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

by James D. Hornfischer

  It was around 2:30 a.m. when Hoover decided, in the apparent absence of Callaghan and Scott, that he had in all likelihood ascended to officer in tactical command. His first task was to contact surviving ships and arrange a rendezvous. From the Helena’s navigation bridge, he called all ships over the TBS. “Form 18. Course 092. Speed 18. Don’t answer.” The message instructed the task force to head east at eighteen knots. Hoover didn’t want everyone to break radio silence now, but over the TBS came a voice from the O’Bannon, asking him to repeat the course heading. Hoover did so, adding, “Unable raise other big boys.” In the indeterminate distance, he saw ships believed to be Japanese firing at each other.

  There came a cry as a lookout spotted a large ship ahead, off the port bow. Hoover started following it about eight hundred yards astern. “That sure looks like a battleship,” Robert Howe said to another sailor. He surmised that it had to be friendly or they never would have gotten so close. “We didn’t know where it could have come from, but we were sure glad to have a battleship on our side.”

  Then a flare popped overhead and began swinging down on a parachute. It was “like sitting under a big streetlight,” Howe said. Studying the ship more closely, he noticed sailors in foreign white uniforms. “We had no trouble telling that it was a Japanese battleship,” he said.

  After a few minutes following astern the enemy monster—likely the Kirishima, scarcely damaged at all and withdrawing at high speed—Hoover broke away and turned east. His PPI scope showed a scattering of green blips sliding north. Abe’s force was withdrawing in disarray.

  Soon another phantom loomed in the night, pressing in on the starboard bow. Bin Cochran identified it as a cruiser of the Atlanta class, knifing straight for the Helena’s midsection. Since the Atlanta lay dead in the water, this had to have been the Juneau. Hoover ordered a hard right rudder, and as the stern started swinging left, Cochran tensed for an impact on the starboard quarter. Somehow the blow never fell, and soon the Juneau was gone again in the night.

  That ship was consumed with her own problems. The Juneau had no fire control to her turrets. Her fantail was broken and buckled all the way forward to the hip-mounted five-inch gun on the starboard deck. Her electrical devices were subsisting on thin gruel from the emergency diesel generator. Several large belowdecks compartments were full of the dead, snuffed out by the blast of a torpedo in her engineering spaces. Having lurched through the enemy formation with a broken keel and a crippled main battery, the Juneau’s sailors came out badly shaken. They were no more rattled and no less gallant than any other men in the task force, but under fire, men could feel the impulse to claw at the steel decks with their hands to escape the killing hail, or vomit on deck, or weep.

  According to Allen Heyn, a gunner’s mate stationed on the Juneau’s fantail near the depth charge mount where the oldest of the five Sullivan brothers, George, stood watch, “It seemed like everyone was giving it to us, you know. There was a big flash, and the salvos would hit the water on one side of the ship and splash all over and then they would hit on the other side.… Then something hit up forward. I don’t know what it was because it hit again and the ship shook all over. The ship seemed to be out of control kinda.” With most of that behind them, they found refuge in the night. The Juneau’s skipper, Lyman Swenson, thought he might find shelter near Malaita, hole up to see about repairs.

  The majority of Callaghan’s ships—now Hoover’s ships—had taken as heavily as they had given, but the Helena’s own damage was slight: just five hits, none of serious consequence. With a single man killed and two hospitalized, she was deeply lucky. Slugging through two first-order nighttime brawls in two months, she had taken scarcely a scratch. Smart reliance on SG radar had allowed Hoover to refrain from the standard but generally suicidal act of opening searchlight shutters within gun range of an alerted foe. He wisely chose to illuminate his targets on invisible frequencies, with his radars.

  At length, late in the night, the O’Bannon, the Fletcher, and finally the Sterett checked in on the radio. The Sterett’s captain, Jesse Coward, bristled at first when he was asked if he intended to retire. “We’ll fight her until we sink!” he said. He had two torpedoes left in the tubes. When his torpedo officer informed him the mount was inoperable, Coward turned to his exec, Lieutenant Frank Gould, and said, “Frank, let’s get the hell out of here.” As the destroyer left the area, six or seven burning pyres dotted the sea behind her.

  Belowdecks, firefighting crews played their streams over smoldering bedding and red-hot shell cases, stuffed the holes in the hull with mattresses, and shored them. “Bodies, mattresses and other debris sloshed back and forth with the movement of the ship,” Perry Hall said. “Footing was difficult and battle lanterns provided the only light. I had no idea what time it was or where the ship was. I knew we were maneuvering using the screws because I couldn’t hear the rudder.”

  Ahead lay the outline of Florida Island. “We had not seen an American ship for a long time, and I began to wonder if we were the only one left,” the Sterett’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant Cal Calhoun, wrote. Surveying the wreckage of his ship, which held the remains of twenty-eight men, Calhoun felt “strangely detached, as if I were on another planet surveying the earth in miniature.” The feeling persisted till the ship reached Lengo Channel, where she would eventually catch up with Captain Hoover’s survivors.

  STILL TRYING TO GATHER his surviving vessels, Hoover sent the instruction “Answer” to the San Francisco, but none came. Where was Callaghan? Norman Scott and the Atlanta were unaccounted for, too. Finally a lookout announced the sighting of yet another unidentified ship on the port bow. The Helena’s killing train was set quickly rolling. Hoover ordered, “Shift target!” and Rodman Smith, the gunnery officer, coached his turrets on the new bearing. This ship, spectral and suspicious, had been shattered. Not a pane of glass remained in her. Fires glowed in several places on deck.

  The officer-of-the-deck of the damaged mystery ship was studying the Helena through his binoculars as she overtook him to starboard. From about two thousand yards away, he could make out her twin stacks and five sleek turrets—all trained right at him. Then, in the Helena’s superstructure, a light signaled the letters “H-I-S H-I-S.” An encoded challenge signal required a prompt reply, but neither of the two officers up forward on the battered vessel’s navigation bridge, Bruce McCandless nor John Bennett, knew what reply to give to this challenge. The dispatch containing the reply codes assigned for use that day had been lost in the fires. Though the codes had also been scrawled with chalk on the bulkhead of the flag bridge, the metal where they had been recorded was thoroughly punctured and scorched. Any attempt to memorize the codes had been “driven from my mind by the events of the last hour,” McCandless wrote. “In seconds, unless the correct reply was given, fifteen six-inch and four five-inch would fire into us.” Virtually all of the principal means of communication—TBS radio, searchlights, signal flags and halyards, fighting lights—had been destroyed or made inoperable. The steam line to the flagship’s siren and whistle had been punctured by splinters. The signalmen had a blinker light, but they hesitated to respond because they knew something their officers didn’t: that the three-letter reply code specified for that day was “J-A-P.” One signalman, Vic Gibson, told a colleague who was holding a blinker gun, “If you don’t want them shooting at us, you’d better send them J-A-P.” Nothing doing. The signalman felt that a response that like was as likely to invite gunfire as forestall it. The Helena’s batteries were seconds from turning loose when a San Francisco signalman, on order from McCandless, blinked a message in Morse from the bridge. “C38 … C38 …”

  Seeing this signal—a reasonable approximation of the San Francisco’s hull number, CA-38—Rodman Smith relaxed his grip on the firing key and the Helena’s gun captains stood down. “Thank God the Helena accepted that,” Jack Bennett said. “Captain Hoover, may he live forever, took a second look before letting us have it,” McCandless wrote. The s
ad news quickly followed via the flashlight that the San Francisco was bereft of its senior leadership. On hearing this, Gil Hoover signaled that he would take command of the remnant of Task Force 67 for the journey home.

  By 3:45 a.m., in the company of the Fletcher (untouched despite the numerological odds against her), Hoover’s survivors cleared Sealark Channel. The O’Bannon found them in the channel with her SG radar and took station ahead. In Indispensable Strait, between Guadalcanal and Malaita, the damaged Sterett joined up, her steersman struggling with a balky rudder that was urging the ship toward Guadalcanal’s shoals. Then the Juneau appeared ahead to port. Hoover directed Captain Swenson’s wobbly ship to fall in. Plying submarine-haunted waters, none of the ships was out of danger yet. Some of them were good candidates to sink even without further work by the enemy.

  Simple navigation was a challenge for ships that had been through a bender such as the night action of November 13. Down twelve feet by the bow, listing slightly to port, the Juneau was swerving and skidding as if her long hull were jointed somewhere below. The swells crested near the gunwales, her one screw knocked from a bent shaft, water seeped through seams in the stress-fractured hull, and her auxiliary electrical generators were helpless to power all the pumps. By dawn her technicians had patched things together well enough. They even restored local control to one of her five-inch mounts. Swenson decided to press on south for Espiritu Santo.

  Through the last hours before dawn, bearing the burden of 83 dead and 106 seriously wounded sailors, the San Francisco tailed the Helena’s dim silhouette ahead. “I hung on, occasionally calling her by blinker gun and steering for the answering flash of light,” McCandless wrote. The San Francisco’s engines were good for twenty-eight knots, but steering the damaged ship was a more serious problem. In Sealark Channel, between Guadalcanal and Florida Island, Bennett relieved McCandless and quickly noticed that his quartermaster Rogers was having to repeat his orders over the sound-powered phones. The other quartermaster, Higdon, had gone to the smoky emergency steering compartment below, where the helm orders were being manually executed. Seeing the sluggish response from steering, Bennett suspected Higdon was woozy from smoke inhalation and told Rogers to keep him talking so he wouldn’t pass out and leave the ship unnavigable.

  When a lieutenant stationed in Sky Forward, Dick Marquardt, called down, “You’re about to run aground on Malaita!” Bennett understood that he might be a little groggy himself, having lost sight of the Helena when she turned south while obscured in the island’s silhouette. As he righted his course and fell in line again with Hoover, the decks heeled and a warning came from Bob Dusch, the damage-control whiz, that the rush of free surface water was wiping out the wooden shoring that held several critical mattress patches in place near the bow. When Bennett’s relief finally arrived, Bennett scrawled the zigzag plan in chalk on the conning tower door and handed the newcomer a watch that he had taken from one of Callaghan’s slain staff officers. Then he went to look for Bruce McCandless.

  Bennett found him in the captain’s emergency cabin, sitting on the edge of the bunk, eyes glazed and with blood trickling down his face from shrapnel wounds in his forehead and ear. Bennett picked out as many bits of steel as he could before determining that McCandless didn’t need emergency attention. He left him there, went down to the gun deck, and sprawled on the steel deck, using a Great War–era tin hat for “a wholly unsatisfactory pillow.” There were no words for what they had just been through, and none for the fresh horrors they would find topside when sunrise came.

  33

  Atlanta Burning

  THE NIGHT OF NIGHTMARES PASSED. AS THE SUN DREW BACK THE long shadows of Tulagi and Florida Island from Savo Sound, the remains of the night’s struggle were revealed in all their ragged trauma.

  Broken through the keel, her bow and stern drifting in different directions with the currents, the Atlanta lay dead in the water a few miles off Lunga Point. Still heavily afire, she was kept from breaking apart only by the latent tensile strength of her decks and the fickle mercy of a calm morning sea. Every heavy apparatus on the ship that was removable was jettisoned: an anchor and its chain, a whaleboat and its davits, four torpedoes found in the disabled port side tubes, and miscellaneous gear of all kinds—paravanes, gangways, smoke screen generators, depth charges.

  By the first blush of dawn, Lloyd Mustin saw evidence of the astonishing volume of ordnance that flew over the ship that night. The mainmast near his aft air-defense station, only eight inches in diameter, was riddled with holes. All three forward turrets were knocked out, several of their six barrels sliced away. Like a cavern in a gray sea cliff, her forward engine room was a void. Filled with black water, it was a grave for a fine engineering department headed by Lieutenant Commander Arthur Loeser and chief machinist’s mate Henry A. Wolfe. In the mess compartment above it, a heavy serving table had been “plastered flat against the overhead” by the force of the torpedo’s blast.

  A few rapid tugs on a flywheel spinner was all it took to get a gasoline-powered handy-billy pump growling. Dropped over the side, the inch-and-a-half-diameter suction hose could draw on a limitless supply of seawater to fight fires, with pressure enough to play a stream high into the superstructure, or anywhere else something was burning. On the Atlanta that morning, almost everything was burning.

  “It is a matter of wonder to observe, at close hand, a steel warship on fire,” wrote Bill McKinney, the electrician’s mate. Having rushed topside up ladders and through compartments that were scorched and baking hot, he found that his rebreather expired much more quickly than the fifteen minutes it was rated for. Emerging on the main deck, he confronted a landscape aflame. The shipboard fires illuminated a bleak, steel-gray landscape that seemed deserted. “What is burning that makes the jagged edges around shell holes white hot?” he wondered. “Paint, other combustibles, but more possibly that the type of enemy shells contained thermite, contact with which makes almost anything burn.” Ammunition didn’t need help. Below, magazines full of rounds for the twenties were popping away, small heavy box by small heavy box, and so fiercely that they set the deck burning, melted right through it, spilled down into the compartment below, and set it on fire, too. It was unfortunate for the antiaircraft cruiser that she stored such a large volume of ammunition.

  When the forward gun director was hit, the thick mass of wiring running down through the trunk was set aflame, another avenue for the fiery contagion. A locker containing pyrotechnics—flares and smoke markers—had taken a direct hit, too, producing a spectacular runaway blaze. As flames aspired to the top of the steel foremast, the fires devoured its base, melting through its thirty-inch diameter and felling the eighty-odd-foot-high tower to port, trapping men in the 1.1 clipping rooms. Damage-control parties managed to cut the foremast free, righting some of her starboard list.

  According to McKinney, a terrified shipmate ran past him at one point shouting, “Get off. She’s going to blow!” But the executive officer, Dallas Emory, had already countermanded an order to abandon ship, and McKinney was just as happy to stay aboard. “Better to be blown up than eaten up,” he figured. Then McKinney happened upon “a bright idea”: opening the fire main in his compartment and allowing seawater to flood the deck. He thought this would provide a buffer between the fires above and the magazine below. Emory, in his cabin writing a report by the light of a battle lantern, approved the request. “Just don’t sink the ship,” he advised. As McKinney opened the main, no one on board seemed to understand that the same free-surface effect that was plaguing the San Francisco could have capsized the Atlanta had the seas gotten rough.

  Searching the ship for wounded, Raymond Leslie came upon a hole in the boat deck caused by an explosion from below. The steel plates, blown upward into a jagged rise, had to be carefully negotiated. Razor-edged hunks of steel, most of them the size of anvils, some as large as small cars, were scattered across the decks. In wreckage nearby, Leslie found two shipmates, both friends of his
, trapped under some deck plating. He and the other rescuers set themselves close against the heavy steel, lifting with the legs. Their shipmates were pulled free and taken to an aid station. Later, after daylight, when Leslie and the others returned to the site, they would marvel that they had been able to move the plates at all. Joined by others, they tried again, just to sate their curiosity. They found now that they couldn’t budge them.

  McKinney and another electrician, Bob Tyler, “took a little time to get rid of some bodies that lay in the way of ship’s work.” According to McKinney, “I recall many corpses, badly torn up, but there was not a great deal of blood. Could the white-hot metal that killed them have had a cauterized effect? More probably the massive shock of death stopped the heart and no more blood was pumped.” A particularly grisly place was gun number five, the hip mount on the starboard side. Trained aft, its entire left bulkhead had been torn open and lay nearly toppled over the side. Near the mess of charred metal they attempted to recover the body of a boatswain’s mate, and it came in half in their arms. Another sailor, the mount’s pointer, “hung out of his seat with his head gone from the nose up,” McKinney wrote. “He was jammed in place by a jagged portion of the turret structure which had penetrated his back. We couldn’t get him loose, so I entered the wrecked turret to push him from within. The remains of the Turret Captain hung over his booth railing like a large piece of burnt bacon.” They finally got the pointer out of his seat and tumbled him overboard. As a young sailor walked to the lifeline to throw a dismembered arm overboard, he ate an apple with his free hand. Tyler explored the forward superstructure, which McKinney called “a horrifying spectacle of flesh and bone.” Though most of the remains were beyond recognition, a hand was found wearing a Naval Academy ring engraved with the class year 1911. The navigator, Lieutenant Commander James Stuart Smith, sat in the starboard bridge chair, dead without a mark on him.