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

by James D. Hornfischer

  By the light of a setting quarter moon flirting with low clouds, the Preston opened fire on another ship, the light cruiser Nagara, in the loom of Savo Island. Steaming at twenty-three knots, Stormes’s ship found a hitting range at nine thousand yards when she was struck hard by a pair of 5.5-inch shells that plunged into her machinery spaces from the starboard side, killing everyone in her two fire rooms. The blast propelled a filthy cloud of firebrick and debris out of the stacks that settled all across the amidships area. Shattered torpedo warheads leaked TNT that quickly caught fire. The ship’s after stack fell across a searchlight installation, knocking it over onto the starboard torpedo tube. A heavier hit followed as a strange ship—which the Preston’s officers would speculate was a Japanese heavy cruiser—approached from the port side of the American column and fired on the destroyer. One large shell entered the engine room, exploding against the electrical generators. Another hit near the number three gun, and a third was a direct hit on the number four. The blast was so great that it jammed guns one and two all the way forward. Aft of the stacks, the Preston’s decks were a blazing ruin. Captain Stormes was forced to give the order to abandon ship almost immediately.

  However, to the executive officer of the South Dakota, Commander A. E. Uehlinger, and another officer, Henry Stewart, it was clear that the Preston was a victim of friendly fire. “I saw the Washington open fire to her starboard,” Stewart said. “To us it looked as if the Washington’s fire had caused the accident.” The action reports would lend credence to the idea that even Willis Lee was susceptible to making deadly mistakes in the heat of battle.

  As the Preston coasted to a stop, the Walke was hit, too. Captain Fraser was working to set up a torpedo solution at a large target to starboard when the enemy fish arrived. One struck the Walke forward of the bridge, lifting the forward half of the ship “bodily out of the water,” the action report read. As the destroyer crashed back into the sea without a bow forward of the bridge superstructure, one of the ship’s magazines detonated and its explosion ruptured forward fuel oil tanks and tore holes in the superstructure decks. A few seconds later, several medium-caliber warheads slammed into the ship, blowing away a swath of her forecastle and forward superstructure decking. Across the main deck surged a flood of fuel oil several inches deep. Flames roared through the forward compartments. Very quickly it became clear that the Walke was going down by the bow. When machine-gun ammunition started popping and the forward bulkhead of the fire room finally buckled, Fraser decided to abandon ship. The severed bow floated on as the stern sank. Minutes later the survivors in the water were rocked by an undersea blast as the ship’s depth charges exploded, to grievous effect in their company. The dead included Captain Fraser. The Walke’s dead would number eighty-two men, including six of her officers.

  The Benham, behind the Walke, briefly took the lead before a shell plunged into her fire room. Then a torpedo struck, a Type 90 fish probably fired by the Ayanami. It carried away about fifty feet of the Benham’s bow below the main deck. The blast produced no fatalities but sent a tall column of hot seawater soaring toward the stars. When it came back down, it washed heavily over the length of the ship, causing injuries topside and carrying a man overboard. Then another shower fell on the Benham: oil and debris from the explosion on board the Preston ahead. The Benham continued along at ten knots. The Gwin, riding in the van’s rear, popped star shells, illuminating the coast of Savo, where flashes of gunfire were visible. Her torpedo crew had a solution on a cruiser but a short circuit caused a torpedo to fire prematurely, well out of range. Then the Gwin, too, started absorbing shells, taking a hit in the engine room. A failure in her safety circuits caused three torpedoes to release from their tubes and slide harmlessly overboard. The Gwin came right to avoid the dying Preston and continued on her westerly course.

  The Benham’s captain, Lieutenant Commander John B. Taylor, saw the trouble ahead and decided to steer clear of the damaged ships and the churn of enemy gunfire. Turning hard right, he made a half circle and steadied up, heading east until the Washington passed on an opposite course. Circling back around, Taylor, seeing the burning Walke and Preston, planned to stop and recover survivors. When the two cripples came under fire again, he elected, however, to withdraw.

  It was around this time, at about 11:33 p.m., that the South Dakota suffered an appalling systems failure. Her after turret had just lashed out at a target off the starboard bow when Captain Gatch’s ship was seized as if by an aneurysm, a short circuit in her main switchboard. As the breakers tripped out in the switchboards that served her secondary battery, only to find that they had been tied down by the chief engineer, the overload surged to other switches, creating a collapsing house of cards within the ship’s power grid. In an instant the great battleship went dark. Gone were her gyros and all her fire-control equipment. As the battleship’s main battery fell silent, there was nothing Gatch could do to his enemy but curse.

  When the Washington turned left and passed the burning destroyers on their disengaged side, hidden from the enemy by their fires, she entered waters dense with flotsam and survivors. Making twenty-six knots through the debris field of the stricken Walke and Preston, the battleship’s sailors threw life rafts overboard. From the ranks of bobbing heads they heard cries of encouragement: “Get after’em, Washington!”

  Captain Gatch in the South Dakota tried to follow the Washington as she passed on the disengaged hand of the destroyers, but when a wreck of a destroyer loomed, threatening collision, he was forced to turn the other way, conning sharply right, passing between the Walke and Preston and the enemy. The maneuver placed his blinded warship in an unfortunate tactical position, silhouetted by the burning wrecks and plainly visible to an enemy hungry for targets. Three minutes after her switchboard failure, power returned to the ship. The outage was long enough to disorient one of the two most powerful ships in Savo Sound that night. And the confusion that reigned led to a tactical error in shiphandling that would draw concentrated enemy attention in the coming minutes.

  The heavy toll inflicted on the four leading ships of the American column was the pattern set by previous engagements. Destroyers, always expendable, had sacrified themselves in faithful adherence to duty. Seeing the plight of his leading foursome, Willis Lee excused his van from battle, ordering the Benham and the Gwin to retire. The Washington and South Dakota would carry this fight alone.

  In the Washington, the detonation of the Walke’s depth charges could be felt like a speed bump under tread. The battleship, whose five-inch guns helped batter the Ayanami to a powerless, burning hulk, had to cease firing her secondary battery now for fear of hitting friendly destroyers.

  For his part, Kondo was eager to send his two smaller groups to tangle with the Americans, but he was cautious and hesitant with his more powerful Bombardment Unit. He received a report from Commander Eiji Sakuma, captain of the Ayanami, taking credit for the grievous damage inflicted on the American destroyer van. The elation on the Atago’s bridge was squelched when word arrived from Admiral Hashimoto in the Sendai that the Ayanami had been terribly hit herself. Adrift northwest of Savo Island, she would finally sink when spreading fires detonated her torpedo battery, breaking her in two.

  As his widely roaming forces circled and sparred with Lee, Kondo seemed torn between two objectives. Keenly aware that his mission was to suppress the airfield so as to give Tanaka’s transports, steaming well to his north, a chance to land without further interference from the Cactus Air Force, Kondo kept the Kirishima and his two heavy cruisers interposed between Lee and the transports. Even as lookouts in the Atago and Takao insisted they had seen an American battleship among their opponents, Kondo discounted the possibility. He let his light forces carry the fight while awaiting his opportunity to throw the Kirishima at Henderson Field.

  Having learned from his destroyers that the fight was going well against the U.S. “cruisers,” Kondo ordered Hashimoto to assist the damaged Ayanami. As Hashimoto turned nort
h to comply, he encountered Admiral Kimura’s destroyers, compelling them into a full circular turn to avoid a collision. Kondo’s unwieldy task force organization thus turned and bit him. As the Bombardment Force—the Kirishima and the two cruisers—finally turned south to close on Henderson Field, both Kimura and Hashimoto found themselves out of the fight.

  Kondo had barely settled into his new heading when his lookouts spotted the South Dakota and identified her as a cruiser. At the same time, the Nagara reported seeing two enemy battleships near Cape Esperance. The Atago’s lookouts corrected their error in short order, announcing the presence of battleships. But it was only after his flagship’s searchlights swept over the compact and powerful form of the forty-two-thousand-ton South Dakota that Kondo himself finally grasped the nature of his opponent. All at once both the admiral and his flagship’s commanding officer, Captain Matsuji Ijuin, began shouting orders to engage.

  Fixed by searchlights, the U.S. battlewagon drew the immediate violent attention of every major ship in Kondo’s force. The Japanese flagship Atago and her sister ship, the Takao, struck the South Dakota especially hard, repeated scoring with eight-inch fire from five thousand yards. From the Atago, the Nagara, and four destroyers, thirty-four Long Lances splashed into the sea. The Kirishima fired on Gatch’s ship with her fourteen-inch battery from eleven thousand yards, scoring with a hit at the base of her great after turret. The blast turned the surrounding deck planks into a storm of chips, incinerated the canvas gun bloomers, and cast fragments up and down the deck. A loader on the left gun inside the turret heard officers on the phones, wondering about the extent of the damage and whether the gun would still fire with an Olympian dent in her barbette. “Our turret commander was certainly a cool-headed duck,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Never mind how bad we’re hit. I don’t give a damn if the guns blow up. I’m going to fire.’ ” There came a double buzz followed by a long buzz, indicating the turret was about to discharge. The expectant seconds passed, but the great guns remained silent. With the main battery out, paralyzed by the electrical failure, Gatch was able to respond only with his secondary battery. The battleship’s five-inch guns jackhammered fiercely in local control, but were hardly a deterrent to heavy cruisers and a battleship.

  Topside, the South Dakota was taking the same kind of punishment that had turned the San Francisco’s decks into a killing field two nights before. The wash of shrapnel made a sizzling sound as it sliced into cables, gun shields, and steel decking. Well protected though the engineering compartments were deep within the vital “armored box,” no battleship’s topsides stations were proof against such firepower. More often than not, the armor-piercing rounds fired by Kondo’s ships penetrated and passed through the superstructure plating without exploding. Still, the fires raged so fiercely that some enemy observers became convinced she was a goner. The barrage of hits to the South Dakota’s superstructure shattered steam pipes going to the ship’s whistle, and gusts of steam scalded many sailors in those exposed spaces. In Battle Two, the executive officer, Commander A. E. Uehlinger, refused to abandon station after it was engulfed in steam. In the end, the battleship’s high foremast superstructure was poor shelter. It was a death trap.

  The chaplain, James Claypool, recalled hearing men praying. Some were so scared they couldn’t remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer. “At such times everything you do is a prayer,” a chief petty officer said. “Even your cuss words are prayers.”

  The South Dakota was designed for a different kind of fight, conducted at distances to the horizon and beyond, where her huge guns could kill at standoff range. At close ranges, the variables were too many to manage and the risk was great. When an eight-inch shell exploded near an ammunition hoist, flashing through the opening and igniting some life jackets, a fire rose in a passageway adjacent to a handling room serving the five-inch battery. This small fire was a dangerous one. But it and the rest of the South Dakota’s belowdecks fires were quickly extinguished, and a disastrous secondary explosion was forestalled. It was Gatch’s good fortune especially that none of the many torpedoes fired his way struck his ship, as her design was vulnerable below the waterline. Several Long Lances exploded prematurely on the way in. Topside, the flames danced.

  WILLIS LEE IN THE Washington had been patiently tracking a large target on his starboard hand, but since he had lost track of the South Dakota, owing to his blind spot astern, he dared not turn loose his big guns on this bogey, the Kirishima, until her identity could be verified. When the Japanese opened their searchlight shutters on the South Dakota, however, he had his answer. Lee’s flagship enjoyed momentary concealment as she slid behind the burning Walke and Preston, which blinded Kondo to his presence. Here was an hour of truth, and the truth was this: Willis Lee was the contemporary master of radar fire control, and Washington’s SG system gave him a clear electronic view of the oceanic battlefield under almost any circumstances.

  While sailors in open-air stations saw the horror of naval combat in the machine age with their own senses—steaming through the debris fields of the sunken destroyers, shouting out to sailors bobbing on rafts nursing ghastly wounds, smelling the sweet tang of burned flesh—inside, officers with access to a radar image watched an abstract painting of the battlescape unfurl in a remorseless electric light. It was a picture cleansed of horror and emotion. Lee knew how to operate by it. He trained one group of his starboard side five-inch dual mounts on the Atago, and his main battery and the other group of five-inch mounts on the larger blip on his scope, the Kirishima. The Washington’s unblinking electronic eyes nudged the main battery on target. From eighty-four hundred yards—“body punching range,” as a Washington lieutenant put it—the South Pacific’s battleship gunslinger emerged from the cover of his burning destroyers and turned loose with everything he had. Naval engineers who designed protective armor schemes for battleships calculated from the need to stop large-caliber direct gunfire from around twenty thousand yards. But at close ranges, stopping a sixteen-inch projectile was hopeless. One of the South Dakota’s turret officers, Paul Backus, exclaimed, “Throwing fourteen-inch and sixteen-inch shells at that kind of range—Jesus.” Willis Lee had won the draw on the Kirishima.

  The last time Lee had held night spotting and gunnery practice was in January 1942. But since then, he had drilled his crews in target selection and fire-control procedures so thoroughly that it did not really matter whether it was night or day. An ensign named Patrick Vincent, stationed in the Washington’s armored conning tower, said, “I was amazed at how well Captain Davis and Admiral Lee could function on the bridge with all the noise and blasting pressure from the guns. The racket was unbelievable. Even in the conning tower, it was almost impossible to communicate. The pressure from the gunfire spurting through open ports was knocking men down.” It was nothing like what a battleship experienced on the receiving end of that fury.

  It had been just six minutes since the Kirishima’s gunners had lost a solution on the South Dakota and checked their fire. Lookouts on the Atago, spotting the Washington, shouted, “There is another ship forward of the first, a big battleship!” Short seconds later the lookouts were crying, “Kirishima is totally obscured by shell splashes!” According to Lee, the Washington’s fire control and main battery “functioned as smoothly as though she were engaged in a well-rehearsed target practice.” The first salvo probably hit, and the second one certainly did.

  Ashore, roused from sleep by the heavy hammering of main batteries in the sound, Bill McKinney was among a team of Atlanta electricians stationed on a searchlight installation that stood watch over Guadalcanal’s northern coast. Defended by a detachment of marines, the facility consisted of a tower of sixty-inch searchlights with a diesel generator and a remote-control director station. It was inoperable because its power cable had been slashed by overzealous foxhole diggers. Now, awakened, they were seized by the sight of battle. There was no telling who was friend or foe. It was like watching a baseball game without lineup ca
rds, with everyone in the same colorless uniform. Ships revealed themselves suddenly with long gouts of flame and the bright parabolas of tracer rounds lazing through the night. The luminous red globes that seemed to float across the water knew no nationality. A few of them seemed to hover and disappear into the silhouette of a large ship, which stopped firing.

  The Kirishima took a frightful battering from the Washington. The first hit destroyed the forward radio room located at the base of the foremast pagoda, below the main deck. Shells smashed into the barbettes of her two forward fourteen-inch turrets, starting fires that threatened the magazines. The battleship’s assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Horishi Tokuno, ordered a forward powder magazine flooded to prevent fires. The rush of water caused the ship to list slightly to starboard. Another projectile hit the steering machinery room, flooding it and leaving the rudder jammed to starboard. After this, only the ship’s inboard shafts were working, making it impossible to steer by reversing the outboard shafts. When hydraulic pressure failed in the after part of the ship, her two after main gun turrets were left inoperable.

  Heat and smoke from topside fires, sucked into the ship by ventilation turbines, forced the evacuation of the engine rooms. A pair of thirty-foot holes yawning in her deck amidships were the scars of this massive assault. On the Kirishima’s bridge, Lieutenant (j.g.) Michio Kobayashi noticed the ship slowing and turning in a circle.

  The Kirishima’s main battery managed to roar several times in return. The commanding officer, Captain Sanji Iwabuchi, thought his first salvo scored two hits, one of them blowing off the bridge of his target. “At least ten hits were made upon them, but the enemy could not be finished off,” he said. It was the familiar optimism of a warrior lost in a battle larger than he can comprehend. The fourteen-inch armor-piercing rounds passed like giant subway cars over the Washington’s rigging. “They must have been mighty close,” a Washington sailor said, “but an inch is as good as a mile.” Ed Hooper’s remorseless radars would have allowed no escape, even if the enemy ship retained the ability to maneuver. As the radar automatically lay the big rifles, the Washington’s gun trains kept rolling and the night rained murderously with heavy metal. The U.S. flagship’s rapid-firing secondary battery popped five-inch rounds into the Kirishima’s pagoda foremast, stacks, and superstructure, causing untold loss of personnel.