17
NORMAN SCOTT, DESPITE HIS PAINSTAKING ATTENTION TO DETAIL, nearly threw away the game board before the match had even begun. His orderly march toward battle ended as soon as the task force executed his latest order, “COLUMN LEFT TO 230 … EXECUTE.”
In a “column turn,” ships turn to the designated heading upon reaching a fixed point in space. The leader turns, and each successive ship follows as soon as she reaches the leader’s rudder kick—the visible swirl in the sea produced by rudder movement. In such a maneuver, each ship retains her place in the column, following in her predecessor’s wake. If visibility is good, it is a simple matter to verify one’s proper position in the formation: The wake of the ship ahead is a ready visual reference. The disadvantage is that the turn takes a while to execute, its total duration being the time it takes the last ship in column to reach the spot where the leader first turned.
A very different type of turn is known as a “simultaneous turn,” in which each ship within the column executes the turn immediately. A single column of ships ordered to turn ninety degrees ends up steaming in line abreast on the new heading. A 180-degree turn serves to reverse the column’s heading, with the former lead ship bringing up the rear and the original tail-end Charlie serving as the new column leader. A simultaneous turn is quicker to execute than a column turn, but because the conning officer in each ship lacks the visual reference point provided by the stern of the ship in front of him, careful plotting is needed, especially in conditions of poor visibility.
It was on this basic curriculum, elementary to any course in naval shiphandling, that Scott’s battle plan foundered. As the SG radar showed, a well-executed reversal of course would have brought his column right across Goto’s—a perfect “crossing of the T”—allowing his formation to rake the Japanese column with their full broadsides and leaving Goto to reply with only his forward batteries. But Scott’s notion of the timing of the engagement and the spacing of his ships was thrown into disarray as soon as his van destroyer, the Farenholt, threw her rudder over.
Quite unexpectedly, the conning officer of the San Francisco turned simultaneously with the Farenholt. This error threw a hot potato to Captain Moran in the Boise. Following astern of the San Francisco, he faced a critical decision that had to be settled in a snap: Should he continue as ordered and make a column turn, holding his rudder until he reached the spot where the Farenholt turned? Or should he turn immediately and stay with his flagship? Either choice would have sundered Scott’s column in two. The first would leave the San Francisco on her own. The second would cut loose his vanguard destroyers. Perhaps realizing that keeping the cruisers together was the more urgent priority, Moran chose the latter course. As the Boise turned, and as the Salt Lake City followed her, Scott’s leading trio of destroyers forged out into the night alone.
As the cruisers settled into their southwesterly course, the order passed for the turret crews to match up with the bearing of the turret directors as they sought to pin down targets broadly located by the search radar. On the secondary batteries, star shells were locked into their breeches. The SC search radar of the Salt Lake City was the first to make contact with the Japanese. The Boise’s radar picked them up soon afterward, sketching their approach in electron beams, the vertical stem of the T just fourteen thousand yards to the northwest. When Moran’s talker reported these contacts as “bogeys,” some listeners wondered whether he might be referring to aircraft.
Scott had instructed his commanders to open fire as soon as they had a confirmed fix on the enemy. With the destroyers lost in the night, nothing could be confirmed now. Flying his flag in a ship that had no SG radar and was forbidden from using its SC set, Scott certainly had no ready picture of the unexpected geometry of the fight. The contact reports he was hearing from the other cruisers might well be Captain Robert G. Tobin’s destroyers, spun off from his column by the San Francisco’s error. His fears were firmly underscored when the Boise reported a cluster of ship contacts bearing sixty-five degrees. Moran meant to report contacts at sixty degrees relative to the Boise’s own course heading. Standard tactical doctrine, however, required ships to report contacts as true bearings, with 0 degrees indicating the north and 180 the south.
The difference was critical to Admiral Scott. A report of strange ships at sixty-five degrees true would have been consistent with his notion of where he believed the Farenholt, Duncan, and Laffey were located. Captain Tobin, dismayed to find himself separated from the battle line, somewhere off the starboard quarter of the cruisers, ordered his tin cans to ring up flank speed. As the commanders in the cruiser line prepared to open fire, the Farenholt was steaming about nine hundred yards abreast of the Boise; the Laffeywas following, even with the Helena. At eleven forty-five, Scott didn’t have a clear picture. He radioed Tobin, “Are you taking station ahead?” Tobin replied, “Affirmative. Moving up on your starboard side.”
In his battle plan, Scott allowed for the possibility that his ships might wander from his grasp. His plan, which called for any stragglers to fall out on the column’s disengaged side, presupposed there would be an orderly engagement and that the stragglers would know where the American column was in the first place. The perils of ambiguous identity were severe. “Do not rejoin,” Scott wrote, “until permission is requested giving bearing in voice code of approach.” That was more or less what Tobin had just done—except that Scott’s ships had no way of knowing at exactly what bearing to starboard the friendly destroyers would appear. The Japanese ships they were tracking were to starboard, too.
As the ten-centimeter waves radiating from the Boise’s and Helena’s parabolic antennae pulsed along, their operators watched as the range between Scott’s broken column and Goto’s onrushing T closed to three miles. But still the muzzles were silent. When a Helena lookout reported to Captain Hoover, “Ships visible to the naked eye,” the ship’s young radar officer remarked to the navigator, “What are we going to do, board them?” A chief wondered aloud, “Do we have to see the whites of the bastard’s eyes?”
Hoover, the commander of the Helena, didn’t know what the problem was. He had commanded destroyers once. In May, he led Destroyer Squadron 2 in the Battle of the Coral Sea and later served in the Yorktown’s screen at Midway. From his time at the Bureau of Ordnance, he had learned about the Navy’s experiments with radar and knew the importance of drilling with his destroyers to get the most out of the new tool. He fully appreciated now, as the pips on his scope blinked toward each other, that a critical advantage was being frittered away by indecision.
The Helena’s skipper instructed his talker to raise the San Francisco and make a request to open fire. The transmission, per the fleet’s General Signal Procedure, went out as “Interrogatory Roger,” with “interrogatory” indicating a question, and “Roger,” code for the letter R, the signal for opening fire. This brought from Admiral Scott a quick affirmative response: “Roger.” Hoover repeated the request, just to be sure. And again came “Roger.”
But Scott thought he was answering a different question altogether. Captivated by his concern for the whereabouts of his destroyers, he was not ready to open fire yet. As he would explain afterward, he misinterpreted Hoover’s message as a request that he acknowledge Helena’s last transmission of a radar contact. Hoover, of course, was beyond caring whether Scott was receiving him. If Scott wanted to rely on what the radar was showing, he would have made the Helena his flagship. Hoover interpreted Scott’s response, “Roger,” in accordance with its standard meaning in the General Signal Book: as a code to commence firing.
With this critical exchange, which prompted the immediate and ferocious discharge of the Helena’s fifteen six-inch guns, a miscommunication compounded a previous miscommunication and the engagement that would be known as the Battle of Cape Esperance spun into chaos, beyond the control of any single commander.
Throwing gunfire against surface targets was what the Helena and her class did best. It was a light cruiser’s first and only business, and so it went, muzzles roaring, spent brass tubes kicking out to the turret deck, projectile hoists whining, shell trays loading, breeches slamming and spinning shut, and the turrets salvoing again. Fire-control doctrine prescribed a more deliberate cadence of salvo fire—all fifteen guns discharging at once—when targets were beyond twelve thousand yards from the ship. At closer ranges, the ship switched to automatic-continuous mode. The experience was elemental. “The night had been still and inky black a moment before,” Chick Morris wrote. “Now suddenly it was a blazing bedlam. The Helena herself reared and lurched sideways, trembling from the tremendous shock of recoil. In the radio shack and coding room we were sent reeling and stumbling against bulkheads, smothered by a snowstorm of books and papers from the tables. The clock leaped from its pedestal. Electric fans hit the deck with a metallic clatter. Not a man in the room had a breath left in him.” If this was the effect of the ship’s gun work on the men who were practicing it, one can imagine what life might have been like on the ships they were hitting.
The Salt Lake City’s heavier guns lashed out to starboard, planting a straddle just short of what was identified as a cruiser, probably Goto’s flagship, the Aoba, four thousand yards away. The director was ranged up three hundred yards and another salvo went out. “The second never touched the water,” the cruiser’s action report declared. “All hits.”
As the night blossomed in flames, Captain Moran of the Boise, wired for sound wearing headphones and a steel helmet, shouted to his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander John J. Laffan, “Pick out the biggest and commence firing!”
The Boise’s directors were fixed on the same ship the Salt Lake City was targeting, the leader of the Japanese column, the Aoba, a mere forty-five hundred yards distant, forward of the starboard beam. In the Boise’s depths, in Central Station, the damage-control officer, Lieutenant Commander Tom Wolverton, decided it was time to relieve the tension. Recalling his four-year-old son’s panicked response the first time he rode on a roller coaster and clanked his way to the summit, he gathered his deepest baritone and shouted so that everyone could hear him: “Daddy, I want to go home now!” The effect worked magic as grins spread over a dozen faces and his crew settled back and relaxed. When Captain McMorris in the San Francisco saw a destroyer-sized target to starboard and persuaded himself that the ship could not possibly belong to Tobin’s squadron, he opened fire, too. Task Force 64’s cruiser column was fully engaged, opening fire from rear to fore.
In the aborning age of radar, the stately traditional method of firing ranging salvos first, then walking shells to their target by progressive correction was a thing of the past. In Mikawa’s blitz against Riefkohl, the Japanese performed the old ritual well. Four salvos were fired short of the Vincennes and Quincy before blood was finally drawn. Now, with microwave radar laying the guns, fire controlmen tapped the power of Newtonian physics. With electron beams cleansing their equations of errant human perception, opening salvos usually yielded immediate straddles and hits. Several outlying shells from the Boise’s first broadside were seen to hit a heavy cruiser. After a correction of “up one hundred” was dialed in to the rangekeeper, extending the reach of the guns by a football field’s length, the next salvo registered more heavily and the Japanese ship was soon buckling and burning under a radar-controlled barrage. It happened so fast, the Japanese never knew what hit them.
Variations in the efficiency of individual gun crews soon turned the structured cadence of full-salvo fire into a continuous staccato as single guns waged their own fights in parallel trios from turret to turret. When the firing cycle reached full tilt, Moran’s and Hoover’s capacity to monitor the action with their own senses was obliterated by their ravenous muzzles, turned out and blasting away just forward of their bridge stations. When Scott led his cruisers in an unsignaled turn to the northwest, Moran’s conning officer could make out the San Francisco ahead only by the flashes of her gunfire and the periodic blinking of her fighting lights.
Ensign Weems in the destroyer McCalla, at the end of the American column, mistook the output of the cruisers for machine-gun fire. The rolling stream of six-inch tracers looked like the fire from the 1.1-inch “Chicago pianos.” The Japanese, witnessing this from the business end, would discuss the appearance of these “machine-gun cruisers.” Through the flash and concussion of the McCalla’s number three gun, firing directly over him, Weems had fleeting glimpses of the enemy. “I felt a wildly exultant joy in watching us let them have so much at such murderous range. If you stop and think—2,500 to 3,500 yards is point-blank range for big guns. You can hardly miss even if you wanted to!”
The burning enemy ships looked to him like “the most dramatic Hollywood reproductions.… I saw two that worked about like this: 1) pitch darkness, 2) stream of tracers from our ships, 3) series of flashes where hits were scored, silhouetting of ships by star shells, 4) tremendous fires and explosions, 5) ship folds in two, 6) ship sinks. All in all, a much better performance than Hollywood’s very best.”
This was pure burning savagery, a Marine Corps attitude, the spirit of Colonel Chesty Puller brought to sea. Now staccato, parsed with short pauses, then overlapping and simultaneous and cacophonous, like the mistimed pistons of a gigantic combustion engine, the continuous cycling output of cruiser gunfire gave no break to the eardrums. Any sailor sprinting past a turret was likely to get his ears deafened or his hide scorched.
Four minutes after the Boise opened fire, the ship had put out three hundred rounds from her main battery. Out in the dark to starboard, Moran could make out a trunked forward stack and a latticed tripod mainmast close to the after stack, the architecture of a cruiser. This ship was ready for action and returned fire. There came the whistling of “overs” as the Boise was straddled fiercely. Reports of the death of the Imperial fleet would be greatly exaggerated that night. More Japanese destroyers were reported sunk in official U.S. records than Admiral Goto actually commanded. But there was no questioning the vector of the outcome. The throw-weight of Scott’s line was beginning to tell. At least three enemy ships were burning in the Boise’s immediate vicinity.
The Aoba was hit no fewer than twenty-four times in the battle’s first twenty minutes, knocking out two main turrets, her main gun director, several searchlight platforms, her catapults, and several boiler rooms. Her foremast toppled down and demolished a starboard antiaircraft mount. The flagship veered out to starboard, signaling earnestly, “I AM AOBA,” as if her assailants were friendly. In the early going, it seemed Goto was unaware that the ships he was closing with were hostile. The Japanese commander’s final thoughts as American projectiles shattered his world, claiming the lives of seventy-nine men, including his own, were apparently that a Japanese force, his own reinforcement group, was firing on him. As his ship absorbed the blows of the U.S. cruisers, he shouted in frustration, “Bakayaro!”—idiots! Captain Yonejiro Hisamune ordered a smoke screen, and the Aoba vanished from view.
In those same tumultuous minutes, Norman Scott was seized by a corresponding fear: that the ships he was hitting were his own. The admiral was apoplectic as he climbed the ladder from the San Francisco’s flag bridge to the main bridge. He shouted an order that astonished everyone.
“Cease firing, all ships.”
Scott was gone as quickly as he had come, as the cease-fire order was relayed to the task force. It no doubt came as a relief to men on both sides when the firing slackened, but the Boise among others never relented, even as Scott repeatedly ordered Moran to check fire. Captain McMorris kept firing, too. He raised the microphone to his mouth and addressed the whole crew with the order he gave his gunners. “Rapid fire, continuous …” Then, in apology, he leaned over the rail of the bridge wing and added, “Begging your pardon, Admiral.” McMorris knew well who and what he was shooting at. Ceasing fire preemptively could get men killed.
As Tobin, the destroyer commander, radioed Scott, saying, “We are on your starboard hand now, going up ahead,” the firing continued, all the while Scott futilely repeating the cease-fire order on the TBS. Buck fever was rife, and spreading. “It took some time to stop our fire,” Scott wrote. “In fact it never did completely stop.”
The strains on discipline reached down to the enlisted ranks. A gun captain in the Farenholt by the name of Wiggens couldn’t bring himself to obey the order, even when his own captain, Lieutenant Commander Eugene T. Seaward, repeated it. An old hand from the Asiatic Fleet, he had been forced to leave his wife, a Chinese national, behind in Singapore in December when the British stronghold fell to the Japanese. He learned later that she had been killed by the occupiers. “Every time he could train on that huge Jap battlecruiser (at point-blank range) he would let go with another round,” wrote Ford Richardson, a talker for the Farenholt’s gunnery officer. “Wiggens went wild. Crazy wild. He hated Japs with a passion.” He never stopped shooting.
The San Francisco’s errant turn had been a mystery to the officers in the lead destroyer. As the Farenholt’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Alcorn G. Beckmann, watched the flagship lead the other three cruisers in a turn inside the Farenholt’s own, he wondered at his ship’s own lagging pace. Scott’s cruisers, it seemed, were outrunning some of his destroyers. He had heard Captain Tobin respond to Scott’s query, “Affirmative. Moving up on your starboard side.” They would need to hustle to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between the American and Japanese lines.
Settling into a westerly course as the Farenholt led the destroyers in their separate column, the destroyer Duncan, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Edmund B. Taylor, plotted an unidentified radar contact eight thousand yards to the west and rang up flank speed to pursue it. The U.S. cruiser line was in full voice now, and by the light of the fires they were planting on his target, Taylor could see it was a cruiser. Soon another enemy ship appeared, following close behind the first. As Taylor brought the Duncanbroadside to the enemy ships and prepared to launch torpedoes to starboard, he found himself in the difficult position of standing between Scott’s cruisers and their prey. To port, he saw the familiar silhouette of the Helena. As he overtook the light cruiser, he steered right standard rudder, looking to stay clear of the light cruiser’s line of fire.
Knowing that he had lost control of events, Scott tried to raise Tobin on the TBS. “How are you?” Scott asked the commander of Destroyer Division 12. “Were we shooting at Twelve?”
Tobin replied, “Twelve is okay. We are going up ahead on your starboard side. I do not know who you were firing at.”
Scott then ordered Tobin’s ships to display their recognition lights. They flashed momentarily in a proscribed pattern of green and white. With friends having declared themselves to friends, Scott directed his group to open fire again to starboard. Tobin would soon know all too well which ships Scott’s cruisers were targeting.
Ford Richardson, stationed in the Farenholt’s main battery director, “stood there transfixed watching the pyrotechnics. Our cruisers on one side of us were firing at the Jap ships on the other side of us.” Standing out of the hatch of the gun director, Richardson’s gunnery officer steered the fire of the forward five-inch battery into an enemy ship that had been brilliantly illuminated by star shells. When he dropped back down inside the director, Richardson, as his talker, followed him. “At that very instant,” Richardson recalled, “we were hit by a six- or eight-inch shell at the cross arm of the foremast, some twenty-five feet over my head!”
Tobin had just ordered his squadron to fire torpedoes at targets of opportunity when the airburst rattled the Farenholt’s decks. Shrapnel cut down several men in exposed topside stations. The heavier shards penetrated the rangefinder, slicing through a man standing forward of it. The wounded man was passed down from the rangefinder to Richardson. With a penlight he saw that the shrapnel had entered the man’s body behind the collarbone, exited below his arm, and reentered his body near the groin, leaving a big hole in his upper leg. Then it went through the deck. Richardson stopped the heavy bleeding by stuffing a T-shirt into his shipmate’s gaping wound and using his belt as a compress.
The hit sliced the Farenholt’s radar antenna from the foremast, exploding spectacularly and sending a shower of fragments that pierced the air flask of a torpedo loaded in the ship’s quintuple mount, which was aimed on the centerline straight ahead. With a hiss of compressed air, liberated by the penetration, the missile launched itself from the tube and wedged in the base of the destroyer’s forward stack. The impact tripped the starter that sparked the torpedo’s motor to life. The motor screamed for a while before burning itself out without exploding. Another shell hit the waterline on the port side, knocking out all power and communications in the forward part of the ship. Water rushed in, and she took a list to port. Altogether Captain Seaward’s tin can was holed at the port side waterline by four American shells. The hits on the Farenholt most likely came from one of Scott’s own heavy cruisers, the San Francisco or the Salt Lake City. Friendly ships shot up the Duncan, too. The destroyer had turned her forward batteries on a Japanese cruiser thirty-three hundred yards off her starboard bow when she took a hit to the bridge that knocked out fire control and set afire the handling room beneath the number two gun. The Duncan’s skipper, Commander Taylor, had no sooner managed to steady on a torpedo firing course and release his first fish when another shell burst forward of the director platform, disabling the director and seriously wounding the torpedo officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) R. L. Fowler. The chief torpedoman fired another torpedo by local control at a target that already had the attention of Scott’s cruisers. “Almost immediately she was observed to crumble in the middle, then roll over and disappear,” Taylor wrote. The Duncan would share her fate.
Another salvo floated in, blasting the chart house, killing the two men on the Duncan’s SC radar, a sonar operator, the bridge radioman, and the yeoman keeping the record of the battle. The main radio room was a total loss with no survivors, the fire there having merged with the blaze from the number one fire room, fed by fresh air pouring through a rent in the overhead. Taylor lost steering control and found himself circling helplessly in a left-hand turn. When the forward portholes were opened to vent the smoke and steam washing into the pilothouse, they served not as an exhaust, but as an intake for flames and smoke coming from the burning number two gun. Trapped in the asphyxiating cloud, Taylor could see little of the battle now but sensed that his circling had carried him out of the line of fire of the American cruisers. But the ship would not be saved. When the boilers in the after fire room lost their supply of feed water, the fire main pumps failed, too, and the flames spread, punctuated by detonations of five-inch projectiles. The crew fought a brave rear-guard action with handy-billy pumps, but Taylor could see it was futile. He helped lower wounded from the bridge level to the deck and then into the water. Then, with flames enveloping the pilothouse on all sides, he found his only route of escape was by jumping from the starboard bridge wing.
The gunfire from Scott’s cruisers was prodigious, and when their lines of fire got clear of the obstruction presented by the van destroyers, they did far worse to intended targets than accidental ones. Tracked by all four American cruisers as she advanced along the axis of Scott’s column, the Furutaka took a series of heavy hits that would prove to be mortal. The Japanese cruiser was hit in her number three turret and in the port torpedo tubes. Several of her Long Lances caught fire, and the flames drew more fire.
It was just a few minutes past midnight when the Salt Lake City swept the beams of her fire-control radar through a wide arc to the engaged side. The extent of destruction wrought by Scott’s ships was reflected in these high-frequency microwaves. All of the ships the radar found were marked in the visible wavelength by fires.