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

by James D. Hornfischer

  Variations in the efficiency of individual gun crews soon turned the structured cadence of full-salvo fire into a continuous staccato as single guns waged their own fights in parallel trios from turret to turret. When the firing cycle reached full tilt, Moran’s and Hoover’s capacity to monitor the action with their own senses was obliterated by their ravenous muzzles, turned out and blasting away just forward of their bridge stations. When Scott led his cruisers in an unsignaled turn to the northwest, Moran’s conning officer could make out the San Francisco ahead only by the flashes of her gunfire and the periodic blinking of her fighting lights.

  Ensign Weems in the destroyer McCalla, at the end of the American column, mistook the output of the cruisers for machine-gun fire. The rolling stream of six-inch tracers looked like the fire from the 1.1-inch “Chicago pianos.” The Japanese, witnessing this from the business end, would discuss the appearance of these “machine-gun cruisers.” Through the flash and concussion of the McCalla’s number three gun, firing directly over him, Weems had fleeting glimpses of the enemy. “I felt a wildly exultant joy in watching us let them have so much at such murderous range. If you stop and think—2,500 to 3,500 yards is point-blank range for big guns. You can hardly miss even if you wanted to!”

  The burning enemy ships looked to him like “the most dramatic Hollywood reproductions.… I saw two that worked about like this: 1) pitch darkness, 2) stream of tracers from our ships, 3) series of flashes where hits were scored, silhouetting of ships by star shells, 4) tremendous fires and explosions, 5) ship folds in two, 6) ship sinks. All in all, a much better performance than Hollywood’s very best.”

  This was pure burning savagery, a Marine Corps attitude, the spirit of Colonel Chesty Puller brought to sea. Now staccato, parsed with short pauses, then overlapping and simultaneous and cacophonous, like the mistimed pistons of a gigantic combustion engine, the continuous cycling output of cruiser gunfire gave no break to the eardrums. Any sailor sprinting past a turret was likely to get his ears deafened or his hide scorched.

  Four minutes after the Boise opened fire, the ship had put out three hundred rounds from her main battery. Out in the dark to starboard, Moran could make out a trunked forward stack and a latticed tripod mainmast close to the after stack, the architecture of a cruiser. This ship was ready for action and returned fire. There came the whistling of “overs” as the Boise was straddled fiercely. Reports of the death of the Imperial fleet would be greatly exaggerated that night. More Japanese destroyers were reported sunk in official U.S. records than Admiral Goto actually commanded. But there was no questioning the vector of the outcome. The throw-weight of Scott’s line was beginning to tell. At least three enemy ships were burning in the Boise’s immediate vicinity.

  The Aoba was hit no fewer than twenty-four times in the battle’s first twenty minutes, knocking out two main turrets, her main gun director, several searchlight platforms, her catapults, and several boiler rooms. Her foremast toppled down and demolished a starboard antiaircraft mount. The flagship veered out to starboard, signaling earnestly, “I AM AOBA,” as if her assailants were friendly. In the early going, it seemed Goto was unaware that the ships he was closing with were hostile. The Japanese commander’s final thoughts as American projectiles shattered his world, claiming the lives of seventy-nine men, including his own, were apparently that a Japanese force, his own reinforcement group, was firing on him. As his ship absorbed the blows of the U.S. cruisers, he shouted in frustration, “Bakayaro!”—idiots! Captain Yonejiro Hisamune ordered a smoke screen, and the Aoba vanished from view.

  In those same tumultuous minutes, Norman Scott was seized by a corresponding fear: that the ships he was hitting were his own. The admiral was apoplectic as he climbed the ladder from the San Francisco’s flag bridge to the main bridge. He shouted an order that astonished everyone.

  “Cease firing, all ships.”

  Scott was gone as quickly as he had come, as the cease-fire order was relayed to the task force. It no doubt came as a relief to men on both sides when the firing slackened, but the Boise among others never relented, even as Scott repeatedly ordered Moran to check fire. Captain McMorris kept firing, too. He raised the microphone to his mouth and addressed the whole crew with the order he gave his gunners. “Rapid fire, continuous …” Then, in apology, he leaned over the rail of the bridge wing and added, “Begging your pardon, Admiral.” McMorris knew well who and what he was shooting at. Ceasing fire preemptively could get men killed.

  As Tobin, the destroyer commander, radioed Scott, saying, “We are on your starboard hand now, going up ahead,” the firing continued, all the while Scott futilely repeating the cease-fire order on the TBS. Buck fever was rife, and spreading. “It took some time to stop our fire,” Scott wrote. “In fact it never did completely stop.”

  The strains on discipline reached down to the enlisted ranks. A gun captain in the Farenholt by the name of Wiggens couldn’t bring himself to obey the order, even when his own captain, Lieutenant Commander Eugene T. Seaward, repeated it. An old hand from the Asiatic Fleet, he had been forced to leave his wife, a Chinese national, behind in Singapore in December when the British stronghold fell to the Japanese. He learned later that she had been killed by the occupiers. “Every time he could train on that huge Jap battlecruiser (at point-blank range) he would let go with another round,” wrote Ford Richardson, a talker for the Farenholt’s gunnery officer. “Wiggens went wild. Crazy wild. He hated Japs with a passion.” He never stopped shooting.

  The San Francisco’s errant turn had been a mystery to the officers in the lead destroyer. As the Farenholt’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Alcorn G. Beckmann, watched the flagship lead the other three cruisers in a turn inside the Farenholt’s own, he wondered at his ship’s own lagging pace. Scott’s cruisers, it seemed, were outrunning some of his destroyers. He had heard Captain Tobin respond to Scott’s query, “Affirmative. Moving up on your starboard side.” They would need to hustle to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between the American and Japanese lines.

  Settling into a westerly course as the Farenholt led the destroyers in their separate column, the destroyer Duncan, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Edmund B. Taylor, plotted an unidentified radar contact eight thousand yards to the west and rang up flank speed to pursue it. The U.S. cruiser line was in full voice now, and by the light of the fires they were planting on his target, Taylor could see it was a cruiser. Soon another enemy ship appeared, following close behind the first. As Taylor brought the Duncan broadside to the enemy ships and prepared to launch torpedoes to starboard, he found himself in the difficult position of standing between Scott’s cruisers and their prey. To port, he saw the familiar silhouette of the Helena. As he overtook the light cruiser, he steered right standard rudder, looking to stay clear of the light cruiser’s line of fire.

  Knowing that he had lost control of events, Scott tried to raise Tobin on the TBS. “How are you?” Scott asked the commander of Destroyer Division 12. “Were we shooting at Twelve?”

  Tobin replied, “Twelve is okay. We are going up ahead on your starboard side. I do not know who you were firing at.”

  Scott then ordered Tobin’s ships to display their recognition lights. They flashed momentarily in a proscribed pattern of green and white. With friends having declared themselves to friends, Scott directed his group to open fire again to starboard. Tobin would soon know all too well which ships Scott’s cruisers were targeting.

  Ford Richardson, stationed in the Farenholt’s main battery director, “stood there transfixed watching the pyrotechnics. Our cruisers on one side of us were firing at the Jap ships on the other side of us.” Standing out of the hatch of the gun director, Richardson’s gunnery officer steered the fire of the forward five-inch battery into an enemy ship that had been brilliantly illuminated by star shells. When he dropped back down inside the director, Richardson, as his talker, followed him. “At that very instant,” Richardson recalled, “we were hit by a six- or
eight-inch shell at the cross arm of the foremast, some twenty-five feet over my head!”

  Tobin had just ordered his squadron to fire torpedoes at targets of opportunity when the airburst rattled the Farenholt’s decks. Shrapnel cut down several men in exposed topside stations. The heavier shards penetrated the rangefinder, slicing through a man standing forward of it. The wounded man was passed down from the rangefinder to Richardson. With a penlight he saw that the shrapnel had entered the man’s body behind the collarbone, exited below his arm, and reentered his body near the groin, leaving a big hole in his upper leg. Then it went through the deck. Richardson stopped the heavy bleeding by stuffing a T-shirt into his shipmate’s gaping wound and using his belt as a compress.

  The hit sliced the Farenholt’s radar antenna from the foremast, exploding spectacularly and sending a shower of fragments that pierced the air flask of a torpedo loaded in the ship’s quintuple mount, which was aimed on the centerline straight ahead. With a hiss of compressed air, liberated by the penetration, the missile launched itself from the tube and wedged in the base of the destroyer’s forward stack. The impact tripped the starter that sparked the torpedo’s motor to life. The motor screamed for a while before burning itself out without exploding. Another shell hit the waterline on the port side, knocking out all power and communications in the forward part of the ship. Water rushed in, and she took a list to port. Altogether Captain Seaward’s tin can was holed at the port side waterline by four American shells. The hits on the Farenholt most likely came from one of Scott’s own heavy cruisers, the San Francisco or the Salt Lake City. Friendly ships shot up the Duncan, too. The destroyer had turned her forward batteries on a Japanese cruiser thirty-three hundred yards off her starboard bow when she took a hit to the bridge that knocked out fire control and set afire the handling room beneath the number two gun. The Duncan’s skipper, Commander Taylor, had no sooner managed to steady on a torpedo firing course and release his first fish when another shell burst forward of the director platform, disabling the director and seriously wounding the torpedo officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) R. L. Fowler. The chief torpedoman fired another torpedo by local control at a target that already had the attention of Scott’s cruisers. “Almost immediately she was observed to crumble in the middle, then roll over and disappear,” Taylor wrote. The Duncan would share her fate.

  Another salvo floated in, blasting the chart house, killing the two men on the Duncan’s SC radar, a sonar operator, the bridge radioman, and the yeoman keeping the record of the battle. The main radio room was a total loss with no survivors, the fire there having merged with the blaze from the number one fire room, fed by fresh air pouring through a rent in the overhead. Taylor lost steering control and found himself circling helplessly in a left-hand turn. When the forward portholes were opened to vent the smoke and steam washing into the pilothouse, they served not as an exhaust, but as an intake for flames and smoke coming from the burning number two gun. Trapped in the asphyxiating cloud, Taylor could see little of the battle now but sensed that his circling had carried him out of the line of fire of the American cruisers. But the ship would not be saved. When the boilers in the after fire room lost their supply of feed water, the fire main pumps failed, too, and the flames spread, punctuated by detonations of five-inch projectiles. The crew fought a brave rear-guard action with handy-billy pumps, but Taylor could see it was futile. He helped lower wounded from the bridge level to the deck and then into the water. Then, with flames enveloping the pilothouse on all sides, he found his only route of escape was by jumping from the starboard bridge wing.

  The gunfire from Scott’s cruisers was prodigious, and when their lines of fire got clear of the obstruction presented by the van destroyers, they did far worse to intended targets than accidental ones. Tracked by all four American cruisers as she advanced along the axis of Scott’s column, the Furutaka took a series of heavy hits that would prove to be mortal. The Japanese cruiser was hit in her number three turret and in the port torpedo tubes. Several of her Long Lances caught fire, and the flames drew more fire.

  It was just a few minutes past midnight when the Salt Lake City swept the beams of her fire-control radar through a wide arc to the engaged side. The extent of destruction wrought by Scott’s ships was reflected in these high-frequency microwaves. All of the ships the radar found were marked in the visible wavelength by fires.

  18

  “Pour It to ’Em”

  AS THE LAST HOUR OF OCTOBER 11 EXPIRED INTO A NEW DAY, GOTO’S squadron awakened to the reality that it faced a formidable enemy battle force. The Japanese cruisers had spent the first minutes of the battle with their turrets turned in. Originally loaded for shore bombardment, hoists filled with time-fuzed shells designed to explode short of impact and throw burning fragments over a wide area, they were finally alive to the challenge of Scott’s group. Shortly before midnight, the Salt Lake City was on the wrong end of an anti-personnel airburst that exploded high amidships. That shell sprayed her topsides with steel, cutting down twenty sailors on starboard gun mounts, four of them dead.

  The Boise was struck by an eight-inch shell that dented and ruptured her side plating above her waterline armor belt, shattering the sleeping compartments used by the ship’s junior officers. A minute later, two or three smaller rounds registered, blasting Captain Moran’s cabin and leaving it a wreck of twisted metal. A clock was knocked from the skipper’s desk and shattered on the deck, frozen at five minutes to midnight as the flames spread.

  Tom Wolverton, the Boise’s damage-control officer, was providing a play-by-play to crew belowdecks that was “getting hotter than a Joe Louis fight broadcast.” Up to then, Wolverton had little to do in his assigned capacity. Scott’s fast-firing cruisers had been delivering an overwhelming one-way barrage. But in battle, circumstances are usually temporary and perception almost always fragile. A short lull followed in which Scott tried to reassemble his straggling line behind the San Francisco. As he called course changes over the radio, the Japanese used the reprieve well. They continued removing bombardment rounds from their hoists, replacing them with armor-piercing rounds engineered to kill ships.

  As the Boise plunged along in the San Francisco’s wake, Moran found that his radars were becoming almost as badly impaired as his own vision. It was hard to pick out targets in the abundant intermingling of ships. Many shell splashes were large enough to return an echo to his scopes. Though other ships made good use of star shells to silhouette their targets, Moran chose to use his searchlights now. Locating a target off his starboard beam, he ordered his searchlights on. As his turrets raged out at what he thought was a light cruiser, fires sprang to life on that ship. The Boise was revealed in bright relief by her own mirrors. The Japanese ship returned fire and scored at least four times.

  Ahead, on the Boise’s starboard bow, there appeared a larger ship whose directors pegged Moran’s ship cold. This vessel, probably the heavy cruiser Kinugasa, “fired at Boise unopposed,” Moran would write in his action report, “shooting beautifully with twin eight-inch mounts. She straddled us repeatedly along the forward half of the forecastle, and made two known hits.” The first struck the barbette underneath turret one, crashed through a deck, and lay in a compartment near the turret stalk, an explosive-laden steel time bomb with a defective fuze fizzing along. Alive to the pending catastrophe, the turret officer, Lieutenant Beaverhead Thomas, pushed open the turret’s small escape hatch and ordered the crew to exit. As he guided the gun house gang to safety, he reported to Commander Laffan, his gunnery officer, that he had abandoned station. He said, “The fuze hasn’t gone off yet. I can still hear it spluttering.” They were his last words. The muffled blast of the 250-pound projectile vented through passageways, hatches, and vents, incinerating or asphyxiating a hundred men in a flash.

  The survivors of turret one, eleven men, exited to the deck just in time to be batted down by two more hits. One plastered the faceplate of turret three, just forward of and below the bridge, gashing
the barrels of its trio of rifles and spackling the superstructure with shrapnel. Another shell from the Kinugasa entered the water short of the Boise, precisely as intended. This projectile was designed with a protective cap that broke away on impact and enabled it to retain its ballistic properties underwater. It hit close enough aboard to swim downward and penetrate the hull nine feet below the waterline. Bursting through the hull and exploding in the forward six-inch magazine, it sent a wash of flame through the forward handling rooms and up the stalk of the two forward turrets, roasting the entire crew in turret two and several of the escaping survivors of turret three.

  Mike Moran noted proudly that the men on the port side five-inch battery were keeping their backs turned to the fiery spectacle unfolding to starboard. Their duty was to watch for threats on the disengaged side. A spout of flaming gases shot into the air from the Boise’s forward turrets and a jolt threw men to their knees. The eruption reached as high as the flying bridge and set much of the forecastle deck ablaze. It was followed by a torrent of hot seawater, debris, smoke, and sparks. A storm of sparking splinters and smoldering leather and burning bits of life jackets and life rafts blew across the superstructure. Struggling against fumes, firefighting teams dragged out heavy hoses, fed by mains in the after part of the ship.