37

 

The Gun Club

FAITHFULLY MOTORING IN CIRCLES AS IT CAST ITS TEN-CENTIMETER microwaves, the Washington’s SG radar spied the enemy ships to the north of northwest, as they left the cover of Savo Island making twenty-one knots. The radars watched the enemy vessels for several minutes at a range of eighteen thousand yards, sharing their data on human wavelengths via the PPI scope, and to the mechanical fire-control computer that delivered calculus to the gun turrets, before losing track of the contacts because of interference from land.

The radars were sketching a picture, definite in range and bearing if indistinct in composition, of two groups of enemy ships north of Savo Island. Admiral Lee and Captain Davis had designed the Washington’s fire-control procedures around the fact that this type of data was essential to everything. They made sure that their radar plot officer did not operate the traditional way, communicating through a sailor who served as his “talker.” Instead, he was wired up with his own headset to speak directly to the gunnery officer, the main battery plotting room officer, and the trainers in each of the gun director stations, all at the same time. In this way, he could describe the appearance of the scope and designate targets directly to all stations with a need to know, with less confusion.

With a Philip Morris hanging from his lips, Willis Lee said to Davis, “Well, stand by, Glenn, here they come.” In every compartment of the Washington, an electronic bell gave two short rings, signaling a warning that a salvo was imminent. Hydraulic hoists trundled twenty-seven-hundred-pound projectiles up from the magazines to the turrets. The powder cars whisked up silk cylindrical bags filled with explosive propellant. The projectiles were eased mechanically onto the heavy bronze breech-loading trays and the powder bags laid in behind them, as many as eight per load depending on the range to the target. After the breech had been rammed and locked, the gun captain hit the ready light indicating the gun was ready to fire.

Admiral Kondo had arrayed his force in three groups. Consisting of the Kirishima and the cruisers Atago and Takao, his Bombardment Unit was his centerpiece. Ahead of those large ships went his Screening Unit, the light cruiser Nagara leading six destroyers, commanded by Rear Admiral Susumu Kimura. Off to the east steamed a separate Sweeping Unit made up of the light cruiser Sendai and three destroyers under Rear Admiral Shintaro Hashimoto. It was this latter group that Lee’s radars detected first as the Washington and South Dakota plunged along on their westerly heading, tracing a course south of Savo Island. On the radar scope, the Washington’s radar plot officer watched the light echoes separate from the mass of Savo Island, “then separate into ‘drops’ similar to the effect of planes taking off from a carrier.”

The Washington’s turrets trained to starboard and fixed on Hashimoto’s group as it approached on the east side of Savo Island, sliding aft relative to the battleships as they moved west. At 11:13 p.m., when Main Battery Control reported to Lee that the narrowcasting fire-control radars had found targets and were yielding ranges, Lee hailed Gatch over the TBS and gave the South Dakota permission to open fire. It was not until the enemy vessels were spotted visually, at 18,500 yards, that the Washington, followed closely by the South Dakota, let loose. For the second time in three nights, Savo Sound erupted in thunder and light.

Ensign Robert B. Reed of the Preston watched the mighty flagship astern. As the corona of the Washington’s first broadside faded, he could follow the nine red tracers as they flew away, “grouped together for all the world like a flight of airplanes,” he said. Reed watched the salvo disappear up into the low-hanging clouds, then reemerge ten miles downrange. When the fire-control radar received echoes that showed the first salvo had landed “over,” beyond its target, the plotting officer checked his headphone chinstrap—the concussion of the big guns sent more than a few headsets clattering to the deck—then instructed the gunnery officer, Commander H. T. Walsh, to “spot down,” lowering the elevation of the gun. The second salvo, fired forty-five seconds later, registered a “straddle.” The officers watching the radars knew their fire was on target when they saw the radar image of the target flicker at the moment of impact.

After the two battleships commenced fire, radio snoopers in the South Dakota heard a cacophony of Japanese voices, “excited and very numerous.” They counted at least thirteen stations on this frequency at one time. Though the South Dakota’s main battery was hamstrung, with just four guns working in her two forward triple turrets, she continued her cannonade until her forward turrets, swinging aft to remain on target, bumped up against the stops that kept her from firing into her own superstructure. The after turret, with no such restraints, kept firing, however, and as it trained straight aft the wash of fire from her barrels set fire to her two floatplanes, fantail-mounted on catapults. The small bonfires raged briefly before the next salvo blew them right off the ship.

The light cruiser Sendai and the destroyers Shikinami and Uranami were the objects of this large-caliber fury. Though Hashimoto’s small squadron was engulfed in that maelstrom, not one of his ships was actually hit. The Sweeping Unit commander, the first naval officer to take fire from sixteen-inch guns, ordered his captains to lay a smoke screen—of little benefit against a radar-guided foe—and reverse course to seek other opportunities to “sweep.” Surrounded by towering splashes, the captains of the Japanese ships, making smoke, beat a high-speed retreat.

The Washington’s secondary battery cracked ferociously away as well, with the two forward five-inch mounts shooting at the main battery’s targets, and the next two mounts aft firing on a cruiser that appeared to be illuminating the South Dakota. The after dual five-inch mount lofted star shells. The intense flash of the five-inch fusillades blinded his main battery director operators and turret captains as they looked out through their night scopes. But fighting by eyesight was the old way of war. Now the human senses were an auxiliary system. “Radar has forced the Captain or OTC to base a greater part of his actions in a night engagement on what he is told rather than what he can see,” Lee would write. Coolly deciding which directors would control which turrets, and switching them as the geometry of the engagement shifted, Willis Lee became the first naval commander to manage a gunfight mostly by radar remote control.

Using the picture his radar provided him, Lee could see his four destroyers ahead and monitor the shifting geometry of the landmasses around him. He had a fine view of the naval landscape. What he did not have, owing to an oversight in ship design, was an electronic picture of the situation to his rear. With his radar transmitters bolted to the front side of the tower foremast, he could register no returns through a sixty-degree arc astern. The South Dakota was in that blind spot. Without visual contact with the other battleship, he was susceptible to the same uncertainty that clouded the view of Scott and Callaghan in the previous surface engagements in Savo Sound. Lee could no longer be completely sure that large targets on his radar were hostile.

Lee’s battleships were the first ships that night to make their powerful presence felt, but in short order the destroyers in his van were grappling with the enemy—and suffering the consequences of the collision. At about 11:30 p.m., the lead vessel, the Walke,located a target on her starboard beam at fifteen thousand yards. It was a lone enemy ship, the destroyer Ayanami, which had strayed from Hashimoto’s formation and was winding a course west of Savo Island, alone. As the ship closed on their starboard hand, the Walke opened fire with her five-inch guns. Five minutes later, lookouts in Commander Max Stormes’s Preston, third in line, spotted the Nagara ahead, leading four destroyers of the Screening Unit, and opened fire on her at seventy-five hundred yards. The Walkeand the Benham, Preston, and Gwin turned their fire on these ships ahead.

The Walke’s captain, Thomas E. Fraser, had a hard time seeing his target, the Ayanami, given how closely the enemy destroyer was hugging Savo’s shore. His radar could see the target only when it was far enough from land to return a separate echo. The Ayanami’s captain had no plans to allow that to happen. From the cover of the dark shoreline, around eleven thirty, he fired torpedoes at the American van and reversed course away from the action. The torpedoes were on their way. Enemy gunfire was faster in arriving.

By the light of a setting quarter moon flirting with low clouds, the Preston opened fire on another ship, the light cruiser Nagara, in the loom of Savo Island. Steaming at twenty-three knots, Stormes’s ship found a hitting range at nine thousand yards when she was struck hard by a pair of 5.5-inch shells that plunged into her machinery spaces from the starboard side, killing everyone in her two fire rooms. The blast propelled a filthy cloud of firebrick and debris out of the stacks that settled all across the amidships area. Shattered torpedo warheads leaked TNT that quickly caught fire. The ship’s after stack fell across a searchlight installation, knocking it over onto the starboard torpedo tube. A heavier hit followed as a strange ship—which the Preston’s officers would speculate was a Japanese heavy cruiser—approached from the port side of the American column and fired on the destroyer. One large shell entered the engine room, exploding against the electrical generators. Another hit near the number three gun, and a third was a direct hit on the number four. The blast was so great that it jammed guns one and two all the way forward. Aft of the stacks, the Preston’s decks were a blazing ruin. Captain Stormes was forced to give the order to abandon ship almost immediately.

However, to the executive officer of the South Dakota, Commander A. E. Uehlinger, and another officer, Henry Stewart, it was clear that the Preston was a victim of friendly fire. “I saw the Washington open fire to her starboard,” Stewart said. “To us it looked as if the Washington’s fire had caused the accident.” The action reports would lend credence to the idea that even Willis Lee was susceptible to making deadly mistakes in the heat of battle.

As the Preston coasted to a stop, the Walke was hit, too. Captain Fraser was working to set up a torpedo solution at a large target to starboard when the enemy fish arrived. One struck the Walke forward of the bridge, lifting the forward half of the ship “bodily out of the water,” the action report read. As the destroyer crashed back into the sea without a bow forward of the bridge superstructure, one of the ship’s magazines detonated and its explosion ruptured forward fuel oil tanks and tore holes in the superstructure decks. A few seconds later, several medium-caliber warheads slammed into the ship, blowing away a swath of her forecastle and forward superstructure decking. Across the main deck surged a flood of fuel oil several inches deep. Flames roared through the forward compartments. Very quickly it became clear that the Walke was going down by the bow. When machine-gun ammunition started popping and the forward bulkhead of the fire room finally buckled, Fraser decided to abandon ship. The severed bow floated on as the stern sank. Minutes later the survivors in the water were rocked by an undersea blast as the ship’s depth charges exploded, to grievous effect in their company. The dead included Captain Fraser. The Walke’s dead would number eighty-two men, including six of her officers.

The Benham, behind the Walke, briefly took the lead before a shell plunged into her fire room. Then a torpedo struck, a Type 90 fish probably fired by the Ayanami. It carried away about fifty feet of the Benham’s bow below the main deck. The blast produced no fatalities but sent a tall column of hot seawater soaring toward the stars. When it came back down, it washed heavily over the length of the ship, causing injuries topside and carrying a man overboard. Then another shower fell on the Benham: oil and debris from the explosion on board the Preston ahead. The Benham continued along at ten knots. The Gwin, riding in the van’s rear, popped star shells, illuminating the coast of Savo, where flashes of gunfire were visible. Her torpedo crew had a solution on a cruiser but a short circuit caused a torpedo to fire prematurely, well out of range. Then the Gwin, too, started absorbing shells, taking a hit in the engine room. A failure in her safety circuits caused three torpedoes to release from their tubes and slide harmlessly overboard. The Gwin came right to avoid the dying Preston and continued on her westerly course.

The Benham’s captain, Lieutenant Commander John B. Taylor, saw the trouble ahead and decided to steer clear of the damaged ships and the churn of enemy gunfire. Turning hard right, he made a half circle and steadied up, heading east until the Washingtonpassed on an opposite course. Circling back around, Taylor, seeing the burning Walke and Preston, planned to stop and recover survivors. When the two cripples came under fire again, he elected, however, to withdraw.

It was around this time, at about 11:33 p.m., that the South Dakota suffered an appalling systems failure. Her after turret had just lashed out at a target off the starboard bow when Captain Gatch’s ship was seized as if by an aneurysm, a short circuit in her main switchboard. As the breakers tripped out in the switchboards that served her secondary battery, only to find that they had been tied down by the chief engineer, the overload surged to other switches, creating a collapsing house of cards within the ship’s power grid. In an instant the great battleship went dark. Gone were her gyros and all her fire-control equipment. As the battleship’s main battery fell silent, there was nothing Gatch could do to his enemy but curse.

When the Washington turned left and passed the burning destroyers on their disengaged side, hidden from the enemy by their fires, she entered waters dense with flotsam and survivors. Making twenty-six knots through the debris field of the stricken Walke and Preston, the battleship’s sailors threw life rafts overboard. From the ranks of bobbing heads they heard cries of encouragement: “Get after’em, Washington!”

Captain Gatch in the South Dakota tried to follow the Washington as she passed on the disengaged hand of the destroyers, but when a wreck of a destroyer loomed, threatening collision, he was forced to turn the other way, conning sharply right, passing between the Walke and Preston and the enemy. The maneuver placed his blinded warship in an unfortunate tactical position, silhouetted by the burning wrecks and plainly visible to an enemy hungry for targets. Three minutes after her switchboard failure, power returned to the ship. The outage was long enough to disorient one of the two most powerful ships in Savo Sound that night. And the confusion that reigned led to a tactical error in shiphandling that would draw concentrated enemy attention in the coming minutes.

The heavy toll inflicted on the four leading ships of the American column was the pattern set by previous engagements. Destroyers, always expendable, had sacrified themselves in faithful adherence to duty. Seeing the plight of his leading foursome, Willis Lee excused his van from battle, ordering the Benham and the Gwin to retire. The Washington and South Dakota would carry this fight alone.

In the Washington, the detonation of the Walke’s depth charges could be felt like a speed bump under tread. The battleship, whose five-inch guns helped batter the Ayanami to a powerless, burning hulk, had to cease firing her secondary battery now for fear of hitting friendly destroyers.

For his part, Kondo was eager to send his two smaller groups to tangle with the Americans, but he was cautious and hesitant with his more powerful Bombardment Unit. He received a report from Commander Eiji Sakuma, captain of the Ayanami, taking credit for the grievous damage inflicted on the American destroyer van. The elation on the Atago’s bridge was squelched when word arrived from Admiral Hashimoto in the Sendai that the Ayanami had been terribly hit herself. Adrift northwest of Savo Island, she would finally sink when spreading fires detonated her torpedo battery, breaking her in two.

As his widely roaming forces circled and sparred with Lee, Kondo seemed torn between two objectives. Keenly aware that his mission was to suppress the airfield so as to give Tanaka’s transports, steaming well to his north, a chance to land without further interference from the Cactus Air Force, Kondo kept the Kirishima and his two heavy cruisers interposed between Lee and the transports. Even as lookouts in the Atago and Takao insisted they had seen an American battleship among their opponents, Kondo discounted the possibility. He let his light forces carry the fight while awaiting his opportunity to throw the Kirishima at Henderson Field.

Having learned from his destroyers that the fight was going well against the U.S. “cruisers,” Kondo ordered Hashimoto to assist the damaged Ayanami. As Hashimoto turned north to comply, he encountered Admiral Kimura’s destroyers, compelling them into a full circular turn to avoid a collision. Kondo’s unwieldy task force organization thus turned and bit him. As the Bombardment Force—the Kirishima and the two cruisers—finally turned south to close on Henderson Field, both Kimura and Hashimoto found themselves out of the fight.

Kondo had barely settled into his new heading when his lookouts spotted the South Dakota and identified her as a cruiser. At the same time, the Nagara reported seeing two enemy battleships near Cape Esperance. The Atago’s lookouts corrected their error in short order, announcing the presence of battleships. But it was only after his flagship’s searchlights swept over the compact and powerful form of the forty-two-thousand-ton South Dakota that Kondo himself finally grasped the nature of his opponent. All at once both the admiral and his flagship’s commanding officer, Captain Matsuji Ijuin, began shouting orders to engage.

Fixed by searchlights, the U.S. battlewagon drew the immediate violent attention of every major ship in Kondo’s force. The Japanese flagship Atago and her sister ship, the Takao, struck the South Dakota especially hard, repeated scoring with eight-inch fire from five thousand yards. From the Atago, the Nagara, and four destroyers, thirty-four Long Lances splashed into the sea. The Kirishima fired on Gatch’s ship with her fourteen-inch battery from eleven thousand yards, scoring with a hit at the base of her great after turret. The blast turned the surrounding deck planks into a storm of chips, incinerated the canvas gun bloomers, and cast fragments up and down the deck. A loader on the left gun inside the turret heard officers on the phones, wondering about the extent of the damage and whether the gun would still fire with an Olympian dent in her barbette. “Our turret commander was certainly a cool-headed duck,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Never mind how bad we’re hit. I don’t give a damn if the guns blow up. I’m going to fire.’ ” There came a double buzz followed by a long buzz, indicating the turret was about to discharge. The expectant seconds passed, but the great guns remained silent. With the main battery out, paralyzed by the electrical failure, Gatch was able to respond only with his secondary battery. The battleship’s five-inch guns jackhammered fiercely in local control, but were hardly a deterrent to heavy cruisers and a battleship.

Topside, the South Dakota was taking the same kind of punishment that had turned the San Francisco’s decks into a killing field two nights before. The wash of shrapnel made a sizzling sound as it sliced into cables, gun shields, and steel decking. Well protected though the engineering compartments were deep within the vital “armored box,” no battleship’s topsides stations were proof against such firepower. More often than not, the armor-piercing rounds fired by Kondo’s ships penetrated and passed through the superstructure plating without exploding. Still, the fires raged so fiercely that some enemy observers became convinced she was a goner. The barrage of hits to the South Dakota’s superstructure shattered steam pipes going to the ship’s whistle, and gusts of steam scalded many sailors in those exposed spaces. In Battle Two, the executive officer, Commander A. E. Uehlinger, refused to abandon station after it was engulfed in steam. In the end, the battleship’s high foremast superstructure was poor shelter. It was a death trap.

The chaplain, James Claypool, recalled hearing men praying. Some were so scared they couldn’t remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer. “At such times everything you do is a prayer,” a chief petty officer said. “Even your cuss words are prayers.”

The South Dakota was designed for a different kind of fight, conducted at distances to the horizon and beyond, where her huge guns could kill at standoff range. At close ranges, the variables were too many to manage and the risk was great. When an eight-inch shell exploded near an ammunition hoist, flashing through the opening and igniting some life jackets, a fire rose in a passageway adjacent to a handling room serving the five-inch battery. This small fire was a dangerous one. But it and the rest of the South Dakota’s belowdecks fires were quickly extinguished, and a disastrous secondary explosion was forestalled. It was Gatch’s good fortune especially that none of the many torpedoes fired his way struck his ship, as her design was vulnerable below the waterline. Several Long Lances exploded prematurely on the way in. Topside, the flames danced.

WILLIS LEE IN THE Washington had been patiently tracking a large target on his starboard hand, but since he had lost track of the South Dakota, owing to his blind spot astern, he dared not turn loose his big guns on this bogey, the Kirishima, until her identity could be verified. When the Japanese opened their searchlight shutters on the South Dakota, however, he had his answer. Lee’s flagship enjoyed momentary concealment as she slid behind the burning Walke and Preston, which blinded Kondo to his presence. Here was an hour of truth, and the truth was this: Willis Lee was the contemporary master of radar fire control, and Washington’s SG system gave him a clear electronic view of the oceanic battlefield under almost any circumstances.

While sailors in open-air stations saw the horror of naval combat in the machine age with their own senses—steaming through the debris fields of the sunken destroyers, shouting out to sailors bobbing on rafts nursing ghastly wounds, smelling the sweet tang of burned flesh—inside, officers with access to a radar image watched an abstract painting of the battlescape unfurl in a remorseless electric light. It was a picture cleansed of horror and emotion. Lee knew how to operate by it. He trained one group of his starboard side five-inch dual mounts on the Atago, and his main battery and the other group of five-inch mounts on the larger blip on his scope, the Kirishima. The Washington’s unblinking electronic eyes nudged the main battery on target. From eighty-four hundred yards—“body punching range,” as a Washington lieutenant put it—the South Pacific’s battleship gunslinger emerged from the cover of his burning destroyers and turned loose with everything he had. Naval engineers who designed protective armor schemes for battleships calculated from the need to stop large-caliber direct gunfire from around twenty thousand yards. But at close ranges, stopping a sixteen-inch projectile was hopeless. One of the South Dakota’s turret officers, Paul Backus, exclaimed, “Throwing fourteen-inch and sixteen-inch shells at that kind of range—Jesus.” Willis Lee had won the draw on the Kirishima.

The last time Lee had held night spotting and gunnery practice was in January 1942. But since then, he had drilled his crews in target selection and fire-control procedures so thoroughly that it did not really matter whether it was night or day. An ensign named Patrick Vincent, stationed in the Washington’s armored conning tower, said, “I was amazed at how well Captain Davis and Admiral Lee could function on the bridge with all the noise and blasting pressure from the guns. The racket was unbelievable. Even in the conning tower, it was almost impossible to communicate. The pressure from the gunfire spurting through open ports was knocking men down.” It was nothing like what a battleship experienced on the receiving end of that fury.

It had been just six minutes since the Kirishima’s gunners had lost a solution on the South Dakota and checked their fire. Lookouts on the Atago, spotting the Washington, shouted, “There is another ship forward of the first, a big battleship!” Short seconds later the lookouts were crying, “Kirishima is totally obscured by shell splashes!” According to Lee, the Washington’s fire control and main battery “functioned as smoothly as though she were engaged in a well-rehearsed target practice.” The first salvo probably hit, and the second one certainly did.

Ashore, roused from sleep by the heavy hammering of main batteries in the sound, Bill McKinney was among a team of Atlanta electricians stationed on a searchlight installation that stood watch over Guadalcanal’s northern coast. Defended by a detachment of marines, the facility consisted of a tower of sixty-inch searchlights with a diesel generator and a remote-control director station. It was inoperable because its power cable had been slashed by overzealous foxhole diggers. Now, awakened, they were seized by the sight of battle. There was no telling who was friend or foe. It was like watching a baseball game without lineup cards, with everyone in the same colorless uniform. Ships revealed themselves suddenly with long gouts of flame and the bright parabolas of tracer rounds lazing through the night. The luminous red globes that seemed to float across the water knew no nationality. A few of them seemed to hover and disappear into the silhouette of a large ship, which stopped firing.

The Kirishima took a frightful battering from the Washington. The first hit destroyed the forward radio room located at the base of the foremast pagoda, below the main deck. Shells smashed into the barbettes of her two forward fourteen-inch turrets, starting fires that threatened the magazines. The battleship’s assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Horishi Tokuno, ordered a forward powder magazine flooded to prevent fires. The rush of water caused the ship to list slightly to starboard. Another projectile hit the steering machinery room, flooding it and leaving the rudder jammed to starboard. After this, only the ship’s inboard shafts were working, making it impossible to steer by reversing the outboard shafts. When hydraulic pressure failed in the after part of the ship, her two after main gun turrets were left inoperable.

Heat and smoke from topside fires, sucked into the ship by ventilation turbines, forced the evacuation of the engine rooms. A pair of thirty-foot holes yawning in her deck amidships were the scars of this massive assault. On the Kirishima’s bridge, Lieutenant (j.g.) Michio Kobayashi noticed the ship slowing and turning in a circle.

The Kirishima’s main battery managed to roar several times in return. The commanding officer, Captain Sanji Iwabuchi, thought his first salvo scored two hits, one of them blowing off the bridge of his target. “At least ten hits were made upon them, but the enemy could not be finished off,” he said. It was the familiar optimism of a warrior lost in a battle larger than he can comprehend. The fourteen-inch armor-piercing rounds passed like giant subway cars over the Washington’s rigging. “They must have been mighty close,” a Washington sailor said, “but an inch is as good as a mile.” Ed Hooper’s remorseless radars would have allowed no escape, even if the enemy ship retained the ability to maneuver. As the radar automatically lay the big rifles, the Washington’s gun trains kept rolling and the night rained murderously with heavy metal. The U.S. flagship’s rapid-firing secondary battery popped five-inch rounds into the Kirishima’s pagoda foremast, stacks, and superstructure, causing untold loss of personnel.

When the officer in Main Battery Control ordered the guns to cease fire, based on an erroneous report that his target had sunk, Captain Iwabuchi tried futilely to conn the Kirishima away from the Washington, but “we couldn’t make way at all,” he said. “In the meantime, the engine rooms became intolerable because of the increased heat, and most of the engineers were killed though they had been ordered to evacuate. Only the central engine could make the slowest speed. Fires brought under control gained strength again, so that the fore and aft magazines became endangered. Orders to flood them were then issued.”

Ninety seconds later, Captain Davis ordered his main battery, “If you can see anything to shoot at, go ahead,” and the great guns opened up again on the Kirishima, whose gunners were able to respond with only her after turret. “More hits obtained,” the action reported declared.

More than two hundred sailors lay dead in the Kirishima, victims of a stem-to-stern pummeling by at least twenty sixteen-inch shells from the Washington. Lieutenant Kobayashi believed the ship took half a dozen torpedoes as well, but these were most likely underwater hits. Many of the great twenty-seven-hundred-pound American projectiles struck short but plowed under the sea on flat trajectories to strike below the waterline. Admiral Lee, seeing their splashes, most likely counted these as misses. But they did, by far, the greatest damage to the Kirishima, all along her length. These underwater hits were Willis Lee’s answer to the Long Lance torpedo.

After midnight, Kondo ordered his battered Bombardment Unit onto a westerly course. Only the Atago, lightly damaged, and the Takao, unhit, could comply. The Washington’s radars tracked the Japanese ships as they withdrew—a light cruiser was fixed for the forward turrets, and a destroyer for the after turret. But Lee, unsure of the South Dakota’s location, would not allow the main battery to fire.

Captain Gatch was fortunate to escape with a seaworthy battleship. The South Dakota had taken twenty-six hits, including eighteen by eight-inch projectiles and one by a fourteen-incher. The damage wrought to the upper works was serious. With all of the ship’s lights out, working parties operated by feel as they searched for the dead in the darkened foremast tower. They would not soon forget the things they found.

Having lost track of the Washington, Gatch decided that his night was over. His battered ship, alone, was unable to carry the fight any longer. He elected to retire. This decision came as a relief to Willis Lee, who had pursuit on his mind and didn’t need a wounded compatriot to worry about. The last report from Cactus Control at 7 p.m. put five Japanese transports dead in the water about fifteen miles north of the Russell Islands, and four more limping northwest with a small combat escort.

His big rifles not yet cool, Lee steered a course to intercept them the next day. The Washington had come through virtually unscratched by enemy fire. A five-inch hole in her giant “bedspring” air-search radar transmitter was her only wound. She took a much worse thrashing from the blast of her own guns: bulkheads caved in, compartments violently tossed, and a floatplane left in ruins, suitable only for parts. Her only human casualties were a punctured eardrum and an abrasion to the back of a hand. She was the most powerful ship in these waters, but any ship alone is a vulnerable one.

Shadowed by several of Kondo’s destroyers, Glenn Davis rang the Washington’s engine room to make emergency power, and his raging boilers piped enough steam to whistle up the four shafts to nearly twenty-seven knots. At that speed, the 44,500-ton battleship, accelerating through a turn, cleaved wakes from her bow and stern that, in collision, generated wave peaks high enough to register on radar and spook her plotting officers that enemy ships were close in pursuit. When the Washington’s radar registered real phantoms—small blips, presumably destroyers, on the starboard bow—and when a smoke screen was sighted ahead, Captain Davis turned sharply right to avoid contact with a torpedo-wielding enemy; he continued turning until the flagship was headed south, on course to retire. As he did so, large explosions raised great columns of water in her wake. He had turned away just in time.

The battered Kirishima would not be saved. The light cruiser Nagara was nearby and Captain Iwabuchi requested a tow, but it was refused. The captain sent a radio message to Admiral Yamamoto, requesting that he order Nagara to tow the ship, but there was no time for intervention from Truk. The big vessel’s list was just too severe. “An attempt to prevent the flooding of the steering gear room also failing, the ship became hopeless,” Iwabuchi said. The ship alternated listing to left and to right, as the free-surface effect of floodwaters pulled her from side to side. Finally the ship listed to starboard so badly as to make it impossible to stand on the bridge. Iwabuchi ordered Lieutenant Kobayashi to use a flashlight to signal the destroyers Asagumo and Teruzuki to come alongside, one to starboard, the other to port, to remove survivors. Officers in the wrecked and burning ship performed the earnest rituals of defeat—lowering the ensign to shouted banzais, transferring the emperor’s portrait to the Asagumo. As eleven hundred souls were taken off the colossal wreck, the list was so severe that Iwabuchi had no choice but to scuttle her. His engineers opened the Kingston valves, attached to the bottom of her fuel tanks to enable cleaning, and the sea flooded in.

Lieutenant Kobayashi had scarcely hopped over to the Asagumo when the Kirishima rolled hard and unexpectedly to port. The Asagumo freed her lines and pulled safely away. The captain of the Teruzuki had to order an emergency back full to avoid being capped by the turtling battleship’s superstructure. With about three hundred men still on board, the Kirishima joined the boneyard in Ironbottom Sound shortly after 3 a.m. on November 15, about eleven miles west of Savo Island. “My men fought well and displayed the noble spirit of servicemen,” Iwabuchi said. “My only regret is that we could not sink the enemy in exchange for our ship.” Before the two fleets parted ways and returned home, the Atago tried one final time to grapple with the American battlewagons. Captain Ijuin’s ship launched a dozen torpedoes in three salvos, but these, fired at a poor angle astern their retiring target, never had a chance. The cruiser opened fire with her eight-inch main battery on the Washington from fifteen thousand yards, but this was a halfhearted final gesture from a force that had spent its fighting energies. Ijuin ordered a smoke screen and turned away to the north. The Washington’s fire-control specialists tracked the Atago and observed the flashes of her gunfire, but Admiral Lee and Captain Davis had had enough for one night, too. They set course south and departed the battle area.

Lee had good reason to be satisfied with his night’s work. Beyond the hammer blows he had landed on the Kirishima—the only battleship that would be sunk by another, one on one, during the entire Pacific campaign¹—he knew that the Japanese troop transports, wherever they were, were too far away to reach Guadalcanal before sunrise, when Henderson Field’s pilots, spared a thrashing from the sea, would be ready with a savage greeting. Lee directed the Gwin and the limping Benham to head for Espiritu Santo, but the Benham would not make it. Her fractured hull put her at risk of floundering and losing her entire crew. The Gwin scuttled her that night.

Finally locating the South Dakota, which greeted them with the signal, “I AM NOT EFFECTIVE,” Lee and Davis formed up with Gatch. Following behind, the Washington plowed seas tainted with the South Dakota’s bunker oil all the way back to Nouméa. Shorn of the company of destroyers, the victorious American battlewagons, one riddled like a can on a stump, with thirty-nine fatalities, the other completely unscathed, rode beam-to-beam toward the comfort of their tropical home.

Later the South Dakota’s captain would marvel at the fact that the battleships hadn’t been hit by torpedoes. Gatch credited the destroyers for this. He thought they had “indirectly deceived” the Japanese; judging by the swarms of torpedoes Kondo’s escorts had fired at his van, Davis thought Kondo had mistaken the U.S. destroyers for more lucrative targets. “This probably saved the battleships being hit by torpedoes,” he observed. When Lee asked Gatch afterward whether he felt the use of his destroyers had been proper in light of their near total loss, Gatch told him, “As things turned out, I thought it was.” This was cold testimony to the expendability of the destroyer force, which lost more than two hundred men on the night of November 14–15. Lee appreciated their sacrifice. “In breaking up the enemy destroyer attack, our destroyers certainly relieved the battleships of a serious hazard and probably saved their bacon,” he wrote.

At Nouméa, the crews of the two battleships were far less generous with each other. Until the South Dakota departed for a stateside overhaul, they had more than a week to fight out the question of her combat performance in the bars and lockups. “War was declared between the two ships. It was that simple,” a Washington sailor said. Furious, Lee finally called a truce, issuing a special Order of the Day that stated, “One war at a time is enough!” and arranging for the two battleships to stagger their liberties ashore.

Halsey’s decision to throw his two battleships into the breach was vindicated by victory. It was the sort of risk that Nimitz had implicitly counseled against, and that Fletcher had forsworn with his carriers. “Our battleships,” Lee wrote, “are neither designed nor armed for close range night actions with enemy light forces. A few minutes intense fire, at short range, from secondary battery guns can, and did, render one of our new battleships deaf, dumb, blind and impotent through destruction of radar, radio and fire control circuits.” Halsey would say of his decision to send in Lee’s battleships: “How are all the experts going to comment now? The use we made of them defied all conventions, narrow waters, submarine menace, and destroyers at night. Despite that, the books, and the learned and ponderous words of the highbrows, it worked.” Naval tacticians would find it tempting to undervalue what Lee accomplished that night, saying the Washington did what any modern battleship should do to a smaller specimen of the previous generation. But his victory was anything but an anticlimax foretold in a war lab—especially to the men who were there. Had Lee not confronted Kondo, the airfield would have been a feast for the IJN that night and perhaps into the next morning. If Henderson Field had been neutralized, the Enterprise would have been the only source of U.S. airpower left in the combat area, and a feeble one at that: When the carrier retired south, she had only eighteen Wildcat fighters on board. Her entire complement of Avengers and Dauntlesses had gone to operate with the Cactus Air Force at Henderson Field.

With the battle of giants over, Rear Admiral Tanaka turned the broad prows of his four navigable transports southward. (Several of their damaged cohorts would lie dead in the water near the Russell Islands, soon to fall victim to pilots from Guadalcanal.) Yamamoto himself endorsed Tanaka’s plan to run the ships aground. It was around 4 a.m. when they beached themselves near Tassafaronga. Though they brought one last load into “Starvation Island,” they took themselves out of the war. These ships would be easy targets for attacks from air, land, and sea. Set upon by the forces of nature in the ensuing decades, the wreckage of the transports would stand as symbols of Japan’s futile determination to hold the southern Solomons. From a force of more than twelve thousand soldiers that Tanaka had originally embarked at Rabaul, only about two thousand straggled ashore, along with 260 cases of ammunition and fifteen hundred bags of rice. Every one of more than fifty-five hundred men Turner had transported to the island that week arrived safely. The numbers would spell victory.