Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  Kirishima (BB)

  Nagara (CL)

  Akatsuki (DD)

  Ikazuchi (DD)

  Inazuma (DD)

  Amatsukaze (DD)

  Yukikaze (DD)

  Teruzuki (DD)

  Asagumo (DD)

  Harusame (DD)

  Murasame (DD)

  Yudachi (DD)

  Samidare (DD)

  (Photo Credit: 27.1)

  On contact with the Americans, “pandemonium” broke out within the chain of command of the Japanese force, according to Captain Hara of the Amatsukaze. In the Hiei, Captain Masao Nishida and his gunnery officer debated what type of ordnance the flagship should be loading. Prepared for a bombardment mission, the gunnery officer had Type 3 incendiary and high-explosive projectiles loaded in his hoists. They settled in favor of armor-piercing ammunition. But as crews in the shell decks and turrets of both the Hiei and Kirishima scrambled to remove bombardment rounds from the hoists and ready storage execution, it was clear that execution was more difficult than decision. “There was a stampede in the magazines, men pushing and kicking to reach the armor-piercing shells stored deep inside,” Hara wrote. Evidently the Japanese were unsuccessful switching out their projectiles, judging by the volume of pyrotechnics that burst over Callaghan’s formation that night.

  For the leading ships, the shooting would begin at a range so close that mechanical sensors were altogether unnecessary. The Battle of Friday the 13th would go down as the first naval engagement in the steam age to begin with a nearly blind head-on collision in the dark.

  28

  Into the Light

  THE HELENA’S GUNS WERE LAID ALMOST TO THE HORIZONTAL—AND still no order to commence firing had come—when a piercing beam of light stood out in the darkness to port, artificial and startling, stinging the night-adjusted eyes of every American sailor manning a topside station. “The light seemed high, as though shining down on us from a higher elevation than our own fighting bridge,” wrote Ensign Bin Cochran. “There was a shocking moment when, staring into that light, all seemed completely silent. Everything around us in the night was quiet and black and here we were standing out for all to see.” On the lightless nighttime sea, the flare of a match could be seen for miles around; the searchlight was overwhelming in its brightness.

  “There was a feeling, one that you knew was without logic, that there was protection in getting out of the direct glare of that light,” Cochran continued. “Everybody I could see crouched into a shadow.” It was while squatting in that undignified position, stooping behind the four-foot-high sides of the Helena’s open bridge, that Rodman Smith decided he’d had enough and hustled over to his skipper. “Permission to open fire, Captain?”

  Hoover, ducking out of the light himself, shouted back to his gunnery officer, “Open fire!”

  The Atlanta was swinging through her own turn to avoid a collision with the van when the searchlight, probably from the destroyer Akatsuki, lit upon her from abaft the port beam. Captain Jenkins reacted as commanders had been trained in peacetime: “Counter-illuminate!” he shouted. His gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander William R. D. Nickelson, Jr., preferred to respond with other hardware. At once he shouted into his headset mike: “Fuck that! Open fire!” His assistant, Lloyd Mustin, was recording accurate ranges from the narrowcasting fire-control radar and didn’t need help from other wavelengths. “Action port. Illuminating ship is target,” he instructed his gun captains. Mustin, controlling the after trio of five-inch mounts, and Nickelson slewed their directors onto the lights and opened fire immediately.

  As Abe’s battleships lofted star shells high in the air, which burst behind the American cruisers, the Japanese destroyers hit Commander Stokes’s destroyer van with terrific fire. The Atlanta came under fire now, too. Captain Jenkins had just ordered the antiaircraft cruiser’s torpedoes fired—she was basically an oversized destroyer—when small-caliber projectiles from the Akatsuki plowed into her port torpedo director. The officer assigned to that station, Lieutenant (j.g.) Henry P. Jenks, was one of the first casualties. With the loss of automatic control, the bulky torpedo mount, loaded with four big Mark 15s, was too heavy to operate manually with sufficient speed.

  But guns were the USN’s weapon of choice. By the white light of his carbon-arc fixtures, Mustin could see his own salvos hitting the water just short of the Akatsuki’s searchlight. He called corrections to his spotter, who upped the pointer elevation and walked the next one right in. As their target, followed by another destroyer, crossed Atlanta’s bow heading north, “You couldn’t help but see our projectiles were just tearing into it,” Mustin said. “Shooting into a destroyer-size hull from six hundred yards, you just don’t miss. You just don’t miss.”

  The Akatsuki paid the price of all vessels that uncloaked themselves first in the night. Gunfire from the Atlanta, the San Francisco, the Helena, and several destroyers converged on her. Soon she was wrecked and afire, her steering, power, and communications gone, her deadly torpedoes still in their tubes.

  The destroyers Inazuma and Ikazuchi, trailing the Akatsuki just ahead of the Hiei’s starboard beam, exited the rain squall and took over the lead. Japanese naval doctrine generally dictated the firing of torpedoes prior to the opening of bright, position-revealing gunfire. Conning his ship past the battered Akatsuki, Commander Masamichi Terauchi, captain of the Inazuma, saw silhouettes of American ships ahead, blinking with flashes of gunfire. He had had no instructions from Abe. The first signal that came from the Hiei conveyed not orders, but requests for information. In the absence of orders, Terauchi and his torpedomen would do what they did best. Launching at angles to lead the American line, they were as prodigious as ever. Each of the destroyers loosed six torpedoes toward the Atlanta, their closest target, before the Ikazuchi was hit hard, taking at least three eight-inch shells around her forward gun mount. The burning ship was forced to retire.

  Soon after the shooting started, Callaghan ordered, quite superfluously, “Odd ships commence fire to starboard, even to port.” Given that steel was already flying, and that the American column was in the midst of executing a sharp turn, the use of a command based on ships’ relative headings—starboard and port—was “a display of futility,” Mustin thought. “Starboard was north with us and port was south, but it was east for other people and so on.” Though Callaghan was trying to avoid wasteful concentrations of his gunfire, micromanaging a captain’s decisions in battle was risky business. A ship’s own officers usually knew what they should be shooting at, especially after the shooting had started.

  Commander Jesse Coward, the captain of the destroyer Sterett, third in line, had all guns and his torpedo tubes trained on an approaching target to port. But when Callaghan’s order came, requiring odd ships to fire to starboard, he complied begrudgingly, swinging his weapons to the opposite beam. Lieutenant Cal Calhoun, the gunnery officer, ordered his fire controlmen to seize hold of the closest enemy target to starboard. A light cruiser, the Nagara, filled that bill.

  Several of the Sterett’s mounts were loaded with star shells. From four thousand yards their effect was spectacular if ineffective, detonating on contact and enveloping the light cruiser’s forecastle in magnesium-phosphorous pyrotechnics. The next four-gun salvos from Coward’s tin can were common projectiles. These packed a harder punch, and Sterett fired a dozen such salvos at the Nagara as she passed by. Life and death had been set loose on their own schedule, and task force commanders no longer had much to say about it.

  When the Cushing opened fire on a destroyer skitting away to the east, probably the Yukikaze, Captain Parker lost use of his voice radio from the concussion. Mute now and blind without fire-control radar, Parker would fight without the benefit of hearing Callaghan’s course and speed orders. He had rung up twenty-five knots after opening fire, but was able to hold it only briefly. Just a couple of minutes after opening fire, the Cushing was hit hard by shellfire and began losing power. Enveloped by enemy ships and raked by lighter we
aponry, the destroyer slowed and lost steering control. And then a new threat appeared on her starboard hand.

  The large vessel’s dark form was massive, eldritch, as it loomed off the Cushing’s port bow in the flash-lit darkness. This was the Hiei. The recognition of the battleship spread down the van, from the Cushing to the Laffey to the Sterett to the O’Bannon. Parker came right, with his crews swinging the rudder by hand, and fired six torpedoes by local control. The range to their big target was about twelve hundred yards—too close to miss, but also too close for the torpedoes to arm themselves en route. A destroyer’s life expectancy within hailing distance of a battleship was short. The Hiei’s secondary guns and several destroyers tore into the Cushing, landing accurate fire on each of her gun mounts, and blasting her engineering plant with medium-caliber ordnance. She shook from the impact of hits from ships all around her, and very quickly her loss of steam power was complete. The other ships of the van, passing her on both sides, carried the battle forward, moving in and among Abe’s ships. Lieutenant Julian Becton, the executive officer of the Aaron Ward, wrote, “It was disorganized. It was individual, with every ship for herself. Perhaps if Tennyson had seen it he would have called it magnificent.”

  The Laffey now found herself leading the American van. Tom Evins, her torpedo officer, was deafened by the ship’s battery as it fired on a destroyer ahead—“a roar so constant as to create the impression that there was no noise at all.” Though the ship had ridden in Scott’s van at Cape Esperance, each battle seized the mind in unique ways. For the sailors in the Laffey, that signature image was the Hiei, closer to hand now than anyone might ever have wished. The great vessel’s proximity registered stunningly on Evins through the time-slowing numbness of five senses strained by overload. “There, bearing down on us on a collision course from the port side, was what seemed to be the biggest manmade object ever created,” he said.

  Richard Hale, the pointer in gun two, was startled to see the battleship’s bridge and superstructure through his pointer’s scope. “It was so close we could throw hand grenades and hit it.” The five-inch guns trained out and started a brisk cadence, joined soon, Hale recalled, by the chattering twenties. “The flight of our shells to the target was instantaneous,” he wrote. “We saw them penetrate their bulkheads and explode inside.”

  “She was only about a thousand yards away, and there was clearly not a second to lose,” said Tom Evins. “It seemed like an eternity before I was able to launch our single spread of five gas-operated steel fish. Meanwhile the great battleship came relentlessly on, as if to crush us.” The effect from the destroyer’s point of view was like the head of a great ax slicing toward them through the water.

  The Laffey’s captain, Lieutenant Commander William E. Hank, rang emergency full astern. Cross-connecting his engine and fire rooms, with burners full open, he then signaled emergency full ahead. The captain’s shiphandling had been a source of consternation and embarrassment to the crew when he showed a willingness to use emergency engine orders during routine docking. Now the circumstances required it. The destroyer leaped forward as her screws bit into the seas. Surging just past her fantail went the Hiei, “so close Hank could have hit her with a slingshot,” Julian Becton wrote. The destroyer’s gunners riddled the Japanese ship with guns of all calibers. A sailor named John H. Jenkins, impressed with the opportunity at hand, ran to a twenty-millimeter mount whose operator was hanging lifeless in the harness. Wrapping his arms around the corpse, using it as a shield, he raised the barrel and fired a clip into the battleship’s portholes. As fire from the Laffey and the other three destroyers raked the Hiei’s bridge, Admiral Abe took shrapnel to the face, and Captain Masao Nishida fell wounded, too. Abe’s chief of staff, Commander Masakane Suzuki, was a fatality. As heavier blows fell, delivered by American ships farther away, flames and smoke washed through the pilothouse. Jenkins saw pieces of the superstructure falling onto the great fourteen-inch turret below it.

  Having momentarily “blinded the Cyclops,” in Becton’s words, the Laffey pulled away to the north, under heavy fire but opening the range. Her narrow escape from a collision with a ship eighteen times her weight was only the first of her hurdles. As the ship headed for Savo Island, looking to use the island’s silhouette as camouflage, the trio of destroyers on Abe’s northern flank of his van, the Asagumo, Murasame, and Samidare, began crossing ahead of her from port to starboard and took the Laffey under fire. “The whole world suddenly seemed to burst into the brilliance of an eerie blue midday as the star shells exploded over our heads,” Tom Evins recalled. “The Laffey was designed for 37.5 knots but we were making in excess of forty,” wrote Lieutenant Eugene A. Barham, her engineering officer.

  The battleship Kirishima, steaming on the Hiei’s port quarter, fired on the Laffey. Two shells bit into her bridge and her number two gun mount. According to Evins, “The next second I was hanging onto a stanchion, trying to keep myself from being thrown from the ship. She seemed to pitch herself into the air and then nosedive for the bottom. Tons of water poured down over our superstructure; it was difficult to stand under the weight of it and every man topside was drenched to the skin.” This particular excitement—a straddle by a fourteen-inch salvo—was followed by a shell that penetrated the deckhouse below his station in the torpedo director, passed through the ship, and hit the water, exploding in a mess of blue dye.

  Around this same time, a torpedo hit the fantail. The explosion ripped loose fifty feet of the Laffey’s stern, all the way forward to gun number four, which was folded up onto the mount located just forward of it. The destroyer’s after fire room and electrical workshop were a gutted shambles. Up from within this deep wound swirled a terrible oil fire. Just forward of the blast, in the machinery spaces, the ship’s propeller shafts began spinning wildly as her screws, along with her rudder, were shorn away. According to Richard Hale, “I could see that a fire of that magnitude meant the magazine could blow at any time. I went back up to the bow to get as far away from that fire as I could.”

  The crew of the Laffey’s gun number four were dead at their stations. Sailors looking to rescue them found a fuze setter still alive in his seat, but trapped by the shell hoist, which had been bent in over him. The smoke was overcoming him, and he was nearly unconscious. According to Ensign David S. Sterrett, only a skilled shipfitter with a blowtorch could have cut him out of the metal prison. “The air was full of thick, dark smoke,” Sterrett said. “There was nothing we could do. We handed him a gas mask so he could have a few more breaths of air.”

  THROUGH THE SPRAY kicked up by his bow wave, Captain Hara in the Amatsukaze, advancing with Abe’s left-hand vanguard, saw five or six American ships 5,000 meters (5,450 yards) away on his starboard bow. They were silhouetted in the yellow-white light of airborne flares. “I gulped. My heart bubbled with excitement,” he wrote. Most likely these were Callaghan’s rear echelon: the Juneau leading the Aaron Ward, the Barton, the Monssen, and the Fletcher. Lieutenant Masatoshi Miyoshi, his torpedo officer, shouted, “Commander, let’s fire the fish!” Hara ordered, “Get ready, fisherman!” Ordering the helm left, he let fly with eight of them.

  The Savo Sound fireworks show commanded a large audience ashore. Searchlights stabbed and intersected, playing briefly on their targets then blinking out when the opposing gunners caught on. From on high floated star shells and flares. There were moments when the men in the ships, too, indulged themselves as onlookers and marveled. Commander Coward of the Sterett noted that the Japanese were firing “a form of firecracker or sparkle effect with brilliant white flashes fired low between the two forces with the apparent intention of blinding our cruisers.” These were surely the airburst incendiaries loaded in the hoists of the battleships and meant for the men of Henderson Field.

  At the start of it, the exec of the Sterett had told his gunners not to bother manning their weapons, as he didn’t think a destroyer’s small guns would have any work this night. But this battle had no precedent in thei
r experience. Ahead, they could see the Nagara delivering a beating to the Cushing, whose engineers were trying to use the lull to get her engines going again. The Laffey was in a crossfire, too. The Sterett’s gun crews concentrated on the Nagara for a while, until they found a larger target, the Hiei, within range. Looming to port, the great ship drew their fire in to two thousand yards, by which time the battleship underwent a sudden transformation from “a ghostly gray” to “a brilliant orange” as flames seemed to take hold of her from stem to stern.

  While the formations surged through one another, a Japanese destroyer, possibly the Harusame, appeared a thousand yards on the Sterett’s starboard bow. Coward launched two torpedoes at this vessel, and his gunners turned loose several full salvos at eight hundred yards. Though the torpedoes never could have armed, somehow the enemy ship was seen to rise from the water by her stern. This gut punch, probably landed by another ship, left the enemy’s after mounts swallowed in flames and her stern glowing a cherry red. Watching from the director, Lieutenant Calhoun found himself shouting, “Oh, you poor son of a bitch!” As he recalled, “The water around her seemed to boil, and her hull threw off steam with a hiss that we could hear aboard the Sterett.” Calhoun passed news of this to his gun captains over the phones. “I told them to send their powder monkeys up the ladder to the main deck so they could see what they had just done.” But there was little time to celebrate.

  Around this time the Sterett fell into a withering enemy crossfire from her port side. “It was as if a huge star shell had burst and illuminated the sea. It was like noon on a bright sunny day,” Perry Hall recalled. The Hiei and other ships were focused on her. The foremast buckled as radar and radio antennae were carried away. Shrapnel peppered the gun director, felling most of the fire-control team. Cal Calhoun took a shower of steel into his kapok life jacket and battle helmet but emerged, improbably, no worse for the wear.