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

by James D. Hornfischer

  In the Helena, high up in Sky Forward, an antiaircraft director station, Lieutenant Jim Baird held a stopwatch and a clipboard, keeping a record of the gunners’ performance. Counting salvos and tabulating hits, he shook his head in disbelieving admiration at what the new light cruisers could throw. His colleagues in Control were coaching the ship’s batteries onto a target to starboard, and splashes landed all around the ship, when a burning vessel was sighted in the U.S. column ahead. Word spread quickly that it was the Boise. As the Helena moved past her burning cousin, a flurry of salvos straddled her. Hoover’s men had gotten to know Moran’s crew at Nouméa, had gone head-to-head with them on the baseball diamonds there, bound by a pride that only the sailors of a fistfighting light cruiser could know. In the exercises under Norman Scott, their sense of squadron identity grew stronger. “The battle had been a game until then,” Chick Morris wrote. This put some fire in their fight. As Moran shouted, “Cruiser to starboard. Shift target!” Lieutenant Warren Boles in Spot One relayed the order coolly: “Set ’em up in the next alley. Pour it to ’em.” Noticing that one of the talkers with him on the fighting bridge was visibly jittery, Captain Hoover put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Take it easy, son. We’ll get you out of this.”

  In the Boise, a gunner’s mate named Edward Tyndal pleaded with his superiors to allow him to enter one of the turrets to look for survivors. He refused to believe his younger brother, Bill, was not alive in there somehow, needing his help. When the firefighters tried to play their nozzles into the turrets via the hatches, they found several of them blocked by a grotesque clotting of charred bodies, men who had given their last while trying to escape. The stymied firefighters inserted their nozzles through the case ejection scuttles in the bottom of the turrets instead, and quenched their burned interiors.

  As the HMS Hood had learned in her duel with the Bismarck, and as the Arizona had discovered in the sights of Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor bombers, an explosion in a powder magazine was the gravest calamity a warship could suffer. Moran knew he had to flood his forward magazines, but when he issued the order he found that the men assigned to the remote valve-control station were not alive to carry it out. The Boise was spared from disaster by the collateral effect of her gutting: Waves of seawater let in by the underwater hit flooded all the forward hull spaces, including the magazine. The water’s weight on the third deck imparted a wave motion to the long, slender hull that was strong enough to make some of the crew believe a torpedo had struck.

  As smoke spread below, men wearing rescue breathers shored up bulkheads against the flood and set submersible pumps to race the waters flowing in through the breached hull. The medical department decided to move the sickbay from the wardroom to the battle dressing station. One of these patients, wearing a cast on his broken leg, limped quickly along on crutches. A sailor who had had his appendix removed several days earlier rose from his bunk and told the corpsmen converging on him with a stretcher, “Outta my way! I’m getting the hell out of here!”

  Observers throughout Scott’s task group believed the Boise was doomed. But despite the evisceration of her forward stations and the pyrotechnic display that bloomed overhead, her boilers and engines were intact. Moran’s engineers responded quickly to his order to flank speed. Down by the bow and listing to starboard, the ship sheered out of line to port, accelerating to thirty knots, just as another salvo from the Kinugasa raised a cluster of splashes right where the Boise would have been had Moran not changed course. All the while, her after turrets kept up the cadence in continuous fire. Soon her expenditure of six-inch ordnance topped eight hundred rounds.

  To avoid the Boise ahead, Captain Small ordered the Salt Lake City’s rudder hard right and threw the starboard engine into reverse to sharpen the turn. This placed Small’s ship between the Japanese and the burning Boise. Silhouetted by the ship he was thus shielding, Small paid the price almost immediately. An eight-inch shell struck the Salt Lake City’s starboard side and exploded, dishing in the plating of the armor belt. Another penetrated the hull, passed through the supply office, and settled with a heavy clang on the deck plating of the fire room before exploding with a muffled, low-order blast. Though several men standing just six feet from the point of impact were uninjured, saved by untold failures of mechanics or chemistry within the powder charge, this explosion still managed to sever electrical cables, disable a boiler, and start a fire in the bilges that, fed by twenty-six thousand gallons of fuel oil leaked from a ruptured transfer line, grew hot enough to warp one of the ship’s heavy longitudinal I-beams and buckle the armored second deck.

  As the Salt Lake City came clear of the burning Boise, which was falling out of line and limping away from the action, Small rang up full speed again as his battery trained on an enemy heavy cruiser forward of his starboard beam. The amidships secondary guns coughed a spread of star shells to a perfect bursting point beyond their target, a Japanese cruiser, three miles distant. The heavy cruiser’s searchlight shutters opened, shone briefly, then closed, and a ten-gun salvo roared out. When it landed—straddle, over—a correction was dialed into the rangekeeper, and the next four salvos touched nothing but steel. But for the Salt Lake City’s gallant interposition, the Boise might have been finished. The Boise would remain a burning beacon, and a pyre for more than a hundred dead, visible for miles, until her firefighters finally prevailed over the turret fires. At that point the ship, alone, seemed to vanish into the night.

  On the Salt Lake City, circuits failed throughout the ship as the salvos hit. Captain Small lost steering control from the bridge. Receiving a mistaken report of fires forward, he preventively flooded his forward magazines. As steering was transferred to the after emergency steering cabin, the Salt Lake City’s engineers, bereft of steam from the forward fire room, closed the throttles to the outboard engines, leaving the two inboard screws to carry her load.

  WITH THE FURUTAKA and the Aoba rent by shattering blows, Admiral Goto dead, and the sharpshooting and undamaged Kinugasa, too, turning a course north, the Japanese force began its retirement. At 12:16 a.m., Norman Scott brought the San Francisco onto a northerly heading as if to pursue. Wondering how many ships would be in a position to follow, he then thought twice about it and decided to retire. He recalled later, “The enemy was silenced and our formation at the time was somewhat broken.” A clear recognition of who was friend and who was foe had been the first casualty of battle, and from that followed much of the tragedy of the night. The Battle of Cape Esperance ended as if by tacit mutual assent.

  It seemed that at least one Japanese captain was looking to exploit the confusion. From the flying bridge of the San Francisco the shout went out that an unidentified destroyer was approaching. A mysterious ship came rushing in on the flagship’s starboard bow, displaying an unfamiliar pattern of recognition lights—white over red. Her gambit was overly bold. Recognizing the improper signal, the San Francisco opened fire, then the destroyer’s signalmen doubled down on their deception, flashing in Morse code: “D491 V D456,” indicating with the respective hull numbers a call from the Farenholt to the Laffey. Captain McMorris interpreted this as a legitimate query and promptly ordered his cruiser to cease fire. Other American observers recalled seeing the ship up close, and recognizing the telltale white striping painted on a Japanese destroyer’s stack. The opponents exchanged fire—what hits might have been registered is lost to history—and the destroyer was soon gone.

  The Helena had come through the gauntlet unscathed except for a small fire ignited astern by a hot shell casing and a close call with a hang fire in turret four. The Salt Lake City was badly bruised but soon fulfilled the expectations held of the top-rated engineering department in the Pacific. Captain Small signaled Scott that despite the damage to his fire room, his engineers had steam to make twenty-five knots.

  Nothing had been heard from Mike Moran and the Boise. Scott ordered Captain Tobin via the TBS: “Detail one of your boys to stand by Boise.” Told that the ship’s location
was unknown, Scott queried Small in the Salt Lake City and was informed she was last seen twelve miles west of Savo Island, heading west. That ship soon became the object of a concentrated search in the dark.

  Scott prepared a quick dispatch to Admiral Ghormley in Nouméa, summarizing the night’s events. “ENGAGED ENEMY WEST OF SAVO ABOUT MIDNIGHT. AT LEAST FOUR ENEMY DD’S BURNING AND PROBABLY ONE CA HIT BADLY. BOISE BURNING BADLY WHEN LAST SEEN. FARENHOLT NOT YET LOCATED. MCCALLA SEARCHING. REQUEST AIR COVERAGE. AM PROCEEDING TO POINT CAST [50 MILES SOUTH OF CAPE SURVILLE, SAN CRISTOBÁL], SPEED 20.”

  Then, attempting to gather his scattered task force via the radio, Scott ordered all ships to switch on their emergency identification lights for ten seconds. On San Francisco, Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless noticed that the flagship’s port side bulbs did not come on. Soon thereafter, two star shells burst overhead, illuminating the night and possibly heralding hotter fires. Aware that the threatening ship was friendly, a San Francisco signalman lofted three green flares. “And the navigator pushed the buttons even harder,” McCandless wrote. “This time both sides lighted up. This seemed to satisfy the fire control teams in the Salt Lake City, 3,000 yards to port. One of the operators on her main battery director had already sounded two stand-by buzzers and was about to ring the third and turn loose a salvo when the flares ignited. “Hold it! It’s the ’Frisco!” someone shouted, knocking the man out of his metal seat. “For this we will eternally be grateful,” McCandless wrote.

  IN THE SHATTERED heavy cruiser Furutaka, shortly after midnight, Captain Tsutau Araki passed the order to abandon ship. He ordered the ensign pulled down and the emperor’s portrait salvaged, but the man assigned to the task was killed by American shellfire before he could retrieve it. Araki went to his cabin on the bridge to end his disgraceful ordeal, but found that his revolver and his sword had been taken away from him. When he returned to the bridge to strap himself to the compass mount, he could find no fasteners right for the job. The possible culprit confronted him there: his executive officer, who pleaded for his captain to survive. As the two officers argued, the rising sea engulfed the deck of the bridge, and as the Furutaka foundered Araki found himself floating alongside the bow, disgracefully alive.

  The idea that a captain should die with his ship, so central to the Japanese Navy’s code of ethics, was opposed by Admiral Yamamoto. Concerned about the high command’s tendency to be “rather too sensitive in punishing commanders for their incapability in carrying out operations,” Yamamoto conferred with his chief of staff, Matome Ugaki, and the two composed a letter to the chief of the personnel bureau: “If we do not approve of the skipper surviving when his ship goes down after hard fighting, we shall not be able to carry through this war, which cannot be settled soon. There is no reason why we should discourage their survival, while we are encouraging the fliers to survive by means of parachute. In a war which must be carried out against tremendous odds, I, as commander in chief, could not help feeling reluctant in issuing orders if I had to ask our skippers not to return alive when their ships sink.” A modern fleet, he felt, could go nowhere but down in the grip of such primitivism. The Imperial Navy would improve through experience and prevail over the decadent Americans only if its delicate sense of honor was kept somehow intact and experienced commanders were not required to immolate themselves on the dubious altar of pride.

  Twenty-two miles northwest of Savo Island, the Furutaka went dow stern-first. Thirty-three officers and crew went down with her, with 225 more missing in action. The two other heavies, the Aoba, badly mauled, and the Kinugasa, scarcely scratched, set course for Shortland Island with their destroyers.

  IT WAS NEARLY 3 A.M. when the Boise was finally located again. Captain Moran’s battered light cruiser fell in with the San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Helena, Buchanan, and Laffey and headed south. Off the western end of Guadalcanal, heading for his own preset rendezvous point, Admiral Scott wanted to ring up maximum speed to elude the radius of enemy bombers and pull his ships farther under the covering shelter of the aircraft of the South Pacific Force. But the Boise was nearly a cripple. Rescue and recovery crews were exploring the burned-out forward turrets. Scores of men had been trapped in those flames. A few were revived with artificial respiration, but nine in ten were dead of asphyxiation or concussion. Mike Moran slowed to twenty knots to reduce the sea pressure on his shored-up forward bulkheads. The Farenholt survived her bashing by American cruisers. She extracted herself from the vacated and bloodied battlescape with some deft and rapidly applied damage control: tossing heavy gear—whaleboat, depth charges—over the listing side, transferring fuel from port to starboard, and running portable pumps and a bucket brigade to lighten the load till her waterline holes were dry. She trailed the cruisers by fifty miles but reached Espiritu Santo under her own power.

  Lingering behind while a repair party went aboard the Duncan in a futile attempt to salvage her, the McCalla searched Savo Sound for survivors and recovered 195 of them, nearly the entire crew of the wounded ship. When a dawn patrol of Wildcats from Henderson Field found the Duncan abandoned near Savo, her entire topsides melted by the fires, the flight leader noticed two big holes in her hull and remarked that her “bow end looked cooked.” With the arrival of dawn, American planes found the rest of Task Force 64 by its trail of bunker oil and followed it all the way home to the anchorage at Espiritu Santo.

  Despite the carnage, much of it self-inflicted, Scott’s task force had plenty of cause for celebration, and that was just what the veterans of the battle did after they returned to Espiritu Santo on October 12. “As we pulled into harbor, we were a cocky bunch,” Laffey signalman Richard Hale recalled. “We wanted to paint a couple of cruiser and destroyer symbols on the side of our mount to let everyone know that the Laffey was a real fighting ship. We lost all fear of battle at that point, and getting away without a scratch while pounding the enemy meant that we were ready to win the war.” As turret crews mustered to clean powder residue out of their barrels, with two pairs of sailors, one inside the turret, the other out, pulling hard wire back and forth to scrub them clean, they relived the battle and recalled its highlights and sidelights—“little things, remembered now in detail and passed from group to group, often distorted beyond recognition before they got very far,” Chick Morris wrote. “But it was good for the ship’s morale. Anything was good that contributed to the story of the enemy’s defeat.”

  Scott credited his “crude night firing practices” for the success. Mike Moran was so pleased with his ship’s performance that he overlooked the fact that some of his zealous gunners had continued firing despite Scott’s orders to cease. According to Moran, “The rapidity and accuracy of fire, fire discipline, and absence of material casualties were all without precedent in target practice. Perfect fire discipline was an especially conspicuous feature. At the orders of ‘Commence Firing’ continuous fire began instantaneously. When ordered to cease or check fire the batteries responded at once. In an action involving relatively brief bursts of fire and frequent target shifts, the importance of such positive control can scarcely be overemphasized.” Sailors of the Farenholt and Duncan, of course, thought the cruisers’ fire discipline left plenty to be desired. Captain McMorris paid the Farenholt a traditional tribute and fee. When they reached Espiritu Santo, the flagship sent over twenty gallons of ice cream—“reparations,” Ford Richardson called it. But there was no making light of the tragic mistake. Gunfire from friendly ships had killed three of the Farenholt’s men and wounded forty-three.

  There was nothing sweet about the Japanese experience in a battle that in many ways resembled the American ordeal in the Battle of Savo Island: a rout by a battle-ready cruiser force over a complacent one. If Admiral Scott didn’t exact the same punishing price from Goto that Mikawa took from Bode and Riefkohl, the effect on American morale made the difference a matter of accountancy. “Throughout the ‘Night Battle off Savo Island,’ ” an official Japanese source wrote of the engagement
that Americans would call the Battle of Cape Esperance, “providence abandoned us.… The future looked bleak for our surface forces, whose forte was night warfare.” For U.S. sailors who had been overawed by the Japanese prowess in night battle, here was reason to believe that the IJN was run by mortals after all.

  Captain Small’s staff in the Salt Lake City drew a wide range of lessons, cataloging them in thirty-nine numbered paragraphs in the ship’s action report, covering everything from gunnery and fire control to shiphandling, repairs, and communications. Most of them could be learned only in battle:

  “Restrict telephone circuits to the business at hand. Do not permit uncertainty or panic to creep in on circuits either by tone of voice or context of message.”

  “It is the function of Control to search for targets. Never require the director to do so when engaged.”

  “In a short-range night action, shift targets during the loading interval.”

  “Stretcher bearers should remain in a darkened compartment or wear dark adaptation goggles during night battle to preserve their night vision.”

  THOUGH THE U.S. NAVY had a victory to celebrate, its immediate benefit to the men on Guadalcanal would be negligible. The Reinforcement Group that had sailed ahead of Goto benefited from Scott’s preoccupation with the cruisers. Eluding detection, it reached Doma Cove on Guadalcanal’s north coast, unloaded its cargo of artillery, vehicles, men, and supplies, and escaped before the rise of morning.

  And as the events of the next forty-eight hours would show, the marines of General Vandegrift’s garrison and the airmen at Henderson Field had yet to experience their most trying hour. Scott’s victory, though an invigorating boost to the spirits, would do little to stop the coming rain of fire.

  (Photo Credit: P.3)

  “The regular Navy enlisted man is today the highest type in our history; he is intelligent, aspiring, and has initiative, albeit a ready and cheerful susceptibility to discipline.… Properly handled, he will go through fire and water. He is not always properly handled.”