33
THE NIGHT OF NIGHTMARES PASSED. AS THE SUN DREW BACK THE long shadows of Tulagi and Florida Island from Savo Sound, the remains of the night’s struggle were revealed in all their ragged trauma.
Broken through the keel, her bow and stern drifting in different directions with the currents, the Atlanta lay dead in the water a few miles off Lunga Point. Still heavily afire, she was kept from breaking apart only by the latent tensile strength of her decks and the fickle mercy of a calm morning sea. Every heavy apparatus on the ship that was removable was jettisoned: an anchor and its chain, a whaleboat and its davits, four torpedoes found in the disabled port side tubes, and miscellaneous gear of all kinds—paravanes, gangways, smoke screen generators, depth charges.
By the first blush of dawn, Lloyd Mustin saw evidence of the astonishing volume of ordnance that flew over the ship that night. The mainmast near his aft air-defense station, only eight inches in diameter, was riddled with holes. All three forward turrets were knocked out, several of their six barrels sliced away. Like a cavern in a gray sea cliff, her forward engine room was a void. Filled with black water, it was a grave for a fine engineering department headed by Lieutenant Commander Arthur Loeser and chief machinist’s mate Henry A. Wolfe. In the mess compartment above it, a heavy serving table had been “plastered flat against the overhead” by the force of the torpedo’s blast.
A few rapid tugs on a flywheel spinner was all it took to get a gasoline-powered handy-billy pump growling. Dropped over the side, the inch-and-a-half-diameter suction hose could draw on a limitless supply of seawater to fight fires, with pressure enough to play a stream high into the superstructure, or anywhere else something was burning. On the Atlanta that morning, almost everything was burning.
“It is a matter of wonder to observe, at close hand, a steel warship on fire,” wrote Bill McKinney, the electrician’s mate. Having rushed topside up ladders and through compartments that were scorched and baking hot, he found that his rebreather expired much more quickly than the fifteen minutes it was rated for. Emerging on the main deck, he confronted a landscape aflame. The shipboard fires illuminated a bleak, steel-gray landscape that seemed deserted. “What is burning that makes the jagged edges around shell holes white hot?” he wondered. “Paint, other combustibles, but more possibly that the type of enemy shells contained thermite, contact with which makes almost anything burn.” Ammunition didn’t need help. Below, magazines full of rounds for the twenties were popping away, small heavy box by small heavy box, and so fiercely that they set the deck burning, melted right through it, spilled down into the compartment below, and set it on fire, too. It was unfortunate for the antiaircraft cruiser that she stored such a large volume of ammunition.
When the forward gun director was hit, the thick mass of wiring running down through the trunk was set aflame, another avenue for the fiery contagion. A locker containing pyrotechnics—flares and smoke markers—had taken a direct hit, too, producing a spectacular runaway blaze. As flames aspired to the top of the steel foremast, the fires devoured its base, melting through its thirty-inch diameter and felling the eighty-odd-foot-high tower to port, trapping men in the 1.1 clipping rooms. Damage-control parties managed to cut the foremast free, righting some of her starboard list.
According to McKinney, a terrified shipmate ran past him at one point shouting, “Get off. She’s going to blow!” But the executive officer, Dallas Emory, had already countermanded an order to abandon ship, and McKinney was just as happy to stay aboard. “Better to be blown up than eaten up,” he figured. Then McKinney happened upon “a bright idea”: opening the fire main in his compartment and allowing seawater to flood the deck. He thought this would provide a buffer between the fires above and the magazine below. Emory, in his cabin writing a report by the light of a battle lantern, approved the request. “Just don’t sink the ship,” he advised. As McKinney opened the main, no one on board seemed to understand that the same free-surface effect that was plaguing the San Francisco could have capsized the Atlanta had the seas gotten rough.
Searching the ship for wounded, Raymond Leslie came upon a hole in the boat deck caused by an explosion from below. The steel plates, blown upward into a jagged rise, had to be carefully negotiated. Razor-edged hunks of steel, most of them the size of anvils, some as large as small cars, were scattered across the decks. In wreckage nearby, Leslie found two shipmates, both friends of his, trapped under some deck plating. He and the other rescuers set themselves close against the heavy steel, lifting with the legs. Their shipmates were pulled free and taken to an aid station. Later, after daylight, when Leslie and the others returned to the site, they would marvel that they had been able to move the plates at all. Joined by others, they tried again, just to sate their curiosity. They found now that they couldn’t budge them.
McKinney and another electrician, Bob Tyler, “took a little time to get rid of some bodies that lay in the way of ship’s work.” According to McKinney, “I recall many corpses, badly torn up, but there was not a great deal of blood. Could the white-hot metal that killed them have had a cauterized effect? More probably the massive shock of death stopped the heart and no more blood was pumped.” A particularly grisly place was gun number five, the hip mount on the starboard side. Trained aft, its entire left bulkhead had been torn open and lay nearly toppled over the side. Near the mess of charred metal they attempted to recover the body of a boatswain’s mate, and it came in half in their arms. Another sailor, the mount’s pointer, “hung out of his seat with his head gone from the nose up,” McKinney wrote. “He was jammed in place by a jagged portion of the turret structure which had penetrated his back. We couldn’t get him loose, so I entered the wrecked turret to push him from within. The remains of the Turret Captain hung over his booth railing like a large piece of burnt bacon.” They finally got the pointer out of his seat and tumbled him overboard. As a young sailor walked to the lifeline to throw a dismembered arm overboard, he ate an apple with his free hand. Tyler explored the forward superstructure, which McKinney called “a horrifying spectacle of flesh and bone.” Though most of the remains were beyond recognition, a hand was found wearing a Naval Academy ring engraved with the class year 1911. The navigator, Lieutenant Commander James Stuart Smith, sat in the starboard bridge chair, dead without a mark on him.
With the forward engine spaces gutted and the after boilers swamped, the ship was powerless to resist the currents that moved toward the beach. They threatened to carry the crippled Atlanta within range of Japanese artillery. Commander Nickelson rallied a work party to lower the ship’s remaining anchor to keep her from grounding near the Japanese-held section of the coast. Even with all hundred fathoms of heavy chain run out laboriously by hand, it still did not reach.
As the shoreward drift continued, Captain Jenkins sent Lloyd Mustin to the ship’s armory to issue Springfield rifles to the crew. As daylight came, shots began ringing out all through the ship’s topside spaces when the newly armed crewmen began firing on Japanese survivors paddling in the oil-drenched waters around the ship. “They were so deeply ingrained against capture that they wouldn’t let us rescue them, for the most part,” said Mustin. He ordered the snipers to stand down.
With more than half of her forty-five officers killed or wounded, and 153 of 700 enlisted men dead or missing, the Atlanta was ultimately fortunate to lie so close to Guadalcanal. From the auxiliary radio room, survivors called Naval Base Guadalcanal (a makeshift naval station and encampment commanded by the skipper of the late Astoria, Captain Bill Greenman, who adopted the title Commander, Naval Activities, Cactus-Ringbolt Area) and asked for small boats to take off the wounded. The sailors ashore responded swiftly, manning boats and venturing into the battle-littered sea. Bill Kennedy, a gunner’s mate at the station, wrote, “The entire area was covered with a thick layer of oil; all kinds of debris was floating in it with survivors hanging on to whatever they could grab. They were all so black with oil that we had to come in close to see if they were ours or theirs. American survivors took precedence, of course; later in the day we went back out for the Japs but found very few. My boat didn’t see any.”
A small fleet of utility craft, known as “mike boats,” began motoring out to the ship. Manned by marines, they pulled alongside and took off survivors. To Mustin’s surprise, one of the boats turned out to have an unexpected crew. “As it came alongside where I was standing at the rail—the rail was not very far above the water at this point—here stood up in the boat a Japanese sailor. He had his white uniform jumper on. His boatswain’s insignia were unmistakable. He was gesturing that he wanted some rags. He showed us that he had about six or eight men there who were wounded in various ways and all covered with oil. He was taking care of them. A couple of them were Japanese, and a couple of them were Americans. They were all immobile. They were perhaps unconscious. This one Japanese boatswain’s mate had taken it upon himself to take care of all those sailors.”
Retrieving the wounded from the clutches of the sea, Atlanta sailors had to content themselves with small victories. Thomas Carroll took a raft out and returned with the only survivor of turret five, a sailor named Stanley Hicks, who had been blown out the side of the gun house when it was hit. Hicks’s reunion with his brother, Benjamin, was tearful.
To hold on to one’s sanity, it helped, Bill Kennedy found, to see the horror in terms of simple physics. Kennedy wrote, “There were not very many parts, arms and legs, that is. I don’t know why, but when arms and legs are blown off, they usually sink—but not the torso; it will float. Doc told us that the torso has cavities which retain and even produce gasses—like the lungs, stomach, bowels, etc. Makes sense.” After several shuttle trips out to the Atlanta, the decks of Kennedy’s boat were blackened with oil. “It took weeks of washing them down with gasoline, over and over again, to dissolve it. With a lot of sweat, we got the boats clean. That is, we got the oil and grime off. Funny thing about the blood stains; much of it remained until we repainted the boat.”
As morning deepened, the risk of air attack returned. The Atlanta’s vulnerability was evident enough. Little remained of her formidable main battery. Her aftermost two five-inch mounts were the only ones that weren’t disabled. But without steam, there were no generators working, and thus no power to train them. It was not an ideal state for repelling a fast-developing air attack. A tug working out of Tulagi, the Bobolink, came alongside, hooked up, and gingerly began towing her toward shore until her anchor, streaming at full extension, finally grabbed the seafloor, holding the ship a few miles off Lunga Point.
The senior assistant in the engineering department, Lieutenant Commander John T. Wulff, realized that the ship’s 250-kilowatt diesel generator could be tied into the switchboard to supply the necessary power, but the superheated compartment needed to be made habitable first. Bill McKinney and others set up a portable blower to remove the tremendous heat from the partially flooded engine room. A submersible bilge pump was next, pumping the water level below the second-level gratings. Then, adjusting the switchboard to take power from the emergency generator, he connected one end of a cable to the 440-volt board, and threaded the other end down several decks to the emergency diesel room, where the generator was. Through trial and error, Wulff and his men got power flowing to turret eight, and soon its guns were barking at the sky as a single Japanese aircraft approached. Ten salvos quelled any ambitions the pilot might have had to finish the crippled vessel, and the plane veered away.
Close by the Atlanta, a larger ship circled like a shark. When she was first seen, “There was a general rush for the torpedo tubes,” McKinney wrote. They stood down when Lloyd Mustin determined that the stranger was the Portland. The men of that ship, too, had been struggling to peg the identities of the smashed ships around them. Seeing a destroyer standing to their north, they quickly identified it as an enemy and trained the ship’s two forward turrets on her. This turned out to be the Yudachi, still dead in the water. Captain DuBose got on the intercom and invited anyone who wasn’t busy serving the main battery to come topside and watch a firing squad by naval rifle. In the Atlanta, all damage-control work was stopped. “We stood, frozen at the life-lines, spectators to a kind of action rarely witnessed,” McKinney wrote.
The Portland’s fire-control team quickly got comfortable with their ship’s gyrations, drew on the target with their after director, and fired six salvos from 12,500 yards. Over. Short. Straddle. Straddle. There came then a report from Commander Shanklin that the Japanese destroyer was showing a white flag.
DuBose asked his gunnery officer what nationality the flag was. The gun boss said, “It’s not in my registry.”
“Sink the S-O-B,” DuBose replied.
The next salvo struck the destroyer amidships, bringing a bright flash and a tower of black smoke. When it cleared, nothing remained. On the Atlanta, “We raised a cheer,” McKinney wrote. “A sentimentalist near me croaked, ‘Don’t cheer fellows. The poor guys are dead. It could have been you.’ All shared his observation, few his recommendation.”
The next short chapter in the “battle of the cripples” belonged to the Japanese. The Hiei, lying north of Savo Island, outside the Portland’s line of sight, opened fire on the nearest American ship, the Aaron Ward. As he lolled in an opiate-addled haze, Bob Hagen watched the great splashes close by as the third and fourth two-gun salvos straddled the ship, compelling Captain Gregor to duck behind the pilothouse wheel. Seeing the frailty of that small installation relative to the towers of seawater raised by the salvo, and his holy terror of a skipper diving for cover, Hagen couldn’t suppress a numb smile. The torment ended quickly for the Aaron Ward when some Marine Dauntlesses from Henderson Field, escorted by Wildcats, found the battleship.
Shortly after 7 a.m., when Master Technical Sergeant Donald V. Thornbury planted a thousand-pound bomb into the Hiei’s superstructure, it was the first of a rain of ordnance that would fall in a daylong deluge, seventy sorties in all. The Hiei’s assailants included nine Avengers from the Enterprise’s Torpedo Squadron 10, “the Buzzard Brigade,” which attacked after 10 a.m. Led by Lieutenant Albert P. Coffin and Lieutenant MacDonald Thompson, the veterans of the action off Santa Cruz eased their big Grummans out of the cloud cover and dispersed to set up “anvil” torpedo attacks, converging on either bow. Zero fighter pilots flying from Rabaul, Buin, and the carrier Junyo were foiled by distance and heavy weather and could do little to protect the battleship. The Buzzard Brigade would claim three hits. Rearming at Henderson Field, they attacked again in the afternoon.
(Photo Credit: 33.1)
The Hiei still had a surprisingly deep reservoir of fight left in her. She was capable of ten or more knots, and as long as her crew remained ahead in the close race with floodwaters for control of the manual steering compartment, there was hope she might get away. By midmorning, the Kirishima received orders from Admiral Kondo to reverse course and return south to take the Hiei in tow. According to Japanese sources, however, an attack by a U.S. submarine, which landed two dud hits on the Kirishima, compelled Kondo to abandon the plan and recall the Kirishima to rejoin his Advance Force.
As American planes kept the struggling Hiei under siege, the tug Bobolink took the Aaron Ward under tow, handing her off to a patrol craft that brought her into Tulagi’s harbor. The Portland aspired to get there, too, but her starboard sheer defied all efforts at navigation. Higgins boats pushed against her starboard bow. The ship’s port anchor was cast out and streamed alongside. The crew fashioned large improvised sea anchors out of canvas and threw them overboard, hoping to drag enough water to pull the ship out of her circle. That, too, was to no avail. As the struggle continued, the Portland served as an emergency aid station for wounded sailors rescued from the sound. The cruiser’s whaleboat, Higgins boats from Guadalcanal, and several floatplanes motoring around the surface brought some thirty-eight men aboard, most of them from the Barton. They were treated and sent on to Tulagi. Finally, the busy Bobolink nudged alongside and threw her powerful shoulder into the Portland’s starboard bow. Aided by the patrol boat YC-236, they got the heavy cruiser going in the right direction, creeping along at a walking speed.
At 10:20 a.m., disturbed by the persistence of the air attacks, which required the ship to keep moving and thus foiled flood-control efforts, Abe ordered the Hiei’s captain, Masao Nishida, to beach the ship on Guadalcanal. The flooding had conquered the steering compartment, and as soon as it was abandoned, the ship was stuck circling northeast of Savo Island. But Nishida flatly refused the order, and in the face of his doggedness, Abe relented. If they could survive the day, they might have the liberty, under cover of darkness, to pump flooded compartments dry and get her under way again.
The return of the Buzzard Brigade at about two twenty-five that afternoon dashed these hopes. Fliers swooped down and planted a pair of torpedoes into the battleship’s starboard side. The shoring that held the floodwaters out of the steering compartment finally yielded, and the ship became unnavigable. As Captain Nishida ordered the crew to abandon, he supervised them from a chair perched atop turret three aft. He stayed there even as Dauntless dive-bombers bore down on the ship. With the Hiei listing to starboard and down by the stern, Abe ordered Nishida forcibily taken from the ship. Flying his flag in the destroyer Yukikaze, standing by, Abe decided his old flagship was a total loss. Though Admiral Yamamoto intervened directly from Truk, instructing Abe that the Hieinot be scuttled, leaving her instead to lend support to Tanaka’s transports as they approached Savo Sound in conjunction with a renewed attack by surface warships, Abe saw no hope in this. After dark, the Hiei sank unobserved, somewhere north of Savo Island. Yamamoto was reportedly furious with Abe for his resistance, and removed him from seagoing command.
WHEN THE PILOTS FROM the Enterprise’s Buzzard Brigade returned to Henderson Field, they were met by the surprised commander of the Cactus Air Force, Brigadier General Louis Woods, who declared, “Boys, I don’t know where you came from, but you look like angels dropping out of heaven to us.” Touching down on the airfield again near dusk, with their khakis still fresh and their faces clean-shaven, the carrier pilots found old friends from flight school among the Marine fliers and enjoyed the occasion to celebrate. They gained full membership in the Cactus Air Force by donating some torpedo fuel to the bar, run by Seabees, who always had a healthy supply of grapefruit juice on hand as a mixer. Assigned tents in a camp already crowded with survivors of the naval action, the tenants of Henderson Field raised their glasses and cheered.