34
CAPTAIN HOOVER LED HIS SQUADRON OF SURVIVORS TOWARD ESPIRITU Santo, forced to limp at ten knots until temporary repairs let the San Francisco keep pace with the nimbler survivors. The Helena led her and the damaged Juneau south. As the shell-battered Sterett passed the San Francisco to take station ahead, forming a patchwork destroyer screen with the unscratched Fletcher and the lightly grazed O’Bannon, her crew beheld what the night had wrought on Dan Callaghan’s flagship. The bridge was battered and charred; the after control tower, thoroughly put to the torch. They counted twenty-six holes in her port side.
On request from Bruce McCandless, the Juneau sent the San Francisco a medical officer, Lieutenant Roger W. O’Neil, and a trio of corpsmen to assist with the wounded. O’Neil was angry about being sent away from his ship. “I don’t know why they sent us over here,” he said, coming aboard. “You people are going to sink, and we are needed back on the Juneau.” In Captain Swenson’s ship, a damage-control party was working to fortify her fractured keel.
Just before dawn, the San Francisco’s senior enlisted men reported topside to join a grim detail, conducting what was known as a body parts sweep. Such an effort was necessary following any battle action in which casualties occurred. Its purpose was to cleanse the ship of human remains. The crew picked up body parts and threw them overboard, and washed down the ship’s steel surfaces of drying blood. As with abandoning ship, it wasn’t something that could be realistically rehearsed ahead of time.
“The ship was just absolutely a shambles,” said Joseph Whitt, a San Francisco sailor. “It was just like you were opening up your eyes in a nightmare. I walked amidships and the five-inch guns that I passed had been hit, just wrecked. I looked at the stack—and this is a sight that I shall never ever forget. There were holes in the stack from the shrapnel from those explosions, and there was blood from the top of that stack running down the side of it, where the body parts had been blown up there and splattered down the side of it. The way that smelled … it was just something that no one should ever go through.”
Few new sailors were equipped to handle it. “Detailing the senior rates for this gruesome task was a good call,” Don Jenkins wrote. All around the ship, the growling of handy-billy pumps swelled. Hoses were dropped overboard and streams of water set flowing against all surfaces. Slowly the stubborn knots of flesh clotting the ship’s thousands of crooks and crevices, the drying splashes of blood, were washed away. All hands received a “ditty bag” and were ordered to identify the dead, remove their dog tags and personal effects, place a five-inch dummy shell down the front of their dungarees, cinch their belt tight, and ease the body over the side. The San Francisco had no chaplain aboard, so there was no ceremony to any of this. Lieutenant James I. Cone, who supervised the gathering of personal effects, collected far too many Annapolis class rings for his liking. Through this grimly determined effort, the ship returned to a tolerable state of habitability.
Littering the deck everywhere were small tubes of phosphorous, detritus of the incendiaries fired by the Japanese battleships. “Fellows were picking them up and putting them in their pockets as souvenirs,” Joseph Whitt remembered. It was a bad move. Some of the dud incendiary elements were still doing a slow burn. “One guy had one in his hip pocket, and before he tore his pants off, this thing really blistered him,” Whitt said. “Water wouldn’t put the fire out.”
The sickbay was too small to handle all the wounded. They had to be carried to the hangar deck. Don Jenkins recalled, “I never will be able to erase from my mind the utter feeling of helplessness and sorrow one feels as each time you deliver another wounded to the hangar. The moans and screams of pain, and many of the badly wounded calling out to their mothers.” In the admiral’s cabin, the doctor from the Juneau, Lieutenant O’Neil, donned a mask to assist in emergency surgery on Captain Cassin Young. His wounds were mortal, and there was no saving him.
As the ships passed through Torpedo Junction, it was clear to everybody, most of all Captain Hoover, that they were a vulnerable group. The crews of Wasp, the North Carolina, the O’Brien, and the Saratoga had been no less diligent than they were, and had enjoyed far more protection than Hoover’s threadbare destroyer screen offered now. The O’Bannon’s sonar was out of commission. The Sterett’s stack was working, but the ship had no depth charges, having jettisoned them as the fires raged aft. She was able to steer only with her engines. The Fletcher was in good shape. But a single fully functional destroyer was a weak deterrent to submarine attack. Hoover called SOPAC air command to request aerial coverage and hoped for the best.
In the Helena’s pilothouse, all talk was of the battered flagship, steaming on the port quarter. The helmsman, George A. De Long, thought the San Francisco would be lucky to reach Espiritu Santo. McCandless placed her fighting efficiency at 25 percent. Though the Juneau was four feet down by the bow, she looked considerably healthier as she made seventeen knots on the Helena’s starboard quarter.
The radio, meanwhile, carried hopeful tidings—the excited transmissions from U.S. pilots as they swarmed a Japanese battleship, the Hiei, dead in the water near Savo Island. The running report was vastly entertaining for sailors who had just finished their own turn in the battle zone and had had a hand in leaving the aviators this first-class prize.
It was about 11 a.m. when a lookout noticed a disturbance on the surface of the sea to port. He said at first that it resembled “the usual eruption made by a porpoise.” Then a Helena gunner on a port side mount spotted it, a thin wake and a fin breaching the surface, just inside the wake of the Sterett, riding on the Helena’s port bow. A torpedo. He watched as it passed astern. The navigator shouted, “Hard right rudder, De Long!”
On the San Francisco, a bridge lookout, speechless, grabbed Lieutenant Commander Schonland by the shoulder and pointed at no fewer than four wakes approaching the ship’s port bow. Schonland ordered, “Full right rudder, emergency full ahead.” Seeing the white wakes burning toward the ship, Joseph Whitt starting running aft to escape the explosion. Leaping over a large gash in the deck, he caught his foot and went sprawling. He gathered himself quickly and looked forward to find the wake. The torpedo passed under the ship on the starboard side. He found himself looking directly at the Juneau.
There was no way to send warning to Captain Swenson’s ship. With all of the San Francisco’s steam lines broken, she could not give voice to her siren or her whistle, and with her flag bags burned, her TBS transmitter out, signal halyards cut, and all but one large searchlight wrecked, it was impossible to raise an effective alarm. Fate had placed Hoover’s formation in the periscope crosshairs of the submarine I-26, the same boat that had hit the Saratoga in August. Lying along the eastern flank of the column’s southerly line of travel, the IJN boat had three torpedo tubes flooded and ready.
As the Helena came right, De Long watched the Juneau through a porthole but soon lost her to the shifting line of sight. Then, unexpectedly, the navigator hollered, “Hard left rudder!” De Long reversed the helm, and the ship shuddered for several seconds and slowly came back. That was when the ocean shivered.
A Helena signalman was watching his counterpart on the Juneau through a glass, taking a blinker signal. One moment the man on the Juneau was standing there, sending Morse, the next he was gone, snatched up from the field of view as if by a giant hand. Removing the glass from his eye, the Helena man saw his counterpart hurtling through the air.
Joseph Whitt in the San Francisco heard a “loud crrrrrack, like a lightning strike nearby.” On the bearing that the antiaircraft cruiser once occupied, all the Helena’s George De Long could see was a large cloud swelling low on the water. “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? I don’t want to ram her!” he said. No one remained in the Helena’s pilothouse. Everyone had raced out onto the bridge wing. A sailor ducked back into the pilothouse and said, quietly, “De Long, she ain’t no more.”
Even after the unprecedented blooding of the previous night, never had anyone witnessed a blast such as this. Bruce McCandless wrote, “The Juneau didn’t sink—she blew up with all the fury of an erupting volcano. There was a terrific thunderclap and a plume of white water that was blotted out by a huge brown hemisphere a thousand yards across, from within which came the sounds of more explosions.” As Hoover would report to Admiral Turner, “Debris fell to such extent and volume as to cause belief of high level bombing attack.”
What fraction of the Juneau’s steel plates and hardened armor belts were launched skyward and fell back to earth in shards is anyone’s guess, but the shrapnel rain was heavy and voluminous. As Schonland, McCandless, Wilbourne, and Lair looked on stunned from the San Francisco’s flag bridge, the officer-of-the-deck, Jack Bennett, noticed an object hurtling toward them through the air. “Scatter!” he shouted as a rectangular plate of steel plating wobbled in and smashed into the superstructure just a few feet from where they stood. It bounced across the deck and fell overboard. One of the Juneau’s twin five-inch mounts arced through the bright sky and splashed down not a hundred yards astern the Fletcher.
“As we got up even with it—the pall of smoke had begun to rise up from the water—there was a gigantic explosion under the water,” Joseph Whitt said. “They said it was probably the boilers blowing up. She came up just like a big whale. You’ve seen pictures of them as they come up and breech and go back down. It was a big, huge bubble. In that bubble of water was part of the hull of that ship. I mean it was eerie.”
As witnesses struggled to believe, an ocean swell some thirty feet high crested into the San Francisco from the starboard side. “Our ship rapidly keeled over to port until the outboard portion of the well deck was underwater,” Don Jenkins wrote. “One had to hold on for dear life to keep from tumbling across the well deck into the sea. The ship slowly came back to an even keel and then we found that all our shoring and caulking had been knocked out of the waterline shell holes and sea water was pouring in by the thousands of gallons.”
On a day of terrible visions, the sudden death of the Juneau may have been the worst of all. Few witnesses could imagine there were any survivors. The suddenness with which more than six hundred men perished had no analog in other types of combat. The single blast offered none of the emerging trauma of an eroding front line or a sundered and faltering flank. It was an apocalyptic accident, random and undeserved, and paid in a single shocking stroke. Chick Morris observed, “No one moved or spoke.… A man needs some kind of mental and physical reserve to accept such a disaster when not prepared for it, and we had exhausted our reserve during the night.… Many a man aboard Helena walked the decks for the following few hours in a kind of trance, brooding and frightened.”
Robert Howe said, “We often talked about getting hit by a torpedo so we could go back to the States for repairs. Never again after seeing the Juneau disappear under a cloud of smoke.” It was still Friday the thirteenth. “The rest of the day I don’t think anyone took their eyes off the water.”
GIL HOOVER TOOK the Juneau’s loss hard. Her captain, Lyman Knute Swenson, had been a Naval Academy classmate and a close friend. Now he was either gone or, worse, alive, wounded and in urgent need of rescue. Untold scores of the antiaircraft cruiser’s survivors floated on the swells in Torpedo Junction. Though many witnesses professed to see no survivors, they were assuredly there. The crew of an aircraft that happened by later counted at least sixty of them, their lives spared by freak accidents of physics that kept the gusting remains of the ship from breaking their bodies as they flew into the sea.
As Hoover judged it, the logic of the situation required him to foreclose any thought of saving them, or his friend. With just a single undamaged destroyer to chase submarines, with the responsibility to get heavily damaged ships and badly wounded men to base on his shoulders, with an adeptly commanded enemy submarine still at large, he decided he couldn’t risk stopping to search for survivors. Earlier that morning he had ordered the O’Bannon to steam away to the north to transmit a report of the previous night’s engagement to Nouméa. When maintaining radio silence, ships departed formation before transmitting their messages to avoid betraying the group’s location to radio snoopers. The O’Bannon wasn’t due to rejoin him until midafternoon.
Few naval commanders understood the delicate work of rescue at sea as well as Hoover. As commander of Destroyer Squadron 2, he had escorted the Lexington when she was sunk in the Coral Sea, and had received the Navy Cross for the manner in which his destroyers pressed in close, braving repeated heavy explosions and flames, to recover the carrier’s survivors. Hoover’s award citation stated, “The intrepid and seamanlike way that these officers handled their vessels about the listing and burning Lexingtonwithout regard for the flames and explosions emanating from her, was in accord with every fine tradition of our Navy and of the sea, and undoubtedly contributed to the rescue of many survivors who might otherwise have been lost.” Circumstances now were vastly different. Still, he would write that the decision to continue south “was not made without much effort.”
At eleven twenty-one, a B-17 Flying Fortress arrived from Espiritu Santo, as Hoover had requested, to provide air cover. To preserve radio silence, Hoover refrained from radioing Turner or Halsey about the incident. Instead, he had one of his signalmen blinker to the bomber overhead: “JUNEAU TORPEDOED DISAPPEARED LAT 10–32 LONG 161–02 AT 1109 X SURVIVORS IN WATER REPORT COMSOPAC.” The plane acknowledged receipt of the message with a visual signal, and Hoover repeated it. He could only hope the pilot would appreciate the tremulous state of the survivors in the water, many of whom had to be severely wounded. The plane acknowledged receipt of the second transmission and zoomed off toward Henderson Field. Joseph Wylie, the exec of the Fletcher, would call Hoover’s decision to press on to Espiritu Santo “probably the most courageous single decision I’ve ever seen a man make, because everybody’s instinct is to go after survivors.” Wylie felt that instinct strongly, but when Hoover signaled the Fletcher that he had reports of three more Japanese submarines lurking along their route, he felt mollified.
Shortly after noon, the destroyer Buchanan joined Hoover’s group; the O’Bannon rejoined them at three thirty. As Hoover continued on, bringing his wounded ships home, the Juneau’s brown pall receded over the horizon behind them.
THE ATLANTA LAY AT ANCHOR a few miles from Lunga, seeping to death through her holes and broken seams. Jack Wulff, the assistant engineering officer, had hoped for a time that his crews would get the after fire room pumped down to where the burners could make steam. If the inboard screws got turning again, they could limp to Tulagi and make repairs in the shelter of a cove. Now, as the water levels rose, he saw the futility in it. With a fourth consecutive sleepless night approaching for the crew, the bucket brigades were up against their limits. When Dallas Emory, the exec, concurred that the ship couldn’t be saved, Captain Jenkins radioed the Portland that he could not check flooding and would have to scuttle his ship. DuBose, as the senior officer present, approved. As boats from Guadalcanal took off the crew, a demolition charge was placed in the diesel engine room. When it blew, the Atlanta went quickly with all hatches open, revealing as she rolled over to port the grievous extent of her torpedo wound; it stretched from its impact point below the port side waterline across the keel and into the starboard bottom of the hull. “If we had tried to steam that ship,” Lloyd Mustin said, “she might have opened in half.… If she had run into heavy weather, she would never have made it.”
As night fell over Ironbottom Sound again, the Portland was still struggling toward Tulagi. Near midnight, those troubles were supplemented by the arrival of other combatants eager to throw themselves into the fracas in the sound: American PT boats. The first sign of their presence was a radio transmission Captain DuBose picked up over the TBS. “Here comes a bear. Give him two fish.”
The small boats were stalking a “bear”—a target. DuBose came to understand that the ship in question was his own. A bizarre parley ensued between the cruiser captain and the PT boat officers, with DuBose declaring his identity in plain English and his stalkers discussing among themselves what to do with the large stranger. “This is the American cruiser Portland. This is Captain DuBose speaking. There is a tug standing out from Tulagi to assist us. The name of her captain is Lieutenant Foley. We are not—repeat not—a Japanese.” The PT boat skippers, having heard reports of crippled targets about, must have been skeptical of this silver-tongued, English-speaking enemy officer trying to talk his way out of a well-deserved spread to the midsection. The damaged heavy cruiser, struggling to keep a heading at three knots and unable to steer, was at the tiny boats’ mercy.
Nervous lookouts scanned the waters for torpedo wakes. In the ambient light of the moon and star field overhead, here they came: two white bubbling lines in the deep, passing ahead. The PT skippers had evidently overestimated their target’s speed, perhaps seeing the vigorous churn of her counter-turning screws but not appreciating its waste.
The commander of the PT boats in the area, Lieutenant Commander Alan P. Calvert, saw the absence of heavy U.S. ships in Savo Sound that night as an opportunity for his command.
According to Charles Melhorn of the PT-44, he gave the briefing to the “Peter Tares” that night, and it amounted to: “There is a Japanese task force due in about midnight, and we may have a battleship task force due in about midnight. Go out and get the Japs.” Until that moment, when they emerged as the lone U.S. naval force in Savo Sound, they had been held on a leash, skirmishing indecisively with Tokyo Express destroyers now and then, but ordered to stay in their base as the November 13 battle approached.
Melhorn saw right away how it could be suicide, in such a vulnerable craft, to issue the standard blinker challenge to an unidentified ship. “If you challenge the wrong group, that’s the end of you,” he said. That may be why one of the boats, PT-48, dispensed with diplomacy and sent four fish churning toward the U.S. cruiser.
The gunners on DuBose’s ship didn’t appreciate the attention and according to Melhorn returned fire at their harassers. “We thought that was pretty dirty pool,” Melhorn said. It was no dirtier than anything else a ship’s crew might do at night, when friend and enemy alike are skulking phantoms.
The drama of the PT boat encounter passed. After midnight, in the first hours of November 14, the Portland reached Tulagi and anchored in thirty-nine fathoms. The steep drop-off near shore allowed them to tie up to a palm tree and run a gangway from the ship to the shore. They camouflaged the ship with netting to prevent being spotted from the air. “Then we all dropped in our tracks and fell asleep,” Harold L. Johnson said. “We had been at general quarters over fifty hours by this time.”
The peace would last for only about an hour. With the remnants of the American cruiser force limping away toward Espiritu Santo, the way was open for the Imperial Japanese Navy once again.