Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  Opponents intermingled in the narrow channel, firing madly at targets that unexpectedly appeared and just as suddenly disappeared mere hundreds of yards away. Guns so fiercely rolled thunderclaps over Guadalcanal that Marines ashore were glad they were not at sea. “The battle would have pleased Mars,” Vandegrift wrote. “For nearly an hour we watched naval guns belch orange death with such rapid vehemence that the island seemed to shake beneath us.” The earsplitting booms from Abe’s battleships nearly drowned out the softer fire from O’Bannon’s and Fletcher’s five-inch guns, presenting, according to Vandegrift, “a fantastic spectacle which offered no clue as to victor or vanquished.”16

  New York Times correspondent Ira Wolfert, on Guadalcanal to cover Marine operations for his newspaper, watched that night with hundreds of Marines as O’Bannon and the other twelve ships grappled with Abe’s force. The Japanese navy had been a frequent and unwelcome guest, making nightly runs to bring in reinforcements or to bombard the Americans’ airfield and front-line positions, and now the Marines’ naval comrades were rushing to their defense. From their foxholes and bunkers Marines strained seaward in hopes of glimpsing some hint that indicated the American ships had gained the upper hand. According to Wolfert, “The action was illuminated in brief, blinding flashes by Japanese searchlights which were shot out as soon as they were turned on, by muzzle flashes from big guns, by a fantastic stream of tracers, and by a huge range of colored explosives” as three ships in sequence exploded within minutes. “From the beach it seemed like a door opening and closing and opening and closing, over and over again,” as warships exchanged gunfire. Two Japanese aircraft “were caught like sparrows in a badminton game and blown to bits.”

  Wolfert noticed that the ships, exchanging blows in a watery arena bound by Guadalcanal on one side and Florida Island on the other, so stirred Ironbottom Sound that waves crashed against the rocks and swirled onto the beaches near his position. He was uncertain of the battle’s outcome but admired the sailors, for “our Navy was there, incredibly,… like the hero of some melodrama.”17

  While her deck gun crews pounded the battleship with accurate fire, by 2:00 a.m. O’Bannon had drawn within twelve hundred yards of Hiei. Flames sprouted from several spots on the Japanese ship, and Hiei’s gunfire had slackened. Now in range, Wilkinson launched two torpedoes at the damaged ship and had just fired a third when a tremendous explosion rocked the battleship and spread flames from bow to stern. Men on O’Bannon’s exposed forward antiaircraft guns dodged burning particles and fragments of eight-inch shells from Hiei, and one shell struck the door to the right barrel of the forward torpedo mount, knocking it out of commission before ricocheting downward and crashing into the deck just forward of the Number Two stack.

  Having launched the torpedoes, MacDonald repeated Wilkinson’s order for hard right and emergency full astern to clear the damaged battleship. As the destroyer swerved away, MacDonald turned to look at the fires engulfing Hiei. They reminded him of the conflagrations he had witnessed in London, but with one key difference: here, in the waters off Guadalcanal, he was no longer a neutral observer of someone else’s war, but an active participant in a close-range duel with an enemy who wanted to kill him.

  While others credited divine intervention, MacDonald could thank his medallion and Whisler his lucky coin for their deliverance from an action that should have ended in their fiery demise. A destroyer rarely challenges a battleship without paying a stiff price, but besides a damaged torpedo mount and a brief shower of razor-sharp shrapnel, the crew of O’Bannon had suffered neither death nor injury in the bold charge.

  Would their luck hold? Gun flashes or shell explosions lit up the darkened waters, and when MacDonald counted five burning or exploding vessels on the starboard quarter and another off the port side, he thought he might never see the next day.

  The next three minutes packed enough action and scares for a lifetime. In the madness of battle, MacDonald thought that the Japanese ships were firing indiscriminately at each other. He admitted that even with radar, at this stage “you couldn’t tell friend from foe. A ship in flames sometimes has no identity.”18

  At 2:01 a.m. the bow of a ship suddenly loomed ahead. The white numbers painted on her bow denoted it as American, and MacDonald, at the helm for Wilkinson, ordered a hard left rudder to avoid a collision with what turned out to be a fellow destroyer, Laffey (DD-459), which had been caught in a crossfire and was sinking. The helmsman, Quartermaster 3/c Richard N. Lanham, responded instantly, and narrowly averted running into Laffey. MacDonald concluded that at least twice, had Lanham not reacted so quickly, O’Bannon would have been damaged. “His work was so well done,” MacDonald put in his action report, “that in my mind if he had not acted correctly and quickly we would have had two collisions, one with the Sterett and one with the wreck of the Laffey.”19

  The course change veered the destroyer directly past a group of survivors swimming on the surface and screaming for help. Low on ammunition and uncertain as to how the battle was going, Wilkinson could not stop to rescue the men, but ordered his deck crew to toss life jackets overboard.

  One minute later two torpedo wakes crossed ahead of O’Bannon, forcing another hard left turn. A rumbling underwater explosion ensued close aboard on the port beam, either from Laffey’s depth charges triggering as the destroyer plunged to the bottom or from a torpedo detonating at the end of its run. The eruption so violently rocked the ship and lifted the stern out of the water that MacDonald feared O’Bannon was going down.

  “We were shaken good,” said Machinist’s Mate Rhyne, then in the forward engine room. “It felt like it lifted the ship out of the water. Why it didn’t break our steam lines I don’t know.”20 Men in the aft engine room were flung against the bulkhead, lights went out, and alarm bells and sirens blared as the ship lurched.

  Not far from Rhyne, Lieutenant Pfeifer was certain that an abandon-ship order would soon come down from the bridge, but he and his men remained at their posts and kept power coursing to the engines and throughout the ship. Pfeifer’s calm lent stability to an engine room filled with young sailors in their first surface action.

  In the aft engine room Lieutenant Douglas P. Bates, the assistant engineering officer, was equally pleased with the men. Some officers and chiefs had claimed that the new recruits would never rise to the skilled level of their veteran shipmates, but Bates no longer held such doubts. “From that moment on I knew we had no reason to worry about the men of the O’Bannon,” Bates said. “From their actions at a time when they were convinced death was but minutes or seconds away, I was certain we had a four-O crew of topnotch men.”21

  While the ship had momentarily slowed and lost power, O’Bannon otherwise appeared to be in good shape. Their concerns dissipated when repair parties and the engine room reported no major damage.

  Across the waters, the Japanese destroyer Akatsuki fired torpedoes at Atlanta, but was quickly caught in crossfire and sunk by the cruiser San Francisco and a US destroyer. As that occurred, the battleship Kirishima moved in and battered the American cruiser with her fourteen-inch batteries, badly damaging the warship and killing more than seventy men, including the cruiser’s skipper, Captain Cassin Young, and Admiral Callaghan.

  Admiral Abe, with his flagship’s internal communications dead, now chose to withdraw, accompanied by Kirishima. Hiei might have escaped a fatal hit during the battle, but the next day American bombers sent her to the bottom off Savo Island.

  As the fighting around O’Bannon blazed, MacDonald saw a column of Japanese destroyers race past O’Bannon’s starboard side. On their way toward Fletcher and the rearguard destroyers, the Japanese warships, according to MacDonald, “had a field day torpedoing our ships at the end of the column.”22

  “The Lord Was on Our Side”: Fletcher in Battle

  “Hey, this is just like the Fourth of July out here!”23 Commander Cole shouted across the bridge to his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Wylie. In an early versio
n of what evolved into the combat information center (CIC), which the two later helped develop, instead of asking Wylie to man the aft steering position, which many skippers did with their executive officers during battle in case the bridge was hit, Cole stationed Wylie on the radar in the chart house a few feet aft of the bridge, close enough so that the two could verbally communicate with each other through a ventilation port. Cole believed this would result in a smoother flow of information to the bridge, which he believed was crucial during battle. Standing within earshot of Cole and connected with headphones to the gunnery officer and torpedo officer, Wylie could assess the situation from the radar screen and quickly relay to Cole information about surface contacts, potential targets, and where to concentrate fire. Based on Wylie’s feedback, Cole could then issue his orders. A few seconds could mean the difference between victory and defeat, and Cole thought he could find those crucial seconds by having Wylie close at hand. This battle was the first test of their system.

  The clash would also test Seaman 2/c Jacob Thomas Chesnutt Jr., who had only recently joined Fletcher. Born in Hope Hull, Alabama, in 1921, Chesnutt enlisted after the ship had been commissioned. “I’d hardly ever been out of Alabama,” he said. “I was a green hick who didn’t know anything, but I was raring to go!” Chesnutt reached Pearl Harbor in late September, where “they marched us to a baseball field. They named 150 of us out of 2,800, the men whose last name began with C, and told us we would be joining the cruiser Juneau.” As the ship was then already in the South Pacific, Chesnutt and his companions boarded a ship bound for Espiritu Santo, but when the Juneau was tardy in returning to that port from the Guadalcanal area, superiors instead placed Chesnutt aboard Fletcher. Before arriving in the South Pacific, Chesnutt thought Guadalcanal was another body of water like the Panama Canal, and when he stepped aboard the destroyer, Wylie asked if he wanted to work with the radar. “‘What’s radar?’ I asked.”24

  Shortly before 2:00 a.m. Cole opened fire on a cruiser to his rear. Fletcher gunners poured a stream of shells portside that, along with the fire of other American ships, left the Japanese vessel in flames.

  A few minutes later Cole turned his batteries on another cruiser astern of his first target but was interrupted when the American destroyer Barton, two ships ahead of Fletcher, “exploded and simply disappeared in fragments” that spiraled onto Fletcher’s deck. With enemy batteries zeroing in, the rear column was soon in disarray. The damaged Aaron Ward limped out of the line, Monssen sat low in the water, and Fletcher dodged a flurry of incoming shells. “Medium caliber shells were splashing on both sides of us,” wrote Cole in his action report. Fire on both flanks was “heavy and sustained,” and “the situation at this time became very confused.”25 At first Seaman Chesnutt ducked when shells splashed near the ship, but stopped when he decided that nothing on the destroyer could shield him from enemy shells if they hit the lightly armored Fletcher. He was admittedly nervous during his first action, but he focused on his job in the radar room. “You let everything else go, and let others do their job. You knew you could go at any time from a shell or a torpedo, but you can’t do anything about it, so I didn’t worry about it. You had to do your job so the other guys could do theirs.”26

  From a distance of only one hundred yards Japanese ships, including Amatsukaze, launched torpedoes at the rearguard destroyers. “Everything we had was shooting at them,” recalled Wylie, as five-inch gun crews on Fletcher maintained their fire to fend off the threat.27

  Shells cut fiery paths toward their targets and explosions dotted the nighttime sky, but Machinist’s Mate 1/c Donald Holmes and the other crew belowdecks never saw the pyrotechnic display. They could still hear shells impacting the water, however. “I was down in the bottom of the ship, the lowest level, right above the bilges,” said Holmes of his station on the steam pump in the forward engine room keeping the feed pumps running. “The entire ship was above me, and I was scared as can be! I could hear guns firing and splashes, but I didn’t know what was going on or know what was happening at all. I was by myself in the bottom of the ship. That was a hard thing.”

  The hard-nosed chief who had trained them, Machinist’s Mate 1/c James F. Gebhardt, stood in the engine room with a forty-five-caliber sidearm holstered to his waist. During exercises he had cautioned the young sailors that when the real deal occurred, he would not hesitate to use the weapon should anyone think of abandoning his post. Holmes and his buddies had joked about the comment but wisely decided not to test their chief. “I wanted to leave but knew better. Gebhardt never had to use the pistol. We were all in it together.”28

  Illumination from Barton’s flames and from ships’ guns revealed enemy torpedoes cutting toward Fletcher’s starboard side. On deck, Fire Controlman Douglas J. Huggard braced for an impact, but one torpedo passed fifty yards ahead of Fletcher, and three slid harmlessly underneath the ship. In the engine room, Holmes heard the torpedoes pass mere feet beneath the hull, only failing to smash into Fletcher because they had apparently been set at the deeper depths designated for cruisers. “Yes, the Lord was on our side that night,” said Wylie.29

  Having dodged the enemy’s torpedoes, Cole implemented maneuvers to set up a torpedo attack of his own. He turned the destroyer hard right and raced through the maelstrom of ships, firing to port and starboard as he wound his way. In the chart room, Wylie counted radar pips and guessed that twenty-eight ships then stood in a three-mile-wide circle. “Hey,” shouted Cole to his executive officer, “aren’t you glad our wives don’t know where we are right now?”30

  Wylie agreed, and then informed Cole that radar had plotted another cruiser. When a star shell illuminated a Japanese vessel close on the starboard side, which some crew claimed was the largest enemy ship they had yet seen in the war, Fletcher’s fate seemed sealed. Men on deck waited for the inevitable roar from guns that could have demolished the destroyer with one salvo, but no sound rent the night. In the darkened madness of the battle, the Japanese failed to spot the Fletcher and steamed by without firing.

  When at 2:22 a.m. the torpedo officer alerted Cole that the torpedoes were ready, Cole gave the order, and within one minute ten torpedoes, the ship’s entire supply, were on their path toward their target, three and a half miles away.

  Wylie momentarily moved outside to the flying bridge and pulled out a stopwatch to time the torpedoes’ run. At the moment he figured the torpedoes would hit, he and men near him thought they heard booms and detected flames in the distance, but in the confusion they could not be certain their ship had inflicted the damage. “We felt at the time that we did because the running time was right and we did see flashes,” said Wylie. “The other side of the coin is that this was the era when, God knows, we couldn’t have more useless torpedoes. They all ran too deep and the magnetic exploders didn’t work.”31

  When Cole asked Wylie for their location, he answered that as far as he could tell, they were sitting in the middle of the entire Japanese fleet. “Wylie stayed in that room on that scope, guiding us and calling out to Captain Cole,” recalled Ensign Fred Gressard. “Then Cole said, ‘How do we get out of here?’ and Wylie gave him a course—they were always within earshot during battle; a great team.”32

  Meanwhile, Cole’s counterpart aboard Amatsukaze, Tameichi Hara, had to make split-second decisions of his own. As he related in his book, Japanese Destroyer Captain, early in the battle he noticed that Hiei, then trading blows with O’Bannon, was aflame. He thought of rushing to her assistance until a cluster of US ships—Fletcher and the other three rear destroyers, then under attack from Yudachi—burst out of the darkness on a parallel course to his starboard. “Get ready, fishermen!” he shouted to his torpedo crew, and moments later eight torpedoes dunked into the turbulent waters. Two minutes later a pair of explosions dissected Barton, two ships ahead of Fletcher, and sank the destroyer. Hara’s other torpedoes churned on, some being the ones Holmes heard pass beneath the Fletcher.

  After Hara launched four more torp
edoes, shells inundated the waters about Hara’s ship. The cruiser Helena had taken advantage of Hara’s focus on the American destroyers to creep in on his port side. A shell exploded so close to Amatsukaze that “I hunched my back and clung to the railing. The blast was so strong, it almost threw me off the bridge. The detonations were deafening. I got sluggishly to my feet, but my mind was a complete blank for several seconds.” A second shell smashed into the deck immediately below the bridge and exploded in the radio room, killing everyone there. On the bridge near Hara one man, his head a bloody mess from shrapnel, slumped dead over the range-finding gear. Another sailor had been obliterated, with only part of his legs remaining. The shells had killed forty-three of his men “while I stood uninjured in their midst.”

  Hara ordered his gunners to open fire at Helena, but the American shelling had destroyed the hydraulic system and immobilized the gun turrets. With near misses rattling his ship and damaging her rudder, Hara could now neither fire his deck guns nor maneuver as normal. “If the enemy closed,” he wrote, “we would be as defenseless as a bull in a slaughterhouse.”33 Expecting the worst, Hara gratefully watched Helena cease fire and pull away when three Japanese destroyers came to Amatsukaze’s rescue and forced the American ship to retreat.

  Amatsukaze was in no shape to continue the battle. Hara lacked full rudder control, dead sailors littered the bridge, and holes punctured the ship’s hull. The Japanese commander had no choice but to join Abe in withdrawing, and he turned north to exit Ironbottom Sound.