Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  With the forward engine spaces gutted and the after boilers swamped, the ship was powerless to resist the currents that moved toward the beach. They threatened to carry the crippled Atlanta within range of Japanese artillery. Commander Nickelson rallied a work party to lower the ship’s remaining anchor to keep her from grounding near the Japanese-held section of the coast. Even with all hundred fathoms of heavy chain run out laboriously by hand, it still did not reach.

  As the shoreward drift continued, Captain Jenkins sent Lloyd Mustin to the ship’s armory to issue Springfield rifles to the crew. As daylight came, shots began ringing out all through the ship’s topside spaces when the newly armed crewmen began firing on Japanese survivors paddling in the oil-drenched waters around the ship. “They were so deeply ingrained against capture that they wouldn’t let us rescue them, for the most part,” said Mustin. He ordered the snipers to stand down.

  With more than half of her forty-five officers killed or wounded, and 153 of 700 enlisted men dead or missing, the Atlanta was ultimately fortunate to lie so close to Guadalcanal. From the auxiliary radio room, survivors called Naval Base Guadalcanal (a makeshift naval station and encampment commanded by the skipper of the late Astoria, Captain Bill Greenman, who adopted the title Commander, Naval Activities, Cactus-Ringbolt Area) and asked for small boats to take off the wounded. The sailors ashore responded swiftly, manning boats and venturing into the battle-littered sea. Bill Kennedy, a gunner’s mate at the station, wrote, “The entire area was covered with a thick layer of oil; all kinds of debris was floating in it with survivors hanging on to whatever they could grab. They were all so black with oil that we had to come in close to see if they were ours or theirs. American survivors took precedence, of course; later in the day we went back out for the Japs but found very few. My boat didn’t see any.”

  A small fleet of utility craft, known as “mike boats,” began motoring out to the ship. Manned by marines, they pulled alongside and took off survivors. To Mustin’s surprise, one of the boats turned out to have an unexpected crew. “As it came alongside where I was standing at the rail—the rail was not very far above the water at this point—here stood up in the boat a Japanese sailor. He had his white uniform jumper on. His boatswain’s insignia were unmistakable. He was gesturing that he wanted some rags. He showed us that he had about six or eight men there who were wounded in various ways and all covered with oil. He was taking care of them. A couple of them were Japanese, and a couple of them were Americans. They were all immobile. They were perhaps unconscious. This one Japanese boatswain’s mate had taken it upon himself to take care of all those sailors.”

  Retrieving the wounded from the clutches of the sea, Atlanta sailors had to content themselves with small victories. Thomas Carroll took a raft out and returned with the only survivor of turret five, a sailor named Stanley Hicks, who had been blown out the side of the gun house when it was hit. Hicks’s reunion with his brother, Benjamin, was tearful.

  To hold on to one’s sanity, it helped, Bill Kennedy found, to see the horror in terms of simple physics. Kennedy wrote, “There were not very many parts, arms and legs, that is. I don’t know why, but when arms and legs are blown off, they usually sink—but not the torso; it will float. Doc told us that the torso has cavities which retain and even produce gasses—like the lungs, stomach, bowels, etc. Makes sense.” After several shuttle trips out to the Atlanta, the decks of Kennedy’s boat were blackened with oil. “It took weeks of washing them down with gasoline, over and over again, to dissolve it. With a lot of sweat, we got the boats clean. That is, we got the oil and grime off. Funny thing about the blood stains; much of it remained until we repainted the boat.”

  As morning deepened, the risk of air attack returned. The Atlanta’s vulnerability was evident enough. Little remained of her formidable main battery. Her aftermost two five-inch mounts were the only ones that weren’t disabled. But without steam, there were no generators working, and thus no power to train them. It was not an ideal state for repelling a fast-developing air attack. A tug working out of Tulagi, the Bobolink, came alongside, hooked up, and gingerly began towing her toward shore until her anchor, streaming at full extension, finally grabbed the seafloor, holding the ship a few miles off Lunga Point.

  The senior assistant in the engineering department, Lieutenant Commander John T. Wulff, realized that the ship’s 250-kilowatt diesel generator could be tied into the switchboard to supply the necessary power, but the superheated compartment needed to be made habitable first. Bill McKinney and others set up a portable blower to remove the tremendous heat from the partially flooded engine room. A submersible bilge pump was next, pumping the water level below the second-level gratings. Then, adjusting the switchboard to take power from the emergency generator, he connected one end of a cable to the 440-volt board, and threaded the other end down several decks to the emergency diesel room, where the generator was. Through trial and error, Wulff and his men got power flowing to turret eight, and soon its guns were barking at the sky as a single Japanese aircraft approached. Ten salvos quelled any ambitions the pilot might have had to finish the crippled vessel, and the plane veered away.

  Close by the Atlanta, a larger ship circled like a shark. When she was first seen, “There was a general rush for the torpedo tubes,” McKinney wrote. They stood down when Lloyd Mustin determined that the stranger was the Portland. The men of that ship, too, had been struggling to peg the identities of the smashed ships around them. Seeing a destroyer standing to their north, they quickly identified it as an enemy and trained the ship’s two forward turrets on her. This turned out to be the Yudachi, still dead in the water. Captain DuBose got on the intercom and invited anyone who wasn’t busy serving the main battery to come topside and watch a firing squad by naval rifle. In the Atlanta, all damage-control work was stopped. “We stood, frozen at the life-lines, spectators to a kind of action rarely witnessed,” McKinney wrote.

  The Portland’s fire-control team quickly got comfortable with their ship’s gyrations, drew on the target with their after director, and fired six salvos from 12,500 yards. Over. Short. Straddle. Straddle. There came then a report from Commander Shanklin that the Japanese destroyer was showing a white flag.

  DuBose asked his gunnery officer what nationality the flag was. The gun boss said, “It’s not in my registry.”

  “Sink the S-O-B,” DuBose replied.

  The next salvo struck the destroyer amidships, bringing a bright flash and a tower of black smoke. When it cleared, nothing remained. On the Atlanta, “We raised a cheer,” McKinney wrote. “A sentimentalist near me croaked, ‘Don’t cheer fellows. The poor guys are dead. It could have been you.’ All shared his observation, few his recommendation.”

  The next short chapter in the “battle of the cripples” belonged to the Japanese. The Hiei, lying north of Savo Island, outside the Portland’s line of sight, opened fire on the nearest American ship, the Aaron Ward. As he lolled in an opiate-addled haze, Bob Hagen watched the great splashes close by as the third and fourth two-gun salvos straddled the ship, compelling Captain Gregor to duck behind the pilothouse wheel. Seeing the frailty of that small installation relative to the towers of seawater raised by the salvo, and his holy terror of a skipper diving for cover, Hagen couldn’t suppress a numb smile. The torment ended quickly for the Aaron Ward when some Marine Dauntlesses from Henderson Field, escorted by Wildcats, found the battleship.

  Shortly after 7 a.m., when Master Technical Sergeant Donald V. Thornbury planted a thousand-pound bomb into the Hiei’s superstructure, it was the first of a rain of ordnance that would fall in a daylong deluge, seventy sorties in all. The Hiei’s assailants included nine Avengers from the Enterprise’s Torpedo Squadron 10, “the Buzzard Brigade,” which attacked after 10 a.m. Led by Lieutenant Albert P. Coffin and Lieutenant MacDonald Thompson, the veterans of the action off Santa Cruz eased their big Grummans out of the cloud cover and dispersed to set up “anvil” torpedo attacks, converging on either bow.
Zero fighter pilots flying from Rabaul, Buin, and the carrier Junyo were foiled by distance and heavy weather and could do little to protect the battleship. The Buzzard Brigade would claim three hits. Rearming at Henderson Field, they attacked again in the afternoon.

  (Photo Credit: 33.1)

  The Hiei still had a surprisingly deep reservoir of fight left in her. She was capable of ten or more knots, and as long as her crew remained ahead in the close race with floodwaters for control of the manual steering compartment, there was hope she might get away. By midmorning, the Kirishima received orders from Admiral Kondo to reverse course and return south to take the Hiei in tow. According to Japanese sources, however, an attack by a U.S. submarine, which landed two dud hits on the Kirishima, compelled Kondo to abandon the plan and recall the Kirishima to rejoin his Advance Force.

  As American planes kept the struggling Hiei under siege, the tug Bobolink took the Aaron Ward under tow, handing her off to a patrol craft that brought her into Tulagi’s harbor. The Portland aspired to get there, too, but her starboard sheer defied all efforts at navigation. Higgins boats pushed against her starboard bow. The ship’s port anchor was cast out and streamed alongside. The crew fashioned large improvised sea anchors out of canvas and threw them overboard, hoping to drag enough water to pull the ship out of her circle. That, too, was to no avail. As the struggle continued, the Portland served as an emergency aid station for wounded sailors rescued from the sound. The cruiser’s whaleboat, Higgins boats from Guadalcanal, and several floatplanes motoring around the surface brought some thirty-eight men aboard, most of them from the Barton. They were treated and sent on to Tulagi. Finally, the busy Bobolink nudged alongside and threw her powerful shoulder into the Portland’s starboard bow. Aided by the patrol boat YC-236, they got the heavy cruiser going in the right direction, creeping along at a walking speed.

  At 10:20 a.m., disturbed by the persistence of the air attacks, which required the ship to keep moving and thus foiled flood-control efforts, Abe ordered the Hiei’s captain, Masao Nishida, to beach the ship on Guadalcanal. The flooding had conquered the steering compartment, and as soon as it was abandoned, the ship was stuck circling northeast of Savo Island. But Nishida flatly refused the order, and in the face of his doggedness, Abe relented. If they could survive the day, they might have the liberty, under cover of darkness, to pump flooded compartments dry and get her under way again.

  The return of the Buzzard Brigade at about two twenty-five that afternoon dashed these hopes. Fliers swooped down and planted a pair of torpedoes into the battleship’s starboard side. The shoring that held the floodwaters out of the steering compartment finally yielded, and the ship became unnavigable. As Captain Nishida ordered the crew to abandon, he supervised them from a chair perched atop turret three aft. He stayed there even as Dauntless dive-bombers bore down on the ship. With the Hiei listing to starboard and down by the stern, Abe ordered Nishida forcibily taken from the ship. Flying his flag in the destroyer Yukikaze, standing by, Abe decided his old flagship was a total loss. Though Admiral Yamamoto intervened directly from Truk, instructing Abe that the Hiei not be scuttled, leaving her instead to lend support to Tanaka’s transports as they approached Savo Sound in conjunction with a renewed attack by surface warships, Abe saw no hope in this. After dark, the Hiei sank unobserved, somewhere north of Savo Island. Yamamoto was reportedly furious with Abe for his resistance, and removed him from seagoing command.

  WHEN THE PILOTS FROM the Enterprise’s Buzzard Brigade returned to Henderson Field, they were met by the surprised commander of the Cactus Air Force, Brigadier General Louis Woods, who declared, “Boys, I don’t know where you came from, but you look like angels dropping out of heaven to us.” Touching down on the airfield again near dusk, with their khakis still fresh and their faces clean-shaven, the carrier pilots found old friends from flight school among the Marine fliers and enjoyed the occasion to celebrate. They gained full membership in the Cactus Air Force by donating some torpedo fuel to the bar, run by Seabees, who always had a healthy supply of grapefruit juice on hand as a mixer. Assigned tents in a camp already crowded with survivors of the naval action, the tenants of Henderson Field raised their glasses and cheered.

  34

  Cruiser in the Sky

  CAPTAIN HOOVER LED HIS SQUADRON OF SURVIVORS TOWARD ESPIRITU Santo, forced to limp at ten knots until temporary repairs let the San Francisco keep pace with the nimbler survivors. The Helena led her and the damaged Juneau south. As the shell-battered Sterett passed the San Francisco to take station ahead, forming a patchwork destroyer screen with the unscratched Fletcher and the lightly grazed O’Bannon, her crew beheld what the night had wrought on Dan Callaghan’s flagship. The bridge was battered and charred; the after control tower, thoroughly put to the torch. They counted twenty-six holes in her port side.

  On request from Bruce McCandless, the Juneau sent the San Francisco a medical officer, Lieutenant Roger W. O’Neil, and a trio of corpsmen to assist with the wounded. O’Neil was angry about being sent away from his ship. “I don’t know why they sent us over here,” he said, coming aboard. “You people are going to sink, and we are needed back on the Juneau.” In Captain Swenson’s ship, a damage-control party was working to fortify her fractured keel.

  Just before dawn, the San Francisco’s senior enlisted men reported topside to join a grim detail, conducting what was known as a body parts sweep. Such an effort was necessary following any battle action in which casualties occurred. Its purpose was to cleanse the ship of human remains. The crew picked up body parts and threw them overboard, and washed down the ship’s steel surfaces of drying blood. As with abandoning ship, it wasn’t something that could be realistically rehearsed ahead of time.

  “The ship was just absolutely a shambles,” said Joseph Whitt, a San Francisco sailor. “It was just like you were opening up your eyes in a nightmare. I walked amidships and the five-inch guns that I passed had been hit, just wrecked. I looked at the stack—and this is a sight that I shall never ever forget. There were holes in the stack from the shrapnel from those explosions, and there was blood from the top of that stack running down the side of it, where the body parts had been blown up there and splattered down the side of it. The way that smelled … it was just something that no one should ever go through.”

  Few new sailors were equipped to handle it. “Detailing the senior rates for this gruesome task was a good call,” Don Jenkins wrote. All around the ship, the growling of handy-billy pumps swelled. Hoses were dropped overboard and streams of water set flowing against all surfaces. Slowly the stubborn knots of flesh clotting the ship’s thousands of crooks and crevices, the drying splashes of blood, were washed away. All hands received a “ditty bag” and were ordered to identify the dead, remove their dog tags and personal effects, place a five-inch dummy shell down the front of their dungarees, cinch their belt tight, and ease the body over the side. The San Francisco had no chaplain aboard, so there was no ceremony to any of this. Lieutenant James I. Cone, who supervised the gathering of personal effects, collected far too many Annapolis class rings for his liking. Through this grimly determined effort, the ship returned to a tolerable state of habitability.

  Littering the deck everywhere were small tubes of phosphorous, detritus of the incendiaries fired by the Japanese battleships. “Fellows were picking them up and putting them in their pockets as souvenirs,” Joseph Whitt remembered. It was a bad move. Some of the dud incendiary elements were still doing a slow burn. “One guy had one in his hip pocket, and before he tore his pants off, this thing really blistered him,” Whitt said. “Water wouldn’t put the fire out.”

  The sickbay was too small to handle all the wounded. They had to be carried to the hangar deck. Don Jenkins recalled, “I never will be able to erase from my mind the utter feeling of helplessness and sorrow one feels as each time you deliver another wounded to the hangar. The moans and screams of pain, and many of the badly wounded calling out to their mothers.” In the admiral�
��s cabin, the doctor from the Juneau, Lieutenant O’Neil, donned a mask to assist in emergency surgery on Captain Cassin Young. His wounds were mortal, and there was no saving him.

  As the ships passed through Torpedo Junction, it was clear to everybody, most of all Captain Hoover, that they were a vulnerable group. The crews of Wasp, the North Carolina, the O’Brien, and the Saratoga had been no less diligent than they were, and had enjoyed far more protection than Hoover’s threadbare destroyer screen offered now. The O’Bannon’s sonar was out of commission. The Sterett’s stack was working, but the ship had no depth charges, having jettisoned them as the fires raged aft. She was able to steer only with her engines. The Fletcher was in good shape. But a single fully functional destroyer was a weak deterrent to submarine attack. Hoover called SOPAC air command to request aerial coverage and hoped for the best.