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

by James D. Hornfischer

  Andrew tried to get a fix on the island as the helmsman sought to avoid a collision astern. “At this instant,” Andrew wrote, “the Captain straightened up and fell back, apparently dead, without having uttered any sound other than a moan.” Shortly before he fell, Captain Moore had ordered control of the ship transferred to Battle Two, the battle station of his executive officer, high in the tripod mainmast aft. When Andrew heard that Battle Two had been hit and destroyed, he knew it was time to abandon ship.

  All life in two of the cruiser’s fire rooms had been extinguished by a single torpedo. By two twenty, the fireboxes in a third fire room were swamped. One of Quincy’s engine rooms never got the abandon-ship order. The final act of the chief engineer was to order a sailor forward to inform Captain Moore that the power plant was nearly inoperable. By then, the captain was already dead, and minutes after the messenger left, two torpedoes from the Tenryu struck the compartment, leaving that sailor as its sole survivor. As the Quincy’s port rail touched the sea, the five-inch-gun deck was engulfed. floodwater partly quenched the fires that blazed belowdecks. But the mercy of this happenstance was useless. At about 2:35 a.m., the Quincy rolled on her port beam ends and sank by the bow.

  BEREFT OF THE COMPANY of her sisters, the Astoria faced a terrible struggle after the Japanese melted into the night and the encounter off Savo Island was left to reverberate in the memories of a thousand lives lost. Like the Vincennes and Quincy, she had been gutted before her officers knew what was happening. Though some foresighted aviation machinists had drained the gas lines of her Seagulls the night before, there was no shortage of things to explode. When the valve heads on some gas cylinders stored in the aircraft hangar became superheated, they blew spectacularly, and “gas jetted high in the air, igniting as it went up ‘like Roman candles,’ ” one sailor recalled. As an Astoria marine recalled, “Our ship was blazing like a straw stack on a summer night.”

  In the northern cruiser force on its night of doom, a hundred small dramas played out. As the Astoria’s executive officer, Frank Shoup, ordered Battle Two abandoned, he saw that the fire on the boat deck had spread to the legs of the mainmast and was greedily climbing, devouring its smooth gray veneer. Battle Two was the last refuge now of several dozen trapped sailors. On all sides, the ladders down to the main deck were blocked by the rising flames. “All communications were shot away,” Jack Gibson wrote. “Our eyes were burning with smoke, and we were choking in the fumes of flaming diesel oil.”

  Leaving the director and going out to the machine-gun platform, Gibson found seven dead men “all heaped together behind the torn splinter shield in a jumble of arms, legs and broken bodies.” They included Ensign McLaughlin, the machine-gun control officer, killed with his crew before they ever got off a shot. Puzzlement, anger, and frustration, not fear, were the predominant emotions of the moment. Gibson saw a fire controlman named Dean pull a large hunk of steel out of his thigh and throw it disgustedly to the deck.

  Gibson recalled, “We salvaged the first aid kit from the control room and gave the wounded shots of morphine. Then I called down to the fantail for a fire hose.” With help from sailors who had climbed onto the roof of turret three, a hose was attached to a light line and tossed up to the platform. It didn’t carry much water. It sputtered and went dead.

  “Without a word,” Gibson wrote, “Seaman Barker went down the hot ladder to the flaming launches and hacked off a heavy coil of rope. Machine-gun ammunition exploded around him, but he got back up with only minor burns.” The improvised zip line had been singed badly enough to call its utility into question. Unsure of its strength, they puzzled how best to test it and finally settled on a coldly pragmatic method underwritten by a difficult moral calculus: They decided to try it on the worst of the wounded. An unconscious sailor was attached to the line and sent on his way, sliding down toward the roof of turret three. “He could not have been more than ten feet down,” Wade Johns recalled, “when the line went slack in our hands and we heard the crunching sound of his body after he fell that last forty feet.

  “We checked every foot of the remaining line. We knotted it around the burned segments, checked again, and then began the successful lowering of the wounded, one by one.”

  The Astoria was divided in two by a valley of fire amidships. About 150 men were trapped on the fantail. They could get no word of their shipmates in the forward stations. With the fires amidships walling them off, they doubted there could be any survivors. “We sat there while the fire roared amidships and our ammunition was blowing up,” Gibson wrote. “We were sure all hands forward were dead, while they never dreamed that anyone could have survived the fire aft.” Wounded men were being saved in unlikely ways, in some cases delivered topside through large gashes opened up by the impact of enemy shells.

  The Astoria’s bridge had an enormous section shot away, and her scorched hangar area was blackened. Her most threatening wounds were eight large shell holes located just above the torpedo belt on her starboard side. She was holed but seaworthy, and though many of her rivets were weepy, the larger penetrations were well plugged from within. As long as the port list could be controlled, the volume of water shipping in would not be fatal.

  Chaplain Bouterse, seated on the fantail, was dangling his legs over the side and resting them on the welded letters spelling the name of his ship. There came a drizzle of rain and he welcomed its coolness. The water below his feet was obsidian and foreboding, lit only by the flicker of flames and the little splashes of light that came whenever debris, cast by explosions into the sea, disturbed the plankton and stirred them to a momentary green glow. Here and there fuzzy iridescent streaks were swirled up by the baleful wakes of shark fins.

  Contemplating a world without a USS Astoria, Bouterse found he could not take his eyes from a ghastly sight. “One of our crew had been killed at his battle station at After Control, the tall superstructure just abaft the hangar, which contained some of our fire control equipment. His body had caught on the rail and was hanging there. The fire from below was coming closer and closer to him as I watched transfixed.

  “I know I wasn’t the only one of that group of dazed survivors who noticed our shipmate’s body slowly shrinking as the flames consumed it. The thought never crossed my mind that I should try to climb up and pull that body down, and no one else moved either … a funeral pyre seemed symbolically appropriate in the last moments of our ship’s existence, and, for all we knew, ours. One must only watch in dignified silence and say farewell.”

  One sailor who was sent below to find some life jackets returned with a box of cigars. Bouterse knew the kid. He had been trying to teach him to read and write. As he offered smokes to men clustered around turret three, the kid swelled a little, as if he knew he had won a small battle. He shouted to the chaplain, “Hey, man, I just made chief the hard way!” The sight of this sailor, cocky despite the circumstances, struck Bouterse in the heart. “I was back in a more familiar world where sailors could do crazy things like that, throwing the butchery of battle right back into the face of the enemy.… The bitter laughter tasted good.”

  8

  Burning in the Rain

  IT WAS ABOUT 2:40 IN THE MORNING WHEN ADMIRAL CRUTCHLEY, from the bridge of the Australia, observed a trio of objects burning on the sea between Savo and Florida islands and wondered what calamity he had missed. The muzzle flashes he had seen earlier had stopped. His commanders had reported no victory, yet no attack on the anchorages had ensued. The pieces of a strange puzzle floated all over the sound.

  To his interim squadron commander, Captain Bode in the Chicago, the British officer sent a terse imperative: “REPORT SITUATION.”

  Bode was quick with a reply: “CHICAGO SOUTH OF SAVO ISLAND. HIT BY TORPEDO, SLIGHTLY DOWN BY BOW. ENEMY SHIPS FIRING TO SEAWARD. CANBERRA BURNING ON BEARING 250 FIVE MILES FROM SAVO. TWO DESTROYERS STANDING BY CANBERRA.”

  Crutchley pondered this incomplete report and passed what he could to Kelly Turner: “SURFACE ACT
ION NEAR SAVO. SITUATION AS YET UNDETERMINED.”

  Among the transports off Tulagi, nerves were tight as tow cables. The Hunter Liggett went to general quarters at about 2 a.m. at the first sign of trouble. Her skipper, a Coast Guard captain named Lewis W. Perkins, leaned on the front rail of his bridge and peered into the night, studying the flashes of gunfire. Then he heard the uneven gurgling of an aircraft engine, and suddenly it was like daytime as a flare popped overhead. “Its searing light revealed the transports and destroyers, grotesquely naked. On the horizon, firing began again.” Perkins shouted, ‘Hold on! If we’re going to get it, this is it!’

  “We stood breathless, gripping the rail. The shells, if they were coming, were on the way. The white light glared down on us. Our ships just sat there: fat, stupid ducks in the blinding glare.”

  Mikawa’s arrival had been a surprise to all. Joe Custer, who interviewed several of the observers, recalled their confusion and fear. There was no comprehending the horrible truth behind the pyrotechnics that flashed in the night. “Huge balls of red fire would leave one ship; they could watch them winging in an arc straight for the other ships, then the spurting of flames as they hit. Then, answering balls of fire would retrace the arc, and explode in flaming geysers.”

  “We’d automatically move our heads from left to right, from side to side, at the exchange,” the navigator on one of the transports said. “It was like watching a tennis match—in hell.” That officer made out one large ship in particular, very possibly Mikawa’s Chokai, throwing salvos so swiftly that they appeared to be chasing one another through the air. In the direction of their arc, flames were towering in the black sky. Some distance still farther away, the bottoms of clouds were warmed by a red glow. The Canberra was in her final throes.

  The destroyer Patterson came alongside the burning Australian cruiser, only to be driven away by the detonations of ordnance. She tried again and stayed, passing over pump and fire hoses. The rains were driving then, extinguishing smoldering debris but doing little against deeper conflagrations.

  Bad as it looked for the Canberra, the plan to abandon her was delayed when it became clear that she would not be left until all the wounded were removed. The destroyers turned to the task, with the Patterson taking four hundred survivors on board, including seventy wounded, and the Wilson rescuing more than two hundred more. A call came then to aid the Astoria.

  But the tin cans could only accomplish so much. At four fifteen, with the Canberra suffering from internal explosions, her starboard list growing to almost thirty-five degrees, the Patterson’s deck force threw their hoses off, helped the wounded to settle in, and then passed the order for the stricken cruiser to abandon ship.

  Kelly Turner had always intended to withdraw most of his amphibious and supply ships from Guadalcanal and Tulagi forty-eight hours after the landings. Fletcher’s removal of his carriers was pending—they would spend the night and predawn morning in a “night retirement station” southwest of San Cristobál. If the Canberra could not be righted and made seaworthy in time to join the fleet’s exit, planned for 6:30 a.m., she would have to be scuttled. The Patterson relayed Turner’s grim order to the Canberra.

  It was about five fifteen when a strange ship, presumably a hostile one, appeared on the Canberra’s port quarter. Seeing the threat, the Patterson blinkered the Canberra: “OUT ALL LIGHTS.” It was not a moment too soon, for the approaching ship immediately took the Patterson under fire. The destroyer replied in kind. The good news was that none of the shells the strangers traded hit. The bad news was that the ship firing at them proved to be Howard Bode’s Chicago, returning from her solo foray into the west. The Patterson turned on her identification lights and Bode checked his fire.

  THE PYRES OF THE Vincennes and Quincy were not long below the waves, and the Canberra’s and Astoria’s bouts with fire only beginning, when Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa took on his next challenge—deciding how to exploit his stunning rout. At issue was whether he would carry out his principal mission and attack the transport anchorages. Mikawa and his chief of staff, Toshikazu Ohmae, knew that the landing areas off Guadalcanal and Tulagi were vulnerable. They also understood their own exposure. The Aoba had already escaped catastrophe during the battle when an American shell struck her port side torpedo mount. Because thirteen of her sixteen fish had been fired already, the explosion did not produce the devastating secondary blast it might have. A shell from the Quincy that destroyed the Chokai’s chart room struck five yards aft of the bridge, just a hairbreadth from killing the admiral and most of his staff. As was always the case in a high-speed action at night, a few minutes’ notice either way could have changed the outcome. “I was greatly impressed by the courageous actions of the northern group of U.S. cruisers,” Mikawa would comment. “They fought back heroically despite heavy damage sustained before they were ready for battle. Had they had even a few minutes’ warning of our approach, the results of the action would have been quite different.”

  Frayed by the confusion of battle, Mikawa’s formation re-formed northwest of Savo Island. The Chokai took the lead in column ahead of the Furutaka, Kako, Kinugasa, Aoba, Tenryu, Yubari, and Yunagi. The ships were all low on torpedoes—fully half of them had been launched in the preceding hour—along with as much as a third of their main-battery ammunition. Chief among the admiral’s worries was the question of time and daylight. If he pressed on into the American anchorage, he doubted he would escape before daylight. He estimated it would take half an hour to finally reassemble his force, another half hour to close up into battle formation, and still another half hour to regain battle speed. From there, the anchorage was a sixty-minute sprint at high speed. The total time of those processes, two and a half hours, meant that Mikawa’s task force would hit the anchorage just an hour before sunrise; it would be impossible to escape under cover of the night.

  The shadow cast by naval aviators was long and dark. The outcome at Midway, like Coral Sea before it, had taught Mikawa that land-based airpower was usually the master of its surrounding seas. “To remain in the area by sunrise would mean that we would only meet the fate our carriers had suffered at Midway.” It was six hundred miles from Rabaul to Tulagi, and the 11th Air Fleet was having trouble finding planes to commit to Guadalcanal in any event. Trouble loomed. From intercepted radio traffic, he knew Fletcher’s carriers were out there somewhere. He lacked friendly air cover to save him from American planes in a daylight sprint back to base.

  En route to surprising Bode and Riefkohl, it had been keen navigational skill that enabled Mikawa to hug Savo’s black coast. Proceeding into the littorals of an anchorage without good charts—incinerated when his flagship’s chart room was hit—would have been perilous. Besides, what was the hurry? Victory had been easy. Other opportunities would come. The Army had long been saying it would be no great chore to unseat the Americans from their small beachhead.

  Eight months earlier Mikawa had been second in command to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the Pearl Harbor strike force. Mikawa had command of Battleship Division 3, the mighty Kirishima and Hiei. When a decision loomed then about whether to retreat or attack again, Mikawa had urged further attacks against Oahu’s oil storage and repair facilities. Now he evaluated similar if smaller risks and chose discretion—and withdrawal. The irony of that decision was considerable: As Mikawa departed to the north, the U.S. aircraft carriers whose wrath he feared were preparing to get under way in the other direction.

  “We were all shocked and disconcerted momentarily,” wrote Ohmae. “We were still absorbed with the details of the hard fight just finished and had lost track of time. I was amazed to discover that it was just shortly after midnight, and then we were headed in a northerly direction. As we continued northward, we ran the risk of going ashore on Florida Island, so a change of course was made to the left. I asked the lookout if there was any sign of pursuing ships. There was not.”

  * * *

  THE FIGHT TO save the Astoria was at a fever
pitch. With hundreds of sailors marshaled as a bucket brigade, heaving water with buckets and spent eight-inch shell casings, many of the fires raging throughout the ship began to yield. Countless small acts of gallantry marked the morning. A lieutenant, Walter Bates, dove overboard to push a life raft containing a portable pump closer to the ship. When he noticed a shark trailing him, he leaped into the raft, grabbed an oar, and splintered it over the predator’s skull. Then Bates was in the water again, pushing the raft into position. The pump coughed to life and water flowed for a brief while. When it died again for good, Bates climbed up on deck and joined scores of others removing wounded. “He was everywhere, working feverishly,” Joe Custer reported. “And he came out with only a sprained ankle.” A first-class petty officer named C. C. Watkins had the kind of commanding presence that rallied the bucket brigade. “Men naturally responded to his confidence, actions, and commanding voice,” wrote Lieutenant Commander John D. Hayes, the engineering officer. When Frank Shoup, the exec, first noticed a sailor trapped between a whaleboat davit and a gash in the starboard side of the upper deck, he thought the man was dead. He had only a moment to register the slight wave of the hand the sailor gave before Watkins, joined by two other sailors, Wyatt J. Luttrell and Norman R. Touve, were picking their way through the flames to bring him down. The rescuers found two other sailors while saving this first man, including one who was clinging to the bulge in the cruiser’s torpedo belt as the ship was threatening to capsize. “The rescue of these three men,” Shoup wrote, “was a heroic action, and was the finest deed I witnessed in a night when high courage was commonplace.… I would not have ordered anyone in to make this rescue, as I did not think it could be done.”