Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  When Shoup heard a pump motoring in the forward part of the ship, beyond the no-man’s-land of the amidships fires, it was his first indication that people were alive on the other side of the hangar deck. Within an hour the persistent labor of the bucket brigades had quenched the fires as far forward as the well deck. Only a stubborn lube-oil fire in the starboard forward corner of well deck was evidence of the great conflagration that had been.

  Shoup and Hayes were optimists. But a hotter blaze was worming its way deeper in the Astoria’s belly, a severe fire in the wardroom that was unapproachable by hand or by hose. Notified of it, Greenman ordered the forward magazines flooded to prevent an explosion. Enterprising sailors tossed a couple of preventive bucketfuls down the ammunition hoists, then turned open the seacocks. As the powder bags were swamped, one danger vanished and another rose in its place. The weight of the water accumulating below threatened to increase the modest port-side list.

  It was around 3:30 a.m. when the rain came, and for about an hour it fell, heavy and cold. Custer remembered some folklore he’d heard that said rain always came after a big naval battle because the concussion of big guns unhinged the equilibrium of the atmosphere.

  Topside the rains fell hard. Though they did little against the blaze in the well deck, the superstructure cooled, steamed, and smoked. The blackened foremast turned to solid steel again after buckling under the heat. Hoses lay about, withered down to their coils like discarded snakeskins. The forward turrets, manned now by corpses, were still trained in the direction of the last known target. The ship, coughing flames from her belly, shook occasionally from the muffled thump of five-inch projectiles exploding in superheated hoists. In the midst of it all, men were nearly stuporous. “I stood for a moment of silence in memory of the men I had known,” Jack Gibson said. “Then voices roused me. They came from a destroyer coming up alongside.”

  When the Bagley first appeared ahead at around four o’clock that morning, the ship was blacked out and identification impossible. The Astoria’s survivors mistook the flashes of her signal lamp for the muzzle of an enemy rifle firing into their shipmates adrift. Captain Greenman ordered a signalman to climb atop turret two and challenge the newcomer with a blinker gun. “Shaking with cold and fright,” recalled signalman Vince Furst, “I sent out AA and the familiar SOS.”

  The voice that came in reply was unmistakable, the New England twang of the Bagley’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander George A. Sinclair, well known in the Astoria from his recent tenure as her engineering officer. His destroyer approached bow-to-bow in a well-executed “Chinese landing” and held fast to the vastly larger cruiser. The wounded were taken from the Astoria’s forecastle by triage, stretcher cases first, crews working in the darkness by voice and touch. When Joe Custer’s turn came, he began descending to the destroyer’s deck, then heard Greenman call from the bridge, “Able-bodied men stay aboard! We are not abandoning ship!” A spontaneous cheer went up.

  The effort to save the Astoria called Kelly Turner’s battered screening group to a proud new purpose. The Bagley took aboard seventy of her wounded. Playing searchlights on the water, looking for more, Sinclair’s tin can shoved off and drew alongside aft. She took off more wounded and sent aboard a salvage crew of several hundred men. As the sun rose low over Florida Island, the destroyer-minesweeper Hopkins approached and backed up to the Astoria, fantail-to-fantail. Captain Greenman, blood all over him, arm in a sling, asked for a tow. A cable was tied to the base of the smaller ship’s towing winch and fastened tight. A 120-volt electrical lead and a fire hose followed. Shoup and Hayes were glad for the help. If power could be restored, steam might be raised, too.

  Then the Wilson came alongside, sidling up on the windward beam to starboard, pumping water into the fires forward. The work never proceeded without thought of a renewed enemy attack. The destroyers were repeatedly called away to investigate sonar contacts.

  With the Hopkins towing from astern and the Wilson’s deck force hosing fires in the wardroom, the list steadied. Bucket brigades redoubled their back-straining labors. It was not enough. When fires below reached the shell hoists, seized by shell damage and full of ordnance meant for enemy targets, a series of explosions began weakening the ship from within like small strokes. As several of these breached the hull, the Astoria’s list slowly grew more serious. At ten degrees it was difficult for men to walk on deck.

  Further on into the morning, the Astoria suffered a particularly heavy explosion deep within, probably in the forward five-inch magazine, which precautionary flooding never reached. From a deep and inaccessible void, its detonation was felt more than heard. There was a muffled cacophony of collapsing bulkheads. Bubbling to the surface on the port side came an exhalation of yellow gas, detritus of a burned-out powder magazine. Sailors on the other ships could see tendrils of smoke leaking from nearly every rivet on the ship, thousands of them. When the list grew to fifteen degrees, the shell holes above the waterline started shipping water. The makeshift bandages of mattresses and pillows shored up with timber could do only so much. When the list reached thirty degrees, all her sailors could do was watch the Astoria yield.

  Shortly after noon, the port side gunwales were awash. The bucket brigades stood down as all hands were ordered aft. The Buchanan, alongside to fight fires, secured her hoses and began taking off survivors. Sailors without life jackets floated on the sea gripping discarded powder cans. Destroyers stood by to retrieve them. A survivor of the Astoria’s forward turrets, Charles C. Gorman, saw a man in the water near the fantail of a destroyer screaming for help. The deckhands threw him a line, but as they did so, the destroyer accelerated, evidently called away to pursue a submarine contact. The man grabbed the line but missed, and the sharks were soon on him. Gorman called it “one of the most horrible sights of all the wars I have been in.”

  Many more-fortunate souls were already aboard the tin cans, lying prone on their steel decks. The decks of the Bagley were filled with Astoria wounded; limbs, heads, and torsos wrapped in bandages and gauze. On the Bagley, those who could manage it stood at the rail, attention fixed on the floundering carcass of their onetime home. The Astoria was rolling to her port side, bow deep and stern raising high. On the afterdeck, a sailmaker and a special working party wrapped bodies for burial at sea until the list forced them to disband.

  “Off her slanting side, men were walking slowly, deliberately, into the calm water,” Joe Custer observed from the Bagley. “Some of them went into shallow dives, like kids off a raft. Others just walked off the edge and started their arms in motion. Some wore life jackets, others didn’t. Officers’ khaki mingled with seamen’s dungarees. There were hundreds of heads bobbing in the water. And now the great group went into a mass crawl, like so many porpoises, toward the destroyers and lifeboats hovering nearby.”

  “The day was beautiful, the sea like glass and the ship was slowly overturning and sinking,” a sailor on the transport Alchiba wrote. “Men were in the water, boats were picking them up. It would have made a gripping picture.” It was just past noon on the ninth when the Astoria began settling by the stern. Then she was gone. The inventory of enshrouded dead piled on the afterdeck entered the sea without ceremony. For the third time within twelve hours, the temperate waters of Savo Sound absorbed the heat of an American man-of-war’s incandescent ruins.

  AT HIS HEADQUARTERS in Nouméa, Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley was awaiting news of the landings, about which he knew nothing, nor about the explosive events that followed. “These were endless hours and days for us,” the commander of SOPAC wrote. Evidently, however, he felt no urgency to end them. He did not ask his commanders for updates. “I did not want to interfere with the operations by demanding reports when I did not know the local conditions as to ability to send dispatches,” he would write. Ghormley was wise to assume the worst of his patchwork radio setup. But it would strike some as curious that he, a theater commander, equated inquiry with interference and used his unfamiliarity with the fo
rward area to justify his continuing detachment from it.

  When news of the disastrous fate of the cruisers filtered down to the landing area that morning, unloading accelerated to a frantic pace. Turner’s plan was to withdraw his troop transports and cargo ships on August 9, getting them under way at first light. That decision looked more urgently necessary than ever. Already they were unguarded by carrier planes. Now their cruiser screening force had been wiped away, too.

  Supplies were needed ashore, and shipboard deck space was in demand for the wounded. As stores and arms flowed to the beach, the vacated stowage was used to accommodate casualties of battle. A transport officer recalled, “Most of them were young kids sitting numbly, their semi-naked bodies black from burns and the oil of sunken ships. I doubt I will ever forget that sweet smell of burned flesh.”

  Before sunrise on Sunday morning, August 9, the remnants of Task Force 62 gathered for their march of shame. The antiaircraft cruiser San Juan, Rear Admiral Norman Scott’s flagship, used her new surface radar to form up in the dark. If the new equipment was useful in retreat, there was no telling how it might have performed in battle. As the battle raged the San Juan stood idle, several miles to the southeast, patrolling outside the Tulagi transport anchorage. “If the San Juan had been up there,” said Lieutenant Commander Horacio Rivero, her assistant gunnery officer, “we would have picked up [Mikawa’s] ships coming down.… We had the only radar that could do that. And we weren’t in the area where it could be used. They didn’t realize what it could do.” Turner was indeed unaware that the equipment in the destroyers on picket duty, the Blue and Ralph Talbot, was inadequate to cover the breadth of their patrol line. Though Admiral Ghormley had questioned the idea of using just two destroyers as pickets, he was assured that they would detect the approach of any enemy ships within twelve to fourteen miles with their SC search radar. Its range was just five thousand yards, or about half of what Crutchley believed it was, and half of the “conservative estimate” given to Admiral King by the commander of the Pacific Fleet’s destroyer force, Rear Admiral Walden L. “Pug” Ainsworth.

  As the sun rose, Task Force 62 steamed eastward through Lengo Channel, older, smaller, and, soon enough, wiser for the disaster of the preceding six hours. The broken-bowed Chicago led the Patterson, Mugford, Ralph Talbot, Dewey, and five destroyer-minesweepers along with several transports. In the second group went the rest of the transports, with the Australia, San Juan, and Hobart escorted by the destroyers Selfridge, Henley, Helm, Bagley, Blue, Ellet, Wilson, Hull, Monssen, and Buchanan. Shortly after the first dog watch (i.e. 1600–1800), the amphibious force, unloaded to the degree possible, got under way for Nouméa, too.

  Officers on all ships struggled to comprehend what had transpired the previous night. The skipper of the Monssen, Commander Roland N. Smoot, saw the missed opportunity as a disgrace. “I couldn’t help but keep saying to my gang around the bridge, ‘Why in the devil don’t we get into this? What are we doing down here waiting to be picked off one at a time? What’s the matter with us?’ ” Smoot’s comments had hindsight’s clarity. As the battle raged, the only American flag officer within range of the scrap, Norman Scott, believed he was watching the two American cruiser groups firing on each other. Scott’s thinking appears to have mirrored that of the five heavy cruiser commanders, four of whom, all but Captain Bode in the Chicago, were asleep in their sea cabins when the bugles rang. Despite the revolutionary radar eyes available to him, Scott was, according to Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, “without information except for what he had seen indistinctly.” As Mikawa’s cruisers were rounding the bottom curve of their counterclockwise circuit of Savo Island, Scott’s group had just reversed its patrol course to the south and was only fifteen thousand yards south of Mikawa’s fast-firing Chokai. Opportunity arrived at twenty-four knots and soon was gone again.

  Combat readiness simply wasn’t the order of the day. Captain Riefkohl would acknowledge that he had received reports of an approaching Japanese force on the afternoon of the battle, and that he had even calculated it could well arrive that night. If that was the case, it is hard to explain why, after noting this in his night order book, he retired to his cabin.

  The commanders on duty that night would have years to sort out the questions of culpability and innocence. Those whose ships had gone down fighting at least had that much honor left to hold on to. Captain Bode of the Chicago wasn’t given such a reprieve. Had the Chicago been sunk, leaving him a gallant survivor, it might have discharged some of the shame. Payment for his sins of omission and commission would come due in time.

  ADMIRAL KING WOULD CALL it the “blackest day of the whole war.” More than a thousand Allied sailors died on the night of August 8–9. The tally grew every hour through the day on the ninth as the badly wounded succumbed. Reporting the disaster to his president, King promised that the new battleships South Dakota and Washington, as well as the light cruiser Juneau, would help make up for the shortage of surface combatants. They were due to arrive at Tongatabu the first week of September. King asked Nimitz to send three to five of the repaired older battleships to shore up the battered South Pacific surface fleet. Nimitz, always a serious student of costs and benefits, was eloquent by his inaction. In the meantime, Vandegrift and his men stood essentially alone.

  Turner knew that the most essential need for the invasion force ashore was food, followed by land-based aircraft, ammunition, antiaircraft guns, barrage balloons, and radio construction personnel. Turner planned weekly convoys from Nouméa to keep them supplied. Running the convoys without air cover would be an unavoidable risk.

  Recuperating in the President Jackson en route to Nouméa, Captain Greenman was surprised to find two familiar faces from the Astoria, his executive officer, Frank Shoup, and the newsman Joe Custer. Lying on his back in his bunk, the skipper gestured to Custer and said to his exec, “Look what we’ve got here!”

  “A ghost!” said Shoup. The exec’s entire face was thick and black with burn jelly, as were his forearms and hands, except for his fingertips. “Well, aren’t we a lovely looking pair of sailors?”

  “We’ve just been discovering we still belong to the living,” Greenman said. As they lit smokes, Shoup found he couldn’t bend his middle three fingers. He held the butt with his pinkie and thumb. For a week he would be under medical orders to keep his arms high, to prevent blood from flowing into the burned flesh of his hands and forearms. Greenman had eleven pieces of shrapnel in him, including one that had struck in the small of his back and missed his spine by less than an inch. While the doctors took X-rays and picked shrapnel, he began reconstructing events to prepare his after-action report, making a list of the dead, the wounded, and the living and interviewing his officers and men.

  At Nouméa, Greenman forgot his own wounds and checked on his orphaned crew, asked after them, concerned himself with their mental state. He attended many of their burials at sea. As a chaplain intoned the Lord’s Prayer, two men would lift the cot with crisp ceremony. The hiss of the shroud sliding over canvas was “a sound that I felt go through my bones,” Joe Custer wrote. “This was the memory, I knew then, that I would never forget: the sound of bodies sliding on canvas.… The battle itself didn’t convey the despair, the hopelessness of this sound, for in the turmoil and the thunder of that battle night there were sounds of life all about, of men’s voices, of leather pounding steel decks: There was Life—and here was Death.”

  The Astoria’s junior chaplain, Matthew Bouterse, was haunted ever afterward by one corpse in particular: the one he had seen suspended in the mainmast, cooking above the flames. “That body burned in my dreams for weeks and it was almost completely consumed both in my dreams as it was in reality, and it came near consuming me with it.”

  Army personnel were generous, giving rescued sailors new shoes and olive drab fatigues. The crew of the transport American Legion would raise a fund to provide each survivor with a carton of cigarettes with matches, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a
nd a dollar’s worth of coupons to the ship’s store.

  One of the high-ranking naval officers in the area paid a visit to the hospital ship Solace. Walking between bunks, he talked quietly with every sailor he saw, many of them from his old ship. “When he got to me,” said Keithel P. Anthony, a water tender, “he knelt down and asked, ‘What ship, sailor?’

  “I said, ‘Astoria.’

  “And he asked, ‘Were you on there when I was captain?’