They sat down wearily. Paige felt the sweat drying coldly on his body. He watched vapor rising from his machine-gun jacket. He felt a burning sensation in his left arm. He looked down. From fingertips to forearm a long white blister was forming, swelling as thick as a rope to mark the place where flesh had held hot steel.
Out in the Bay behind him, submarine Amberjack had at last surfaced, had finally delivered her cargo of fuel, and was now sailing eagerly away to Australia.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
BATTLES on land, sometimes entire campaigns, often have depended upon the outcome of a naval battle; but seldom has a great fight been fought at sea because of what happened ashore.
Yet, the battle of Henderson Field was directly responsible for the savage carrier conflict called The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.
Successive postponements of the 17th Army’s major assault on Guadalcanal had not only cost the Japanese the services of carrier Hiyo but had given the Americans time to double their carrier forces; and carrier power varies as the square: two carriers are four times as powerful as one. General Maruyama’s premature message of victory had also left Admiral Yamamoto teetering on a tightrope of indecision and had very nearly sent his carriers tearing into the trap which Admiral Halsey had planned for them.
But Admiral Nagumo’s two turnarounds had kept him well north of Hornet and Enterprise as they slanted northwestward from their run around the Santa Cruz Islands. Throughout the night of October 25–26, while the Sendai Division made rendezvous with ruin, the two American flattops raced along an aggressive northwestward course toward the enemy. Hornet had a deckload of aircraft ready for a moonlight strike, all of the ships were alerted for immediate action—but the Japanese carriers were never found.
Nagumo had been frightened into his second and most fortuitous turnaround by the fruitless attack on Zuikaku. After he had reversed course, the Vanguard Group of battleships and cruisers had also turned north.
Shortly before three o’clock in the morning of October 26, thirteen scouts went zooming aloft from the Japanese carrier decks. A few minutes later the entire fleet—Vanguard gunfire ships, Nagumo’s three carriers, and Admiral Kakuta in Junyo about 130 miles to the north—turned south again.
About five o’clock on the bridge of Amatsukaze Commander Hara heard his radio-room voice tube come to life with the message: “Shokaku scout plane reports a large enemy force at KH17. Force consists of one Saratoga-class carrier and fifteen other ships heading northwestward.”1 Commander Hara gasped. KH17 was an area 210 miles away on a bearing slightly to the left. The Americans were not directly ahead, or even to the right between the Japanese and the Solomons, as Nagumo’s officers expected. They were to the left. Without those two turnarounds and runs north, the Japanese would have been far to the south and the Americans would have been in behind them.
On Shokaku’s flag bridge, the white-gloved Nagumo grinned broadly. He ordered immediate strikes. Planes began roaring down the decks. To the rear, Admiral Kakuta grimaced angrily to discover the enemy was 330 miles away. He rang up top speed and big Junyo’s boilers built her speed to twenty-six knots in a record ten minutes. Junyo even sprang ahead of her destroyers, much to their astonishment, while Kakuta ordered a strike readied. Although he was far away from the enemy, his pilots could return to the closer Zuikaku or Shokaku. And by the time he was prepared to launch a second strike, he would be much closer.
Ahead of him, forty dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers escorted by twenty-seven Zeros were airborne and burning up the miles between Nagumo’s three carriers and the Americans to the south.
ATTACK. REPEAT, ATTACK.
It was only three words, but it was in the style characteristic of Bull Halsey, and it had the effect of opening the sleep-gummed eyes of sailors gulping pre-dawn breakfast on the American ships, of electrifying pilots being briefed on carrier decks, and of making everyone in Kinkaid’s force aware that today there would be a battle.
Kinkaid had already ordered a search of what were to be the battle waters, a thousand square miles of South Pacific to the north of the Santa Cruz. It was a wise decision considering his lack of information on the enemy; but unfortunate in the fact that a few minutes after sixteen Dauntlesses took off, he received a Catalina report, delayed two hours, placing the enemy about two hundred miles to the northwest.
By then the Dauntlesses, each armed with a 500-pound bomb, “just in case,” had paired up and fanned out over the battle water by twos.
Some of the pairs found the Vanguard Group commanded by Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, and a few of them made unsuccessful attacks on cruiser Tone.
But it was not until a few minutes before seven that Nagumo’s carriers were located. They promptly put up smoke and altered course. The Dauntlesses began fighting off the Zeros buzzing in on their tails. But their report also drew Lieutenant Stockton Strong and Ensign Charles Irvine to the area. They saw the smaller carrier Zuiho below them. They nosed over, a pair of small bombs between them, and went screaming down.
Commander Hara gaped. The American scout planes had come down from the overcast undetected and were already pulling up over Zuiho. Hara could see the silver streaks of their bombs flashing toward the unsuspecting ship. Then Hara groaned. A pair of explosions shook Zuiho and black clouds rolled skyward.
Just two bombs, and both had hit in almost the same place, tearing open a fifty-foot hole in Zuiho’s flight decks, knocking out gun batteries and starting fires. Zuiho signaled that she could launch planes but could not receive them. Nagumo ordered her to fly off all of her fighters and withdraw.
Of five flattops which had sailed from Truk, only three were left.
Moreover the Lord, thy God, will send the Hornet among them until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.
To Hornet’s fighting sailors, many of whom carried this capital-H quotation from Deuteronomy inside their wallets, no comment on the battle could be more appropriate. And at half-past seven that morning Hornet was first to strike at “they that are left and hide themselves.” Lieutenant Commander William (“Gus”) Widhelm led fifteen Dauntlesses, six Avengers and eight Wildcats aloft, to be followed by forty-four additional aircraft from both carriers.
Behind these seventy-three aircraft winging northwestward, the American ships prepared to receive Nagumo’s sixty-seven warbirds roaring southeast.
Aboard the carriers flammables were heaved over the side, deck hoses were shut off and men stood by with buckets of foamite to fight flames. Liquefied carbon dioxide was fed into gasoline lines to freeze and crystallize as protection against fire. Damage-control units fanned out through the ships while men who worked the huge sprinkler systems stood by in control rooms ready to flood any section of the ship upon order.
Sailors and Marines everywhere put on their helmets and flash clothes, their life jackets as well, if they did not interfere with movement, and the brigs were thrown open and prisoners temporarily freed to take up their battle stations: in the sick bays, in the engine rooms, in the galleys, or on the guns.
Inside soundless turrets made of thick steel, gunners and ammunition passers checked the chains which brought up shells and powder bags from magazines below, while less protected gun crews on weather deck mounts stood by their sights or wiped the oil from gun barrels. Aboard Enterprise, men trained to fire the new 40-mm antiaircraft guns spoke confidently to each other of what these sleek new beauties would do to “bastards,” as American seamen, with characteristic delicacy of phrasing, called enemy aircraft.
Big new battleship South Dakota also mounted the new gun, an American version of the famous Swedish Bofors, and she had them because of an accident.
Rushed to the South Pacific through the Panama Canal, South Dakota had torn her belly open on a coral pinnacle near Tongatabu, and had had to limp into Pearl Harbor for repairs. While there, she was fitted with dozens of the new forties. And her skipper, Captain Thomas Gatch, had made sure his men could
shoot them, for Gatch may not have had much passion for clean fingernails or white-glove inspections, but he did like a bull’s-eye. All the way from Pearl Harbor, Gatch had kept his men busy at target practice. Squeegees and buckets lay neglected in South Dakota’s lockers and the big ship became a slattern. At Santa Cruz she was probably the dirtiest ship in the United States Navy, but also one of the deadliest.
And so the ships made ready, and on Hornet, thoughtful cooks baked thousands of mince pies and doughnuts. They hoped, if there was a lull in the battle, to take them throughout the ship, along with buckets of hot coffee, to feed Hornet’s hungry fighters.
Colonel Masajiro Furumiya was in a torment of hunger and thirst. The preceding night, he and the five other survivors of the Seventh Company had attempted to break out of the American lines and rejoin their comrades. They had gotten to within a hundred yards of the American wire and had been pinned to the ground by the terrible hail of fire which riddled General Maruyama’s second nocturnal assault.
They had crept back to a clump of underbrush, and now, as they lay there on the morning of October 26, tortured by hunger cramps, their lips cracked and their mouths swelling—tantalized by the smell of cooking issuing from the nearby encampment of Marine mortars—Furumiya again toyed with the idea of suicide. But then, he decided to make one more attempt to escape and save the colors.
At nightfall, calling upon all the strength remaining to them, they would break up into two-man groups and try to crawl to freedom.
There would be no lulls for hungry sailors.
Shortly after nine o’clock that morning, while Enterprise slipped into the sanctuary of a rain squall, the Japanese fliers found Hornet.
There were twenty-seven of them—fifteen Val dive-bombers, twelve torpedo-carrying Kates—and they pressed their attack with great courage, straight into a storm of five-inch and lesser fire from Hornet and her screen. Such attacks seldom fail, and mighty Hornet began to rock and shudder from enemy hits.
The first struck the starboard side of the flight deck aft, and then two near-misses hammered her hull. Next, the Japanese squadron commander came thundering down on a suicide dive. He carried three missiles—one 500-pound bomb and two 100-pounders—and one of the smaller bombs exploded as he smashed into Hornet’s stack. His own momentum and the thrust of the explosion drove him on down through the flight deck, where the second 100-pounder exploded and tore into a ready room below. The big bomb was a dud, but it remained wedged below decks to menace the men of the Hornet as they turned to face the far greater ordeal of the torpedo-bombers.
Though some of the Kates blew up and others plummeted into the sea, the others bored in low astern. Two torpedoes struck to starboard in swift staggering succession, tearing away the ship’s armor and ramming into the engine rooms.
Belching smoke, ablaze from gasoline fires set by the suicider, Hornet lurched to starboard, slowed to a stop, and began taking in water.
Two more 500-pounders struck aft and a third landed slightly forward.
And then a blazing Kate made a suicide run from dead ahead, crashing into the forward gun gallery and blowing up near the forward elevator shaft.
In five minutes Hornet had been left a helpless, drifting, blazing hulk. Her fire mains were broken and her power lines were cut, communications were out, and six fires were burning fiercely, threatening at any moment to engulf the ship, or worse, detonate the deadly 500-pound egg lodged in her vitals.
She seemed surely lost, and there was one despairing moment when Captain Charles Mason issued the order, “Prepare to abandon ship!” But minutes later the bullhorns blared: “Belay that … Belay that … Fires under control!”
Hornet was being avenged.
Her Dauntlesses had found Shokaku, accompanied by still-smoking Zuiho. Just as the Japanese had struck at their own ship, the Americans went plummeting down through layers of flak with enemy fighters clawing at their tails, and they put three to six 1000-pound bombs into Shokaku’s vitals.
Pouring out columns of smoke, her flight deck shredded and her hangars in ruins, all of her guns useless, Shokaku turned away.
Commander Hara aboard Amatsukaze watched her departure in agony, but then he hastened to obey the retiring Admiral Nagumo’s orders to join the screen protecting Zuikaku.
Fortunately for Japan, the American Avengers never found Shokaku, and were unable to finish her off with torpedoes. They struck, instead, along with riddled flights from Enterprise, at Admiral Abe’s Vanguard Group, damaging cruiser Chikuma and forcing her to withdraw. But they had missed the prize: the carriers.
Even so, big Shokaku was out of the war for nine months.
Hornet looked like a good risk.
Damage-control teams led by Commander Henry Moran, and greatly assisted by destroyers Morris and Russell lying alongside to hose the burning ship with sea water, had brought all fires under control by ten o’clock in the morning. Commander Pat Creehan’s black gang had provided steam by hooking up three undamaged boilers to unruptured pipes ingeniously connected to the after engine room. Hornet was fit to be towed, and cruiser Northampton came cautiously forward to secure a line to her.
But then a lone Val swooped down to drop a bomb that missed, but which also canceled towing operations and sent the apprehensive screening ships racing wildly around the crippled giant.
They need not have bothered, for the enemy aircraft were at that moment concentrating on Enterprise.
“I think,” Commander John Crommelin said thoughtfully, studying one of the diving Vals with professional detachment, “I think that son of a bitch is going to get us.”2
He was right.
Plunging at an angle, the 500-pounder slammed through the forward overhang of Enterprise’s flight deck, came clear for fifteen feet, ripped through the fo’c’sle deck, and tore out of the ship’s port side to explode under the port bow, ripping jagged holes in the ship’s side and blowing a Dauntless into the sea.
Thus, at 11:17 A.M., the onslaught on the only undamaged American carrier in the entire Pacific was begun.
Only an hour before, Enterprise had already lost destroyer Porter out of her screen. Japanese submarine I-21 had launched a spread of Long Lances at Big E, but Porter had taken them in her fire rooms and had had to be sunk by gunfire from destroyer Shaw.
And so Captain Osborne Hardison, Enterprise’s new skipper, had also to think of subsurface attack when the enemy dive-bombers came hurtling down from the blue. Fortunately, he did not also have to deal with simultaneous aerial torpedo attack. The Japanese had planned it that way, but of the forty-four planes that were to make co-ordinated torpedo and bombing assaults, the twenty-four dive-bombers arrived a half-hour earlier and went immediately into action.
Steel and flame spouted up to meet them. Aboard mighty South Dakota a hundred muzzles flamed and fell, flamed and fell, like lethal pistons, and a cloud of dark-brown powder smoke drifted off her stern. South Dakota would claim thirty-two enemy aircraft shot down that day, she would be officially credited with twenty-six, but she, and all the other gunfire ships, all of Enterprise’s guns taking full aim at the relentless Vals coming straight down on their twisting, maneuvering ship, could not deny the enemy.
Moments after the first bomb struck, another crashed abaft the forward elevator, breaking in two on the hangar deck where one half exploded and the other half drove down to the third deck before exploding and killing forty men. Fires broke out; light, power, and communications lines were cut; and then a third bomb hit aft of the island superstructure to starboard.
Enterprise was whiplashed. She shook along every inch of her 800-foot length. Nearly every man on his feet was slammed to the deck, her entire foremast turned a half inch in its socket—knocking the antennas on it out of alignment—and a fuel tank was torn open to trail a wake of oil behind as Hardison swung his stricken ship hard to port.
Then the bombers departed and the torpedo-bombers arrived.
There were eleven dark-green Kates
in the first wave, but after Lieutenant Stanley (“Swede”) Vejtasa got through with them there were only five. In one of the great flying feats of the war, Swede Vejtasa, who had already shot down two Vals over Hornet, sent six torpedo-planes into the sea before he ran out of ammunition. Three or four more Kates were shot down by other Navy pilots, but still, fifteen broke through the fighter screen. They came flat over the water toward Enterprise, boring in off both bows.
Captain Hardison stood on the Big E’s bridge, his helmet in his left hand, watching the enemy aircraft, staying on course, with South Dakota following a thousand yards distant like a wingman, watching while American firepower whittled the enemy. Five miles out a Kate burst into flames and dove into the ocean with a brief plume of spray. Three miles out another skidded into the water. Two more came apart. But then, five Kates on the right bow made their drops.
Hardison looked quickly to the left. Four more Kates were coming in but had not yet launched. He looked again to his right.
Like a dreadful V, three torpedoes sped straight and true toward him, the middle one slightly out in front. They would strike and sunder Enterprise amidships.
Hardison studied the wakes intently. Everything—Guadalcanal even—depended on his judgment. For one long calculating second Hardison stared at those three long lines of bubbles …
“Right full rudder.”
“Right full rudder, sir!”
Slowly, ponderously, Enterprise’s stern swung left, while her rudder—a huge steel blade three stories high—swept tons of water to the right. Slowly, with fraught majesty, her great bow swung toward the torpedo tracks. Captain Hardison walked to the left wing of his bridge to watch.
Admiral Kinkaid came to stand silently beside him.
Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War Page 32