Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  CLIFF SPENCER, having promised Allen Samuelson a life jacket, went to a life jacket locker, opened it, and found a man hiding inside. “This locker is too thin to protect you!” he hollered, and the marine displaced, only to be killed elsewhere minutes later. Retrieving a pair of life jackets, Spencer went to find Samuelson, stepping around the dead. When Spencer found him again and handed him the jacket, the marine clutched it to his chest and, as Spencer put it, “quietly passed from this vale of tears.” Standing over the dead man, experiencing his first twinges of survivor’s guilt, Spencer wrote, “In his final moments he was not in pain. The life jacket I gave him gave him comfort, and he just slipped away.”

  Then his right hand took an impact that felt like a baseball bat. Spencer saw that his thumb was blown back, leaving “mangled red meat where my hand attached to the wrist.” A sergeant in his detachment, John Egan, was rallying survivors to get the silenced five-inch guns back into action. Seeing that Spencer would be of little help, Egan directed him to sickbay. As Spencer descended several ladders, the last one was ripped away and he fell in a heap to the quarterdeck. When he recovered his senses, he looked around and saw that all but one man from the gallery of five-inch mounts had been cut down. The lone survivor was a chief fire controlman, wounded but still standing. “His headset wires were cut off just below his chin and he was bleeding from the ears and nose,” Spencer wrote. “He shouted the order repeatedly for his non-existent crews to ‘fire.’ He appeared to be dying on his feet and I knew he could not even hear me, let alone help me.”

  Lurching aft on one good leg over razor-edged debris, Spencer stepped over and around the human forms, careful to soften his path by treading on their sleeves and pant legs. One fallen sailor, thus disturbed, shouted, “Get off of me you SOB. I ain’t dead yet.” Spencer hid behind a searchlight platform as a Japanese destroyer appeared to port, firing with small arms. As tracers and small rounds ricocheted off bulkheads, he was hit again. He cried and tried to pray. From a dark corner of the ship, he heard another sailor sobbing. Recognizing the voice, he found it was someone he knew well and hailed him by name. “I’m no coward,” the sailor said. “I just don’t know what to do!” Spencer gave him a job. “He cut off most of my undershirt and wrapped it around my right hand.… He then half carried me down to the mess hall for treatment, talked to me while we sloshed our way forward through the starboard passageway, giving me encouragement every step of the way. Let me tell you, that sailor was no coward.” In sickbay, a corpsman patched his hands and feet with large wound compresses, gave him two morphine syrettes, and sent him to the machine shop to convalesce. “I hobbled and waded through water and over fire hoses to the shop and went through the metal screen door. I hobbled over behind a large lathe, thinking it would protect me from any shell blast to port, and popped myself with a syrette.” Under the influence of the morphine, named after the Greek god of dreams, Spencer laid his head on a life jacket and escaped from the nightmare.

  WHEN JACK BENNETT reported to the San Francisco’s bridge, having seen most of the gun crews he was supervising cut down by gunfire, McCandless departed the conning tower. “Leaving Higdon at the forward slit and Rogers steering, I went back up to the navigation bridge to have another look for Captain Young and get him into conn where he could exercise command of his ship if he were still alive.”

  To a young officer whose training had never prepared him for the vertigo and shock of this butchery, restoring his captain to command must have seemed like a sensible way to set right a careening universe. McCandless found that his head had stopped a few small pieces of shrapnel. The ringing in his ears would not quit, but he was crisply alert to his surroundings. “Against a midnight-blue backdrop brilliant starshell flares drifted down to go out in the sea,” he would write. “Red, white and blue tracers interlaced. Searchlights stabbed the darkness; the Hiei put a cluster of three on us, only to have them shot out by a hail of automatic weapons fire from half a dozen ships. Guns flashed yellow flame. Shell hits kicked up hot red sparks, often a flash; misses threw up splashes. Aboard the Hiei a shower of luminous snowflakes rose above her masthead and fell like a waterfall.

  “The navigation bridge was a weird place indeed in the intermittent light of gunfire,” McCandless continued. “It had been hit several times more during my brief absence. Bodies, helmeted and life-jacketed, limbs, and gear littered the deck. The siren was moaning and water was raining down through holes in the deck above from the ruptured water-cooling system of the forward 1.1-inch quads. I could not identify Captain Young in my hasty search of the navigation bridge, but left convinced that neither he nor anyone else up there would take further part in this action.” He would not. Nor would Admiral Callaghan or any of his staff. On the starboard side of the flag bridge, McCandless found all of them. A battleship projectile had struck the underside of the navigation bridge from slightly abaft the beam and burst directly overhead. Littering the deck were the bodies of Callaghan and three lieutenant commanders on his staff, Louis M. LeHardy, Damon M. Cummings, and Jack Wintle. A fourth, Emmet O’Beirne, was unconscious but alive, the only survivor among the senior staff.

  While making this grim discovery, McCandless stepped into a jagged hole in the deck, fell through, and stuck fast. As he wriggled free, he found himself looking out through another shell hole in the port bridge screen. Through it he could see a Japanese destroyer just a few hundred yards away, racing down the port side on a reverse course, firing into his ship. “Her first shots hit the forward part of the bridge just as I arrived on its after end, but she conveniently shifted to our port five-inch battery, which had taken her under fire. In this mutual mayhem one of our open mounts was hit directly, the others were swept by a storm of fragments. But one gun, firing in local control under chief boatswain’s mate John McCullough, with the last round it got off, caused a large explosion on the destroyer’s stern that looked like depth charges going off.”

  Around this time McCandless reached Schonland on the battle telephone and confirmed that Schonland was the senior surviving officer. With this fragile chain of command, the ship was, according to McCandless, “fighting by departments, each headed by a lieutenant commander. Schonland, in command, would keep us afloat and right side up; Rodney B. Lair would run the engineering plant, which was virtually intact; Wilbourne and Cone controlling our main and antiaircraft batteries, respectively, would engage any enemy ships they could identify; I would essay the role of navigator; and Dr. Edward S. Lowe would attend to the wounded.

  “We had good interior communications (despite a shortage of talkers) over the sound-powered battle telephones, but because of indoctrination and training, little coordination between departments was necessary: officers and enlisted men assumed leadership, saw things that needed to be done and got about doing them without waiting to be told. This is not the best way to run a ship, but it is surprising how far the momentum of a well-trained outfit will carry when its leaders are cut down.”

  31

  Point Blank

  THAT NIGHT THE TORPEDO MARKSMANSHIP OF THE JAPANESE HAD been practiced to the usual high professional standard. Long Lances gutted the Laffey and the Atlanta. Now the hull-busting weapons found the middle of the American line.

  It was nearly 2 a.m., barely fifteen minutes since first contact. Captain DuBose of the Portland had settled on a northerly course. He was blowing salvos at a target on his starboard beam when a torpedo, probably fired by the Yudachi, bubbled in and struck aft on the starboard side. The blast chewed into the cruiser’s fantail, leaving a rough, semicircular bite about sixty feet in diameter. The blast destroyed eighteen compartments, sheared off the inboard screws, and disabled turret three by heaving it from its roller path. A large piece of hull plating, torn out, extended into the sea and scooped a cataract of water, forcing the ship into a sharp right turn that the jammed rudder was helpless to correct. As the ship began circling, nothing the helmsman did with the rudder or the engines could straighten her course
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  After the Portland finished staggering through her first clockwise circle, the Hiei appeared at four thousand yards dead ahead. As his ship came right, Lieutenant Commander Shanklin’s forward eight-inch turrets engaged, firing four salvos as they trained left through the cruiser’s swing to the right, planting an estimated ten to fourteen hits into the ship. As flames washed through her superstructure, the Hiei boomed in return, hitting the Portland with a pair of fourteen-inch bombardment projectiles that squandered most of their force by exploding on contact with the armor instead of penetrating.

  An exact chronicle of events was beyond anyone’s reach now, although a collage of impressions was indelible and immediate to all within the tempest. DuBose saw an unidentified large ship sundered by a great blast. He saw the San Francisco burning. The Helena steamed by close aboard to starboard, drawing clear, her six-inch batteries fast-cycling at targets in the dark. Chick Morris was caught in the spell of what the engines of naval war had wrought. “Other ships, blazing just as brilliantly, rushed through the night like giant torches held aloft by invisible swimmers. It was a picture too vast for the imagination, and even when it was over no man could quite put the flaming bits of the puzzle together or be sure of what he had seen.”

  The Hiei, fires raging all through her now, drew abeam the Juneau. The Japanese battleship was “wallowing there like a wounded monster, spouting a hell of flame, but still very much in action,” the Juneau’s Joseph Hartney would write. “Her searchlights flashed on, fingered across the 2,000 yards of water and seemed to waver and then clamp down on us.” Hartney swiveled his fifties at the light. “I felt nothing now. I was just part of the gun that was bouncing in my hand.” The antiaircraft cruiser’s five-inch batteries slashed into the enemy warship. The tracers looked from afar like “a bridge of red-hot steel between us and the target.”

  The trio of Japanese destroyers from the disengaged side of Abe’s formation entered the mix after the Hiei and Kirishima cleared their lines of fire to the south. The Asagumo, Murasame, and Samidare sighted strange ships burning everywhere. The Murasame jabbed with the Juneau, trading salvos and loosing a spread of eight torpedoes.

  A torpedo caught the Juneau in the belly, on the port side near the forward fire room. Joseph Hartney felt his ship leap and shake in the air and fall back down, heavier on the water than before, listing to port. The explosion ruptured internal bulkheads and buckled the deck. The fire-control system serving her eight twin five-inch turrets failed. Oil fumes leaked up from within. Her chief engineer thought her keel was broken.

  The stricken cruiser veered toward an unidentified Japanese ship whose duress was similar. Seeing her sailors leaping from her burning decks and struggling to escape her fire-eaten passageways, Hartney called it “a weird, unforgettable pageantry that Dante himself could not have dreamed up.” When a lookout shouted a warning of a collision, the quartermaster in the after control station, on a quick order from the exec, evaded in time. The Juneau’s reward for ducking the impact and opening the range again was another fusillade of gunfire into her superstructure. One of her stacks took a hard hit, casting the ruins of its searchlights from their platform onto the deck below. A fourteen-incher smashed into the mess hall triage, killing all the wounded there and their attendants. In the tangle of remaining steel plating, it was difficult to distinguish bulkhead from deck from overhead.

  Throughout the American squadron, a hundred small catastrophes played out. The Portland, torpedoed and circling; the San Francisco, shattered but game. The Atlanta, a leaking, burning wreck; the Juneau, torpedoed and drunk in the keel; the Laffey sinking; the Cushing, still afloat but a lost cause; the Sterett, in a crossfire and burning. On the Laffey, whose propellers had been shorn away with the rest of her fantail, her hull nearly broken in two, a brief argument ensued between Captain Hank and his engineering officer, Lieutenant Barham, about whether the ship could be saved. “Chief, just get me going and I’ll get you out of this,” Hank said. But the engineer recommended abandoning ship. Barham asked for permission to let boats over the side, the least he could do for crew who had already gone over the rail. The captain approved. As Barham left to see about that task, Hank passed the order to abandon ship. Soon thereafter the fires reached a powder magazine. The eruption tore loose the deck, and shattered steel filled the air. “My first reaction was one of surprise—it was as if an old and trusted friend had suddenly hit me with a baseball bat,” Tom Evins remembered. This catastrophe was the last the ship would suffer. Hank was never seen again.

  Such catastrophes were often private experiences for their victims, unwitnessed by ships even in close proximity. As Bruce McCandless would write, “That these disasters could occur within such a short distance of the flagship and not be observed from her bridge seems incomprehensible; that this was the case testified to the intensity of the firestorm about the flagship herself.” Whenever things looked bad, the one thing Admiral Nimitz liked to remind his staff was that “the enemy is hurting, too.” And he was.

  Once the Hiei finished her pass against the Helena, Abe’s flagship had grappled with virtually the whole American line. Her entire superstructure was a conflagration, fiercely lit from within. That vast steel complex, towering over the two sleek and angular twin-mounted fourteen-inch turrets on her forecastle, looked to Jack Cook, one of Captain Hoover’s Marine orderlies, “like a huge apartment building completely engulfed in flames. It was the most amazing sight I ever saw.” Any number of U.S. ships could take credit for the result. Enough of them had crossed the battleship’s path to make most all claims plausible. Among witnesses the predominant emotion seemed to be awe, not joy. These molten ruins had recently been proud, striving, and human. On a night like this, it was difficult not to relate to the enemy’s plight, even as one celebrated it. In the midst of his 1898 victory at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, the U.S. admiral Jack Philip said: “Don’t cheer, men. Those poor devils are dying.” Such a situation called for the right combination of satisfaction and solemnity.

  The idea that fast battleships like the Hiei and the Kirishima would sweep the seas of heavy cruisers like the San Francisco and the Portland, one-third their size, turned out to be unfounded, at least in a battle fought at hull-scraping ranges where heavier armor was no significant advantage. It was probably the San Francisco that inflicted the Hiei’s most consequential wound, a two-meter-wide hole in her starboard quarter that quickly flooded the steering room and shorted the steering engine. With generators short-circuited, the Japanese battleship lost use of her turrets and her hydraulic steering. The secondary battery was disabled by the destruction of its control tower. Despite the battering the Hiei took from some fifty eight-inch and eighty-five five-inch hits, there was little underwater damage and not much flooding aside from the breach of the steering room.

  Around this time, Admiral Abe, struck in the face by shrapnel and probably concussed, must have been operating on reflexes and adrenaline, for he would remember nothing of the battle after he was hit. Sometime around 2 a.m., distracted by his wounds and flinching at the ferocity of the American gunfire, and perhaps even believing he was facing a superior force, Abe decided to cancel the bombardment of Henderson Field. He ordered a general withdrawal.

  In their flooding compartment, the Hiei’s steersmen labored by hand and muscle to keep the ship navigable. Because they could not turn as sharply as the Kirishima, which started her reversal of course from a position on the Hiei’s port quarter, the Kirishima turned inside the flagship’s arc, remaining concealed behind Abe’s burning ship while she came to a homeward course at high speed. As the action drew away from the Portland, Captain DuBose was disoriented. “In the confused picture of burning and milling ships it became impossible to distinguish friend from foe.” Gunners on the destroyer Samidare mistook the Hiei for a U.S. ship. Her commander was preparing a torpedo spread when a correct identification was made, but not before the battleship had fired her secondary battery at the Samidare in turn.
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  Callaghan’s ships never drew a good front-sight bead on the Kirishima. Her only damage by direct fire was a single eight-inch hit on the quarterdeck. In parting, the Japanese battleship’s after turret lofted a last salvo at the San Francisco, a pair of fourteen-inchers fired straight back over the fantail. The Kirishima would escape to fight another day. The Hiei would have a longer residence in Savo Sound.

  AS THE HELENA PASSED the circling Portland and raced after the San Francisco, her main battery directors located a target to starboard, receding at about nine thousand yards. Less than half a minute later, the unidentified vessel opened fire on the San Francisco. It was a destroyer. Instantly, Hoover turned slightly to bring his five turrets to bear. The object of the light cruiser’s continuous-automatic fury was Captain Tameichi Hara’s Amatsukaze.

  Hara had committed a cardinal sin of naval tactics. “Shell drunk,” as he described himself, he neglected to order his searchlight off after taking the San Francisco under fire. Suddenly under a terrible barrage, Hara’s ship reeled. He ordered his gunners to check fire, his searchlight operator to douse the light, and his deckhands to lay a smoke screen. “I hunched my back and clung to the railing. The blast was so strong, it almost threw me off the bridge. The detonations were deafening. I got sluggishly to my feet, but my mind was a complete blank for several seconds. Next, I felt over my body, but found no wounds.” Hara was a lucky one. His ship took some three dozen hits from the Helena, almost all of them blasting holes a meter or more wide in his ship. The Amatsukaze’s hydraulics failed, freezing the gun mounts and the rudder. A warrant officer on the rangefinder had his skull split by a sliver of steel. That same hit tossed Hara’s gunnery officer over the side. In the radio room below him, everyone was dead. Gil Hoover’s gunners had about ninety seconds to batter the Amatsukaze—firing 125 six-inch rounds—before the San Francisco interfered with their line of sight and Hoover ceased fire. The only damage the Helena suffered in the exchange appeared to have been a five-inch hit on her high-mounted after turret, which blew away the leather bloomer from the center gun and gouged its bronze chase so that it could not recoil. The next time the gun was loaded, Lieutenant Earl Luehman, the turret officer, found it would not fire. Confronted with a hot, live round in his breech, he quickly ordered it ejected. When the six-inch round hit the deck, its powder scattered and caught fire, raging briefly until a firefighting team mustered.