In the Helena’s pilothouse, all talk was of the battered flagship, steaming on the port quarter. The helmsman, George A. De Long, thought the San Francisco would be lucky to reach Espiritu Santo. McCandless placed her fighting efficiency at 25 percent. Though the Juneau was four feet down by the bow, she looked considerably healthier as she made seventeen knots on the Helena’s starboard quarter.
The radio, meanwhile, carried hopeful tidings—the excited transmissions from U.S. pilots as they swarmed a Japanese battleship, the Hiei, dead in the water near Savo Island. The running report was vastly entertaining for sailors who had just finished their own turn in the battle zone and had had a hand in leaving the aviators this first-class prize.
It was about 11 a.m. when a lookout noticed a disturbance on the surface of the sea to port. He said at first that it resembled “the usual eruption made by a porpoise.” Then a Helena gunner on a port side mount spotted it, a thin wake and a fin breaching the surface, just inside the wake of the Sterett, riding on the Helena’s port bow. A torpedo. He watched as it passed astern. The navigator shouted, “Hard right rudder, De Long!”
On the San Francisco, a bridge lookout, speechless, grabbed Lieutenant Commander Schonland by the shoulder and pointed at no fewer than four wakes approaching the ship’s port bow. Schonland ordered, “Full right rudder, emergency full ahead.” Seeing the white wakes burning toward the ship, Joseph Whitt starting running aft to escape the explosion. Leaping over a large gash in the deck, he caught his foot and went sprawling. He gathered himself quickly and looked forward to find the wake. The torpedo passed under the ship on the starboard side. He found himself looking directly at the Juneau.
There was no way to send warning to Captain Swenson’s ship. With all of the San Francisco’s steam lines broken, she could not give voice to her siren or her whistle, and with her flag bags burned, her TBS transmitter out, signal halyards cut, and all but one large searchlight wrecked, it was impossible to raise an effective alarm. Fate had placed Hoover’s formation in the periscope crosshairs of the submarine I-26, the same boat that had hit the Saratoga in August. Lying along the eastern flank of the column’s southerly line of travel, the IJN boat had three torpedo tubes flooded and ready.
As the Helena came right, De Long watched the Juneau through a porthole but soon lost her to the shifting line of sight. Then, unexpectedly, the navigator hollered, “Hard left rudder!” De Long reversed the helm, and the ship shuddered for several seconds and slowly came back. That was when the ocean shivered.
A Helena signalman was watching his counterpart on the Juneau through a glass, taking a blinker signal. One moment the man on the Juneau was standing there, sending Morse, the next he was gone, snatched up from the field of view as if by a giant hand. Removing the glass from his eye, the Helena man saw his counterpart hurtling through the air.
Joseph Whitt in the San Francisco heard a “loud crrrrrack, like a lightning strike nearby.” On the bearing that the antiaircraft cruiser once occupied, all the Helena’s George De Long could see was a large cloud swelling low on the water. “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? I don’t want to ram her!” he said. No one remained in the Helena’s pilothouse. Everyone had raced out onto the bridge wing. A sailor ducked back into the pilothouse and said, quietly, “De Long, she ain’t no more.”
Even after the unprecedented blooding of the previous night, never had anyone witnessed a blast such as this. Bruce McCandless wrote, “The Juneau didn’t sink—she blew up with all the fury of an erupting volcano. There was a terrific thunderclap and a plume of white water that was blotted out by a huge brown hemisphere a thousand yards across, from within which came the sounds of more explosions.” As Hoover would report to Admiral Turner, “Debris fell to such extent and volume as to cause belief of high level bombing attack.”
What fraction of the Juneau’s steel plates and hardened armor belts were launched skyward and fell back to earth in shards is anyone’s guess, but the shrapnel rain was heavy and voluminous. As Schonland, McCandless, Wilbourne, and Lair looked on stunned from the San Francisco’s flag bridge, the officer-of-the-deck, Jack Bennett, noticed an object hurtling toward them through the air. “Scatter!” he shouted as a rectangular plate of steel plating wobbled in and smashed into the superstructure just a few feet from where they stood. It bounced across the deck and fell overboard. One of the Juneau’s twin five-inch mounts arced through the bright sky and splashed down not a hundred yards astern the Fletcher.
“As we got up even with it—the pall of smoke had begun to rise up from the water—there was a gigantic explosion under the water,” Joseph Whitt said. “They said it was probably the boilers blowing up. She came up just like a big whale. You’ve seen pictures of them as they come up and breech and go back down. It was a big, huge bubble. In that bubble of water was part of the hull of that ship. I mean it was eerie.”
As witnesses struggled to believe, an ocean swell some thirty feet high crested into the San Francisco from the starboard side. “Our ship rapidly keeled over to port until the outboard portion of the well deck was underwater,” Don Jenkins wrote. “One had to hold on for dear life to keep from tumbling across the well deck into the sea. The ship slowly came back to an even keel and then we found that all our shoring and caulking had been knocked out of the waterline shell holes and sea water was pouring in by the thousands of gallons.”
On a day of terrible visions, the sudden death of the Juneau may have been the worst of all. Few witnesses could imagine there were any survivors. The suddenness with which more than six hundred men perished had no analog in other types of combat. The single blast offered none of the emerging trauma of an eroding front line or a sundered and faltering flank. It was an apocalyptic accident, random and undeserved, and paid in a single shocking stroke. Chick Morris observed, “No one moved or spoke.… A man needs some kind of mental and physical reserve to accept such a disaster when not prepared for it, and we had exhausted our reserve during the night.… Many a man aboard Helena walked the decks for the following few hours in a kind of trance, brooding and frightened.”
Robert Howe said, “We often talked about getting hit by a torpedo so we could go back to the States for repairs. Never again after seeing the Juneau disappear under a cloud of smoke.” It was still Friday the thirteenth. “The rest of the day I don’t think anyone took their eyes off the water.”
GIL HOOVER TOOK the Juneau’s loss hard. Her captain, Lyman Knute Swenson, had been a Naval Academy classmate and a close friend. Now he was either gone or, worse, alive, wounded and in urgent need of rescue. Untold scores of the antiaircraft cruiser’s survivors floated on the swells in Torpedo Junction. Though many witnesses professed to see no survivors, they were assuredly there. The crew of an aircraft that happened by later counted at least sixty of them, their lives spared by freak accidents of physics that kept the gusting remains of the ship from breaking their bodies as they flew into the sea.
As Hoover judged it, the logic of the situation required him to foreclose any thought of saving them, or his friend. With just a single undamaged destroyer to chase submarines, with the responsibility to get heavily damaged ships and badly wounded men to base on his shoulders, with an adeptly commanded enemy submarine still at large, he decided he couldn’t risk stopping to search for survivors. Earlier that morning he had ordered the O’Bannon to steam away to the north to transmit a report of the previous night’s engagement to Nouméa. When maintaining radio silence, ships departed formation before transmitting their messages to avoid betraying the group’s location to radio snoopers. The O’Bannon wasn’t due to rejoin him until midafternoon.
Few naval commanders understood the delicate work of rescue at sea as well as Hoover. As commander of Destroyer Squadron 2, he had escorted the Lexington when she was sunk in the Coral Sea, and had received the Navy Cross for the manner in which his destroyers pressed in close, braving repeated heavy explosions and flames, to recover the carrier’s survivors. Hoover’s awar
d citation stated, “The intrepid and seamanlike way that these officers handled their vessels about the listing and burning Lexington without regard for the flames and explosions emanating from her, was in accord with every fine tradition of our Navy and of the sea, and undoubtedly contributed to the rescue of many survivors who might otherwise have been lost.” Circumstances now were vastly different. Still, he would write that the decision to continue south “was not made without much effort.”
At eleven twenty-one, a B-17 Flying Fortress arrived from Espiritu Santo, as Hoover had requested, to provide air cover. To preserve radio silence, Hoover refrained from radioing Turner or Halsey about the incident. Instead, he had one of his signalmen blinker to the bomber overhead: “JUNEAU TORPEDOED DISAPPEARED LAT 10–32 LONG 161–02 AT 1109 X SURVIVORS IN WATER REPORT COMSOPAC.” The plane acknowledged receipt of the message with a visual signal, and Hoover repeated it. He could only hope the pilot would appreciate the tremulous state of the survivors in the water, many of whom had to be severely wounded. The plane acknowledged receipt of the second transmission and zoomed off toward Henderson Field. Joseph Wylie, the exec of the Fletcher, would call Hoover’s decision to press on to Espiritu Santo “probably the most courageous single decision I’ve ever seen a man make, because everybody’s instinct is to go after survivors.” Wylie felt that instinct strongly, but when Hoover signaled the Fletcher that he had reports of three more Japanese submarines lurking along their route, he felt mollified.
Shortly after noon, the destroyer Buchanan joined Hoover’s group; the O’Bannon rejoined them at three thirty. As Hoover continued on, bringing his wounded ships home, the Juneau’s brown pall receded over the horizon behind them.
THE ATLANTA LAY AT ANCHOR a few miles from Lunga, seeping to death through her holes and broken seams. Jack Wulff, the assistant engineering officer, had hoped for a time that his crews would get the after fire room pumped down to where the burners could make steam. If the inboard screws got turning again, they could limp to Tulagi and make repairs in the shelter of a cove. Now, as the water levels rose, he saw the futility in it. With a fourth consecutive sleepless night approaching for the crew, the bucket brigades were up against their limits. When Dallas Emory, the exec, concurred that the ship couldn’t be saved, Captain Jenkins radioed the Portland that he could not check flooding and would have to scuttle his ship. DuBose, as the senior officer present, approved. As boats from Guadalcanal took off the crew, a demolition charge was placed in the diesel engine room. When it blew, the Atlanta went quickly with all hatches open, revealing as she rolled over to port the grievous extent of her torpedo wound; it stretched from its impact point below the port side waterline across the keel and into the starboard bottom of the hull. “If we had tried to steam that ship,” Lloyd Mustin said, “she might have opened in half.… If she had run into heavy weather, she would never have made it.”
As night fell over Ironbottom Sound again, the Portland was still struggling toward Tulagi. Near midnight, those troubles were supplemented by the arrival of other combatants eager to throw themselves into the fracas in the sound: American PT boats. The first sign of their presence was a radio transmission Captain DuBose picked up over the TBS. “Here comes a bear. Give him two fish.”
The small boats were stalking a “bear”—a target. DuBose came to understand that the ship in question was his own. A bizarre parley ensued between the cruiser captain and the PT boat officers, with DuBose declaring his identity in plain English and his stalkers discussing among themselves what to do with the large stranger. “This is the American cruiser Portland. This is Captain DuBose speaking. There is a tug standing out from Tulagi to assist us. The name of her captain is Lieutenant Foley. We are not—repeat not—a Japanese.” The PT boat skippers, having heard reports of crippled targets about, must have been skeptical of this silver-tongued, English-speaking enemy officer trying to talk his way out of a well-deserved spread to the midsection. The damaged heavy cruiser, struggling to keep a heading at three knots and unable to steer, was at the tiny boats’ mercy.
Nervous lookouts scanned the waters for torpedo wakes. In the ambient light of the moon and star field overhead, here they came: two white bubbling lines in the deep, passing ahead. The PT skippers had evidently overestimated their target’s speed, perhaps seeing the vigorous churn of her counter-turning screws but not appreciating its waste.
The commander of the PT boats in the area, Lieutenant Commander Alan P. Calvert, saw the absence of heavy U.S. ships in Savo Sound that night as an opportunity for his command.
According to Charles Melhorn of the PT-44, he gave the briefing to the “Peter Tares” that night, and it amounted to: “There is a Japanese task force due in about midnight, and we may have a battleship task force due in about midnight. Go out and get the Japs.” Until that moment, when they emerged as the lone U.S. naval force in Savo Sound, they had been held on a leash, skirmishing indecisively with Tokyo Express destroyers now and then, but ordered to stay in their base as the November 13 battle approached.
Melhorn saw right away how it could be suicide, in such a vulnerable craft, to issue the standard blinker challenge to an unidentified ship. “If you challenge the wrong group, that’s the end of you,” he said. That may be why one of the boats, PT-48, dispensed with diplomacy and sent four fish churning toward the U.S. cruiser.
The gunners on DuBose’s ship didn’t appreciate the attention and according to Melhorn returned fire at their harassers. “We thought that was pretty dirty pool,” Melhorn said. It was no dirtier than anything else a ship’s crew might do at night, when friend and enemy alike are skulking phantoms.
The drama of the PT boat encounter passed. After midnight, in the first hours of November 14, the Portland reached Tulagi and anchored in thirty-nine fathoms. The steep drop-off near shore allowed them to tie up to a palm tree and run a gangway from the ship to the shore. They camouflaged the ship with netting to prevent being spotted from the air. “Then we all dropped in our tracks and fell asleep,” Harold L. Johnson said. “We had been at general quarters over fifty hours by this time.”
The peace would last for only about an hour. With the remnants of the American cruiser force limping away toward Espiritu Santo, the way was open for the Imperial Japanese Navy once again.
35
Regardless of Losses
ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO, LIKE HIS STAFF AND COMMANDERS throughout the South Seas fleet, was shocked by the savagery of Abe’s fight with Callaghan. The grinding of steel tooth and nail was like nothing they had seen from the U.S. Navy. The Americans weren’t known to be such fighters. At Cape Esperance in October, Goto had lost a cruiser but gave, in death, nearly as good as he got en route to accomplishing his larger mission, unleashing two battleships against Henderson Field. A month later now, Callaghan had done what his Navy had not been able to do thus far in the war. He had crippled a battleship, the Hiei, and left her to Henderson Field’s vultures. The 36,600-ton warship was to the Imperial Japanese Navy something like what the HMS Hood had been to the Royal Navy before her loss in May 1941: older, smaller, and less powerful than the state-of-art newcomers to whom she played second chair, but an object of nostalgic affection because of her link to the Imperial palace. Hirohito himself had sailed in the Hiei. Her loss was a heavy blow.
After Callaghan thwarted Abe on the night of November 12–13, inflicting the loss of the Hiei and two destroyers, the Akatsuki and Yudachi, Henderson Field was assured of staying in business at least one more day. Accordingly, Yamamoto knew it was folly to allow Tanaka’s eleven irreplaceable troop transports to proceed to Guadalcanal. Postponing plans to land the convoy until the fourteenth, he ordered it to withdraw to Shortland Island at the head of the Slot and await further orders. Yamamoto then turned his attention to renewing the effort to bring the Cactus Air Force under his fleet’s big guns.
The battleship Kirishima, which had left the fracas with Callaghan and company largely unscathed, would be the centerpiece of anothe
r powerful bombardment sortie. When Yamamoto ordered Admiral Kondo to take her back to Guadalcanal for another attack, Kondo gathered up two newcomers to the fight in the Slot, the heavy cruisers Atago and Takao, to join her. The light cruisers Nagara and Sendai were attached as well, leading nine destroyers. Yamamoto had only reluctantly approved the scuttling of the Hiei. Vengeance would belong, if at all, to the ship that sailed with her that night, the Kirishima. The IJN’s developing failure of nerve was now manifest. As the Kirishima headed back toward Guadalcanal under Admiral Kondo, it was telling that she was not joined by her mighty sister ships, the Kongo and Haruna, which Kondo left behind to screen the carriers. Committing battleships was the final gamble. Yamamoto chose to send just one of his three into the next fight.
Admiral Halsey would take a very different approach. Knowing from dispatches that another major naval attack was gathering, the SOPAC commander decided he could no longer play it safe with his sole remaining carrier, the Enterprise, and her powerful accompaniment of battleships. The men on Guadalcanal needed the fleet now more than ever before.
After the beating Callaghan had taken, Halsey knew that his cruiser striking force didn’t have much left to offer. His sole remaining carrier, the Enterprise, didn’t, either. When she was ordered north from Nouméa toward Guadalcanal, the carrier still had a crew of eighty-five repair technicians aboard, working to fix the disabled forward elevator. She trailed an oil slick. “This was the tightest spot that I was ever in during the entire war,” Halsey would write.
“If any principle of naval warfare is burned into my brain, it is that the best defense is a strong offense—that, as Lord Nelson wrote in a memorandum to his officers before the Battle of Trafalgar, ‘No Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy.’ ” Now there were few other options. Willis Lee’s battleships were his “only recourse.” Their long days of steaming as sentinels, protecting other ships instead of attacking the enemy, were over. Shortly before 5 p.m. on November 13, Halsey broke every lesson he’d learned at the Naval War College. He decided to send in his battleships. He directed Admiral Kinkaid, commanding the Enterprise task force, to turn loose his big boys to enter the fight.
Neptune's Inferno Page 42