32
GUN BARRELS COOLED AS THE NIGHT PULLED ITS CURTAIN CLOSED again, leaving the world dark, quiet, and small. The senses of men throughout the task force had withstood a ferocious assault. But the peace had a wounded character, and men found it discouraging. As the Helenacontinued along, heading toward Savo Island, Gil Hoover worried that he had heard nothing from the San Francisco. The Portland checked in, requesting a tow, but Hoover decided now was not the time for that. The flagship had gone off the air at the height of the engagement, shortly after the base units met. Where had she gone?
It was around 2:30 a.m. when Hoover decided, in the apparent absence of Callaghan and Scott, that he had in all likelihood ascended to officer in tactical command. His first task was to contact surviving ships and arrange a rendezvous. From the Helena’s navigation bridge, he called all ships over the TBS. “Form 18. Course 092. Speed 18. Don’t answer.” The message instructed the task force to head east at eighteen knots. Hoover didn’t want everyone to break radio silence now, but over the TBS came a voice from the O’Bannon, asking him to repeat the course heading. Hoover did so, adding, “Unable raise other big boys.” In the indeterminate distance, he saw ships believed to be Japanese firing at each other.
There came a cry as a lookout spotted a large ship ahead, off the port bow. Hoover started following it about eight hundred yards astern. “That sure looks like a battleship,” Robert Howe said to another sailor. He surmised that it had to be friendly or they never would have gotten so close. “We didn’t know where it could have come from, but we were sure glad to have a battleship on our side.”
Then a flare popped overhead and began swinging down on a parachute. It was “like sitting under a big streetlight,” Howe said. Studying the ship more closely, he noticed sailors in foreign white uniforms. “We had no trouble telling that it was a Japanese battleship,” he said.
After a few minutes following astern the enemy monster—likely the Kirishima, scarcely damaged at all and withdrawing at high speed—Hoover broke away and turned east. His PPI scope showed a scattering of green blips sliding north. Abe’s force was withdrawing in disarray.
Soon another phantom loomed in the night, pressing in on the starboard bow. Bin Cochran identified it as a cruiser of the Atlanta class, knifing straight for the Helena’s midsection. Since the Atlanta lay dead in the water, this had to have been the Juneau. Hoover ordered a hard right rudder, and as the stern started swinging left, Cochran tensed for an impact on the starboard quarter. Somehow the blow never fell, and soon the Juneau was gone again in the night.
That ship was consumed with her own problems. The Juneau had no fire control to her turrets. Her fantail was broken and buckled all the way forward to the hip-mounted five-inch gun on the starboard deck. Her electrical devices were subsisting on thin gruel from the emergency diesel generator. Several large belowdecks compartments were full of the dead, snuffed out by the blast of a torpedo in her engineering spaces. Having lurched through the enemy formation with a broken keel and a crippled main battery, the Juneau’s sailors came out badly shaken. They were no more rattled and no less gallant than any other men in the task force, but under fire, men could feel the impulse to claw at the steel decks with their hands to escape the killing hail, or vomit on deck, or weep.
According to Allen Heyn, a gunner’s mate stationed on the Juneau’s fantail near the depth charge mount where the oldest of the five Sullivan brothers, George, stood watch, “It seemed like everyone was giving it to us, you know. There was a big flash, and the salvos would hit the water on one side of the ship and splash all over and then they would hit on the other side.… Then something hit up forward. I don’t know what it was because it hit again and the ship shook all over. The ship seemed to be out of control kinda.” With most of that behind them, they found refuge in the night. The Juneau’s skipper, Lyman Swenson, thought he might find shelter near Malaita, hole up to see about repairs.
The majority of Callaghan’s ships—now Hoover’s ships—had taken as heavily as they had given, but the Helena’s own damage was slight: just five hits, none of serious consequence. With a single man killed and two hospitalized, she was deeply lucky. Slugging through two first-order nighttime brawls in two months, she had taken scarcely a scratch. Smart reliance on SG radar had allowed Hoover to refrain from the standard but generally suicidal act of opening searchlight shutters within gun range of an alerted foe. He wisely chose to illuminate his targets on invisible frequencies, with his radars.
At length, late in the night, the O’Bannon, the Fletcher, and finally the Sterett checked in on the radio. The Sterett’s captain, Jesse Coward, bristled at first when he was asked if he intended to retire. “We’ll fight her until we sink!” he said. He had two torpedoes left in the tubes. When his torpedo officer informed him the mount was inoperable, Coward turned to his exec, Lieutenant Frank Gould, and said, “Frank, let’s get the hell out of here.” As the destroyer left the area, six or seven burning pyres dotted the sea behind her.
Belowdecks, firefighting crews played their streams over smoldering bedding and red-hot shell cases, stuffed the holes in the hull with mattresses, and shored them. “Bodies, mattresses and other debris sloshed back and forth with the movement of the ship,” Perry Hall said. “Footing was difficult and battle lanterns provided the only light. I had no idea what time it was or where the ship was. I knew we were maneuvering using the screws because I couldn’t hear the rudder.”
Ahead lay the outline of Florida Island. “We had not seen an American ship for a long time, and I began to wonder if we were the only one left,” the Sterett’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant Cal Calhoun, wrote. Surveying the wreckage of his ship, which held the remains of twenty-eight men, Calhoun felt “strangely detached, as if I were on another planet surveying the earth in miniature.” The feeling persisted till the ship reached Lengo Channel, where she would eventually catch up with Captain Hoover’s survivors.
STILL TRYING TO GATHER his surviving vessels, Hoover sent the instruction “Answer” to the San Francisco, but none came. Where was Callaghan? Norman Scott and the Atlanta were unaccounted for, too. Finally a lookout announced the sighting of yet another unidentified ship on the port bow. The Helena’s killing train was set quickly rolling. Hoover ordered, “Shift target!” and Rodman Smith, the gunnery officer, coached his turrets on the new bearing. This ship, spectral and suspicious, had been shattered. Not a pane of glass remained in her. Fires glowed in several places on deck.
The officer-of-the-deck of the damaged mystery ship was studying the Helena through his binoculars as she overtook him to starboard. From about two thousand yards away, he could make out her twin stacks and five sleek turrets—all trained right at him. Then, in the Helena’s superstructure, a light signaled the letters “H-I-S H-I-S.” An encoded challenge signal required a prompt reply, but neither of the two officers up forward on the battered vessel’s navigation bridge, Bruce McCandless nor John Bennett, knew what reply to give to this challenge. The dispatch containing the reply codes assigned for use that day had been lost in the fires. Though the codes had also been scrawled with chalk on the bulkhead of the flag bridge, the metal where they had been recorded was thoroughly punctured and scorched. Any attempt to memorize the codes had been “driven from my mind by the events of the last hour,” McCandless wrote. “In seconds, unless the correct reply was given, fifteen six-inch and four five-inch would fire into us.” Virtually all of the principal means of communication—TBS radio, searchlights, signal flags and halyards, fighting lights—had been destroyed or made inoperable. The steam line to the flagship’s siren and whistle had been punctured by splinters. The signalmen had a blinker light, but they hesitated to respond because they knew something their officers didn’t: that the three-letter reply code specified for that day was “J-A-P.” One signalman, Vic Gibson, told a colleague who was holding a blinker gun, “If you don’t want them shooting at us, you’d better send them J-A-P.” Nothing doing. The signalman felt that a response that like was as likely to invite gunfire as forestall it. The Helena’s batteries were seconds from turning loose when a San Francisco signalman, on order from McCandless, blinked a message in Morse from the bridge. “C38 … C38 …”
Seeing this signal—a reasonable approximation of the San Francisco’s hull number, CA-38—Rodman Smith relaxed his grip on the firing key and the Helena’s gun captains stood down. “Thank God the Helena accepted that,” Jack Bennett said. “Captain Hoover, may he live forever, took a second look before letting us have it,” McCandless wrote. The sad news quickly followed via the flashlight that the San Francisco was bereft of its senior leadership. On hearing this, Gil Hoover signaled that he would take command of the remnant of Task Force 67 for the journey home.
By 3:45 a.m., in the company of the Fletcher (untouched despite the numerological odds against her), Hoover’s survivors cleared Sealark Channel. The O’Bannon found them in the channel with her SG radar and took station ahead. In Indispensable Strait, between Guadalcanal and Malaita, the damaged Sterett joined up, her steersman struggling with a balky rudder that was urging the ship toward Guadalcanal’s shoals. Then the Juneau appeared ahead to port. Hoover directed Captain Swenson’s wobbly ship to fall in. Plying submarine-haunted waters, none of the ships was out of danger yet. Some of them were good candidates to sink even without further work by the enemy.
Simple navigation was a challenge for ships that had been through a bender such as the night action of November 13. Down twelve feet by the bow, listing slightly to port, the Juneau was swerving and skidding as if her long hull were jointed somewhere below. The swells crested near the gunwales, her one screw knocked from a bent shaft, water seeped through seams in the stress-fractured hull, and her auxiliary electrical generators were helpless to power all the pumps. By dawn her technicians had patched things together well enough. They even restored local control to one of her five-inch mounts. Swenson decided to press on south for Espiritu Santo.
Through the last hours before dawn, bearing the burden of 83 dead and 106 seriously wounded sailors, the San Francisco tailed the Helena’s dim silhouette ahead. “I hung on, occasionally calling her by blinker gun and steering for the answering flash of light,” McCandless wrote. The San Francisco’s engines were good for twenty-eight knots, but steering the damaged ship was a more serious problem. In Sealark Channel, between Guadalcanal and Florida Island, Bennett relieved McCandless and quickly noticed that his quartermaster Rogers was having to repeat his orders over the sound-powered phones. The other quartermaster, Higdon, had gone to the smoky emergency steering compartment below, where the helm orders were being manually executed. Seeing the sluggish response from steering, Bennett suspected Higdon was woozy from smoke inhalation and told Rogers to keep him talking so he wouldn’t pass out and leave the ship unnavigable.
When a lieutenant stationed in Sky Forward, Dick Marquardt, called down, “You’re about to run aground on Malaita!” Bennett understood that he might be a little groggy himself, having lost sight of the Helena when she turned south while obscured in the island’s silhouette. As he righted his course and fell in line again with Hoover, the decks heeled and a warning came from Bob Dusch, the damage-control whiz, that the rush of free surface water was wiping out the wooden shoring that held several critical mattress patches in place near the bow. When Bennett’s relief finally arrived, Bennett scrawled the zigzag plan in chalk on the conning tower door and handed the newcomer a watch that he had taken from one of Callaghan’s slain staff officers. Then he went to look for Bruce McCandless.
Bennett found him in the captain’s emergency cabin, sitting on the edge of the bunk, eyes glazed and with blood trickling down his face from shrapnel wounds in his forehead and ear. Bennett picked out as many bits of steel as he could before determining that McCandless didn’t need emergency attention. He left him there, went down to the gun deck, and sprawled on the steel deck, using a Great War–era tin hat for “a wholly unsatisfactory pillow.” There were no words for what they had just been through, and none for the fresh horrors they would find topside when sunrise came.