(Photo Credit: P.4)
“The turret whips around but it is the guns themselves that seem to live. They balance and quiver almost as though they were sniffing the air.… Suddenly they set and instantly there is a belch of sound and the shells float away. The tracers seem to float interminably before they hit. And before the shells have struck the guns are trembling and reaching again. They are like rattlesnakes poising to strike, and they really do seem to be alive. It is a frightening thing to see.”
—John Steinbeck, “A Destroyer,” November 24, 1943
36
THE BATTLESHIPS WASHINGTON AND SOUTH DAKOTA PUSHED THROUGH the sea with an implacable ease. Halsey well understood the risks of sending Willis Lee’s two big ships to set an ambush in Savo Sound. “The plan flouted one of the firmest doctrines of the Naval War College,” Halsey would write. “The narrow treacherous waters north of Guadalcanal are utterly unsuited to the maneuvering of capital ships, especially in darkness.” But the big ships were all he had left.
The Washington (the second and last ship of the North Carolina class), and the South Dakota (the first of a newer breed) were not sisters but close cousins, part of the surge in new major ship construction that followed the expiration of the 1930 London Naval Treaty’s five-year-long “building holiday.” The construction of the big new ships was politically risky for President Roosevelt during the pinchpenny, isolationist-minded years after the Great Depression. He waited until after the 1936 elections to authorize the Washington’s construction.
The Navy’s General Board never seemed sure what it was willing to sacrifice in order to meet the limits imposed by treaty limitations on battleship displacement. Its preferred designs changed as frequently as its membership did. In the end, Lee’s two battleships were the product of a decision to emphasize superior firepower. The two ships each carried a sixteen-inch main battery that fired a twenty-seven-hundred-pound projectile. More than ten times the weight of the eight-inch round fired by a heavy cruiser, these heavier weapons changed the calculus of warship architecture and, in turn, tactical doctrine as well. Though it was customary to design battleships to withstand hits from their own projectiles, the Washington did not have armor stout enough to defeat the heavy new sixteen-inch ordnance. The South Dakota’s side armor could take such a hit from beyond twenty thousand yards (or 11.4 miles), but only because her designers had compromised her ability to survive torpedoes. Rushed to the South Pacific soon after their commissionings, neither ship was put through the usual round of sea trials prior to deployment. But there was widespread confidence in them nonetheless, and the ships were more than a match for Japanese battleship such as the Kirishima, with a fourteen-inch main battery.
Aside from the short time they had operated together with the Enterprise task force, the Washington and the South Dakota had never been in each other’s company. While Admiral Lee repeatedly drilled his gunnery and director crews in aiming their guns and finding targets, neither ship had much experience actually firing her big weapons. The Washington had only fired her main battery twice at night, both times in January 1942. Nighttime gunnery experience was scanter still on the South Dakota. She had fired her main battery three times, but never at night. Though the ships were state of the art, the state of their live-fire experience was far less than that of the old battleships sidelined on the West Coast: The Colorado conducted ten main-battery live-fire exercises between July and November. Lee’s four destroyers had never operated together either.
The first time the South Dakota’s main battery was tested with a full nine-gun broadside, the wave of blast pressure pushed through the passageway where Captain Thomas Gatch was standing, tearing his pants right off him. The vast power of the sixteen-inch guns required a perfect physical apparatus to ensure not only their working order but also the safety of the ship. The bomb that exploded atop turret one during the air attacks of October 25 had gouged two barrels of turret two, which jutted out over the bomb’s impact point. A lieutenant junior grade who served in the turret, Paul H. Backus, said, “As you can imagine, we made all kinds of measurements and sent messages back to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, describing these gouges, their depth, their length, and asked the question, ‘Can we shoot these barrels?’ We never did get an answer that we could live with.” Finally word came back that turret two’s center and left guns were not to be fired.
This powerful but patchwork group, Task Force 64, was Lee’s first seagoing flag command. What he may have lacked in combat experience, he had made up for through the rigorous study of the practical problems of combat in the radar age. Having served as director of fleet training just before the war, he was one of the first naval officers to build a career on the wonkery of modern wave physics. The lingo of transmitters, receivers, double-lobe systems, and ring oscillators was like speaking in tongues to most officers. Imperturbable and capable of solving multiple lines of variables as they shifted, Lee was reputed to know the intricacies of radar systems better than their own operators did.
According to Admiral Kinkaid, a close friend and classmate, “He was not what you would describe as a ‘military figure.’ He was without the straight, taut carriage that that description would imply. Lee walked pigeon-toed and was hard of sight. At Annapolis he fretted the physical examination, memorizing the first two lines of the eye chart.”
A native of Owen County, Kentucky, he was known back home as “Mose” but would acquire a more worldly nickname, “Ching,” for his fondness for the Asiatic theater. According to Ernest M. Eller, a subordinate of Lee’s at the Fleet Training Division, “He looked like an Arkansas farmer, a little like Will Rogers. He had a wrinkled, freckled face. You wouldn’t have known he was very astute until you talked to him a while and learned what he knew.… He had a very mathematical, ingenious mind, and at the same time he talked very simply and very easily.”
Lee matched his fluency in the language of science with a generous dose of Appalachian common sense. Early in his career, a destroyer he commanded suffered from a rat infestation. Tired of seeing the rodents scurrying across the wardroom’s overhead beams, Lee fashioned a trap consisting of a solenoid mechanism and an armature attached to a meat cleaver. Delighted with the contraption, his officers diverted themselves with this minor blood sport, competing to see whose reflexes were quick enough to pull the lever and chop the stowaway rodents in two.
Lee’s understanding of gunnery was world-class. In 1907, at age nineteen, he became the only American at the time to win both the U.S. National High Power Rifle and Pistol championships in the same year. In April 1914, during the U.S. intervention in Vera Cruz, Mexico, his landing force from the battleship New Hampshire came under fire. Wielding a borrowed rifle, Lee assumed a sitting position out in the open, drawing fire to locate enemy muzzle flashes, and killed three enemy snipers at long range. After such a performance in combat, the Olympics were hardly a test of nerves. At the age of thirty-two, he was a member of the U.S. rifle team that won seven medals, including five golds, at the 1920 Antwerp summer games.
Lee understood the powerful weapons of a battleship not as specialized naval instruments, but as extensions of the universal laws of ballistics that he had wholly absorbed by the time he took command. Most surface officers were obsessive students of gunnery, but few adapted their expertise to an age of new technology. Lee did so by conducting fire-control drills under odd conditions, sometimes requiring turrets be manned by relief crews instead of the first team, and throwing unexpected twists at them, randomly cutting out electrical connections to the mounts and scrambling their links to the fire-control radars, forcing his men to rely on backup systems or local control. Afterward, he gathered with Captain Glenn B. Davis; his gunnery officer, Commander H. T. Walsh; and a coterie of young officers, where his principal theorist, Ed Hooper, would run through the mathematics late into the night. “His conversation was so loaded with calculi and abelian equations,” a historian wrote, “that sometimes Commander Walsh and Captain Davis would begin to look slightly helpless.” That said a lot, seeing as Davis had served as the “experimental officer” at the Dahlgren Naval Proving Grounds, testing guns, armor, powder, and projectiles, and later served as chief of the gun section at the Bureau of Ordnance.
Lee knew that the key to victory lay not only in terms of engineering or mathematics, but in a crew’s ability to adjust psychologically to the unexpected. Said Lloyd Mustin, “It doesn’t take long to learn these things, a few hours. Learn the basics in a few hours and then start thinking in those terms day in and day out. Not everyone seemed able or willing to take the time.” Willis Lee, like Norman Scott, took the time. He worked endlessly, late into the night, before unwinding with a few pages from a detective novel and falling asleep in his clothes a few hours before breakfast.
News of an inbound battleship force commanded Lee’s attention. Late in the afternoon on November 14, he received a report that the submarine Trout had sighted large enemy units, southbound about 150 miles north of Guadalcanal. The Tokyo Express, though operating with changing rosters of ships and commanders, was keeping to its well-established timetable of midnight arrivals. While the Cactus Air Force was preoccupied with hammering Tanaka’s transports that afternoon, Kondo’s heavy surface force—the Kirishima joined by the heavy cruisers Atago and Takao—had avoided daylight air attack. It would be up to Lee’s surface task force to stop them. Halsey had given him complete freedom of action after his arrival in the waters off Guadalcanal.
Japanese search planes had sighted Lee when he was still a hundred miles south of Guadalcanal, but failed to recognize his principal vessels as battleships. They reported Task Force 64 as composed of two cruisers and four destroyers. Later Kondo dismissed a report of a carrier and possibly some battleships some fifty miles south of the island, on grounds that they were not in position to intercept him that night. Like the men in Tanaka’s transport force, Kondo was confident that the bombardment by the cruisers Suzuyaand Maya the previous night had put down the Guadalcanal aviators. He had little idea what was in store for him.
As Task Force 64 approached the island’s western shore, the captain of the Washington, Glenn Davis, walked into the chart house and pressed the button on the ship’s intercom. “This is the captain speaking. We are going into an action area. We have no great certainty what forces we will encounter. We might be ambushed. A disaster of some sort may come upon us. But whatever it is we are going into, I hope to bring all of you back alive. Good luck to all of us.” After the epic dustups of the previous two nights, the men on the islands around Savo Sound had learned to expect fireworks after dark. Willis Lee slugged north toward collision, aiming to oblige them.
SAVO SOUND WAS QUIET. Off the port bows of Lee’s ships, the skies and calm waters were gently lit by flashes on the horizon—the gunfire from Tanaka’s transport group as it resisted the last wave of aircraft from Henderson Field. As night fell, a quarter moon reclined overhead and the orange glow of fires warmed the western horizon, the fires of burning ships—trophies for the busy pilots of the Cactus Air Force.
None of this soothed the battleship sailors as they cruised at eighteen knots, prows easing through the sea. The sight of land nearby kept their nerves on edge. Appreciating the need for operating space, Lee had arranged his destroyers—the Walke leading the Benham, Preston, and Gwin—nearly three miles ahead of the battleships, which themselves were separated by nearly a mile. The men in the big ships craved sea room. “All we can do is trust in God and our surveys, and the surveys are not much good,” wrote a South Dakota chaplain, James V. Claypool. He tried to play chess with another officer but found he couldn’t concentrate. He read from a book titled How to Keep a Sound Mind but didn’t get very far.
Lee checked in with Guadalcanal’s radio station, known as “Cactus Control,” for the latest dope. His own radio department had heard Japanese voices on the air, but couldn’t translate them for want of an interpreter on board. Indeed, the intelligence setup was one of the continuing weaknesses of the SOPAC command. No reliable coordination yet existed between the commanders on the island and the naval forces they relied on for defense. Neither Captain Greenman, the “Commander of Naval Activities,” nor General Vandegrift was regularly apprised of the movements of friendly ships. As Lee awaited a reply from Cactus Control, there came a mysterious dispatch from an unidentified sender—one that Captain DuBose of the Portland, still moored to a palm tree in the shadows of Tulagi, would have understood all too well.
“There go two big ones, but I don’t know whose they are.” The intercepted words belonged to the skipper of a PT boat, lurking in shadow.
Order of Battle—The Battleship Night Action
(November 14–15, 1942)
U.S.
TASK FORCE 64
Rear Adm. Willis Lee
Washington (BB) (flagship)
South Dakota (BB)
Walke (DD)
Benham (DD)
Preston (DD)
Gwin (DD)
Japan
ADVANCED FORCE
Vice Adm. Nobutake Kondo
Bombardment Unit
Vice Adm. Kondo
Kirishima (BB)
Atago (CA) (flagship)
Takao (CA)
Screening Unit
Rear Adm. Susumu Kimura
Nagara (CL)
Shirayuki (DD)
Hatsuyuki (DD)
Teruzuki (DD)
Samidare (DD)
Inazuma (DD)
Asagumo (DD)
Sweeping Unit
Rear Adm. Shintaro Hashimoto
Sendai (CL)
Uranami (DD)
Shikinami (DD)
Ayanami (DD)
Reinforcement Unit
Rear Adm. Raizo Tanaka
Four transports, nine destroyers
(Photo Credit: 36.1)
Lee raised Guadalcanal again and warned them off. “Refer your big boss about Ching Lee; Chinese, catchee? Call off your boys!” The warning seemed to register. Another episode like the near torpedoing of the Portland would have had dire consequences for the mosquito boat drivers.
By ten thirty, Lee was cutting a clockwise arc about twenty miles north of Savo Island. With his sweeping radar beams revealing no contacts, he passed near the grave site of the Hiei, over the wrecks of the Vincennes, the Quincy, and the Astoria, then reentered Savo Sound, to cruise over the seafloor where the Atlanta lay. As the task force came around to a westerly heading and steamed toward Cape Esperance, the navigators and helmsmen of the task force noticed that their magnetic compass needles were twitching and spinning. Magnetic interference was straightforward enough an explanation. Some thought the dead ships of Ironbottom Sound were reaching out with an inscrutable message.