Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  The best evidence of whose shells hit her lay spattered around the Atlanta’s boat deck: a mess of green dye powder, the telltale color that Callaghan’s flagship used to aid in spotting her shell splashes. Mustin found that another salvo from the San Francisco had struck the port side five-inch waist mount, still trained forward from its engagement with Abe’s lead destroyers. That salvo penetrated the mount from left to right, smashing the breech, slicing one of the guns away, and killing nearly everybody inside. The back was blown loose. It stood leaning against the superstructure. There was no doubt these were eight-inch shells. “You could measure them with a ruler,” Mustin said. The only other ship firing eight-inch ordnance that night was the Portland, but her dye loads were orange. In the Atlanta, from behind the hatchway that led forward from his damage-control station, Bill McKinney, the electrician’s mate, heard banging and shouting. Men were saying that their belowdecks compartment had been breached, that flames were visible, and that blood was running down into it. They needed to get out fast. “I continued to try our phones without success,” McKinney wrote. “Our very large compartment was a factor in the ship’s buoyancy, and I did not dare open the watertight door forward. I did take a peek through the escape scuttle in the large double hatch covering above and leading to the sick bay passageway immediately above us. The space above was full of thick, yellow smoke.”

  Donning a rescue breather, McKinney left through the topside hatch and, joined by a sailor named Daniel Curtin, climbed the ladder into the scuttle above. “The smoke was so thick that the beam of our battle lantern did not extend for more than two feet. We stumbled over the body of the sailor who had been coughing and choking earlier. I wondered if we could have saved him.”

  AS THE BATTLE LOST coherence in the minds of its participants, an order came over the TBS that left Laurance DuBose in the Portland, his gunnery officer, Commander Elliott Shanklin, and every turret officer and gun captain mistrustful of their own ears: “Cease firing own ships. Cease firing own ships. Cease firing own ships.… ”

  The message was from Callaghan. The Portland had just fired a pair of nine-gun salvos at a cruiser that could not be positively identified when the perplexing order came. Captain DuBose asked his admiral, “What is the dope, did you want to cease fire?”

  From Callaghan came, “Affirmative.” That response, documented in the Portland’s radio log, seemed to refute the idea, floated later, that an order meant only for the San Francisco got accidentally transmitted to the whole group. Clearly the flagship, like the Portland, had just fired on a ship of uncertain nationality that made the order necessary. It was identified in records only as “a small cruiser or a large destroyer.” Murky identifications were unavoidable in the night and smoke. It very well could have been the Atlanta.

  The gunners on the San Francisco were firing at shadows. Said Edgar Harrison, a fire controlman on a five-inch director, “We fired at so many targets, what I was doing was have my trainer train on shadows. I’m running the range dial on the computer, and I could see the red-hot bullets go out, then I changed the range up and down until the bullets were disappearing into the shadow. Then I’d check fire and find another target.”

  In the Helena’s chart house, Ray Casten kept a close eye on the PPI scope as he did navigational piloting and managed the dead-reckoning plot. “I watched, almost transfixed, as our ships interleaved with those of the enemy,” the young officer would write. “I actually counted a total of twenty-six blips within the 5,000-yard sweep radius on our PPI scope. Would anyone, could anyone, ever believe this? Even when Captain Hoover asked where our ships were, I was only able to inform him of apparent concentrations.” Amid the confusion of the interlaced formations, it was left to individual captains to decide who was friend and who was foe. Most of Callaghan’s captains, if they ever heard the cease-fire order, ignored it, having arrived at their own diverging views of the priorities of life and death.

  30

  Death in the Machine Age

  HE MUST HAVE SMOKED TWO PACKS OF CIGARETTES THAT NIGHT. Pacing the decks of his flagship, gray brows beetling, nerves afire, he found himself hardly able to stand it, knowing that his fleet was in action and he was not. The bustling pace of Nouméa by day had quieted down, leaving Halsey’s imagination in overdrive as his watch officers in the Argonne brought him the radio intercepts. There would be little or no sleep for him or his staff that night.

  To be a commander in the machine age was to suffer the barrier of distance and live in immediate ignorance of the outcomes of battle. With the Enterprise in the war’s early months, he had awaited the returns of his air groups in the Marshalls and the Gilberts and off Honshu. The stakes then were nothing like they were now. He passed the time poring over charts in Flag Plot, walking the decks, and smoking, and conferring with his staff, and diverting himself, when he could stand no more, with the trashiest magazines in the wardroom, and smoking, always smoking. “I drank coffee by the gallon,” he wrote. The men of his South Pacific Forces were at a moment of decision. All that the dispatches could tell him, again and again, was that another battle was under way. Which way it was going was anyone’s guess.

  The action was more cinematically enthralling for the young men watching from Guadalcanal’s northern shore. It was a diversion from their life in a diseased, death-ridden combat zone. As far away as Aola Bay, almost fifty miles east of Savo Sound, “The concussion could be felt as it came in on the airways, and the explosions seemed to rock the ground under our feet,” recalled a U.S. Army infantryman on Guadalcanal. “One could see the bellows of black smoke over the battle scene, shooting high into the air; at night these smoke clouds were capped with red flames.”

  A marine, Robert Leckie, wrote, “The star shells rose, terrible and red. Giant tracers flashed across the night in orange arches.… The sea seemed a sheet of polished obsidian on which the warships seemed to have been dropped and been immobilized, centered amid concentric circles like shock waves that form around a stone dropped in mud.” From Tulagi’s hills, “all you could see were the tracers and the muzzle flashes, and the hits. But you didn’t know who was getting hit,” a sailor wrote. Tracers looked like glowing red blobs, moving slowly through space to their target, then crashing into larger flashes and fires when they struck. There was a three-beat delay before the wave of thunder arrived over the water.

  Infantrymen who had fought bitterly for months were often callous. The novelist James Jones, an Army soldier who arrived later, developed a perverse outlook. Having resolved that he would die, he could root for death’s reign everywhere. “Consciously or unconsciously,” Jones would write, “we accepted the fact that we couldn’t survive. So we could watch the naval battle from the safety of the hills with undisguised fun. There was no denying we were pleased to see somebody else getting his. Even though there were men dying. Being blown apart, concussed, drowning. Didn’t matter. We had been getting ours, let them get theirs. It wasn’t that we were being sadistic. It was just that we had nothing further to worry about. We were dead.”

  CALLAGHAN’S AND ABE’S heaviest ships, the “base units,” came to grips just before 2 a.m. Tracking four enemy ships in column to her northeast, the Helena asked Callaghan, “Can we open fire if we have targets?” The task force commander replied, “Advise type of targets. We want the big ones.” That’s exactly what he got. According to John Bennett, the San Francisco was closing with three formidable opponents: a cruiser abaft her starboard beam, the Hiei approaching forward of her starboard beam, about twenty-two hundred yards away, and the Kirishima about three thousand yards sharp on the starboard bow. According to Bruce McCandless, “The duel about to begin in which flagship fought flagship was like something out of the past.… The action was brief but violent,” as the Hiei and San Francisco approached on opposite courses.

  With Cassin Young designating targets for the gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander William W. Wilbourne, McCandless swung the helm left to unmask the after turret. As the
San Francisco’s eight-inch turrets roared, the Hiei’s great turrets answered in kind. “Two four-gun salvos hit the water short of us, bursting on impact and projecting vivid greenish pyrotechnics—incendiaries,” McCandless wrote. Wilbourne had little more to do than close his firing key and pray. In close and brutally fast was his only chance, given that his salvos had 20 percent the throw-weight of her enemy. “Had anyone timed our loading crews that night, he doubtless would have seen some new records set.” The crew of the San Francisco’s turret three was operating in local control after the destruction of the after control station by the Betty that afternoon. From twenty-two hundred yards, it was hard to miss. The San Francisco lashed out with all three turrets, battering the Hiei all along her length. The turret officer in turret one shouted over the voice tube to his crew, “We just put a nine-gun salvo into the side of a Jap BB!” At this range not even a battleship’s armor was proof against cruiser fire. The San Francisco would claim “at least eighteen hits” on the Hiei. From amidships, near the Hiei’s waterline, came a blast that “caused plates and wreckage to fly about,” the San Francisco’s action report would state. Stationed on a five-inch mount on the starboard side of the San Francisco, Cliff Spencer was awestruck. “With a pagoda-like superstructure, the big ship was so close she looked like the New York skyline. As our stream of shells hit, you could see men or debris flying off the [searchlight] platform, it was that close.… When my vision returned I looked out upon the battle scene to starboard.… The magnitude of the battle was almost unbelievable.”

  As the time approached 2 a.m., life in Savo Sound was a violent blur, with ships up and down the line fighting for their lives. To the northwest, beyond the maelstrom’s center of gravity, the battered Cushing endured another blizzard of steel as Abe’s rear destroyers, the Asagumo, Murasame, and Samidare, swung past her. The Cushing’s skipper, Butch Parker, would describe this night “just like a barroom brawl with the lights out.”

  Despite some claims to the contrary, the U.S. destroyers likely never got their torpedoes effectively into play. Opportunities to fire them occurred at such close range that the weapons seldom had time to arm. The destroyer O’Bannon, last in the van, spied the Hiei close on her port bow, burning but still roaring salvos over the mast of the American destroyer at unknown targets behind her. Commander E. R. Wilkinson loosed four torpedoes, the third of which coincided with the battleship’s complete envelopment “from bow to stern in a great sheet of flame.” The Sterett claimed a pair of torpedo hits on the Hiei as well, but Japanese records, which chronicle gunfire damage in detail, suggest that the damage went unnoticed. Very possibly these claims arose from the battering the Hiei was taking from the San Francisco around this time.

  As burning particles from the Hiei fell on the O’Bannon’s forward decks, Captain Wilkinson, deeming the Japanese battleship “killed” and finding that no further targets offered, ordered the rudder right until his destroyer was on an easterly course. Swinging the helm again to avoid the shattered Laffey, the O’Bannon passed through waters dotted with U.S. sailors. Wilkinson’s crew tossed life vests, some fifty of them, to the men in the water as they passed. As the O’Bannon steamed away to the east, “attempting to locate either definite targets or definite friends,” five unidentified vessels—probably the Cushing, Sterett, Atlanta, Hiei, and Akatsuki—were seen burning or exploding in her wake.

  It was the San Francisco that had the full attention of the Japanese heavy ships now, the Hiei to starboard and the Kirishima, less vividly noticed, moving across to port. It would be estimated that the San Francisco took some forty-five shell hits, twelve of them major-caliber. One fourteen-incher struck the barbette of turret two, opening its seams, and shattered the flood-control panel. This activated the flooding system in the forward magazine and the lower handling room. The crew in the turret stalk, believing the ship was sinking, began pouring out of the top of the turret, into the open air and a storm of flying metal. Airbursts from fourteen-inch anti-personnel and incendiary rounds were shattering. What they did to people in topside stations was unspeakable. Wherever a shell struck armor, the projectile broke up, denting the plating and smoking up the paintwork. The airbursts hurled incendiaries and fragments in all directions. “Seemingly everywhere,” Bruce McCandless wrote, “we found short lengths of what looked like gas pipe about an inch in diameter. A few contained unburned incendiary, a mixture of powdered aluminum and magnesium, with fuzes at both ends.… This stuff was responsible for many of our casualties and much of our damage.” The crews on the starboard secondary battery were cut down virtually to a man. “The smell of burning flesh.… These are recollections that will last my life,” Bennett said. “That’s something you don’t get over.”

  An armor-piercing projectile bulled into wardroom country, where the ship’s executive officer, Mark Crouter, was convalescing after his legs had been burned in the afternoon air attack. He had insisted on remaining on board. This decision cost him his life. The shell killed him where he lay. This third-hitting salvo from the Hiei was costly. Four fourteen-hundred-pound projectiles crashed into the San Francisco’s bridge and forward superstructure, smashing the chart house and propelling the navigator, Commander Rae Arison, over the port side of the superstructure. He made two complete turns in the air before crashing three decks below onto the barrel of a five-inch mount. The impact broke both of his legs. The gun captain, to the considerable surprise of both men, caught Arison and pushed him aside—toward a ladder that led downward. Helpless now, Arison slipped down the ladder and fell onto the deckhouse, facedown in a sizable puddle of water that had welled in a dished-in section of the deck. From his new vantage point, through the tears of pain in his eyes, Arison could see that everything above him was on fire. He struggled to reach a morphine ampule on his belt but discovered he couldn’t bear to use his fractured right arm. “That failure,” he wrote, “kept me alive, for had I reached it and taken an injection I would have most likely passed out and would then have drowned in the water in which I sat.” The constant struggle to reach that ampule kept him conscious and, he thinks, saved his life. Twice he tried to hail passing crew for aid, but couldn’t make a sound, because a fragment in his neck was pressing on his larynx.

  This blast caught hold of Cliff Spencer, too. “One instant I was fine and the next I was blasted through the air for about twelve feet, fetching up on the amidships ladder rail, hanging head down, draped over the railing,” he wrote. “Groggy and disoriented, my first thought was, ‘I’m hit.’ I tried to right myself and as I did I felt a sharp blow as shrapnel from below hit me in the lower back. When I put weight on my right foot, the ankle wanted to turn. I reached down and felt that a portion of my right heel had been sliced away as if with a large knife.” He moved numbly forward toward the radar room, was hit again, then found a shipmate from the Marine detachment, Allen B. Samuelson, calling for him from within the wreckage of a gun mount. Spencer saw that a gun recoil spring had impaled him through the neck, “giving the impression of a grotesque bow tie.” Samuelson asked him for a life jacket. “I reassured him we were not sinking and told him that I would be right back with a life jacket.”

  On the bridge, Bruce McCandless, stunned, ears ringing, wondered where everyone had gone. Quartermaster Harry S. Higdon called out from the helm, “I’ve lost steering control, sir!” and spun the useless wheel to demonstrate. Making eighteen knots, the heavy cruiser, the helmsman found, was locked into a left turn. The new exec, Joseph Hubbard, contacted Central Station and instructed his first lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Herbert E. Schonland, to shift steering and engine control to Battle Two, the after control tower that had been soaked in flames when the Betty bomber struck it that afternoon. “Hardly had this been accomplished,” McCandless wrote, “when a shell plunged through the roof (overhead) of Battle Two, laying waste to this place for the second time in twelve hours, killing Hubbard and the men around him.” Schonland ordered the ship’s steering and engine control shifted to
the conning tower.

  Concussed and in shock, McCandless managed to tell Schonland that he didn’t know where Captain Young and Admiral Callaghan were. He said he appeared to be the only officer alive on the bridge. That meant Schonland was the ship’s senior officer. McCandless asked, “What are your orders?” As damage-control officer, Schonland had plenty to do belowdecks. Several holes in the hull were shipping water, flooding the second deck, located near the waterline. The valves that were used to flood the magazines were a problem, too. A shell hit up forward had killed the damage-control party and ruined the control panel used to open and close the valves. Stuck open, the valves let the water flow. The magazines filled and kept on filling. Soon water was pouring through the ventilation system and flooding other forward compartments. Additional water pumped aboard by firefighting crews added to the problem.

  The San Francisco had at least twenty-five fires, but the remedy was shaping up to be worse than the disease. The ship faced a serious stability issue. Every time she turned, the water on board rushed the other way, throwing a massive amount of weight into the side of the ship on the outside of the turn. The “free-surface effect” of all this water could capsize the ship. Schonland realized that if he went to the bridge to take command, there would be no officer below who understood the delicate flooding situation. He instructed McCandless to “carry out the admiral’s orders.” If McCandless needed help, he said, he would come as soon as he had the stability problem in hand.

  McCandless went down to the heavily armored enclosure below the bridge, joining two quartermasters, Higdon and Floyd A. Rogers, who took turns going aft to the smoke-filled central steering compartment to relieve the faltering steersman, whose job was physically onerous. Through the horizontal slits in the eight-inch armor of the conning tower, McCandless kept a close lookout ahead, keeping the ship in the open water between Savo Island and Guadalcanal. Spying the coast near Lunga, he decided that if it became necessary to beach the ship, he would be sure to do so in the American-controlled sector. As he proceeded along, he imagined himself to be straightening out his battle line, re-forming the assembled power of Task Group 67.4 behind the flagship. Behind the San Francisco, the Portland was advancing into the mix with Abe’s battleships, too. The light cruiser Helena was blasting away at anything her gunners could find. The Juneau, behind her, leading the rear destroyers, lashed into targets near and far with five-inch fire. For all practical purposes, though, the task force had ceased to be a cohesive unit.