13
IT TOOK CONSIDERABLE FORCE OF WILL TO OVERCOME THE PARALYSIS of the routine, the heavy inertia of predictability that almost every aspect of Navy life promoted, from the plan of the day to the formation plans drawn on the navigation board. It was easy not to notice how tiny elements of routine fused into a culture and made every day reassuringly like the last. The rhythm was made possible through a professionalization of the business of naval service that would never have existed but for previous great victories. In war, those comfortable rhythms needed to be violently overthrown if further victories were to be possible. Fast-thinking, quick-acting men would be needed to overthrow them.
The awareness that one was in the presence of such an insurgent came at a pheromonal level. He didn’t have to be brash or intimidating. If he had the right qualities, they carried through the air around him despite his quietude. Some men were fiery and motivational, leading with a barely restrained recklessness and a demeanor of perpetually fresh anger. Others were intellectual warriors, brains in circuit with the matrix in space where vectors flew toward other vectors and the results of battle followed from the nature of their intersections. The fighter’s way was elemental. It was not possible to cultivate it reliably in an academic meritocracy, or to gauge it by class rank. The woodsmen with their squirrel guns who beat the British at New Orleans rallied to Andrew Jackson’s readiness to fury, a scent that inspired fear, his instinct to abandon prudence and seize a sudden opening to kill. Such a man knew that a warship was not a lady but a platform of systems that fire projectiles that kill. Having tasted defeat, the Navy was starting to come back to appreciating the unpolished strengths of the Georgia farm boys who found themselves under gentle persecution on board Commander Wylie’s Fletcher. A rebel yell and a blast of powder. That and a little planning and technical proficiency would carry the day.
Rear Admiral Norman Scott was one of them. A 1911 graduate of the Naval Academy, he was known as “one of the best-liked men in the class,” in part no doubt because of his prowess in a hand-to-hand fight. An expert fencer, he had won “immortal fame,” as the irrepressible yearbook scribes wrote, by beating West Point en route to becoming an intercollegiate champion. He was a warrior; he always wanted his sword in the fight. According to Admiral Raymond Spruance, Scott’s tour of duty in the CNO’s office was an unhappy one. Sent there after commanding the heavy cruiser Pensacola, Scott “made things so miserable around him in Washington that he finally got what he wanted—sea duty.” Robert Graff of the Atlanta thought Scott was “kind of like a junior Halsey.” But fighters don’t always find their fight. It had been Norman Scott’s fate to sit idly by in the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan off Tulagi as the Japanese sliced through Captain Riefkohl’s cruiser screen on the night of August 9. Scott spent the next day, his fifty-third birthday, reflecting on what little he had seen of the Battle of Savo Island. He could claim some prescience for the screen’s unpreparedness for combat. He had warned Crutchley about the “grave inadequacies” of Condition Two, the state of partial battle readiness whose circuitous personnel shifts underlay the slow-footed response to Mikawa’s appearance.
When he was named as Carleton Wright’s successor as commander of Task Force 64 in mid-September, one of his first acts was to return to tradition. In the late thirties, the U.S. Navy borrowed a training regimen from the Royal Navy, the so-called offset gunnery exercise. In these drills, ships squared off as they would in battle, fixing their gun directors on one another but setting off the alignment of the turrets by several degrees. As the guns fired askance, a second director measured the precision of the offset. Any shot that landed a calculated distance behind the ship, projected in accordance with the range and the degree of the offset, was deemed a hit. Such drills were generally more orderly affairs if one ship did the firing and another served as target, rather than having both duel and maneuver simultaneously at full battle speeds. Precautions notwithstanding, the exercises were acts of faith: With fears of a catastrophic accident always present, they were conducted with a flinching caution that could keep officers up the rest of the night.
Greater cause for insomnia lay in not knowing the proficiency of one’s crew. Admiral Ghormley had been hampered by this uncertainty. He didn’t know what his ships and commanders were capable of. He hadn’t spent time with them, or among them; hadn’t been physically present to assess critical variables, from their intangible esprit to the physical soundness of their machinery. He was candid about this. “I did not know, from actual contact, the ability of the officers, nor the material condition of the ships nor their readiness for battle, nor did I know their degree of training for warfare such as was soon to develop in this area. Improvement was acquired while carrying out combat missions,” he would write. This was a startling admission of a leadership failure. Norman Scott wasn’t about to emulate it, and certainly wasn’t satisfied to leave the education of his men to the enemy.
After the damaging of the South Dakota, North Carolina, Enterprise, and Saratoga, the U.S. Navy had more capital ships on the sidelines than it had in the forward area. The loss of the Wasp left just one carrier, the Hornet, in the entire South Pacific. Battleships would find their moment, when fortune and necessity conspired. Until then, the “light forces”—cruisers and destroyers—would hold the line. The Slot would be their battlefield. “It was the way the Japs would come. We talked about it constantly,” wrote the Helena’s Chick Morris. “The talk was always of the impending clash with the enemy’s warships. Were we good enough? None of us knew. We had never been through the real thing.”
In the last two weeks of September, during moments stolen from the drudgery of escort duty, Scott arranged for his cruisers to practice their craft. Determined to make his own force a match for the Japanese, he had studied the recent night surface actions carefully and instituted what a Marine gunner on the San Francisco, Clifford C. Spencer, called “Night Fighting Course 101.” No peacetime moonlight excursion this. “For the next two weeks we held daily gunnery practice and high speed night tactical maneuvers, every night, all night,” Spencer wrote. “We were at general quarters every night and had mock battles with opposing ships, all moving at flank speed. Some fun! The object of the practice was to have everyone sharpen their night vision and spot the enemy before he saw you. With training, helmsmen were able to maintain ship intervals with more expertise and direct more energy to finding the enemy ships, allowing you to get off those very important first salvos.” Floatplanes towing target sleeves. Flash cards with ship silhouettes. Competitions were instituted to determine the fastest gun crews. “In Texas the battle cry had been ‘Remember the Alamo!’ Here the rally cry was ‘Remember Savo Island!’ ” Spencer wrote. “Fatigue melted away when you thought of the slaughter of friends in the now infamous August 9th ‘Battle of the Sitting Ducks.’ ”
The exercise Norman Scott led on September 22 was the first time some of his heavy cruisers had fired their big guns at all in five months, and the first offset practice they had done in more than a year. Trying to draw a bead on a highly maneuverable destroyer, the gunners of the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City learned the value of alert observation, and of close cooperation between the spotter and the rangekeeper or radar operator. Her officers called it “the best simulation of action it had thus far in target practices.” A few nights later the Salt Lake City was out again, on orders from Scott to duel the Helena. Parameters were loosened, the band of permissible speed widened to fifteen to twenty knots. The Salt Lake City pushed the limits, charging the Helena at twenty-four knots and landing a first-salvo offset straddle from 23,500 yards, more than thirteen miles away. Doctrine called for heavy cruisers to open fire in good weather from twenty thousand yards. Radar could bring even better results, allowing engagements to begin at ranges as great as thirty thousand yards.
In June, after the Battle of Midway, radar was being touted as “the outstanding development of the war in fire control.” In a night exercise, a cruiser drawing ranges with the new high-frequency, magnetron-powered FD fire-control set landed eleven successive straddles on its target. Nimitz’s people looked at those results, studied the reports of battle coming back from the front, and drew the only conclusion: “We are still not getting all that we should out of this splendid instrument.” When his ships were firing on towed sleds, Scott ordered the sleds wrapped with metal and wire mesh, to provide a crisper radar return.
Captain Small of the Salt Lake City knew that technology itself took you nowhere. Understanding and application were everything. Small had made it the “basic radar policy” of the ship that radar was the domain of the gunnery department. Data from the radars was transmitted not only to the bridge and Central Station, as on other ships, but straight to all gun director and control stations as well. This was no trivial modification to standing doctrine. According to the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin, there was “quite a lot of technique involved in transferring a radar target from detection by search radar to acquisition by the fire-control radar.” The search radar’s readings, so laboriously gotten, had to be manually plotted on the bridge before they could be conveyed by telephone to the gun directors. Small’s approach saved critical time by letting the gunnery team do its own plotting and get a direct picture of the situation.
With enough practice, even liabilities could become strengths. Through the drills ordered by Scott, the Salt Lake City’s fire-control teams discovered that faulty circuitry was causing cross-talk between the circuits used by the main and secondary batteries. This defect would have confused an unpracticed crew, but Small’s men turned it into a strength. Overhearing the communications of their counterparts, the two teams came to recognize each other’s voices and in time enjoyed a productive cooperation.
Good commanders helped their men get past their limitations, be they mechanical or psychological. The lessons Scott’s fighters learned were duly circulated fleetwide in bulletins. The problem of “buck fever”—the initial overeagerness of gun crews, firing before solutions were ready—had only one cure: the sobriety that came with experience. Special effort had to be made to keep fire controlmen informed of radar readings whenever a ship began the game of musical chairs that was going to battle stations. As key people changed stations, the flow of critical information could freeze. On some ships, including Scott’s flagship, the San Francisco, the first salvo from the main battery reliably knocked the delicate instrumentation of the FC radar out of operation. The shock of the main battery could jolt the foremast hard enough to throw the man aiming the director off his target, sometimes carrying the aim of the searchlight operator with him. In a light rain, those searchlights were ineffective beyond five thousand yards, like automotive high beams in a fogbank. Cold guns were full of surprises with their quirky ballistic properties. And as always, a ship-to-ship shootout after dark was a harrowing affair that confounded the senses, like riding a galloping bronco through a foggy night while aiming a rifle at a target that lies beyond a burning building. Simply put, there were no panaceas to defeat the sailor’s age-old foe, Murphy’s Law, and the universal problem of entropy.
Their sheer terror was never greater in exercises than on the night of September 30. The San Francisco was shooting at a target towed by the minesweeper USS Breese when that small vessel sent word that the towline had parted. Targets drifting loose at night presented a danger to navigation. Sometimes the targets weren’t small sleds but derelict ships or large barges on which façades had been built to provide realistic silhouettes. To locate the wayward hardware, Scott’s ships began circling, searchlights reaching out into the darkness. No sooner did word come that the target had been found than gunners in one of the San Francisco’s starboard mounts were gripped by the sight of a ship bearing down on them fast, her bow to their starboard beam. When the crew alerted the bridge, the San Francisco went into a hard port turn and the Breese swung her rudder to the right. The minesweeper’s momentum carried her into the San Francisco starboard quarter, delivering a severe but glancing blow that collapsed the Breese’s bow and tore a thirty-foot gash in the cruiser’s side. As the ships turned, their sterns clapped together in a second collision. Physically, it was a mismatch. When the minesweeper’s stern struck the high wall of gray steel that was the San Francisco’s stern, it was forced underwater, subducted by the cruiser’s bulk. “With a sickening thump thump thump our outboard screw passed across Breese’s stern deck and quickly cleared her,” Clifford Spencer, the San Francisco marine, wrote. “Her stern popped up in the water like a cork. I never heard if the Breese had any fatalities, probably a few, but life was cheap in those days and soon it, the collision, was only a memory.”
The vigilance required to avoid such mishaps took a toll. Spencer wrote: “In trying to give you an idea of the strain put on everyone from the Admiral on down to the lowest ranks during this period, I am at a loss, but try this: Imagine your living room is made of steel, the windows are your lookout posts and you have been there for two weeks. With very little rest and less sleep, you stare out day and night for an attack from the air, from across the street, or up from your basement, that you know will destroy your home and probably take your or your family’s life. This might give you a small idea of what the mental and physical conditions are like in sea warfare. This was maneuvers, but we knew that the real thing was just ahead. Grueling, yes, but Admiral Scott had to instill behavior into his ships and crews that the Japanese had perfected over many years. The Admiral had days, or at best a few weeks. We bitched and probably whined a lot, but by God, we learned!”
The Helena’s turret crews learned as rapidly as any in Scott’s task force. They were “quick and slick as precision machinery,” Chick Morris wrote, “swinging their arms with the grace of ballet dancers to maintain the flow of ammunition from magazines to guns.” They got good. They expected to hit, every time. The gunnery department acquired, Morris wrote, a “bull’s-eye complex.” Against Mikawa’s sharp-eyed shooters, they would need it.
The light cruiser had recently taken aboard a new skipper. When Captain Gilbert C. Hoover was swung over in a canvas bag from a destroyer to the larger ship, the crew liked what they saw. Waving to his crew, the forty-eight-year-old native of Bristol, Rhode Island, wore an aviator’s leather jacket and a jaunty overseas cap. He had a Navy Cross, too. The consensus was, “He’ll be a Helena man the minute he puts a foot on our deck,” Chick Morris recalled. Hoover had smarts and sophistication—he had been an aide to President Herbert Hoover (no relation), and served on the first government committee formed by Franklin Roosevelt to study nuclear fission. Those qualities were evident in his bearing and attitude. “They liked the way he came over the side. They liked his looks and his grin. They liked the cut of him. His expression plainly said he was proud to be coming aboard, and that was all they needed to know,” Morris wrote.
At the change of command ceremony, a culture shift became apparent. His predecessor was dressed in the traditional whites. Hoover was ready for work, wearing slacks and short sleeves. “We knew things were going to be different aboard ship,” a Helena sailor named Robert Howe said. “Captain Hoover had been overseas since the war had started. We didn’t know it then, but he knew how to handle a fighting ship.”
When Morris saw Hoover poring over the ship’s blueprints in his sea cabin, he noted that he wasn’t a big man. Neither short nor tall, stout nor slender, he seemed measured and balanced; smart, reliable, and steady in every respect. “In his leather jacket he looked a little like a middle-aged suburbanite about to go for a walk in the woods, with a trout rod tucked under one arm. But that room was a calm and confident place, mellowed already by the captain’s personality.” It was just what the Helena would need in the days ahead.
After the loss of the Wasp, the Helena, one of her escorts, took aboard some four hundred survivors. It was not her crew’s first encounter with a capital ship loss. They had had nine months to process the events of December 7 into a righteous and productive brand of anger. Their ship had been berthed at Pearl Harbor right where Japanese agents had reported the battleship Pennsylvania would be. Pier-side at the 1010 Dock, the Helena took the first torpedo of the war. Dropped from a plane, it burrowed through the sea, passed underneath the shallow-draft vessel moored alongside the Helena, and smashed into the cruiser’s forward engine room. The blast killed forty and wounded one hundred. But it completely did in the Helena’s berth-mate. The old wooden-hulled minelayer Oglala was lost to the underwater detonation close aboard. Her crew would say she was the only warship ever to sink from fright.
Whether they arose at Pearl Harbor or off Savo Island, the debilitating effects of defeat had a certain half-life and it took special measures to exorcise them from the bilges. Repaired at Mare Island as the carrier battles of May and June were fought, the Helena left San Francisco on July 23, 1942, escorting six supply ships for the South Pacific. As the deep swells took hold of her en route again to Pearl, a desire for revenge animated her crew. “The Helena craved action,” one of her officers, C. G. Morris, wrote. “Her men talked of little else and prayed for the day when the ship’s guns would set their words to music.”
Designed exclusively for gun engagements, with five triple turrets mounting six-inch, forty-seven-caliber guns, the Helena had a full-load displacement of fourteen thousand tons—two thousand tons greater than that of a heavy cruiser. It was only her main battery that could be called light. Her six-inch projectiles, 130 pounds apiece, were half the weight of a heavy cruiser’s eight-inch ordnance. What her battery lacked in weight it made up for in rate of fire. Firing “semi-fixed” ammunition that held the powder charge with the projectile in a single case, the Helena’s fifteen guns were rated for ten rounds per minute, as against three or four for a heavy cruiser. The only factor that limited this furious pace, aside from the possibility that her magazines might become exhausted, was the risk that the gun barrels would warp from the heat.
The Helena’s gunnery officer, Commander Rodman D. Smith, built on the strong foundation of his predecessor, Irving T. Duke, who had told his crew on commissioning day at the New York Navy Yard in September 1939, “We want to be consistent. Not sensational, but consistent. All I ask—all I insist upon—is that we get a better than average percentage of hits every time. And to do that, we must know our guns.” Duke left the ship before she ever saw action, but his legacy endured. “The Helena never lost the inspiration he so gently pressed upon her in those early days of her schooling,” Chick Morris wrote.
Morris and two other ensigns, Ozzie Koerner and Sam Hollingsworth, joined the Helena at Espiritu Santo, their final stop on a month-and-a-half journey to the South Pacific in nine different ships. Coming aboard, they were so awestruck that they hardly noticed the assistant gunnery officer standing at the top of the brow, expecting a salute. Lieutenant Warren Boles caught the single-stripers gaping at the ship’s triple turrets, three forward—low, high, low—and two more aft. “Have you ever heard fifteen six-inch guns go off in unison?” he asked. The newcomers shook their heads. “It’s something to hear for the first time. Just be careful which way you jump.”
Veteran sailors worked hard to be nonchalant about the noggin-rattling impact of the Helena’s batteries, but a man’s nervous system couldn’t be rewired by will alone. “The whole ship is enveloped in one shattering blast of noise, and you jump like hell,” wrote Morris. During gunnery exercises, the crew in the radio shack learned to transcribe the five-character blocks of the encoded fleet radio broadcasts while leaning down on their typewriters, the better to keep them from jumping off their desks.
For the Helena and her cohorts in Task Force 64, there was little time for rehearsing combat. Single-day exercises were “too short a time to justify any hope of obtaining adequate tactical unity in a newly organized force,” Admiral King wrote. Gunnery exercises were dangerous business. Accidental explosions of mishandled powder in turrets and hoists took a fearful toll in life. To minimize the risks during peacetime, the drills were carefully scripted, from the number of firing passes each ship made, to which batteries fired and when, to what speeds the ships made. In night exercises, ships towing the target sleds obligingly kept their searchlights trained on the firing ships, just so there were no tragic mistakes. With the location of targets brightly revealed at all times, the potential for confusion—and realism—was written right out of the script.
Eliminating confusion and danger in peacetime exercises was understandable. Eliminating realism and danger during wartime exercises was unforgivable. A low-order schism had developed on Admiral Nimitz’s staff centered on this divide. “His training section was constantly fighting the operations section,” one of his staff officers, Ernest M. Eller, recalled. The goal of the training section was to maximize the proficiency of crews in battle. “Operations,” on the other hand, “saw the world as a series of times of departures and times of arrivals,” Eller said. “Training was something that sailors should know already.” What they didn’t yet know about the art of fighting would be learned finally in action against a living, death-dealing enemy.
Commanders did what they could with local incentives. On the destroyer Sterett, the gunnery officer held a contest to see which of his mount crews was fastest in loading four hundred rounds into the practice-loading machine. The winning crew did it in less than thirty minutes, about four seconds per load, and their reward for their hustle was a four-thousand-dollar cash prize. In Task Force 64, much remained to be done. While it was running with the carriers, training for a surface fight “had practically lapsed,” Admiral Ghormley wrote. What was needed was an overhaul in readiness and spirit. And on both of those counts, Norman Scott, taking command of the flotilla in September 1942, was just the man for the job.
WITH THE ARRIVAL in the South Pacific of commanders such as Norm Scott, Gil Hoover, and Captain Edward J. “Mike” Moran in the Boise, and with the crown prince of shipboard gunnery, Rear Admiral Willis Lee, awaiting the arrival of the Washington at Tongatabu, the Navy was reshuffling its decks and getting the footing it needed for a new kind of fight. Distinctions were being drawn between officers who were battle-minded and those whose savage instincts were reserved for advancing their own careers. Qualities that got you ahead in peacetime were yielding to skills equally ageless, but prized only in desperate times: a glint in the eye, a forward-leaning, balls-of-the-feet bearing, a constitutional aspect of professionalized aggression.
The reach and impact of individual leadership was in flux in the machine age. According to legend, the eleventh-century Spanish general El Cid had such a powerful command presence that it survived his own death. With his corpse secured in his saddle, riding in the lead position, his army was said to have routed a foe by the mere illusion of his leadership. Innovations in the art of war could on one hand extend the reach and power of individuals. The commander of the carrier Enterprise pointed to a new dynamic in the age of airpower. “It is continually proved that the ability of a single individual can make or break the entire situation,” he said. Planes individualized war. The pilot at the stick was the guidance system of his ordnance. But teamwork had not gone out of fashion within the hull of a ship. Men who were battle-minded would win the day so long as their spirit had a contagious strain. Careerists would climb as they usually did: with or without the glory of victory. Though deciding who belonged to which camp was often a matter of private controversy—in 1942 the carrier commanders were the principal case studies in that debate—one thing was clear. The street fighters were coming into play in the South Pacific.
With his return to basics and a regimen that left little time for idle watch standing, the commander of Task Force 64 was winning over his men. “Scott had balls,” Robert Graff of the Atlanta said. “He was smart. And he was shrewd. Those three things usually make a fighter.”
His mission as September drew to a close: bow up to the Tokyo Express and give it its first bloody nose.