Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  In the San Francisco, damage-control parties were working furiously to keep the floodwaters from overturning the ship. No pumps were available to fight them. There were no drains on the ship’s second deck, where the flooding was worst. With free surface water sloshing back and forth with each rudder movement, changing the ship’s center of gravity unpredictably, the water level was rising by the minute. There was nowhere to send it. The first challenge was to stop the inflow. A crew led by Ensign Robert Dusch crawled forward through the flooded passageways and compartments, feeling for the valves that controlled the magazine flooding and groping with reach rods to turn them shut. They struggled like run-blocking offensive linemen to prop mattresses against holes in the hull, no small task on a ship maneuvering at battle speed.

  When Schonland climbed out of Central Station to see what could be done, the water was threatening to spill over the top of the hatch coaming that led down to his belowdecks compartment. His men, trapped in the dark and relying on handheld lanterns for light, were sorry to see the popular officer leave them. When some water came sloshing over the coaming, they feared they might be drowned by a deluge from above.

  To get rid of the water, Schonland and Ensign Dusch directed the crew to position mattresses in the port passageway from the Marine compartment to serve as a sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch to the air lock leading down to the number one fire room. Warning the men below that “We’re going to take water down there, a lot of it, and fast,” he proceeded to drain the second deck compartments into the lower decks of the ship, to serve as ballast. From there bilge pumps could begin discharging water out of the ship.

  Noticing his ship’s drunken gait as she turned in a lazy circle, Lieutenant (j.g.) Jack Bennett returned forward and found Bruce McCandless lying unconscious outside the conning tower. A large shell had struck atop it, about two feet over McCandless’s head. The thickly armored overhead held fast, but flames roared in through the viewing slits through which the lieutenant commander had been peering with his binoculars. The device probably saved McCandless’s eyes, but the concussion laid him out flat. How long the quartermaster, Floyd Rogers, had been conning the ship alone, passing orders (his own) to the after steering station, was impossible for Bennett to tell. “Rogers couldn’t see the compass and the gyro was fifteen degrees out anyway. He couldn’t see. It was pitch black, and with a headset on he couldn’t hear. But he kept his cool,” Bennett said. Callaghan and his staff lay scattered around the deck, their bodies without a mark of violence on them, soaked by water leaking from a cooling tank on a 1.1-inch mount.

  Since the loss of electrical power had disabled the flagship’s sprinkler system, bucket brigades went to work battling the two dozen fires within the ship. All the water they might have needed was sloshing around in the ship three decks underfoot, but with the pumps and mains out of order, they had to lower buckets into the sea on lanyards made from telephone wire.

  The flooding was serious, but it would have doubtlessly been fatal to the flagship had Abe’s battleships used armor-piercing ordnance instead of high-explosive and incendiary rounds meant for bombardment. If this was a gift to the San Francisco as far as her hull integrity went, it extracted a steep cost in casualties topside. Eugene Tarrant, the captain’s cook, was a standby fuze setter on one of the five-inch gun mounts. He was also detailed, as many in S Division were, to assist the ship’s two doctors and four pharmacist’s mates in tending to the wounded. Early in the battle, the call went over the loudspeakers for all medics to report to the well deck on the double. Their workload did not relent.

  Assigned to work with a pharmacist’s mate, Tarrant treated and bandaged those he could, gave morphine to those who needed it, and put tags on the rest. If someone needed a tourniquet, or an emergency procedure that was painful or invasive, it was Tarrant who held him down and tried to settle him while the pharmacist’s mate went to work. He quickly ran out of syrettes, so he started taking them from fallen officers, each of whom carried six on his belt. When Tarrant ran low again, he started splitting them two ways, then three. He wondered if the lower dosages did any good.

  Tarrant helped lead a fire hose around turret three into the burning aircraft hangar, set afire by enemy gunfire. The planes had been catapulted away, but plenty of flammable things remained: fabric parts, textiles, gasoline, and stored aerial depth charges. A pile of kapok life jackets was burning fiercely. When that fire was suppressed, the remains of one of the ship’s floatplane pilots were found underneath. He had died where he tried to hide. A first-class boatswain’s mate, Reinhardt J. Keppler from Wapato, Washington, fought the fires in the hangar and elsewhere and ministered to the injured despite his own severe wounds. They were mortal. Before he finally collapsed from blood loss, he saved several others from the same fate.

  Leonard Roy Harmon, a mess attendant first class, was a genial kind of guy, big, tall, and, according to Tarrant, fun to be around. Hailing from Cuero, Texas, he was clean-cut and very country. He didn’t drink and didn’t smoke and was awkward on the dance floor. He had a girl back home whom he planned to marry. Until then, he bided his time in the fleet and made friends where he could find them—among the cooks and mess attendants. “We were the only game in town,” Tarrant said. “If we didn’t get along together, we were in terrible shape. All we had was each other. We went ashore together, went to dances, picked out our girls.”

  Tarrant and Harmon were called topside, given stretchers, or “metal baskets” as Tarrant called them, and assigned to help the pharmacist’s mates locate and rescue wounded from lower decks. The work would have been strenuous even if the ship hadn’t been maneuvering under heavy fire. Ladders were blown away throughout the ship, hatches jammed, and the threat of shrapnel, fire, and flood all-encompassing. Moving up and down from below to the boat deck, and then carrying the wounded back to fantail, was exhausting, even for a muscular sailor.

  Tarrant had never felt closely attached to the ship. He was willful and not shy about meeting the gaze of those who had been raised not to like him. Even if the shipboard culture hadn’t been one of exclusion, it was usually hard for a man who had his own mind to feel part of the team. But now, moving around the ship tending to the San Francisco’s wounded, Tarrant found the alienation washing away. His ship dying. Everyone at risk. Common cause under a buffeting of explosions. A burning in the shoulder and legs, the clatter of a metal stretcher going up a ladder. Blood on his sleeves. The sound of a shipmate’s moaning.

  “You move like you’re moving in a dream,” he said. “You’re trained to do this. And you reach a point where you’re going like a robot.” In the dark, on the quarterdeck, near the ruins of an antiaircraft mount Tarrant heard: “Help me.” Dimly he saw a figure slumped in the mount’s steel trainer’s seat. He grasped the man’s shoulder in order to assess his wounds, and the shoulder and the arm, all of it, came off in his hand. A spray of warm blood splashed across his face and spread down the front of his shirt. He reacted as all medics were trained. He made a fist. He stuck it into the hole above the armpit. With the bleeding stanched, the pharmacist’s mate went to work wadding and wrapping the wound. “I dreamed about that for nights and days and years.”

  Elsewhere on the ship, Leonard Roy Harmon was helping a pharmacist’s mate named Lynford Bondsteel. Harmon’s numerous small acts of duty and mercy included pulling the unconscious navigator Rae Arison out of the puddle in which he lay, saving him from an unlikely drowning. Harmon had comforted the executive officer Crouter as he lay dying in his stateroom. He took him out into the passageway and stayed by his side as he passed. Harmon was on the well deck, heading with Bondsteel to the aid station in the hangar, when a burst of tracers began snapping into the bulkheads around them. Harmon interposed, pushing Bondsteel down so hard he almost fell down a ladder as he himself was engulfed by the swarm. Tarrant would find Harmon later, unconscious with a wound in his head. He spoke to his friend, urging him to fight. “Harmon suffered for qui
te a while before finally letting go. It seemed to me to last forever.” Tarrant found another friend from the wardroom mess, Charles Jackson, on the deck near the officer’s galley, his abdomen opened by a blast. Herbert Madison, too, Tarrant’s partner during countless sparring matches on the quarterdeck, with a body so beautifully chiseled and heroic, was dead but without a cut on his body, slain by shock.

  There were many men to tend to, of all rates and races and regions, but never did one of them say to Tarrant, “Take your hands off me. I don’t want to be saved by your kind.” Men like the Georgia boys in the Monssen who couldn’t be understood over the battle telephones, or the aggressively unsuperstitious backwoods souls on the Fletcher who had laughed at the ill omens of so many thirteens—not one of them ever called Tarrant the name that would have been routine for the times under ordinary circumstances. “They’d look at me and they’d thank me,” Tarrant said. “Some of them, while they were dying, were delirious. They called me ‘mother,’ or ‘brother,’ or something like that. They’d say, ‘Hold me mommy,’ and I’d hold them. We all bleed, we all grieve, we love, we hate, we do all the things that any other human being does. We all learned that, and it really applied, on that night.”

  THE CHALLENGE FOR VESSELS in the rear of the American and Japanese lines, the last to make contact, was to make sense of the chaos that churned the seas in front of them and to do something useful in confused close combat. “I am reluctant to compare what happened next to a land battle,” wrote Julian Becton, the exec of the destroyer Aaron Ward, “yet in this case the confused drive of our ships right into the middle of the Japanese formation did somewhat resemble the charge immortalized by Tennyson. Every American ship took the bit and raced at Admiral Abe’s forces. We were in among them before they knew what was happening, firing every gun that would bear, launching torpedoes port and starboard.”

  From the bridge of the Amatsukaze, just a few hundred yards away, Captain Hara saw the Yudachi ahead, guns blazing, cutting in front of the Americans and nearly colliding bow-to-bow with the Aaron Ward, which was following the Juneau, and leading the four rear destroyers. The second U.S. tin can, the Barton, had to reverse her engines to avoid colliding with the Aaron Ward from astern. Less than a minute had passed when, with the Barton lagging about a thousand yards off the Aaron Ward’s starboard quarter, two Long Lances struck the Barton, producing a monstrous explosion and an incandescent ball of fire. In the Aaron Ward, Bob Hagen had a close-up view. Commander Wylie, the exec of the Fletcher, bringing up the rear, wrote that the ship “exploded and simply disappeared in fragments.” Tameichi Hara rubbed his eyes in disbelief, believing his torpedoes had done this lethal work. “The ship, broken in two, sank instantly. I heaved a deep sigh. It was a spectacular kill and there was a roaring ovation from my crew.”

  The Barton’s survivors, a mere 42 of her complement of 276, were splashing into the sea even before they could grasp what had happened. Only two officers survived, and just one man from the hundred-odd men stationed belowdecks, a radioman named Albert Arcand, who narrowly escaped the after radio compartment through a surge of seawater that plunged through the overhead hatch as he spun it open. They were soon set upon by the O’Bannon, speeding east, away from the battle zone and right into their midst.

  The experience was terrifying for the survivors in the water. The bow wave tossed them up and away, then the suction of the passing hull, clearly emblazoned with the number 450, drew them back in toward her, the wake marking the path of the churning twin screws. There followed an explosion, probably caused by depth charges detonating. The blast lifted the O’Bannon’s stern out of the water as she steamed by, leaving untold casualties among the men in the water.

  Bob Hagen was still thunderstruck by the demolition of the Barton off his starboard quarter, helping Captain Gregor distinguish friend from foe, when the Aaron Ward made the passing acquaintance of an enemy destroyer, probably the Yudachi. The American ship got the better of the fierce, brief exchange, leaving the Yudachi dead in the water. A few minutes later, the Aaron Ward caught a big one. A fourteen-inch bombardment round tore a thirty-inch hole in the bulkhead outboard of the galley on the port side and exploded, swirling up a gust of shrapnel that flew in all directions. Hagen was cut down by a concussion that burst upward at him, suffering multiple wounds from fragments of silverware and shards of glass. His left bicep was minced. A four-inch-long bolt stuck in his thigh. Dazed and bleeding badly, he tried to turn away the pharmacist’s mates who tended to him, but both put a syrette into him. One of them fixed him a tourniquet around his left arm, and before long he was in “la la land,” asleep in his own blood.

  Steaming behind the Barton, second to last in line, the destroyer Monssen loosed five torpedoes, one at a time, at a battleship off her starboard beam. A few minutes later, after counting several hits on that target, Lieutenant Commander Charles E. McCombs, her captain, fired five more torpedoes in succession at a destroyer. Ahead to port, he could see a U.S. destroyer, probably the Aaron Ward, getting the worst of an exchange with a Japanese ship at close range. His gun boss turned the Monssen’s four guns in the American ship’s defense and let loose until the enemy ceased firing.

  As star shells popped overhead, McCombs turned his rudder full right and saw a destroyer ahead to starboard, less than a thousand yards away, unmistakably Japanese with double white bands painted around her stack. The Monssen’s starboard twenties laced into her, throwing a thousand rounds into her topside stations. McCombs’s after five-inch gun added half a dozen more. McCombs cursed the illumination from the star shells fired by what he suspected were friendly ships. As a precaution, he switched on and off the trio of colored lights on his superstructure that signaled his identity as an American vessel. And that was when a wave of hellfire washed over the small ship.

  At around two twenty-five, the Monssen absorbed a fusillade. A five-inch shell hit the forward gun, killing the entire crew. The handling rooms serving guns two and three took hits that put them out of action. Another shell struck the Monssen in the engineering spaces, cutting steam lines and rupturing a throttle manifold. Off the starboard bow, a larger enemy ship was letting go in a deeper, statelier rhythm. One of these heavier projectiles seems to have been an incendiary. The oversized Roman candle hit the Monssen’s superstructure and turned it into a bonfire. The smaller shells hitting the ship all along her length became too numerous to count; McCombs would estimate them at forty.

  The man who had captained the Monssen at the start of the Guadalcanal campaign, Commander Roland Smoot, had fallen ill and was hospitalized at Nouméa. When Smoot’s replacement was killed in a plane crash en route to the theater, fortune arranged for Lieutenant Commander McCombs, Smoot’s exec, to ascend to command. McCombs might have pondered this conspiracy of fate as he stood in the midst of the blaze on his bridge, his escape aft blocked by fires eating up the passageway, and his route out and down blocked by the sudden absence of ladders, torn from the bulkheads by the gunfire. With all of officers’ country afire, with the ship’s power dead, all guns silent, all fire mains without pressure, both battle dressing stations hit, and virtually every soul on the ship, including McCombs, wounded by shrapnel or worse, the captain passed the order to abandon ship. A torpedo, a white track lit by star shell light, broached and porpoised fifty yards ahead. Two more passed underneath the ship. A fourth buzzed astern on the surface, its propeller kicking up a spray.

  As the Monssen slowed and settled, the Fletcher passed her to port. By the time the Fletcher, the last ship in Callaghan’s column, entered battle, the outcome had been decided, the worst damage inflicted. The destroyer’s executive officer, Joseph Wylie, could hear metal fragments from the Barton raining down on the deck as he watched the SG radar in the chart house aft of the bridge. His skipper, Commander William Cole, appreciated the value of the advanced equipment even if Admiral Callaghan hadn’t. Cole broke with traditional practice by putting his senior subordinate, Wylie, in the chart house instead
of in the after control station. Wylie was sketching the radar readings, but the effort was superfluous now that the principal opposing ships had spent themselves and were looking to regroup and withdraw. Cole conned the Fletcher to a southerly course toward Guadalcanal, then swung east to run parallel to shore. The destroyer was near Lunga Point when lookouts spied a large ship shooting at something in the north. Recognizing an enemy vessel, Cole turned to unmask his torpedo batteries and launched a spread. Seeing explosions, he claimed several hits on the distant target. Wylie and his captain had been speaking through a ventilation port in the bulkhead between the chart house and the bridge. Through it now, Cole hollered to Wylie, “Hey, Joe, aren’t you glad our wives don’t know where we are right now?”