Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  The vigilance required to avoid such mishaps took a toll. Spencer wrote: “In trying to give you an idea of the strain put on everyone from the Admiral on down to the lowest ranks during this period, I am at a loss, but try this: Imagine your living room is made of steel, the windows are your lookout posts and you have been there for two weeks. With very little rest and less sleep, you stare out day and night for an attack from the air, from across the street, or up from your basement, that you know will destroy your home and probably take your or your family’s life. This might give you a small idea of what the mental and physical conditions are like in sea warfare. This was maneuvers, but we knew that the real thing was just ahead. Grueling, yes, but Admiral Scott had to instill behavior into his ships and crews that the Japanese had perfected over many years. The Admiral had days, or at best a few weeks. We bitched and probably whined a lot, but by God, we learned!”

  The Helena’s turret crews learned as rapidly as any in Scott’s task force. They were “quick and slick as precision machinery,” Chick Morris wrote, “swinging their arms with the grace of ballet dancers to maintain the flow of ammunition from magazines to guns.” They got good. They expected to hit, every time. The gunnery department acquired, Morris wrote, a “bull’s-eye complex.” Against Mikawa’s sharp-eyed shooters, they would need it.

  The light cruiser had recently taken aboard a new skipper. When Captain Gilbert C. Hoover was swung over in a canvas bag from a destroyer to the larger ship, the crew liked what they saw. Waving to his crew, the forty-eight-year-old native of Bristol, Rhode Island, wore an aviator’s leather jacket and a jaunty overseas cap. He had a Navy Cross, too. The consensus was, “He’ll be a Helena man the minute he puts a foot on our deck,” Chick Morris recalled. Hoover had smarts and sophistication—he had been an aide to President Herbert Hoover (no relation), and served on the first government committee formed by Franklin Roosevelt to study nuclear fission. Those qualities were evident in his bearing and attitude. “They liked the way he came over the side. They liked his looks and his grin. They liked the cut of him. His expression plainly said he was proud to be coming aboard, and that was all they needed to know,” Morris wrote.

  At the change of command ceremony, a culture shift became apparent. His predecessor was dressed in the traditional whites. Hoover was ready for work, wearing slacks and short sleeves. “We knew things were going to be different aboard ship,” a Helena sailor named Robert Howe said. “Captain Hoover had been overseas since the war had started. We didn’t know it then, but he knew how to handle a fighting ship.”

  When Morris saw Hoover poring over the ship’s blueprints in his sea cabin, he noted that he wasn’t a big man. Neither short nor tall, stout nor slender, he seemed measured and balanced; smart, reliable, and steady in every respect. “In his leather jacket he looked a little like a middle-aged suburbanite about to go for a walk in the woods, with a trout rod tucked under one arm. But that room was a calm and confident place, mellowed already by the captain’s personality.” It was just what the Helena would need in the days ahead.

  After the loss of the Wasp, the Helena, one of her escorts, took aboard some four hundred survivors. It was not her crew’s first encounter with a capital ship loss. They had had nine months to process the events of December 7 into a righteous and productive brand of anger. Their ship had been berthed at Pearl Harbor right where Japanese agents had reported the battleship Pennsylvania would be. Pier-side at the 1010 Dock, the Helena took the first torpedo of the war. Dropped from a plane, it burrowed through the sea, passed underneath the shallow-draft vessel moored alongside the Helena, and smashed into the cruiser’s forward engine room. The blast killed forty and wounded one hundred. But it completely did in the Helena’s berth-mate. The old wooden-hulled minelayer Oglala was lost to the underwater detonation close aboard. Her crew would say she was the only warship ever to sink from fright.

  Whether they arose at Pearl Harbor or off Savo Island, the debilitating effects of defeat had a certain half-life and it took special measures to exorcise them from the bilges. Repaired at Mare Island as the carrier battles of May and June were fought, the Helena left San Francisco on July 23, 1942, escorting six supply ships for the South Pacific. As the deep swells took hold of her en route again to Pearl, a desire for revenge animated her crew. “The Helena craved action,” one of her officers, C. G. Morris, wrote. “Her men talked of little else and prayed for the day when the ship’s guns would set their words to music.”

  Designed exclusively for gun engagements, with five triple turrets mounting six-inch, forty-seven-caliber guns, the Helena had a full-load displacement of fourteen thousand tons—two thousand tons greater than that of a heavy cruiser. It was only her main battery that could be called light. Her six-inch projectiles, 130 pounds apiece, were half the weight of a heavy cruiser’s eight-inch ordnance. What her battery lacked in weight it made up for in rate of fire. Firing “semi-fixed” ammunition that held the powder charge with the projectile in a single case, the Helena’s fifteen guns were rated for ten rounds per minute, as against three or four for a heavy cruiser. The only factor that limited this furious pace, aside from the possibility that her magazines might become exhausted, was the risk that the gun barrels would warp from the heat.

  The Helena’s gunnery officer, Commander Rodman D. Smith, built on the strong foundation of his predecessor, Irving T. Duke, who had told his crew on commissioning day at the New York Navy Yard in September 1939, “We want to be consistent. Not sensational, but consistent. All I ask—all I insist upon—is that we get a better than average percentage of hits every time. And to do that, we must know our guns.” Duke left the ship before she ever saw action, but his legacy endured. “The Helena never lost the inspiration he so gently pressed upon her in those early days of her schooling,” Chick Morris wrote.

  Morris and two other ensigns, Ozzie Koerner and Sam Hollingsworth, joined the Helena at Espiritu Santo, their final stop on a month-and-a-half journey to the South Pacific in nine different ships. Coming aboard, they were so awestruck that they hardly noticed the assistant gunnery officer standing at the top of the brow, expecting a salute. Lieutenant Warren Boles caught the single-stripers gaping at the ship’s triple turrets, three forward—low, high, low—and two more aft. “Have you ever heard fifteen six-inch guns go off in unison?” he asked. The newcomers shook their heads. “It’s something to hear for the first time. Just be careful which way you jump.”

  Veteran sailors worked hard to be nonchalant about the noggin-rattling impact of the Helena’s batteries, but a man’s nervous system couldn’t be rewired by will alone. “The whole ship is enveloped in one shattering blast of noise, and you jump like hell,” wrote Morris. During gunnery exercises, the crew in the radio shack learned to transcribe the five-character blocks of the encoded fleet radio broadcasts while leaning down on their typewriters, the better to keep them from jumping off their desks.

  For the Helena and her cohorts in Task Force 64, there was little time for rehearsing combat. Single-day exercises were “too short a time to justify any hope of obtaining adequate tactical unity in a newly organized force,” Admiral King wrote. Gunnery exercises were dangerous business. Accidental explosions of mishandled powder in turrets and hoists took a fearful toll in life. To minimize the risks during peacetime, the drills were carefully scripted, from the number of firing passes each ship made, to which batteries fired and when, to what speeds the ships made. In night exercises, ships towing the target sleds obligingly kept their searchlights trained on the firing ships, just so there were no tragic mistakes. With the location of targets brightly revealed at all times, the potential for confusion—and realism—was written right out of the script.

  Eliminating confusion and danger in peacetime exercises was understandable. Eliminating realism and danger during wartime exercises was unforgivable. A low-order schism had developed on Admiral Nimitz’s staff centered on this divide. “His training section was constantly fighting the operatio
ns section,” one of his staff officers, Ernest M. Eller, recalled. The goal of the training section was to maximize the proficiency of crews in battle. “Operations,” on the other hand, “saw the world as a series of times of departures and times of arrivals,” Eller said. “Training was something that sailors should know already.” What they didn’t yet know about the art of fighting would be learned finally in action against a living, death-dealing enemy.

  Commanders did what they could with local incentives. On the destroyer Sterett, the gunnery officer held a contest to see which of his mount crews was fastest in loading four hundred rounds into the practice-loading machine. The winning crew did it in less than thirty minutes, about four seconds per load, and their reward for their hustle was a four-thousand-dollar cash prize. In Task Force 64, much remained to be done. While it was running with the carriers, training for a surface fight “had practically lapsed,” Admiral Ghormley wrote. What was needed was an overhaul in readiness and spirit. And on both of those counts, Norman Scott, taking command of the flotilla in September 1942, was just the man for the job.

  WITH THE ARRIVAL in the South Pacific of commanders such as Norm Scott, Gil Hoover, and Captain Edward J. “Mike” Moran in the Boise, and with the crown prince of shipboard gunnery, Rear Admiral Willis Lee, awaiting the arrival of the Washington at Tongatabu, the Navy was reshuffling its decks and getting the footing it needed for a new kind of fight. Distinctions were being drawn between officers who were battle-minded and those whose savage instincts were reserved for advancing their own careers. Qualities that got you ahead in peacetime were yielding to skills equally ageless, but prized only in desperate times: a glint in the eye, a forward-leaning, balls-of-the-feet bearing, a constitutional aspect of professionalized aggression.

  The reach and impact of individual leadership was in flux in the machine age. According to legend, the eleventh-century Spanish general El Cid had such a powerful command presence that it survived his own death. With his corpse secured in his saddle, riding in the lead position, his army was said to have routed a foe by the mere illusion of his leadership. Innovations in the art of war could on one hand extend the reach and power of individuals. The commander of the carrier Enterprise pointed to a new dynamic in the age of airpower. “It is continually proved that the ability of a single individual can make or break the entire situation,” he said. Planes individualized war. The pilot at the stick was the guidance system of his ordnance. But teamwork had not gone out of fashion within the hull of a ship. Men who were battle-minded would win the day so long as their spirit had a contagious strain. Careerists would climb as they usually did: with or without the glory of victory. Though deciding who belonged to which camp was often a matter of private controversy—in 1942 the carrier commanders were the principal case studies in that debate—one thing was clear. The street fighters were coming into play in the South Pacific.

  With his return to basics and a regimen that left little time for idle watch standing, the commander of Task Force 64 was winning over his men. “Scott had balls,” Robert Graff of the Atlanta said. “He was smart. And he was shrewd. Those three things usually make a fighter.”

  His mission as September drew to a close: bow up to the Tokyo Express and give it its first bloody nose.

  14

  The Devil May Care

  FROM EVEN A SHORT DISTANCE OUT TO SEA, THE FIGHTING ASHORE seemed remote, aseptic. As his destroyer, the Monssen, prowled the northern shore of Guadalcanal, Roland Smoot found himself thinking: So this is war. It’s nothing. It was, of course, hardly that. A captain’s thoughts seldom wandered far from the fact that the surface fleet was almost ten months into a war and had yet to win a significant battle.

  The carriers and their pilots were proven winners. American submariners were emerging as world-beaters. The surface Navy—the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers of the traditional black-shoe fleet—would have their day. At Guadalcanal as ever, it was the most expendable members of the deep-sea combat fleet, the destroyers, that made first contact with the enemy and carried the fight to him. While Norman Scott was getting his legs under him as commander of Task Force 64, the destroyer Navy was called to turn its guns in support of their ground-pounding brethren ashore.

  Destroyer captains were known for their esprit. Off Balikpapan, Borneo, in January 1942, the old four-stack tin cans of the now-disbanded Asiatic Fleet had made the first offensive surface-ship foray of the war. In a quick nighttime raid against Japanese shipping at rest in an anchorage, a quartet of destroyers pressed in, turned out, and left several cargomen ablaze. For the first time, the night had been seized from the victory-sotted empire.

  Chester Nimitz was well acquainted with this spirit. In 1907, as an ensign in command of the destroyer Decatur, he ran his ship into a sandbar off Bataan. After turning himself in like the George Washington of legend, he faced a court-martial for incaution and negligence. His defense turned on his observation, calmly articulated during the proceedings, that the commander of a destroyer was supposed to have a devil-may-care attitude and that was precisely what he had given his Navy. In view of his spotless (if thin) record, and the handicap of having outdated charts, he was forgiven the offense and his path to the stars remained open.

  It was in this tradition that the Monssen went hunting on the morning of September 27. Smoot’s ship had been shepherd to a large cargo ship, the Alhena, on a run from Nouméa to Guadalcanal. As the Alhena was being unloaded, the Marine command decided to take advantage of having a modern destroyer in the area. A 1,630-tonner of the Benson class, the Monssen was ordered to cruise along the western shoreline and bombard targets of opportunity. She was a veteran of the North Atlantic convoy runs, of Jimmy Doolittle’s Tokyo raid, and of Coral Sea and Midway, but Smoot had never been involved in something like this, where the enemy was standing so near, taunting him with his proximity.

  The Japanese garrison had been making good use of the reinforcements the Tokyo Express was bringing them. They no longer underestimated the Marines. As they learned to fight smarter, U.S. patrols into the jungles and hills near Henderson Field found their days becoming increasingly dangerous. When the Marines asked the Monssen for a hand, Captain Smoot gladly answered the call.

  The Monssen’s patrol line took her close to the mouth of the Matanikau River, the western boundary of the beachhead, about three miles west of Lunga Point. For several hours, the Monssen’s gunners fired on small Japanese landing craft on the beach, suspicious structures that might shelter the enemy, and anything resembling a fuel or ammo dump.

  Then, cruising off Lunga Point, Smoot spied through his binoculars an American tank climbing a hill and a small group of Japanese soldiers emerging from a cave nearby. For a warship on a fire-support mission, the margin of victory in an encounter like that was defined by the flight time of a salvo to the beach. As far as the men in that tank were concerned, the gulf separating them was unbridgeable. The soldiers began running toward the tank. They climbed atop it and doused it with gasoline. Then a torch was produced and that was that. But the exchange was a total loss for the Japanese, too. “My gunnery officer saw those Japs running back,” Smoot said, “and he turned the whole broadside of the ship on that cave and blew it to smithereens.” Everybody burned.

  Overhead, a high-flying V of Betty bombers arrived and began a run on the airfield. The Monssen pointed her batteries high and engaged them until several Marine Wildcats arrived. Smoot and his men watched as the last Betty in the formation was assaulted by the fighters, began falling, and exploded. One of its wings struck the water just a hundred feet from the ship. Ashore, the bodies of the Japanese dead could be seen wasting in the sand at the mouth of the Matanikau River. This was not distant. It was personal.

  Late in the morning, as sounds of battle echoed through the coconut groves, the Monssen was ordered to escort several landing craft bearing two hundred Marine riflemen who were to be landed behind enemy lines. Four Higgins boats carrying them followed the destroyer to a
projection of shore about a mile west of the river. The Monssen shelled the jungle behind the beach as the marines went ashore and vanished into the jungle.

  At that point, another wave of Bettys arrived. They were promptly met by the Cactus Air Force’s fliers. “The sky was soon crisscrossed with dozens of white streaks, which seemed to persist for many minutes from high altitude to sea level,” a Monssen sailor, Chester C. Thomason, said. “Perhaps a dozen planes—friend and foe—were seen to plunge into the sea. The Monssen did not attempt to fire, as individual dogfights were too confusing.” Afterward, once the surviving aircraft had dropped their bombs and departed, a group of men, apparently Americans, appeared on an open grassy hillside about half a mile inland. They seemed to be surrounded. Mortar rounds were bursting among them. Evidently the landings that the Monssen had accompanied hadn’t managed to encircle and destroy the Japanese.

  It was then that Smoot noticed a lone figure on another hill waving signal flags. His signal read: SEND BOAT ASHORE. The captain was wary of Japanese trickery. The figure was dressed in what he called “army drill,” but from this distance the man could belong to either side. “We didn’t know who it was and I wasn’t going to take any chances.” Smoot asked a signalman if there were a way to verify his identity. The signalman had an idea, and flagged a question to their mysterious correspondent: WHO WON THE WORLD SERIES IN 1941? The answer—YANKEES IN FIVE—decided the issue.