Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

by James D. Hornfischer

  Rains were moving over the cloistered waters around Savo. Lightning flickered sporadically. It was 1:42 a.m. when the Chicago’s lookouts reported orange flashes of light against Savo’s shadow. To Bode and the men of the bridge watch, they looked like fires on the beach. A minute later, the plane that was lazing in circles overhead began dropping flares. Five blinding orbs burst well astern, near the transport anchorage off Tulagi.

  From the destroyer Patterson ahead came a blinker signal, “WARNING—WARNING—STRANGE SHIPS ENTERING HARBOR.” Out in the storm-lit sound, the forms of unidentified ships were dimly visible, approaching nearly head-on. The Patterson’s battery barked, lofting star shells, aiming to backlight the bogeys. The Chicago followed suit, but her phosphorous candles failed to light. Critical minutes passed in the dark. The Bagley swung left, drew on the enemy, and fired four torpedoes from her starboard battery. Seeing targets against the glow of his star shells, Commander Frank R. Walker ordered the Patterson’s helm left and shouted an order to launch torpedoes, but the crashes of her gun battery swallowed it. Then Bode heard a report of torpedoes in the water, inbound on several bearings.

  Ahead, the Canberra was seen turning sharply to starboard when a cry came of a torpedo wake headed for the port bow. Bode ordered his rudder hard to port as the Chicago’s engineers, deep in the ship, labored to answer the bell to make full speed. Noticing a quick, bright exchange of gunfire to the west, Bode steered the Chicago on what he thought was “a good course for engaging both turrets and broadside.” As his ship came to twenty-five knots, Bode was still seeking his enemy when, without fanfare or forewarning, the Canberra was savaged by a concentrated barrage. More than thirty Japanese shells struck the Australian heavy cruiser, killing her commander, Captain Frank E. Getting, and other senior officers. Almost at once both of her boiler rooms were destroyed, and with them died all power and light throughout ship. She was a floating nest of flame.

  In this fleeting moment of contact, the Chicago never did fire her main battery. A shell struck the leg of her mainmast, killing two sailors, including the chief boatswain’s mate, and wounding thirteen, including the exec, Commander Adell, who was hit in the throat. A torpedo fired by the Kako struck the ship from starboard, clipping off part of the bow and vibrating the rest of the ship hard enough to disjoin the main battery director. Gunners on her five-inch secondary battery managed to train on and hit an enemy ship, the Tenryu, killing twenty-three men. But the darkness hid the larger targets. Of the forty-four star shells the Chicago lofted, all but six failed to light. As Bode struggled to decide what to do next, he neglected to report the encounter either to his absent superior, Crutchley, or to his colleague who would be up next in the shooting gallery, Captain Riefkohl in the Vincennes, flagship of the northern cruiser group.

  As the Japanese column steamed by, rounding Savo Island in a counterclockwise course and approaching Riefkohl’s squadron, Bode continued west toward what he thought would be the arena of the principal fight. Afterward, the track charts of the battle would show with cruel clarity that this is not at all what Bode was accomplishing. The record would even suggest, to the uncharitable eyes of inquiring superiors, that the star skipper of the cruiser Chicago was in the grip of an emotion quite distinct from courage.

  On a night when the American fleet would need all the best virtues of its commanders, officers, and men to join together, Bode had committed the first in a swift accumulation of errors. Admiral Mikawa had won the draw and, continuing to the east, found Frederick Riefkohl’s cruisers, majestic on patrol but no more alert than the wayward watchdogs of the southwestern force had been despite the spectacular catastrophe of the preceding four hundred seconds.

  7

  The Martyring of Task Group 62.6

  EAST OF SAVO, TWENTY MILES ASTERN OF CAPTAIN BODE’S WESTWARD-charging warship, the nighttime cloud cover was cast into gray relief by intermittent lightning and the distant flashing of gunfire. On a calm sea, the cruisers Vincennes, Quincy, and Astoria were tracing the northwesterly leg of a box-shaped patrol pattern five miles on a side. Their officers were alert to the light but unaware of its source. They did not know that a critical alarm had already been raised.

  Captain William Greenman of the Astoria was steaming as closely as he thought prudent to the Quincy ahead, in order to get maximum protection from his threadbare anti-submarine screen. With only two destroyers, the Wilson and the Helm, leading them in the van, his greatest fear was submarine attack. On August 6, Nimitz had sent “ultra secret” warnings to all his Operation Watchtower commanders regarding the submarine threat. On the evening before the battle, Turner had instructed Crutchley to discontinue using his shipboard floatplanes to search the Slot for enemy ships. The undersea menace loomed largest.

  Now came a radio warning delivered by a destroyer from the southern screening group, the Patterson, “WARNING—WARNING—STRANGE SHIPS.… ” What to make of this?

  Transmitted at 1:47 a.m., the warning had been missed altogether by Captain Riefkohl in the Vincennes. The TBS frequency was clogged with commanders exchanging the administrivia of the midwatch. It had been burdened most of the night by the chatter of destroyer officers wondering how to approach the task of scuttling the transport George F. Elliott, hit in the afternoon air attack. Though the bridge watch on the Quincy received the warning and sounded general quarters, the reason for the alarm was not immediately conveyed to the ship’s gunnery-control stations.

  In the Astoria, a petty officer named George L. Coleman, stationed in the plotting room beneath the bridge, trained his search radar to the west and reported a bogey approaching on the surface at twenty-nine miles. Though Savo Island’s mass blocked the radar’s field of vision within a twenty-five-degree arc off either shore, Coleman registered contacts and reported them to higher command. The fire-control radar was out of order at the time, but Coleman had faith in his longer-range search set. “The search radar was operating as well as it ever had,” Ensign R. G. Heneberger, the Astoria’s radar officer, would write. When the officer-of-the-deck refused to sound general quarters, Coleman pressed his case. “The more I insisted that the enemy was out there, the more I got excited,” Coleman wrote.

  Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it. “The OOD and the other officers tried to tell me that I had a double echo on my scope and that we had a destroyer in that area,” Coleman said. He made such a nuisance of himself after his relief by the midwatch that someone finally threatened to send him to the brig if he didn’t let the next watch settle in and do their jobs.

  The first irrefutable sign that enemy ships were near came when searchlights fixed on Riefkohl’s slumbering formation and a heavy salvo raised the seas just short of the Vincennes. No one, not even the officer whose duty it was to expect the worst, Riefkohl, believed a Japanese fleet could reach them before morning.

  Sweeping the horizon through his glass, the executive officer of the Vincennes spotted a glow of light and silhouettes on the water, about four miles on his port beam. The “great display of light” blooming in the haze was the product of the high halo of a star shell. The gunnery officer believed it was from the flash of American gunfire bombarding shore. The Astoria’s captain, Greenman, too, was fooled by the evidence before his eyes. When he was roused to a view of Bode’s southern group dying in the dark, he said, “I didn’t know they were shelling the beaches tonight,” and returned to his cabin. But even when the shock of heavy underwater explosions came, the throes of Bode’s squadron could too easily be dismissed by the most plausible explanation: the detonations of depth charges dropped by destroyers hunting submarines.

  Captain Greenman was unaware of the discord in his pilothouse concerning purported radar contacts. Had he been awake, he might have heard through the open hatch the argument between one of the two quartermasters of the watch, Royal Radke, who heard a plane overhead and asked permission to pull the general alarm, and the officer-of-
the-deck, a young lieutenant, who declared such an action the captain’s prerogative. Radke wasn’t standing on ceremony when a decision might determine life or death. Without further deliberation or entreaty, he pulled the red lever. Some would say that this act of insubordination ended up saving more than a few American lives.

  Having dealt with Bode’s force in summary violent fashion, the four Japanese cruisers—the Chokai leading the Aoba, Kako, and Kinugasa—swept along to the northeast. The Kinugasa was still dealing fire at the ruined Canberra when the Chokai ahead fixed her searchlights on the Astoria, last in Captain Riefkohl’s column, and eighty-two hundred yards, or four and a half miles, to the northeast. The Aoba lit the Quincy, and the Kako took the Vincennes.

  Mikawa’s gunners were turning their batteries on the American column when the lieutenant in the Astoria’s main battery director, Carl Sander, found himself studying a strange cruiser through his spotting glasses. Recognizing foreign architecture, he shouted into the phones, “Action port! Load.” As Sander coached the boxy bulk of his gun director onto the target, his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Truesdell, in Sky Control high in the foremast, saw searchlights probing out of the darkness to port. He shouted, “Fire every damn thing you got!”

  Awakened, Greenman reached the bridge shortly after Astoria had let loose her first salvo. “Who sounded the general alarm?” he demanded to know. “Who gave the order to commence firing?” Greenman thought the worst—not an enemy attack, but a blunder of fratricide. When the second salvo blew, the captain feared his gunners were firing into friendly ships. The quartermaster, Radke, was still catching hell from the skipper when a report came that the five-inch-gun deck was on fire. Only when an experienced voice such as Truesdell’s had confirmed that the ships illuminating them were hostile did Greenman let his gunners do their work. From that moment on, the Astoria roared.

  Feeling the lurching of the ship and watching yellow light flash through the slats of the porthole to his sleeping compartment, Joe Custer knew suddenly that he would not escape the battle unhurt. “It was there, as vivid and clear as though someone had told me,” he wrote. For a moment he was frantic to know where the injury would strike him, but then he understood there was little use fretting over what he couldn’t control. “I was suddenly cool and calm: What is to be, is to be.”

  Running to the weather deck, a radio department officer, Lieutenant Jack Gibson, was “surprised to see that we were fixed by a searchlight like a bug on a pin.” Like her two consorts, the Vincennes and the Quincy, the Astoria seemed to come to fighting life when her guns opened up. But enemy gunners were several turns ahead of the Americans in the cycle of loading, fire, and correction of aim. Two hundred yards ahead of the Astoria and five hundred yards to port, a tight group of splashes rose, short. The next group fell a hundred yards closer ahead, five hundred short. The Astoria responded, and then a third salvo fell, directly abeam to port but still five hundred yards short. Tracking targets that were running on a course opposite her own, the Astoria’s director-controlled turrets swiveled aft until they hit the stops that kept them from blasting her own superstructure. The fourth salvo from the Japanese reached out three hundred yards closer aboard. Finally, after the fifth enemy salvo, Admiral Turner’s old ship took one square amidships, in the aircraft hangar.

  Order of Battle—Battle of Savo Island

  Allied

  Task group 62.6

  Rear Adm Victor A. C.

  Crutchley, RN

  Radar Pickets

  Blue (DD)

  Ralph Talbot (DD)

  Southern Cruiser Group

  HMAS Australia (CA)

  HMAS Canberra (CA)

  Chicago (CA)

  Bagley (DD)

  Patterson (DD)

  Northern Cruiser Group

  Vincennes (CA)

  Quincy (CA)

  Astoria (CA)

  Helm (DD)

  Wilson (DD)

  Japan

  STRIKING FORCE

  Vice Adm Gunichi Mikawa

  Chokai (CA)

  Aoba (CA)

  Furutaka (CA)

  Kako (CA)

  Kinugasa (CA)

  Tenryu (CL)

  Yubari (CL)

  Yunagi (DD)

  (Photo Credit: 7.1)

  There was a sublime absurdity to the process by which a U.S. warship roused itself to action. When the general quarters or battle stations alarm rang, men assigned to a particular station on routine watch were replaced by men assigned to that same station to do battle. The replacement of watch personnel by general quarters personnel was wholesale, including key people such as the supervisor of the watch, the officer-of-the-deck, the junior officer-of-the-deck, the helmsman, and all the talkers assigned to the phones on the bridge. Every one of these people changed stations when the general alarm sounded. Though a well-drilled crew could complete the scramble within short minutes, the procedure ensured that officers and crew spent precious, perhaps decisive minutes scrambling, not fighting. It was like a game of musical chairs, begun precisely in that critical moment when seconds weighed most heavily and the marginal cost of a lapse was highest.

  A gunner’s mate standing watch in the forward antiaircraft director, known as Sky Forward, had a difficult course to run after the alarm sounded. He had to scramble down a warren of ladders and passageways to the armory, retrieve the key to the five-inch magazine, run to the magazine, unlock it for the handling crew, then run back up to the flight deck and stand by to launch aircraft from the catapult. All of this had to be done in three minutes—“a stupid set up,” an Astoria sailor would say. “By the time I started my descent, the ship had been hit by several salvos and was on fire below.”

  Surprise was lethal to a ship that operated under such a system. When ladders between decks were blown away, crews had no way to reach their stations. Lieutenant Jack Gibson, the radio officer, was witness to this absurd and tragic chaos. He was climbing from his watch station on the weather deck all the way up to the main battery director while the first blows landed. “The Astoria was shuddering from heavy hits and the repercussion of her own gunfire,” he wrote. “The air was filled with shrapnel that was clanging against the bulkheads, and the well deck, as I passed over it, was strewn with bodies of fallen men. I crouched down to the level of the metal railing, then clambered up to the hangar deck. Up there I was struck by the full glare of the Jap searchlights—and between that and the whizzings and ringings of metal all around me, I suddenly felt as if the fury of the whole war had been turned on me.”

  Gibson bucked up his courage and continued to climb. “One more crossing, another ladder, and I was at my station and out of the light. A burst of shells followed me through the door. They pierced the hangar deck and set the launches on fire. Then the planes began to burn. Their gas tanks caught fire and spread the flames.” Another shell hit the base of the starboard aircraft catapult, plowed across the well deck, and exploded in or under the galley, setting afire the starboard side of the well deck and igniting the plane on the starboard catapult.

  A hard lesson came now: The Achilles’ heel of a cruiser in battle was the highly flammable realm of her shipboard aviation division. In modern navies, cruisers carried catapult-launched floatplanes for reconnaissance and gunfire spotting. The traditionalists bemoaned the oil stains the aircraft left on their ships’ polished teak. Untended planes could do far worse under fire. They made their hosts into tinderboxes. Hangars were rich with flammables: spare wings, drums of lubricating oil, gasoline, and ordnance. The simple act of launching the aircraft unmanned into the sea, and jettisoning their combustibles as the Japanese had already done, would have paid a great dividend. Pacific Fleet headquarters had considered the risks and left the decision to discard the planes to the personal discretion of commanders.

  The hangars were fuses to countless other flammables: paint, paper, furniture, and exposed crates of ready-service ammunition in nearby gun mounts. Steel and wire and cork and glas
s—all of it burned readily. The heat of the fires was sometimes intense enough to ignite paint on bulkheads two compartments away. The burning paint ferried flames through the compartments. Vital sprinkler systems were distributed by long runs of piping, exposed and vulnerable to shellfire, shock, and shrapnel. Fire mains, centrally fed and routed, could fail shipwide with a single hit in the wrong place.

  High-velocity fragments ignited the crates of powder and ordnance stacked on the gun deck. Five-inch shells were set off like rockets or sat there and burned, igniting other charges or causing the projectiles themselves to explode.

  Custer was watching one of the boxes burn as a sailor played a stream from a fire hose over it. “In a few minutes the stream grew feeble, stopped altogether; the power was off. The sailor moved away with the hose, and I edged forward for a better view of the flaming gun deck below.… There was a tremendous white flash—a huge sheet of flame—then crimson spurts flaring in all directions. I heard the whir-whir of shrapnel on all sides … and suddenly I felt a hot, piercing stab of pain in my left eye … shooting stars sprayed in violent streaks.” Feeling for his wound and smearing red streaks across his cheek, he thought, I’ll never see Hawaii again. Squinting through the blood, he groped toward a cluster of sailors sheltered under an overhang in the superstructure. Custer’s thinking ran to distraction—So this is how it feels to die, he thought—even as he rebuked himself for his dramatics.