Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  As fires ignited and began to spread, the firefighters discovered that the mains lacked pressure. Shambling about in their flashproof clothing and asbestos pullovers, they played weak streams from torn hoses on the conflagration aft. Keeping a good footing on decks slick with blood was difficult when the ship was veering to and fro. A shell slammed into the galley locker, scattering potatoes about. The screams of the wounded pierced the night and mingled with more sober voices directing the firefighting. “The number-four handling room was a near holocaust,” Perry Hall said. “Bits of burning bedding smoldered on the bunks, burnt bodies were scattered about the decks, and water poured into a shell hole, just above the waterline, whenever the ship wheeled to port or starboard.… The stench of burning flesh and powder made breathing difficult.”

  The Sterett took eleven direct hits, all on her port side, all above the waterline, and sustained severe shrapnel damage from many near misses. Her after deck house and number three gun, an unshielded open mount back aft, were engulfed by flames that brightly illuminated the flag on the small ship’s mainmast truck. Her after handling rooms were set afire, causing powder in ready service storage to ignite. Though the fires were horrible, it was the crew’s great good fortune that the ship’s engines were undamaged. With just two guns operable and a pair of torpedoes stuck precariously in damaged tubes, Captain Coward found he had to slow occasionally to lighten the breeze stoking the topside fires, which were threatening to rage out of control. Twenty-eight of his men were dead, another thirteen seriously wounded. Four leaped overboard to extinguish their burning clothes. Those who stayed aboard and saved the ship braved burning compartments to turn flood valves and remove wounded from impossible places. They defied smoke to soak powder, gird bulkheads, patch holes, fix pumps, run hoses, and keep electricity flowing. They allowed their hands to melt while connecting superheated brass hose couplings to fight fires. Braving flames that would not otherwise have been beaten, they threw well-baked projectiles overboard and lowered rafts to save their brothers.

  They were cool, efficient, leaderly, and unselfish, according to those who saw them and wrote the reports. “The following men are deserving of commendation”—and this would be written many times in the coming days and weeks—“for the accuracy of his control of the gun battery … at great risk he entered the smoke filled handling rooms #3 and #4 … and directed the damage control parties … for his courage in personally supervising the fire fighting below decks … without thought to his own safety … worked continuously all night and the next day reinforcing shores and operating pumps … it is recommended that this man be advanced to chief … for his heroic action in entering the flames … when after being struck in the neck by shrapnel, although he could in no way determine the extent of his wounds except to feel blood soaking his shirt, calmly identified silhouettes as they appeared … and removing casualties from gun #3 and getting #7 life raft into the water … for his tireless effort and continued excellent performance of duty … directing the fire party to successfully extinguish the fire which helped the ship continue fighting … and rendered valuable aid putting out a fire in compartment C-203-L … for fine assistance in handling casualties of gun #3 … and for helping extinguish fires on clothing.… ”

  Feats like these would be easily lost, along with the names of their authors, men like Byers, Burris, Morris, and Lovas; Keenum, Kozak, Conn, and Hammack; Kelly, Wholley, Fray, and Mayefsky; Lastra, Dean, Weller, and Talbot; Seymour, Boudreaux, Blankenship, Spence, and Shelton; Hall, Hanna, Hodge, Homer, and Robinson. They were men without rank to have monuments but whose names shine out from the haze of reports and deserve to be held up for notice. Not just the men of the Sterett, but all of them, American and Japanese, striving and desperate and frightened and riled and tender and human, in fateful collision on Friday, the thirteenth of November, 1942.

  29

  The Killing Salvo

  CALLAGHAN’S SINGLE COLUMN RESEMBLED A WORLD WAR I–VINTAGE battle line of yore. But it echoed a weapon more ancient still as it thrust into the body of Hiroaki Abe’s force: a piercing long sword, or perhaps a lance. The American commander might have employed it as an archer firing arrows, standing off, using his advanced sensors, killing by surprise out of the dark. Instead, he ran straight ahead, blade fixed, and plunged straight in. The delicate tip of his sword broke on first contact, the van destroyers penetrating momentarily before fracturing, and throwing reverberations back toward Callaghan, riding in the hilt. What followed was a melee, Colosseum-style, with the lights out, and a heavy fog blown over the fighting arena. What can be settled and known is the time of first contact, and the time, ultimately, of disengagement. The terrible middle became a swirl of slash and thrust, ship against ship, captain against the enemy of the moment, which, battered then vanishing, was replaced by a new enemy who delivered or received the next blow unwitting. The records muddle the precise sequence of things. Individual memories are indelibly vivid but pointillistic, dead certain to the beholder but seldom tracking with anyone else’s and unhelpful to the big picture. The events of November 13, 1942, in their chaotic simultaneity, defy the benign lie that is narrative. But the big picture is as simple to understand as a precise 360-degree portrait is difficult: On that night, two groups of powerful steel machines surprised each other on the sea in the dark and, blundering and veering in a manner unworthy of the elegance of their design, grappled bodily, delivering hammer blows until death.

  It was a mystery to participants then and to analysts in decades to come why Callaghan never issued a written battle plan to his commanders. As Bruce McCandless, the San Francisco’s officer-of-the-deck, saw it, a slight turn to the right at the outset, away from the oncoming Japanese swarm, would have “crossed the T” of Abe’s force, bringing the American formation on a course perpendicular to that of the Japanese. This textbook naval maneuver, performed by Norman Scott at Cape Esperance, would have enabled all the U.S. ships to fire full broadsides and the destroyers at either end of Callaghan’s line to attack with torpedoes on the bows. It “should have sufficed to derail this Tokyo Express,” McCandless would write. This was the clarity of hindsight. In the present, there had been no tactical planning. There is no evidence Callaghan ever communicated his expectations to his subordinates. At the moment of contact, he ordered his column left, steering it directly into the enemy’s midst, on a path that the laws of the indifferent universe always seemed to urge, as inertia devolved into entropy.

  After the bloody encounter of the van destroyers with the leading elements of Abe’s force, and after the early battering of the Atlanta, the next ships into the maelstrom were Callaghan’s cruisers. When the Portland made her turn to the west, following the San Francisco, Captain Laurance DuBose saw five evenly spaced searchlights ahead and to starboard, stabbing across the water toward the American line. His five-inch batteries lofted star shells, aiming to shed light on the situation. Then, at murderously close range, sixty-two thousand yards, his main battery lashed out. Though the forward fire-control radar was out, a casualty of short circuits, the “Sweet Pea” scored a first-salvo hit with eight-inch fire. “At least four bursts of flame leapt from the enemy vessel,” wrote the gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Elliott W. Shanklin. After the second salvo, the target, a destroyer, blew up and was left sinking. It was probably the Akatsuki.

  Astern of the Portland, the Helena was worked up to a servo-mechanical rage with her six-inch main battery, targeting a searchlight just forty-two hundred yards to her west. It must have belonged to the Hiei; it appeared too high and large to belong to a destroyer. The officer in a spotting station high overhead reported that the tracers were perfectly aimed in deflection and that “practically all of our shots appeared to hit.” One of her turret officers, Lieutenant Earl A. Luehman, observed, “The tracers from fifteen guns looked like a swarm of bees heading for a target you couldn’t see.” Cycling rapidly with the firing keys closed, the ship’s broadside was like a gigantic combustion engine
with mistimed pistons. Nodding up and down, driven by their director-controlled motors, the guns laid a “rocking ladder” of fire across a two-hundred-yard-long path centered on the range given by the radar. No ship, no matter how stout its armor, would want to be in the path of what she was sending out: more than two hundred 130-pound shells per minute, according to Bin Cochran. As the Helena reached the turning point for the left column turn, the light that her gunners were shooting at faded to black. The superstructure of the enemy ship was a “smoky orange bonfire,” Chick Morris recalled. “How high into the sky that tower of flame extended, no one can say, but the brightness of it was unbelievable.”

  Farther ahead, the Atlanta turned to port to avoid the traffic jam in the van. The San Francisco was riding on the Atlanta’s port quarter. Bruce McCandless at the flagship’s conn called to Captain Jenkins, “The Atlanta’s turning left. Shall I follow her?” Back came the reply, “No. Hold your course.” Then, a few seconds later, “Follow the Atlanta.”

  McCandless recalled: “First I had to swing the San Francisco slightly right to clear her, then use full left rudder; this resulted in our paralleling the Atlanta on a northwesterly course with her slightly on our port bow. As we started to swing in astern of her, enemy searchlights came on, one illuminating her from port. The Atlanta then swung back across our bow from left to right, firing rapidly to port as she went.”

  The heavier San Francisco took wider turns than the Atlanta and swung outboard of her both times. As a result, Callaghan’s flagship, instead of following the antiaircraft cruiser, ended up steaming on her port hand. The Atlanta “swept out of line, her five-inch guns spitting a giddy pattern of fireworks,” wrote Chick Morris on the Helena. “The rest of us stayed in line, led now by the San Francisco, and as we continued at high speed through the tunnel, Jap ships were afire on both sides of us. We were silhouetted like witches speeding across a Halloween moon.”

  Suddenly the Atlanta’s 541-foot length was gripped from below and shaken violently. Robert Graff felt “a tremendous piiing. The ship lurched, like when you hit a heavy pothole.” The word went around immediately: A torpedo had struck on the port side. Two of them, actually. One Long Lance hit the ship between the forward fire room and forward engine room and exploded powerfully. Though magnified by the ocean’s pressure, the blast of the thousand-pound warhead, which seemed to have been delivered by the destroyer Ikazuchi, did not rip the ship apart completely. It was contained within the airtight enclosure formed by the 3.75-inch armored belts on the sides of the hull below the waterline, and by the 1.25-inch armored deck above. But the violent discharge had to go somewhere. According to Lloyd Mustin, it rushed fore and aft, rupturing the after bulkhead of the forward engine room and letting seawater into the machinery spaces. “A monstrous column of water and oil rose on our port side and cascaded down all over the ship, drenching all of the topside. People were thrown to their knees, including me, by the shock of the explosion.” A second torpedo penetrated the hull and stuck fast without detonating.

  Raymond E. Leslie felt the Atlanta move “like a pendulum” and feared he would be flung overboard from the searchlight platform by the elastic swinging motion. “The torpedo created a heavy downpour of seawater on top of us and filled our searchlight platform like a bath tub.” The plotting officer, Lieutenant James C. Shaw, stationed five decks below, was thrown into the bulkhead by the blast, smashing his right hand. As water swirled over the deck, he called Commander Nickelson, the gunnery officer, told him of the flooding, and asked for orders. Nickelson replied, “Stick a pillow in it,” and then the phones went dead.

  When the boilers were secured and a safety valve opened, pressurized steam gusted upward through an exhaust vent in the number two stack, right near the after air defense station, where Mustin and the exec were stationed. “It was absolutely deafening,” Mustin said. “It was impossible to communicate by voice, even by putting your mouth to someone’s ear and shouting. You couldn’t communicate above the sound of that escaping steam.”

  In the dark, groping for a way topside with the help of a battery-powered lantern, electrician’s mate Bill McKinney heard a rending and tearing of metal, as if the ammo hoists that were routed through his compartment had suddenly gone off their tracks. The radio was out. The ship’s lights and engines and gun turrets were dead. The chief engineer was, too.

  When the power died, the final range reading shown by the fire-control radar in the forward main battery director, which electrician’s mate Bob Tyler saw on a plotting board in the interior communications room, was shocking. The distance to the director’s last target was just 450 yards.

  Pounding on the forward bulkhead, McKinney got a return knock, and by shouting found out that several of his shipmates were in the dark as well. Damage-control doctrine forbade them from opening the hatches. Doing so could compromise the watertight integrity of the gravely damaged ship. The question, as on all dying vessels, was whether the doctrine still applied—whether the collective enterprise of fighting as a crew had given way to the pursuit of individual survival. It was anybody’s guess whether Captain Jenkins had ordered them to abandon ship. Through the thin steel overhead, McKinney could hear men choking and coughing and more undetermined noises, and he would have many measureless moments in which to think about such things.

  Around this time, the foundering Atlanta was taken under fire by a heavy cruiser, about thirty-five hundred yards abaft her port beam. Mustin attempted to return fire with the only turret that was responsive on the intercom, turret seven aft, which had to be fired manually. But her crew stood down when the light of their target’s own gun discharges revealed her to be a friendly vessel. Lloyd Mustin recognized the flash of her smokeless powder and the deliberate cadence characteristic of American eight-inch gunfire. The U.S. cruiser’s gunners were all too adept. A series of heavy hits shivered the Atlanta’s forward superstructure and decks.

  Jenkins was with Admiral Scott, standing on the starboard bridge wing looking north, where the battle seemed to have drifted, when there was “some alarm on the port side,” Lloyd Mustin said. “Captain Jenkins went around the catwalk to the port side to see what was going on. When he came back, there was no starboard bridge wing.” Seven large shells had pierced the Atlanta just below the bridge deck. The four-inch armor plating protecting the pilothouse couldn’t stop them. They penetrated and exited forward. The bulkhead door flew from its hinges and slammed into Jenkins from behind, but he was spared the worst of this violent shock to the pilothouse, which killed sixteen of the twenty men stationed there.

  Robert Graff, riven with shrapnel in his legs, hips, arms, hands, and face, the biggest of the pieces about the size of a walnut, crawled from the port signal bridge into the pilothouse, over innumerable bodies, and continued through to the starboard signal bridge. There was a huge hole in the bulkhead there. Graff thought he might climb through it and let himself down to a gun platform, then the main deck. He didn’t remember how he got there, but he would never forget something he realized in the pilothouse along that way: that one of the officers he had crawled over was high ranking and familiar.

  My God, they got Scott, Graff thought.

  “I remember a quick twinge of sadness as I crawled by him. I remember thinking, Oh, shit, that’s a terrible loss.”

  Lieutenant Stewart Moredock, Scott’s operations officer, saw his admiral take his last steps. He would dredge up this memory later, after his recovery from his injuries, recalling how Captain Jenkins had approached him, saying, “Let’s get below. There’s nothing we can do up here.” Unable to find a ladder to the main deck, Moredock, the only one of Scott’s staff to survive, hugged the bridge railing and swung his body over. With his right hand broken he found he couldn’t hold his entire weight with his left, and he plummeted down, falling some twenty feet into a gun tub. “I hit, I’m pretty certain, a bunch of dead bodies on that gun emplacement,” Moredock said. “I heard the noise of their, you know, their lungs, whatever. It
was a shattering kind of feeling.”

  The dead were everywhere but they registered only faintly, the sight of their scattered remains too horrific to bear, though indelibly seen in the periphery, like dim stars. Robert Graff, in a state of shock as he sought a way down to the main deck, said, “I don’t know where I thought I was going. Talk about being on autopilot. What did I think I was going to gain by going to the main deck? Maybe to find a live human being.” As the thought continued to reverberate with him—My God, they got Scott—he felt the need to express it to someone, but found nobody left alive to talk to.

  For years no one would speak comfortably about what had happened that night, or how. Lloyd Mustin was among the first to suspect it. He saw it as it was happening in a blinding incandescent flash of nitrocellulose powder. This “illuminated the firing ship brilliantly and unmistakably,” Mustin said. “It was as easy to recognize the San Francisco in the flash of her own guns as it would have been at high noon in San Francisco Harbor.”

  Norman Scott and his staff and so many men had been cut down by Callaghan’s flagship, which was, it seems, firing on an enemy target beyond the Atlanta. Scott had learned in the Battle of Cape Esperance what happens when ships get caught between friends and enemies at night and lose track of each other with no ready means of identification. Visibility was poor owing to the heavy smoke. Flames and the flashes of muzzles constricted the pupils.

  According to a San Francisco signalman, Vic Gibson, watching from the signal bridge, the Atlanta was caught in a crossfire. “We were firing at such close range that the shells leaving our guns were going right through the superstructure of the Atlanta and the Jap shells were doing the same from their direction.” In the confusion, the San Francisco had simply lost track of her. “Probably she drifted into our line of fire—an almost perfectly flat trajectory at that range,” Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless wrote. “Perhaps something like that was inevitable in the wild, free-swinging brawl that resulted when the two formations merged.”