Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  The Bettys fanned out wide, approaching in line abreast to avoid suffering multiple casualties from flak bursts. Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless in the San Francisco thought the twenty-one planes looked like “an old-time cavalry deployment.” The skies were filthy with the bursts of antiaircraft fire. When the planes were within five thousand yards, the San Francisco and the Helena turned out their main batteries and walloped the sea in front of the planes, intending for the tall splashes to force the pilots to veer away or stop them with a wall of water. This technique seldom if ever worked. Mainly, all the big guns accomplished was to interfere with the aim of the other antiaircraft gunners with the blast and smoke.

  The Atlanta steamed on the far side of the formation, away from the planes. Lloyd Mustin’s practiced gunner’s eye told him there was a high risk of hitting friendly ships if his ship fired too soon. The gun elevation needed to target the low-flying planes was virtually flat. “With this beautifully clear view of these planes coming in, in a position where the entire Atlanta broadside could have engaged them, we really were unable to open fire,” he said. According to Mustin, neither the Navy nor the local commanders had issued a doctrine for distributing antiaircraft fire against a large aircraft formation. When the bomber line flew across their stern, Mustin’s gunners opened fire.

  Confronted with the savage defenses, many of the Japanese pilots flinched. Failure to hold formation was the kiss of death. As they reached the crucial moment of decision—push ahead and drop the torpedo, or lose nerve and turn away—most chose the latter. Turning, they lost airspeed and showed their bellies to the hungry Navy gunners, and that was it. The twenties and forties lit them like fuses. The five-inch guns “seemed to literally hammer them down,” Captain Hoover of the Helena remarked.

  On the San Francisco, Lieutenant (j.g.) John G. Wallace was looking out to starboard from the after main battery control station when he observed a Betty release a torpedo toward the ship from just forward of the beam. The twenties mounted around the mainmast barked out. A gray tendril of smoke trailed from the bomber’s starboard engine, dissipating in its airstream. On it came, closer and closer, and as it did so it became clear that the pilot, if he was alive, had terminal intentions. Though the torpedo somehow missed, the plane itself did not. To those watching helplessly from other stations, the ship’s antiaircraft gunners, in their final moments, were an inspiration: eyes focused through iron sights on the plane as it sped at them, weapons hot, going cyclic, hunched down and never flinching until the Betty struck high on the mainmast, killing them all. The plane jackknifed around its own blunt nose as it hit, each heavy engine tearing away from its wing and hurtling past the director platform to either side. A wash of gasoline enveloped the area and ignited at once.

  “I just had time to duck inside the outer door,” Wallace wrote, “when a tremendous explosion knocked me all the way up to the forward side of secondary conn.” When he regained consciousness, the back of his trousers and shirt were on fire, and his hair and face burned. “I looked around and found myself all alone. I jumped into a nearby motor launch and rolled out my flames on the tarpaulin covering.”

  Joined by another element of Marine Wildcats under Major Paul Fontana, Joe Foss and his boys were viciously in pursuit. They were daredevils, constrained by long training to operate their war machines as a cohesive band. That mix of spirit and discipline paid handsome returns now. “We heard them yelling and cussing as only fighter pilots know how to cuss,” Chick Morris in the Helena recalled. “Watch it. He’s coming in on your port quarter!” “He’s on the run. He’s baggin’ ass. Get on top of the bastard and finish him!” One pilot did just that. Lieutenant Pat McEntee in the Atlanta witnessed it: a Wildcat closing fast on a Betty from behind. The fighter was evidently out of ammunition, for its driver resorted to an unusual tactic. Down came his landing gear. Down went his airspeed. It looked to McEntee as if he was trying “to set his ship down on the bomber’s broad back. And he did—again and again, and again, with sledgehammer impact. He literally was pounding the enemy into the sea with his wheels.” The bomber pilot had no escape. If he tried to pull up, it only increased the force of the impacts. Any evasive turn was easily matched by the agile fighter. “The only course open led down. But before the Jap could make a decision, something snapped under the pounding and the bomber plunged beneath the waves of Savo Sound.”

  The bomber formation was largely shredded in its five minutes over the task force. Its survivors winged out to the west. Just two of them would return to Rabaul. None of their torpedoes found the mark. The Atlanta found a solution on the departing planes and two more fell. Most of the damage Task Force 67 took from direct fire came from their own muzzles. The destroyer Buchanan, steaming ahead of the Atlanta and San Francisco, was hit in the after part of her stack by a five-inch shell. Excited gunners on the Helena briefly squirted their own superstructure with a twenty-millimeter cannonade, busting up a smoke generator and showering a gun crew with its noxious mix.

  The seas around Task Force 67 were a junkyard of broken wings and parts of fuselages and motionless forms of enemy airmen held afloat by their torched life jackets. There was at least one surface engagement that afternoon—a ridiculous duel between a top-turret gunner in a downed Betty and the gunners on an approaching destroyer. It was over in a hurry for the defiant airman.

  The Barton passed a downed Betty just as its pilot was climbing out on the wing. The destroyer’s skipper instructed his crew not to shoot, wanting to recover the aviator for interrogation. A chief petty officer ended the discussion by fixing a Thompson submachine gun at his hip and squeezing out a few bursts. “There was no comment from the bridge,” a witness said.

  Not far from the Helena, two Japanese hung onto the wing of their plane. The younger of the two, evidently a teenager, was willing to be rescued. As an American boat approached, “almost pathetically he held out his hands,” Chick Morris said. But the boy’s companion, much older, “seized him angrily by the neck and yanked him back, slapping his hands down. When the boy struggled to free himself, the big fellow produced a pistol and shot him. Then, swimming away from the rescue boat, he turned defiantly and shot himself. We saw it very clearly.”

  Turner’s transports escaped damage, but the San Francisco’s fire aft was serious. Flames were coming out both doors leading into Main Battery Control, incinerating its critical instruments. Hearing cries for help, Jack Wallace went in and nearly stepped on a man lying on the deck, moaning. It was one of his fire controlmen. “I got him over my shoulders with his clothes still smoldering and I half fell, half climbed down the port ladder and left him on the top of the hangar deck. Then I ran back up the ladder into main battery control and saw a man standing there with his clothes on fire and he couldn’t seem to walk. I led him into secondary conn, and stripped him of all his burning clothing. I asked him if he could walk and then pointed him out the door on the port side to the ladder. I made one more trip into Main Battery Control and picked up a young small kid about seventeen years old named Posh. He was burned horribly. His face was blackened. I carried him down to the deck below and got back to secondary conn just in time to get trapped when more fire came pouring out of both doors leading to Main Battery Control. So, I jumped out of the window in the forward part of secondary conn onto the top of the hangar deck. It was a long drop.”

  On the hangar deck, Wallace was assisting some firefighters when he heard a feeble cry coming from a motor launch on the port side. He lifted himself to look over the gunwale and into the boat, where he saw the fire controlman he had rescued from Main Battery Control lying prone wearing nothing but shorts. “How he got into the boat I’ll never know. Large pieces of skin on his back were peeled half off. I yelled for him to climb out, which he did, into my arms, and I half carried, half dragged him to a stretcher out on the forward part of the hangar deck. I gave him a shot of morphine.” He then found several men lying in a passageway near the ammunition clipping room. One of them
was Posh, “blackened and burned from head to feet.”

  “He must have crawled in from the port side when I left him at the foot of the ladder. I asked ‘How are you doing Posh?’ He said, ‘I’m dying, but I sure don’t want to. I breathed in the flames.’

  “I lied to him: ‘You’re too young and too healthy. Here, let me give you a shot in the arm so you’ll go to sleep.’ At first he wouldn’t let me but with the help of a couple of men we peeled some shirt off his arm. Jabbing the morphine needle in his arm was like jabbing a board. There was no skin—just muscle—and none of the morphine went in. It just oozed back out. I tried three times with the same result. A stretcher finally arrived and we got Posh on with quite a bit of trouble. He was in agony. They carried him off to the mess hall where a temporary sick bay had been set up.” Among the casualties was the ship’s executive officer, Commander Mark H. Crouter, who had both of his legs seriously burned up to the knees. The young kid, Posh, didn’t make it.

  In the carnage that took place on Callaghan’s flagship, twenty-two men died, and twenty-two more were wounded. The casualties were taken to the transport President Jackson. Commander Crouter remained aboard. He insisted it was his duty to stay and coach the newly elevated exec, Commander Joseph C. Hubbard, and to make himself useful to another recent newcomer to the ship, Captain Young. Though Young had received a Medal of Honor for his heroism while commanding the repair ship Vestal at Pearl Harbor on December 7, the San Francisco was his first major combat ship. He needed the experienced guidance of his executive officer. Crouter was escorted to his cabin to recuperate while Hubbard replaced him as exec and Lieutenant Commander Herbert E. Schonland, the assistant first lieutenant, replaced Hubbard as the damage-control officer.

  As terrible as the afternoon was for the San Francisco, it was a fine one for the task force as a whole. The air attack had cost Turner’s transports just a few hours of unloading time. As soon as the surviving planes disappeared, the transports returned to the anchorage and resumed debarking troops of the U.S. Army’s 182nd Infantry Regiment till sunset.

  A submarine contact, pursued vigorously but inconclusively by Callaghan’s destroyers, caused a ruckus before dark. At six fifteen, Turner ordered his transports to depart for Espiritu Santo with five destroyers. Callaghan and Scott steamed in the opposite direction, passing through Sealark Channel and assembling for a sweep of Savo Sound. A SOPAC staff historian of the campaign would impose a master plan on these movements, suggesting that Callaghan was moving to fight “a delaying action so that Admiral Kinkaid’s battleship-carrier force could intercept the anticipated landing forces believed to be enroute.” But there is no evidence of such a design. In that moment Kelly Turner knew nothing of the movements of Task Force 16. For all he was concerned, the entire might of the South Pacific force sailed with Callaghan, and it would be they who determined his fate.

  * * *

  TASK GROUP 67.4 went to general quarters at 8 p.m. The sea rolled easily under a ten-knot southeasterly wind. The moon had set, leaving the squadron in the dark. The destroyer Cushing led the way, leading the van with the Laffey, Sterett, and O’Bannon. They were followed by the Atlanta (the flagship of the idle Norman Scott), the San Francisco (Callaghan’s flagship), the Portland, the Helena, the Juneau, and the rear quartet of destroyers. Hot soup and coffee were served to the crews at their stations as the six-mile-long column entered Sealark Channel.

  As the column passed through the channel, sailors on the Atlanta noticed an unsettling omen, the appearance of the electrical phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire. The mysterious incandescence, manifesting itself in their rigging, was widely thought to be a sign of trouble, its reputation well established in literature a century before. In Moby-Dick, when the Pequod was touched by these coronal discharges, Ishmael called it “God’s burning finger laid on the ship.” As he described it, “All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” Coleridge called it “death-fire.”

  Naval tradition is ever rife with superstition, but sometimes the ill signs are so powerful that they operate in the other direction. In Callaghan’s force, the number thirteen was so prevalent—thirteen ships from Task Force 67 were headed to tangle with the Japanese on Friday the thirteenth—that the tide of superstition shifted. When the commander of the Portland, Captain Laurance T. DuBose, read the instructions Turner had given Callaghan, he showed them to his exec, Commander Turk Wirth, who made virtually the same remark Callaghan had on receiving them: “This is suicide, you know.” Talk of battleships inspired that kind of thinking. DuBose called Wirth’s attention to the date, November 12, and added, “If we can get across midnight into tomorrow, we may make it.” Wirth got what his captain was driving at. DuBose had been president of the Naval Academy class of 1913 and considered thirteen a lucky number.

  The last ship in Callaghan’s column had additional cause for concern as Friday the thirteenth approached: the USS Fletcher was the thirteenth ship in line, named in honor of Frank Friday Fletcher, and had the hull number 445, whose sum was 13. But the destroyer’s Georgia boys weren’t spooked. The signs were so luridly ominous as to become a source of general amusement. The Fletcher’s exec, Commander Wylie, referred to the giddy hilarity that accompanied their anticipation as “triskaidekaphilia.” Let the night come, whatever it may bring. They were U.S. Navy sailors and the 91st Psalm was their shield: “You will not fear the terror of night.… A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” More worrisome than numerical coincidence was the sense Wylie was getting that Callaghan didn’t seem to know fully what he was doing. At least he didn’t seem to appreciate what the newest tools of his trade could do. The Fletcher, the O’Bannon, the Helena, the Juneau, and the Portland all had the new high-frequency SG search radar. Callaghan’s flagship, the San Francisco, had not yet been modified. Wylie tried to point out the need for the flag commander to have access to an SG, but never got a response.

  “If Callaghan had had any understanding of things, he would have given fairly serious thought to moving over to the Helena,” Lloyd Mustin said. “There had been opportunities for Gil Hoover to make known to Callaghan that he had this capability and give him some outline of what it amounted to.… But if any such exchange had occurred it was not known to us in the Atlanta.… If he really had stopped to recognize what he had there in his SG radar capability, he would indeed have given important thought to transferring his flag.” Just as Callaghan had ascended to command—by tradition—he selected his flagship the same way: Tradition held that the heaviest ship in a force serve as its flagship. Norman Scott had made the same decision in October, riding in the San Francisco in the Battle of Cape Esperance. Having served as Scott’s flagship recently, she was fitted with a complete flag suite. These factors encouraged her selection now, even though another heavy cruiser in the group, the Portland, had the SG radar, too.

  As Lieutenant (j.g.) Bennett left the San Francisco’s bridge at the end of his watch, he recalled that exactly a year ago, on November 12, 1941, Bruce McCandless had led a clinic for officers in the gunnery department. The handout he prepared analyzed matchups between the San Francisco and various enemy ship types. A Kongo-class battleship was included “only to show disparity of their fighting strength,” Bennett said. “It was considered an unlikely encounter” and scarcely worth game-boarding, for the weight of a full salvo from such an opponent was five times that of an American heavy cruiser.

  Callaghan and Captain Young were hunched over the chart desk with the navigator, Rae Arison, when Bennett joined them. The appearance of the junior officer led them to change the subject, but that was easy enough. Callaghan recognized Bennett from the ship’s basketball team. Callaghan, a fan, had attended the team’s every game at Honolulu’s Aiea High School gym. The s
kipper was their only spectator, and his boosterism helped them battle to a first-place tie with the team from the battleship West Virginia, whose officers, Bennett contended, arranged with friends in the Bureau of Navigation to have the best athletes assigned to their ship. As the two recalled old times, Young noticed blood leaching through the sling on Bennett’s elbow, a minor wound inflicted by a wingtip of the Betty that hit them. “You’re in no condition to stand a watch,” Young said. “Go on below and get it looked at.” Bennett protested briefly that he’d just stood a watch, but orders were orders. According to Bennett, “I went below but I didn’t stay below. Having heard about the battleships, there was no way was I going to be in my bunk when this went down. I took a lap around the wardroom, then reported to Willie Wilbourne.” The gunnery officer told Bennett to take over a 1.1-inch mount on the fantail.

  When the moon set, the starscape swelled. “I was praying to God to watch over us,” said Robert Howe in the Helena. “It is hard to explain how you feel looking out over the water into the dark of night knowing soon you would hear the report from the radar room, ‘Contact, ships.… ’ It was hard to keep from shaking.”

  27

  Black Friday

  THE JAPANESE FAILURE TO DESTROY THE U.S. BEACHHEAD HAD BEEN worrying the emperor. Though he had recently praised his Navy’s efforts in an Imperial Rescript, a newer telegram told of Hirohito’s anxiety concerning this place, Guadalcanal. “A place of bitter struggles,” he called it. According to Matome Ugaki, “He expressed his wish that it be recaptured swiftly.”