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

by James D. Hornfischer

  Robert E. Riddell, a gunner’s mate, was awakened by flares as he slept near his station, a 1.1-inch quad mount forward on the port side. He told his trainer, F. C. Loomer, to train on a searchlight to port. Coaching onto his target, Riddell pulled the firing lever and rattled away for a while. The light went out, another appeared, and he had no sooner nudged Loomer’s shoulder to change targets when time stopped and the world went black. When Riddell came to he found that his legs wouldn’t take his weight, and that whatever had taken out his legs out had drilled Loomer straight through the torso.

  As the Astoria shuddered, the Vincennes took several devastating shell hits from the Kako. These first hits were critical, striking the bridge on the port side, killing the communications officer and two men in the pilothouse. Hits came by the dozen now, the price of being enveloped after Mikawa’s single column of ships separated into two parallel columns during the rush of battle maneuvers. The Americans were caught in the crossfire by gunners who could see their every burning move. Somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred medium-caliber shells found Riefkohl’s ship.

  The Japanese eight-inch projectiles were set to explode after traveling an average of sixty feet following penetration. Grievous as those internal wounds were, torpedoes were far worse. Hitting below the waterline, they turned the pressure of the heavy sea itself into a lethal weapon. The quick use of torpedoes was a signature Japanese tactic. IJN torpedo officers were taught to hold their fire until everything, slow fish and fast shells, could hit all at once. According to Raizo Tanaka, a rear admiral who pioneered the proactive use of destroyers in night combat, “An ideal torpedoman is full of aggressive spirit and has a strong sense of responsibility and pride in his work.” IJN destroyer commanders were skilled shiphandlers all—“the Navy’s crack night combat force” and “brilliant torpedo experts.” According to Tanaka, “From top to bottom the training and discipline of the crews was flawless. Operational orders could be conveyed by the simplest of signals, and they were never misunderstood.”

  Several torpedoes hit the Vincennes from the port side. The blasts, amplified by the weight of the water, struck at the vital innards of a ship. When inrushing water killed the electrical system feeding the Vincennes’s main battery and silenced her circuits of internal communication, Captain Riefkohl was unable to talk to his engine room, to the officers in Central Station, or the gunnery team in Main Battery Control. He could not signal his following ships. In the course of the short twenty-minute contest, the flagship would manage just two nine-gun salvos, both to port, and two six-gun salvos to starboard. Her battle was quickly and mercifully over. The gunfire of Mikawa’s turret captains was aimed with uncanny accuracy. Six of the nine eight-inch turrets on the three U.S. cruisers were disabled by direct hits. Though Riefkohl must have known that his enemies lurked on all bearings, in the disbelieving first minutes he never quite shook the belief that he was under attack by friendly ships. He blinkered entreaties to them, and hoisted colors, bright in the glare of hostile searchlights, meaning to suggest that this was all a mistake. It all was a mistake, but not the kind the commodore imagined.

  From the perspective of Toshikazu Ohmae, Mikawa’s chief of staff in the Chokai, the Americans were like targets in a gallery. “There were explosions everywhere. Every torpedo and every round of gunfire seemed to be hitting a mark. Enemy ships seemed to be sinking on every hand!” About eight minutes after landing their first hits on the Vincennes, the Kako and Kinugasa shifted to the Astoria, last in the staggering American line. The Furutaka and Yubari picked up the Vincennes by the light of her fires and the Furutaka’s searchlight.

  Riefkohl’s destroyers, the Wilson and Helm, could do little to save her. When the Wilson, riding on the starboard bow of the Vincennes, turned left to close with the enemy, she found the U.S. cruisers blocking her approach. Tactical prudence kept her from firing torpedoes in the proximity of friendly ships, and their flames blinded her to any targets. With the nearby mass of Savo Island lying in the line of sight behind Mikawa’s ships, the Wilson’s radar could not register accurately. She fired her four five-inch guns in a rocking ladder, back and forth over the range that was shown by her stereoscopic rangefinder: about twelve thousand yards. Most of the rounds the Wilson fired—more than two hundred of them—were antiaircraft rounds with fuzes set on safe. Time rushed by to the point of vertigo, and even the Wilson’s clocks surrendered to the chaos. “Times in the above narrative are approximate,” the captain wrote after the action, “for the hands on the bridge clock fell off on our first salvo and it was not realized that the quartermaster was not making exact time records of the occurrences until some time later.” The Helm, steaming on the port bow of the Vincennes, fired just four rounds at the Japanese for want of visible targets.

  Several fires were already burning on the Quincy, courtesy of the Aoba’s third salvo. The ship’s after turret took a hit in the faceplate, dislodging a large piece of armor and jamming the turret in train. An aircraft on the port catapult ignited. Her two forward turrets got off three salvos each before turret two was hit and burned out, killing everyone inside. Some of the fires on the ship were the product of incendiary shells that exploded without penetrating and cast flammable pellets all over.

  On the Astoria, Keithel P. Anthony, a water tender, was racing through the machine shop, aiming to reach the ladder that descended to the number three fire room, when a powerful kinetic force seized the whole bulkhead in front of him and swung it into his path. He was standing there perplexed, his way blocked, when a lieutenant named Thompson found him and said, “There are men in the forward mess hall who need help. Will you go with me?” Anthony assented and, strapping a gas mask over the top of his head, was preparing to venture forward when another explosion bedazzled him. “The lights went out and there were millions of sparks everywhere—like electrocution. I was knocked out and don’t know how long I laid there on the deck. When I came to, there wasn’t a soul moving in the compartment.”

  When Anthony saw Lieutenant Thompson again, he was dead, “blown clear through a wire mesh and his body wrapped around the main steam stack.” His left arm and leg useless, bleeding and in severe pain, Anthony entered the machine shop and found bodies two-men deep. He wondered how he had survived, and soon found that it was only because he had somehow managed to snap the chinstrap of his gas mask that he would live with the curse of being a sole survivor. Poisonous gases killed everyone else. Anthony pulled himself through an escape hatch to the main deck by the starboard side galley. “I sat there and listened to hits coming in left and right overhead. Everything was burning.”

  Lieutenant Jack Gibson described “a roar like an express train in a tunnel” as a Japanese shell hit the main battery director’s control station. “It came right through it, clipping off the steel stem of the sight-setter’s stool and dropping him swearing to the deck. In the half-dark I could see him clawing at the rear of his pants to find out if he was all there.” A voice with a Tennessee twang drawled, “That’ll teach you not to be settin’ when yo’ betters are left standin’ up.”

  “We didn’t have long to laugh,” Gibson wrote. “Our director was so jammed we couldn’t move it.”

  Bathed in the glare of the enemy’s carbon arcs, Joe Custer was lazily aware of men huddled around him. From them came “an overtone of muffled sounds, like mumbled prayers,” he wrote. “There was a crash of an exploding shell right around my ears, and the sudden rat-tat-tat of unseen fragments ricocheting all about me, like steel popcorn sprayed up against the inside walls of a cage. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them whistling by and spattering off the overhead.”

  He remembered his premonition that he would be wounded, but realized then, too, that he would not die. The chief radioman guided him past a large gash in the deck and seated him behind turret two, which provided a loom of shelter even as it shattered his world now and then with blasts from its three muzzles. Then the chief led him down a boom to the main deck, but then
turret two raged again, producing “a crushing explosion” right above him. The deck heaved as Custer shuffled down the boom, using his hearing to gauge his progress. “Look out for my leg,” a sailor nearby said. Custer forced his good eye open and saw through his own blood a chubby sailor in dungarees, his right leg hanging by a shred below the knee. As the sailor sat down on the forecastle, soaked in gore, Custer wondered how the end would feel. If I have to go, he thought, let it be quickly.

  Lieutenant Gibson, stationed in the main battery director, could scarcely stand from the slippery blood on the metal deck. “In flashes of light I could see some of my men, dead with their earphones still on. They had stepped to the door to see what was happening and had taken shrapnel through the chest. The smoke and heat were unbearable in our iron box, but we still tried to get our guns into play. First-class fire controlman Wade Johns reported huskily, ‘I can see ’em, sir!’ It was more than I could do. My gun pointer and gun trainer were at their places straining to get their cross wires lined up, and my sight-setter sat on his metal stool. I noticed wounded men on the floor trying to drag themselves up to their posts.”

  The sixth salvo hit Astoria’s turret one, forward-most on the forecastle. It absorbed three projectiles, including two to the barbette below the gun house, and one straight through the eight-inch-thick Class B armor on the faceplate, killing almost everybody inside. The hits came fast and furious for the next few minutes, slowly disabling the ship’s fire-control apparatus. When turret two jammed in train, Captain Greenman found he could only direct his guns by turning the ship’s rudder. As he ordered the helm around to enable the jammed battery to match bearings with the director, the Astoria’s twelfth and final salvo was fired, rather futilely, by local control.

  The Astoria’s engineers struggled to coax full battle speed out of the besieged ship. The chief water tender, Milton Kimbro Smith, had just lit off the two standby boilers in the number three fire room. He was still looking to bring them online when an explosion rocked the compartment. Shrapnel rained down through the gauges of a control panel. Smoke washed over him, funneled down through the ventilation blowers.

  At the main generator board in the forward engine room, chief electrician’s mate Gilbert G. Dietz heard scuttlebutt that the topside decks were awash with flames. The compartment directly above him was trembling from repeated impacts. The blowers were fighting a losing battle to bring breathable air below. Sparks showered around him, and circuit breakers jumped out. The engineering spaces, fully dependent on forced ventilation, were choked from above. The Astoria had reached fifteen knots when her power plant began to fail.

  Men without masks gasped and fell to the deck grating, struggling. Smith cut the supply of fuel oil to the burners and sounded the emergency alarm. Crew in the number two fire room succumbed to waves of smoke. Shrapnel rained in a hail down the blower trunk. The heat forced the crew in the after engine room to abandon station. When a shell penetrated a kerosene tank en route to exploding in the after mess hall, the combustible liquid leaked all over the well deck. It caught fire and flowed through a hole in the main deck, spreading below. A fire room, an engine room, two more fire rooms, and another engine room—they died in that order. Soon the Astoria was coasting to a tortured stop.

  Matthew J. Bouterse, the Astoria’s junior chaplain, described a din of “steel piercing steel in a shower of fire and lightning bolts and the groans of a great ship in her death throes.… The steel bulkheads were alive with that lightning as they bled streaks of fire.” Smoke was everywhere, and it overcame him. “I became aware I couldn’t hold my breath any longer,” Bouterse recalled.

  By 2:08 a.m. Greenman’s ship was down to seven knots. He could see the Vincennes in the lead, brightly ablaze amidships, just as bad off as his ship was. On the port bow, swinging right, appeared the Quincy. A wholesale mass of fire, Captain Samuel N. Moore’s ship was still firing intermittently. Greenman could see that as the Astoria drew ahead of the Quincy, he was at risk not only of moving into her line of fire, but of a collision, too. He ordered a hard right turn to let the Quincy draw ahead. With the turn, the Japanese ships the Astoria was firing on passed astern. Tracking them, Commander Truesdell in the forward main battery director found he couldn’t see past the large fire amidships. He ordered control passed to director two aft, but they were blind as well.

  Just as the Astoria passed the Quincy to starboard, a salvo struck the Astoria on the starboard side of the bridge superstructure, hitting the pelorus. Quartermaster Donald Yeamans was thrown ten feet and hit the deck with his right eardrum blown out. The blast felled the entire bridge watch to their knees, killing the navigator and several others. The ship careened for a time, guideless. Then the boatswain’s mate, dizzied, regained the helm, turning left on orders from Greenman, trying to find the Quincy and re-form the column. When the boatswain told his captain he was feeling weak and could not hold on, Greenman ordered steering control shifted to Central Station and tried to conn by telephone. He wanted to order a southerly zigzag course toward the transport anchorage, but Yeamans, his talker, found that the phone line was dead.

  The officer in command of Central Station, far belowdecks, Lieutenant Commander James Topper, felt a heavy vibration and a sickening rattle of metal. Blind to it all, connected by wires and tubes and voice lines, he tried to direct the fight to save stations he could not see. As thermostats in the fire alarm systems went out and alarm bells began ringing, electricians moved about, shifting circuits to determine which were working and which were gone. Topper heard a series of grim announcements. The boat deck: an inferno. Wounded men on the bridge. Turret one: hit heavily with few if any survivors. Three more explosions and Radio One was out. Another shattering hit and the number one fire room was gone. An engine room was full of smoke. The after control station commanded by the ship’s executive officer, Battle Two, was threatened by fires.

  Topper ordered a crew from the forward repair party to go topside and join the fight to save the ship. Then a shell came rattling down the armored escape trunk that reached from the foremast to the hull bottom. It exploded atop Central Station’s armored hatch. The watertight seal, flash-fired, flinched. A metal seam opened up, admitting a gust of toxic smoke. Pieces of sparking metal, burning rubber, and debris rained down from above. All hands put handkerchiefs to their faces and stuffed rags into ducts, to little avail. When their request to abandon station was denied, all hands put on gas masks. The chief electrician, Halligan, grabbed a fire extinguisher and played it upon the debris. Then another projectile penetrated the ship’s port side and exploded against the barbette to turret two, giving them other things to worry about. As the Astoria slid to a stop, her bow reaching for the new course, a searchlight appeared on the port beam. Lieutenant Commander Davidson climbed up to trainer’s window of turret two and coached the damaged triple mount onto the tormenting light.

  As far as Greenman knew, it was the last turret he had. The large fires amidships kept him from being able to see whether the after main turret was still firing. But Greenman could follow his shells as they flew, and could see them hit. One of the Astoria’s salvos missed its target, the Kinugasa, and struck another cruiser, the Chokai, on her forward turret. The momentary suppression of the Japanese flagship’s fire did the Astoria little good. When Greenman asked what speed the ship could make, the answer from what was left of his engineering division was, “None.” She was dead in the water.

  At about two fifteen, the avalanche of shellfire engulfing the Astoria relented. The flashes receded and the roar of shelling died. Splashes became intermittent. Then the gunfire ceased. Further shooting at the Astoria would have been gratuitous on the part of the Japanese. Fires were eating her, within and above. Her engineers advised Greenman that the choked and burning engineering spaces should be abandoned. On board the two other American cruisers, similar discussions were taking place.

  At two thirty, with his port side opened up to the sea, Riefkohl passed the order to abandon
ship. Shortly before 3 a.m., the Vincennes turned turtle. The captain was nearly felled by the mast of his capsizing ship smacking the water. In an unceremonial plunge, the Vincennes went down by the head.

  For the Quincy, like the Astoria, a sudden violent crash of enemy steel into the hangar deck had been the inciting catastrophe. She carried five airplanes aboard: one SOC Seagull mounted on each catapult, another floatplane secured on the well deck, and two more parked in the hangar. All of them should have been somewhere else, if not airborne on patrol then at the bottom of Savo Sound, flung away as a safeguard against fire. It was unfortunate that the rolling steel curtain that enclosed the Quincy’s aircraft hangar had been removed the previous day, damaged by the shocks of her shore bombardment. The price of this accident was paid as soon as the Aoba’s first shells hit: a contagious wash of fire over the well deck, and four of the five Seagulls brightly aflame. They could not be jettisoned while burning. By the time the fire hoses were rigged, there was no pressure left on the line.

  The fires, unchecked, were a gift to the Japanese. Their spotters and fire controlmen could switch off their searchlights, hide in the dark, and train on the illumination offered by the Quincy herself, as they did with the other U.S. cruisers as well. The flame and the smoke flowing over the amidships gun deck blinded the surviving gunners in turn. In the struggle to continue, they could not see their targets, and it was impossible for most of them to know that their foundering ship had taken a decapitating blow.

  When the hit came to the Quincy’s bridge—probably from the Aoba—most of the men on watch were killed at their stations. The Quincy’s exec, Lieutenant Commander John D. Andrew, moved forward as soon as the fires aft allowed. He wanted to find his captain. He needed new orders to help direct the ship’s gunnery and helm. He was stunned by what he discovered. “I found it in a shambles of dead bodies with only three or four people still standing. In the pilothouse itself, the only person standing was the signalman at the wheel, who was vainly endeavoring to check the ship’s swing to starboard and to bring her to port. On questioning him I found out that the Captain, who was at that time lying near the wheel, had instructed him to beach the ship and he was trying to head the ship for Savo Island distant some four miles on the port quarter.”