away, Fireman Setter stood ready at his post in the forward engine room. Both listened to chief petty officers bellow instructions to feed more oil to the engines and remind the men to keep sharp, as they were likely to soon be executing a rapid series of course and speed corrections. Damage control parties collected at their assigned spots on deck and below, ready to man hoses to battle fires or to grab pumps to contain any flooding. Antiaircraft gunners stood by their weapons, intent on adding their fire if the Japanese warships came within range of their guns. Radar and sonar crews tracked waters now dissected by a score or more of ships.
With combat imminent, Seaman Whisler touched his grandmother’s lucky silver dollar. Although he knew the coin would hardly determine whether he lived or died in the next few hours, its presence comforted Whisler. He vowed that if he survived this battle, he would keep the coin in his pocket throughout the war.
Aboard the Fletcher, Machinist’s Mate Holmes trusted that if every man aboard the ship did his job, and if luck was on their side, he would emerge in one piece. “I knew we were going into battle around 2:00 a.m.,” explained Holmes. “The captain said it over the speaker. So, we were ready for them. We knew it was pretty serious out there in the Solomons. We needed to be ready for them. We trusted our officers. We had no control over anything. You don’t worry about being killed or wounded because there was nothing you could do about it anyway, so why worry?”46 The more superstitious among them tried to forget that they were steaming into battle on Friday the thirteenth, or that Callaghan’s cruisers and destroyers totaled thirteen, or that the digits in Fletcher’s hull number, DD-445, added up to thirteen.
At the front of the column O’Bannon, fourth in line, was cutting through the waters in the darkness when, “all of a sudden, there were a number of ships around.” From MacDonald’s vantage, it seemed “they were about to meet the whole Japanese South Pacific fleet.” He would now find out if the training had sufficiently transformed these young civilians into an efficient crew. “After a little less than five months aboard the O’Bannon, he wrote, “they knew the ship, the sea, and their guns. But they didn’t know hell.”47
CHAPTER 3
NAVAL SLUGFEST OFF GUADALCANAL
The man who would do everything in his power to bring hell to the American fleet was then on the bridge as his destroyer, Amatsukaze, raced south from Truk toward Guadalcanal. One week before leaving Truk, Tameichi Hara had visited his mentor, Admiral Nagumo, after the admiral had been relieved of his duties. Hara thought his friend, who had been in battle since leading the Pearl Harbor attack force almost one year earlier, appeared haggard and in need of recuperation back home, but Nagumo talked only of what lay ahead for the junior officer. He warned Hara of bitter fighting to come, and he feared that Hara and his fellow ship commanders would steam into battle with a disadvantage now that most of Japan’s carriers were either sunk or being repaired and many of their most gifted aviators had been killed.
In mid-November the Japanese planned a joint operation to defeat the United States Marines on Guadalcanal and to restore naval supremacy in the Solomons. While the land forces assaulted Vandegrift’s lines, the navy would send a unit of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers to bombard Henderson Field and to defeat any American warships that appeared.
The Japanese army took the first step by committing the 38th Division to Guadalcanal. In four speedy runs to Guadalcanal in the month’s first ten days, destroyers landed the entire Japanese division without encountering opposition.
Hara’s skilled senior commander, Rear Admiral Koki Abe, had a reputation for being overly cautious, but Hara dismissed those concerns as he steamed out of Truk with the light cruiser Nagara and seven other destroyers to join Abe’s two battleships and three destroyers near Shortland Island on the morning of November 12. Any hope for surprise ended that same morning when, while still three hundred miles from Guadalcanal, an American bomber spotted them. The plane turned away without attacking, but Hara knew that with this sighting, the enemy would be alerted to their presence and would have time to amass a naval force to greet them.
Abe reacted by altering the formation from a single column into a double semicircular formation. Hara and four other destroyer skippers spread out in a five-mile arc ahead of Nagara, while the other destroyers formed a second arc about Nagara. Abe’s flagship, Hiei, and its sister ship, Kirishima, both 27,500-ton battleships, followed in a column behind Nagara.
As the Japanese neared Guadalcanal, heavy rains disrupted the formation. For seven hours the force navigated blindly through rough seas, which broke Hara’s arc into groups of two and three destroyers and pushed the ships farther apart. With the possibility of engaging the enemy more probable, Hara “trembled in excitement and breathed deeply of the balmy night breeze.” He glanced at the crew about him; “silence prevailed in our ship as every man went to his battle station.”1
He stood silent as well, proud that he led an able crew and sturdy ship into action. Hara remembered Nagumo’s insistence that their nation required convincing victories, and, bolstered by his grandfather’s deathbed admonition that a samurai must always be prepared to die for his emperor, Hara steamed by Savo Island toward Guadalcanal, directly into O’Bannon’s radar range and on a collision course with Callaghan’s cruisers and destroyers.
Hara intended to deliver such a triumph—if need be, with his death.
Both sides in the November Naval Battle of Guadalcanal agreed that one factor dominated: confusion. Fighting in the dark of night, the ships became so tangled in the waters off Guadalcanal that Samuel Eliot Morison, in his epic account of the United States Navy in World War II, concluded that opposing vessels “mingled like minnows in a bucket.” In his description of the fighting, Tameichi Hara said the battle was “one of the most fantastic sea battles of modern history in that it was fought at almost point-blank range between 14 Japanese and 13 American warships,” and he added, “The battle was extremely confused.”2
Shortly after 1:00 a.m. on November 13, the thirteen US ships entered Ironbottom Sound and steamed eastward along Guadalcanal’s northern coast, passing Koli Point and Lunga Point in their search for the reported enemy force. At the same time Admiral Abe and his fourteen ships, including Hara’s Amatsukaze, sliced through the waters separating Savo Island and Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal’s northwest corner, thirty nautical miles from O’Bannon. Rather than advancing in an orderly single column, as Hara hoped, Abe’s formation steamed southeastward in three groups. With the battleship Kirishima, the cruiser Nagara, and three destroyers, Admiral Abe in Hiei moved closest to the Guadalcanal coast, while a few hundred yards ahead and to Abe’s left a pair of destroyers led the way. On Abe’s port side the other six destroyers, including Hara and the Amatsukaze, constituted the left flank.
Thirty minutes later Callaghan ordered a course change from west t
o north. As his ships turned in unison, O’Bannon’s radar screen filled with contacts, and the first destroyer in the column, Cushing, three ships ahead of O’Bannon, reported over the TBS the presence of ships on his starboard bow and to his port.
Across the waters, Admiral Abe faced a predicament. He had not expected to run into a surface force until after he hit Henderson Field, and had thus ordered his battleship gun crews to be ready with incendiary shells for that bombardment. With American ships suddenly materializing, Abe now needed the armor-piercing shells resting in magazines below. He immediately ordered a switch, but feared that he would be under fire before he had a chance to rearm.
Hara concluded the same from the bridge of Amatsukaze and was certain the enemy would open the action. Inexplicably to Hara, however, eight minutes passed without a shell coming from the American side as the two forces closed at thirteen hundred yards per minute, a lapse Hara contended “saved us from catastrophe.”3 During those unexpected minutes, Japanese crews rushed the armor-piercing shells from their magazines to the deck gun crews. In their haste, the men stacked shells all about the deck, which could ignite a violent explosion if an American salvo landed in their midst.
The combat commenced when Hiei shone her searchlight in an attempt to find Nagara’s location, and two Japanese aircraft dropped flares that illuminated O’Bannon and her companion van destroyers. Atlanta instantly responded with her five-inch guns, and Sterett, immediately in front of O’Bannon, opened fire, signaling a naval free-for-all. Now within point-blank range at 5,500 yards, Hiei’s guns swung portside and powered fourteen-inch shells into Atlanta’s bridge, killing Rear Admiral Scott and most of the other bridge officers of that cruiser.
Events occurred rapidly as the two forces groped for each other in the darkness. Wilkinson was preparing to launch O’Bannon’s torpedoes when at 1:48 Callaghan, seeing that the three enemy groups were attempting to box him in to the front and on his flanks, issued an order for the odd ships in line to fire to starboard and the even ships to port. O’Bannon, fourth in line, had been ready to fire to starboard, but as MacDonald recalled, with the new order “the firing got all messed up and they said shift the other way. By that time the Japs were coming down that [port] side and we were running right into them. That was a real close-range battle if there ever was one.”4
Wilkinson ordered his batteries to extinguish a Japanese searchlight on the port bow that lit up the destroyer Cushing, three ships ahead of O’Bannon. Tracers from their five-inch guns sparked a slender path toward the Japanese vessel, shattered the searchlight, and splintered against the ship’s forward superstructure.
“The action now reminded me of a no-holds-barred barroom brawl, in which someone turned out the lights and everyone started swinging in every direction—only this was ten thousand times worse,” wrote the assistant engineering officer aboard Sterett, Lieutenant C. Raymond Calhoun. “Shells continued to drop all around us, star shells and flares hung overhead, tracers whizzed past from various directions, and everywhere we looked ships burned and exploded against the backdrop of the night sky. I could not tell where our forces were. We seemed to be in the midst of about ten Japanese ships without a friend in sight.”5
The prospect had to be unsettling to destroyer crews that largely consisted of novices who had rarely traveled outside the confines of their home counties, let alone the hemisphere. They were about to engage, in the dead of night, veteran Japanese crews who in the Solomons had inflicted an unbroken string of naval defeats on American surface units. The odds did not favor those untested Americans, but the Marines on Guadalcanal, Admiral Halsey, and the nation called on them to step into the gap and deflect a feared enemy from further withering Vandegrift’s already depleted lines.
Ships on both sides turned Ironbottom Sound between Guadalcanal and Tulagi into a modern-day version of a Western shootout. Operating in the early morning darkness, destroyers fired at cruisers and cruisers targeted cruisers, while Abe’s two lumbering battleships trained their batteries on any target that came into view. Large gray ships momentarily loomed out of the darkness, illuminated by flashes as shells raced from guns, giving O’Bannon’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant George Philip Jr., only seconds to aim his fire. “They were like giant, ghostly light bulbs being turned off and on in the twinkling of an eye,” said MacDonald of the nighttime clash.6
Abe erred in using Hiei’s searchlight, as it permitted O’Bannon and her three van companions to concentrate their firing on the flagship. Gunfire from O’Bannon and Cushing zoomed at and over Hiei, with some shells splashing near Hara’s Amatsukaze. Hara, seeing that he was moving uncomfortably close to Florida Island and its treacherous reefs on his port side, shouted, “Gain speed! Let’s get the hell out of here to starboard!”7 He put distance between the reefs and his ship before turning back to the fray.
In the confusion of battle, the three ships in front of O’Bannon slowed, causing the column to bunch. Wilkinson ordered a speedy turn inside to avoid colliding with Sterett, while to his rear, the cruiser Atlanta maneuvered to avoid O’Bannon. Japanese shells striking Sterett’s stern slowed that ship and required Wilkinson to make a hard right and emergency full astern to avoid smashing into her fellow destroyer. Sterett “was virtually blown out of the water, and the other two ships ahead [Cushing and Laffey] were both torpedoed,” wrote MacDonald.8 Wilkinson’s quick thinking and skilled navigation, combined with the efforts of the engineering officer, Lieutenant Carl F. Pfeifer, and his engine room crew, enabled O’Bannon to clear Sterett’s stern by only ten yards.
“Our Navy Was There”: O’Bannon in Battle
The O’Bannon crew avoided one possible catastrophe only to face another when a shell exploded behind Hiei and silhouetted the battleship, which was four thousand yards away. Wilkinson, who realized that he was taking his destroyer into point-blank range of a warship ten times her size and packing more power in a single turret than all of O’Bannon’s deck guns, set a course to shorten the distance and launch torpedoes. With the three American destroyers ahead either damaged or sinking, O’Bannon now led the way. “No man can adequately describe the shock and terror and tremendousness of a great naval battle fought at close range in the dead of night,” MacDonald later said. “It was the most terrible experience that I’ve ever endured.”9
Lieutenant Pfeifer and his Black Gang turned dials and manned pumps to give Wilkinson added speed for the run toward Hiei. Gun flashes illuminated the waters around O’Bannon and shell bursts lit the sky as the destroyer shaved the yardage between her and Abe’s giant vessel. But the O’Bannon was sufficiently shrouded by the darkness that by the time Abe’s lookouts spotted her, the Japanese battleship could not depress her fourteen-inch guns low enough to hit the American destroyer.
O’Bannon moved in so close to Hiei that MacDonald swore he could hear enemy shells swish overhead and zip between the masts. O’Bannon’s bullets and shells growled a response, gouging chunks of metal out of Hiei’s superstructure, and “flashes and sparks were coming out of her pagoda tower. Enormous flames began to appear in and around the ship, her fire ceased and the ship appeared to be dead in the water.”10
Seaman 1/c Louis F. Cianca was at his station on the flying bridge near Wilkinson when the action started. He felt exposed as “showers of shell wadding and burning cork flew about us.” Sheets of flames shot up from Hiei hundreds of feet into the air, and when Cianca looked elsewhere, he saw other ships explode in similar fashion. “It seemed as if someone had opened the door to Hell that night. Our guns never stopped,” said Cianca. He believed that in a small way O’Bannon’s crew was avenging what had been inflicted on the United States Navy the previous December 7: “We felt we were paying back some of our debts.”11
Twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Lendall Knight watched the action from the turret door of a five-inch gun. “I could see star shells, ships blowing up and it became a melee,” he said. His and the other O’Bannon guns sprayed Hiei’s decks “up and down u
ntil it turned cherry red.”12
In his gun mount, Seaman Whisler tried to breathe slower and remember his training as he aimed the gun at Hiei. Despite wearing headphones connecting him to the radar room, he could hear the battle raging outside his mount. Whisler wished he could observe the action unfolding around O’Bannon, but he had his duties to perform. “I don’t think anyone knew who was who,” he said of the surface ships that intermingled off Guadalcanal that night. “We were pretty busy. We were so busy that we didn’t think about our not being able to see anything. You think about your task and have no time to think about anything else.”13
Men belowdecks tried to forget that they could be trapped should a Japanese torpedo explode against O’Bannon’s hull or a fourteen-inch shell rip into the engine room, but the specter of a fiery or watery death was difficult to ignore. “The thunder of the terrific firing ripped through our ears, but down there we could just wonder and hope and work,” said Lieutenant Pfeifer. They were outmatched as to weight and size, “and our five-inch batteries looked like seagoing pea-shooters alongside the fourteen-inch guns she [Hiei] mounted fore and aft.” As O’Bannon moved within fifteen hundred yards, her shells sparked against Hiei’s decks and cut into Japanese sailors. Pfeifer, connected to the bridge, heard Lieutenant Philip whisper, “This is murderous. This is murderous.”14 Pfeifer wondered whether Philip was referring to carnage on the battleship or was instead talking about O’Bannon shipmates above.
In the forward engine room twenty-one-year-old Machinist’s Mate 1/c Willy Rhyne, who had joined the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor because he “wanted to go and beat ’em up,” heard the five-inch shells boom from Knight’s and Whisler’s guns as he manned his station. “They shook the ship enough that the steam lines shook,” he said. His biggest fear was that a torpedo would smash into the ship and leave Rhyne little time to exit the engine room before the waters engulfed him. “During the fight,” he said, “we tried to focus on our task, but it was always in the back of my mind that something can happen.”15
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