Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  With the four cruisers in column and five destroyers arrayed in an anti-submarine screen ahead, the formation covered nearly three miles of ocean. The men in the task force stood in the place that separates the boundless tedium of being under way from the freeze-frame intensity of action. The physical magnitude of what was coming was beyond the ken of everyone except the crew who operated the SG search radar’s graphical scope. The Boise’s rangekeeper operator swept his parabolic transmitter through a continuous 360-degree arc, generating a map-like visual display on the PPI repeaters and distinguishing ship from shore so sharply as to reveal inaccuracies in the ancient charts. The search radar scanned for targets. When they were found, the narrower beams of the ship’s fire-control radars would zero in. The fire-control radars could also be used for search. Moran’s FD operators probed for targets through a quarter-circle arc pointed east. Not fully trusting radar, Scott had ordered his commanders to refrain from using their older SC sets during the run-in, lest their transmissions be detected by the enemy much as the beam of a lighthouse could be seen from beyond its effective range. A man’s eyes could reach only from the churning wake of the ship ahead to the flaring bow wave of the one behind. Everyone in the force, from the admiral down to the loaders on the powder hoists, had his senses heightened by his ignorance.

  In the Boise, some turret crewmen breathed a soft chant over the battle telephones: Pass the word from gun to gun: This won’t be a dummy run. Captain Moran’s ship had compiled a far-flung war record. Fresh from an audacious solo raid on Japanese shipping in their home waters, conceived as a diversion to assist the Guadalcanal landings, “Iron Mike’s” men redeemed what had been a frustrating deployment with the Asiatic Fleet in January. Off Timor, they had met the same fate the South Dakota did off Tongatabu—grounding on an unfortunately situated coral head. The Boise’s withdrawal from the Asiatic theater for stateside repair had earned her the nickname “the Reluctant Dragon.” Having missed battle, Moran’s gang were just like the others in Task Force 64: eager for a scrap but awaiting the measure of their worth that only the actual thing can provide. No officer could have burned with anticipation more than Norman Scott himself.

  Shortly after 6 p.m., the Japanese ships spotted by the patrol planes that morning were reported again, 110 miles north of Guadalcanal, heading down the Slot at twenty knots. Exactly what their mission was—bombardment or reinforcement—continued to be anybody’s guess. The evening call to general quarters was pre-climactic. Hours would pass with Scott’s crews in that ready state, and the heavily fraught tedium mounted. “There was little to do,” Chick Morris said. “Our search planes had returned to their bases and had nothing more for us.” Despite Scott’s order to muzzle the search radars, the Salt Lake City began radiating with its SC unit as the projectilemen loaded star shells into the fuze pots.

  Order of Battle—Battle of Cape Esperance (October 11, 1942)

  U.S.

  TASK FORCE 64

  Rear Adm. Norman Scott

  San Francisco (CA) (flagship)

  Salt Lake City (CA)

  Boise (CL)

  Helena (CL)

  Farenholt (DD)

  Duncan (DD)

  Laffey (DD)

  Buchanan (DD)

  McCalla (DD)

  Japan

  BOMBARDMENT GROUP

  Rear Adm. Aritomo Goto

  Aoba (CA) (flagship)

  Furutaka (CA)

  Kinugasa (CA)

  Fubuki (DD)

  Hatsuyuki (DD)

  REINFORCEMENT GROUP

  Nisshin (CVS)

  Chitose (CVS)

  Asagumo (DD)

  Natsugumo (DD)

  Yamagumo (DD)

  Murakumo (DD)

  Shirayuki (DD)

  Akizuki (DD)

  The moon was new behind the abundant cirrocumulus, the seven-knot wind scarcely rippling the moderate swells as they blew from the east-northeast, when Task Force 64 rounded the northwestern coast of Guadalcanal and turned north to intercept.

  But there was a watcher in the sound: a Japanese submarine riding on the surface in Kamimbo Bay, a landing area near Cape Esperance that was favored by the Tokyo Express. Scott had no inkling the I-26 was there. The same boat that had torpedoed the Saratoga on August 31, she may have been too close to the coastline for radars to discern. The American presence so startled Minoru Yokota that he ordered an emergency dive before he could send a sighting report. By the time he surfaced again two hours later and transmitted it, the events of the evening were too far along for it to matter.

  Rear Admiral Goto’s three heavy cruisers and two destroyers churned south toward Henderson Field. On came the heavy cruisers Aoba, Furutaka, and Kinugasa, all veterans of the Battle of Savo Island, with the destroyers Fubuki and Hatsuyuki riding off their bows.

  On the San Francisco, a marine assigned as a loader on a five-inch gun, Clenroe W. Davis, overheard a radarman in the radar room report to the bridge unidentified blips on his scope. The radarman listened to what the officer had to say in return, then replied, “Well, sir, these islands are traveling at about thirty knots.”

  In the Helena, at the rear of the cruiser column, the men on the bridge were hard to recognize through the layers of their protective clothing. “Dumpy and fat in fireproof goggles, steel helmets, mae wests and gloves, they resembled visitors from Mars,” Chick Morris wrote. In the humid confines of the ships, sailors innocent of combat often resisted donning the protective garb. Those with a better idea of what battle could bring pulled on the heavy clothing, or unrolled their shirtsleeves at least.

  At ten, Scott ordered each cruiser to send aloft a search plane. When the Salt Lake City’s crew flung their plane off the catapult, it caught fire almost immediately, courtesy of a flare on board the plane. The aircraft hit the sea in a mass of flame, searing the dilated irises of the lookouts and stiffening everyone’s nerves with the fear that they had declared their presence to an unseen enemy. The plane burned like a pyre for what seemed like hours.

  Per the battle plan, Scott ordered his destroyers to re-form in a single column with the cruisers. The Buchanan and McCalla heeled out of formation, let the rest of the column overtake them, and took station at the rear. When the search plane from the San Francisco checked in, reporting “One large, two small vessels, one-six miles from Savo off northern beach, Guadalcanal. Will investigate closer,” Scott turned to the northeast, looking to pass Savo Island, darkly visible ahead, five miles off his starboard beam. “The only indication of impending battle was the speed at which the fleet was traveling,” remembered Ensign George B. Weems of the McCalla. “We would step up our speed a couple of knots at frequent intervals, till we were boiling along.”

  (Photo Credit: 16.1)

  It was almost eleven thirty when the Salt Lake City’s search radar painted three distinct clusters of steel on the water to the west and northwest. Captain Small ordered his fire-control radar operators to seek targets on that bearing. The returning echoes conveyed valuable particulars: bogeys at sixteen thousand yards, on course 120 degrees true, speed twenty knots.

  As it happened, the Americans were tracing the same track of sea that the picket destroyer Blue had on the night Admiral Mikawa came calling. If the station was familiar, Scott’s use of it had an entirely different posture now. Running northeast, perpendicular to the axis of the enemy approach, his nine ships were buttoned up for battle. As the pilot relayed further details on the warning net, Scott radioed his commanders: “EXECUTE TO FOLLOW—COLUMN LEFT TO COURSE 230.” Task Force 64 had finally found its fight.

  1 McCain returned to Washington to serve as chief of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics.

  17

  Pulling the Trigger

  NORMAN SCOTT, DESPITE HIS PAINSTAKING ATTENTION TO DETAIL, nearly threw away the game board before the match had even begun. His orderly march toward battle ended as soon as the task force executed his latest order, “COLUMN LEFT TO 230 … EXECUTE.”

  In a
“column turn,” ships turn to the designated heading upon reaching a fixed point in space. The leader turns, and each successive ship follows as soon as she reaches the leader’s rudder kick—the visible swirl in the sea produced by rudder movement. In such a maneuver, each ship retains her place in the column, following in her predecessor’s wake. If visibility is good, it is a simple matter to verify one’s proper position in the formation: The wake of the ship ahead is a ready visual reference. The disadvantage is that the turn takes a while to execute, its total duration being the time it takes the last ship in column to reach the spot where the leader first turned.

  A very different type of turn is known as a “simultaneous turn,” in which each ship within the column executes the turn immediately. A single column of ships ordered to turn ninety degrees ends up steaming in line abreast on the new heading. A 180-degree turn serves to reverse the column’s heading, with the former lead ship bringing up the rear and the original tail-end Charlie serving as the new column leader. A simultaneous turn is quicker to execute than a column turn, but because the conning officer in each ship lacks the visual reference point provided by the stern of the ship in front of him, careful plotting is needed, especially in conditions of poor visibility.

  It was on this basic curriculum, elementary to any course in naval shiphandling, that Scott’s battle plan foundered. As the SG radar showed, a well-executed reversal of course would have brought his column right across Goto’s—a perfect “crossing of the T”—allowing his formation to rake the Japanese column with their full broadsides and leaving Goto to reply with only his forward batteries. But Scott’s notion of the timing of the engagement and the spacing of his ships was thrown into disarray as soon as his van destroyer, the Farenholt, threw her rudder over.

  Quite unexpectedly, the conning officer of the San Francisco turned simultaneously with the Farenholt. This error threw a hot potato to Captain Moran in the Boise. Following astern of the San Francisco, he faced a critical decision that had to be settled in a snap: Should he continue as ordered and make a column turn, holding his rudder until he reached the spot where the Farenholt turned? Or should he turn immediately and stay with his flagship? Either choice would have sundered Scott’s column in two. The first would leave the San Francisco on her own. The second would cut loose his vanguard destroyers. Perhaps realizing that keeping the cruisers together was the more urgent priority, Moran chose the latter course. As the Boise turned, and as the Salt Lake City followed her, Scott’s leading trio of destroyers forged out into the night alone.

  As the cruisers settled into their southwesterly course, the order passed for the turret crews to match up with the bearing of the turret directors as they sought to pin down targets broadly located by the search radar. On the secondary batteries, star shells were locked into their breeches. The SC search radar of the Salt Lake City was the first to make contact with the Japanese. The Boise’s radar picked them up soon afterward, sketching their approach in electron beams, the vertical stem of the T just fourteen thousand yards to the northwest. When Moran’s talker reported these contacts as “bogeys,” some listeners wondered whether he might be referring to aircraft.

  Scott had instructed his commanders to open fire as soon as they had a confirmed fix on the enemy. With the destroyers lost in the night, nothing could be confirmed now. Flying his flag in a ship that had no SG radar and was forbidden from using its SC set, Scott certainly had no ready picture of the unexpected geometry of the fight. The contact reports he was hearing from the other cruisers might well be Captain Robert G. Tobin’s destroyers, spun off from his column by the San Francisco’s error. His fears were firmly underscored when the Boise reported a cluster of ship contacts bearing sixty-five degrees. Moran meant to report contacts at sixty degrees relative to the Boise’s own course heading. Standard tactical doctrine, however, required ships to report contacts as true bearings, with 0 degrees indicating the north and 180 the south.

  The difference was critical to Admiral Scott. A report of strange ships at sixty-five degrees true would have been consistent with his notion of where he believed the Farenholt, Duncan, and Laffey were located. Captain Tobin, dismayed to find himself separated from the battle line, somewhere off the starboard quarter of the cruisers, ordered his tin cans to ring up flank speed. As the commanders in the cruiser line prepared to open fire, the Farenholt was steaming about nine hundred yards abreast of the Boise; the Laffey was following, even with the Helena. At eleven forty-five, Scott didn’t have a clear picture. He radioed Tobin, “Are you taking station ahead?” Tobin replied, “Affirmative. Moving up on your starboard side.”

  In his battle plan, Scott allowed for the possibility that his ships might wander from his grasp. His plan, which called for any stragglers to fall out on the column’s disengaged side, presupposed there would be an orderly engagement and that the stragglers would know where the American column was in the first place. The perils of ambiguous identity were severe. “Do not rejoin,” Scott wrote, “until permission is requested giving bearing in voice code of approach.” That was more or less what Tobin had just done—except that Scott’s ships had no way of knowing at exactly what bearing to starboard the friendly destroyers would appear. The Japanese ships they were tracking were to starboard, too.

  As the ten-centimeter waves radiating from the Boise’s and Helena’s parabolic antennae pulsed along, their operators watched as the range between Scott’s broken column and Goto’s onrushing T closed to three miles. But still the muzzles were silent. When a Helena lookout reported to Captain Hoover, “Ships visible to the naked eye,” the ship’s young radar officer remarked to the navigator, “What are we going to do, board them?” A chief wondered aloud, “Do we have to see the whites of the bastard’s eyes?”

  Hoover, the commander of the Helena, didn’t know what the problem was. He had commanded destroyers once. In May, he led Destroyer Squadron 2 in the Battle of the Coral Sea and later served in the Yorktown’s screen at Midway. From his time at the Bureau of Ordnance, he had learned about the Navy’s experiments with radar and knew the importance of drilling with his destroyers to get the most out of the new tool. He fully appreciated now, as the pips on his scope blinked toward each other, that a critical advantage was being frittered away by indecision.

  The Helena’s skipper instructed his talker to raise the San Francisco and make a request to open fire. The transmission, per the fleet’s General Signal Procedure, went out as “Interrogatory Roger,” with “interrogatory” indicating a question, and “Roger,” code for the letter R, the signal for opening fire. This brought from Admiral Scott a quick affirmative response: “Roger.” Hoover repeated the request, just to be sure. And again came “Roger.”

  But Scott thought he was answering a different question altogether. Captivated by his concern for the whereabouts of his destroyers, he was not ready to open fire yet. As he would explain afterward, he misinterpreted Hoover’s message as a request that he acknowledge Helena’s last transmission of a radar contact. Hoover, of course, was beyond caring whether Scott was receiving him. If Scott wanted to rely on what the radar was showing, he would have made the Helena his flagship. Hoover interpreted Scott’s response, “Roger,” in accordance with its standard meaning in the General Signal Book: as a code to commence firing.

  With this critical exchange, which prompted the immediate and ferocious discharge of the Helena’s fifteen six-inch guns, a miscommunication compounded a previous miscommunication and the engagement that would be known as the Battle of Cape Esperance spun into chaos, beyond the control of any single commander.

  Throwing gunfire against surface targets was what the Helena and her class did best. It was a light cruiser’s first and only business, and so it went, muzzles roaring, spent brass tubes kicking out to the turret deck, projectile hoists whining, shell trays loading, breeches slamming and spinning shut, and the turrets salvoing again. Fire-control doctrine prescribed a more deliberate cadence of salvo fire—all fifteen
guns discharging at once—when targets were beyond twelve thousand yards from the ship. At closer ranges, the ship switched to automatic-continuous mode. The experience was elemental. “The night had been still and inky black a moment before,” Chick Morris wrote. “Now suddenly it was a blazing bedlam. The Helena herself reared and lurched sideways, trembling from the tremendous shock of recoil. In the radio shack and coding room we were sent reeling and stumbling against bulkheads, smothered by a snowstorm of books and papers from the tables. The clock leaped from its pedestal. Electric fans hit the deck with a metallic clatter. Not a man in the room had a breath left in him.” If this was the effect of the ship’s gun work on the men who were practicing it, one can imagine what life might have been like on the ships they were hitting.

  The Salt Lake City’s heavier guns lashed out to starboard, planting a straddle just short of what was identified as a cruiser, probably Goto’s flagship, the Aoba, four thousand yards away. The director was ranged up three hundred yards and another salvo went out. “The second never touched the water,” the cruiser’s action report declared. “All hits.”

  As the night blossomed in flames, Captain Moran of the Boise, wired for sound wearing headphones and a steel helmet, shouted to his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander John J. Laffan, “Pick out the biggest and commence firing!”

  The Boise’s directors were fixed on the same ship the Salt Lake City was targeting, the leader of the Japanese column, the Aoba, a mere forty-five hundred yards distant, forward of the starboard beam. In the Boise’s depths, in Central Station, the damage-control officer, Lieutenant Commander Tom Wolverton, decided it was time to relieve the tension. Recalling his four-year-old son’s panicked response the first time he rode on a roller coaster and clanked his way to the summit, he gathered his deepest baritone and shouted so that everyone could hear him: “Daddy, I want to go home now!” The effect worked magic as grins spread over a dozen faces and his crew settled back and relaxed. When Captain McMorris in the San Francisco saw a destroyer-sized target to starboard and persuaded himself that the ship could not possibly belong to Tobin’s squadron, he opened fire, too. Task Force 64’s cruiser column was fully engaged, opening fire from rear to fore.