8

 

Burning in the Rain

IT WAS ABOUT 2:40 IN THE MORNING WHEN ADMIRAL CRUTCHLEY, from the bridge of the Australia, observed a trio of objects burning on the sea between Savo and Florida islands and wondered what calamity he had missed. The muzzle flashes he had seen earlier had stopped. His commanders had reported no victory, yet no attack on the anchorages had ensued. The pieces of a strange puzzle floated all over the sound.

To his interim squadron commander, Captain Bode in the Chicago, the British officer sent a terse imperative: “REPORT SITUATION.”

Bode was quick with a reply: “CHICAGO SOUTH OF SAVO ISLAND. HIT BY TORPEDO, SLIGHTLY DOWN BY BOW. ENEMY SHIPS FIRING TO SEAWARD. CANBERRA BURNING ON BEARING 250 FIVE MILES FROM SAVO. TWO DESTROYERS STANDING BY CANBERRA.”

Crutchley pondered this incomplete report and passed what he could to Kelly Turner: “SURFACE ACTION NEAR SAVO. SITUATION AS YET UNDETERMINED.”

Among the transports off Tulagi, nerves were tight as tow cables. The Hunter Liggett went to general quarters at about 2 a.m. at the first sign of trouble. Her skipper, a Coast Guard captain named Lewis W. Perkins, leaned on the front rail of his bridge and peered into the night, studying the flashes of gunfire. Then he heard the uneven gurgling of an aircraft engine, and suddenly it was like daytime as a flare popped overhead. “Its searing light revealed the transports and destroyers, grotesquely naked. On the horizon, firing began again.” Perkins shouted, ‘Hold on! If we’re going to get it, this is it!’

“We stood breathless, gripping the rail. The shells, if they were coming, were on the way. The white light glared down on us. Our ships just sat there: fat, stupid ducks in the blinding glare.”

Mikawa’s arrival had been a surprise to all. Joe Custer, who interviewed several of the observers, recalled their confusion and fear. There was no comprehending the horrible truth behind the pyrotechnics that flashed in the night. “Huge balls of red fire would leave one ship; they could watch them winging in an arc straight for the other ships, then the spurting of flames as they hit. Then, answering balls of fire would retrace the arc, and explode in flaming geysers.”

“We’d automatically move our heads from left to right, from side to side, at the exchange,” the navigator on one of the transports said. “It was like watching a tennis match—in hell.” That officer made out one large ship in particular, very possibly Mikawa’s Chokai, throwing salvos so swiftly that they appeared to be chasing one another through the air. In the direction of their arc, flames were towering in the black sky. Some distance still farther away, the bottoms of clouds were warmed by a red glow. The Canberrawas in her final throes.

The destroyer Patterson came alongside the burning Australian cruiser, only to be driven away by the detonations of ordnance. She tried again and stayed, passing over pump and fire hoses. The rains were driving then, extinguishing smoldering debris but doing little against deeper conflagrations.

Bad as it looked for the Canberra, the plan to abandon her was delayed when it became clear that she would not be left until all the wounded were removed. The destroyers turned to the task, with the Patterson taking four hundred survivors on board, including seventy wounded, and the Wilson rescuing more than two hundred more. A call came then to aid the Astoria.

But the tin cans could only accomplish so much. At four fifteen, with the Canberra suffering from internal explosions, her starboard list growing to almost thirty-five degrees, the Patterson’s deck force threw their hoses off, helped the wounded to settle in, and then passed the order for the stricken cruiser to abandon ship.

Kelly Turner had always intended to withdraw most of his amphibious and supply ships from Guadalcanal and Tulagi forty-eight hours after the landings. Fletcher’s removal of his carriers was pending—they would spend the night and predawn morning in a “night retirement station” southwest of San Cristobál. If the Canberra could not be righted and made seaworthy in time to join the fleet’s exit, planned for 6:30 a.m., she would have to be scuttled. The Patterson relayed Turner’s grim order to the Canberra.

It was about five fifteen when a strange ship, presumably a hostile one, appeared on the Canberra’s port quarter. Seeing the threat, the Patterson blinkered the Canberra: “OUT ALL LIGHTS.” It was not a moment too soon, for the approaching ship immediately took the Patterson under fire. The destroyer replied in kind. The good news was that none of the shells the strangers traded hit. The bad news was that the ship firing at them proved to be Howard Bode’s Chicago, returning from her solo foray into the west. The Pattersonturned on her identification lights and Bode checked his fire.

THE PYRES OF THE Vincennes and Quincy were not long below the waves, and the Canberra’s and Astoria’s bouts with fire only beginning, when Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa took on his next challenge—deciding how to exploit his stunning rout. At issue was whether he would carry out his principal mission and attack the transport anchorages. Mikawa and his chief of staff, Toshikazu Ohmae, knew that the landing areas off Guadalcanal and Tulagi were vulnerable. They also understood their own exposure. The Aoba had already escaped catastrophe during the battle when an American shell struck her port side torpedo mount. Because thirteen of her sixteen fish had been fired already, the explosion did not produce the devastating secondary blast it might have. A shell from the Quincy that destroyed the Chokai’s chart room struck five yards aft of the bridge, just a hairbreadth from killing the admiral and most of his staff. As was always the case in a high-speed action at night, a few minutes’ notice either way could have changed the outcome. “I was greatly impressed by the courageous actions of the northern group of U.S. cruisers,” Mikawa would comment. “They fought back heroically despite heavy damage sustained before they were ready for battle. Had they had even a few minutes’ warning of our approach, the results of the action would have been quite different.”

Frayed by the confusion of battle, Mikawa’s formation re-formed northwest of Savo Island. The Chokai took the lead in column ahead of the Furutaka, Kako, Kinugasa, Aoba, Tenryu, Yubari, and Yunagi. The ships were all low on torpedoes—fully half of them had been launched in the preceding hour—along with as much as a third of their main-battery ammunition. Chief among the admiral’s worries was the question of time and daylight. If he pressed on into the American anchorage, he doubted he would escape before daylight. He estimated it would take half an hour to finally reassemble his force, another half hour to close up into battle formation, and still another half hour to regain battle speed. From there, the anchorage was a sixty-minute sprint at high speed. The total time of those processes, two and a half hours, meant that Mikawa’s task force would hit the anchorage just an hour before sunrise; it would be impossible to escape under cover of the night.

The shadow cast by naval aviators was long and dark. The outcome at Midway, like Coral Sea before it, had taught Mikawa that land-based airpower was usually the master of its surrounding seas. “To remain in the area by sunrise would mean that we would only meet the fate our carriers had suffered at Midway.” It was six hundred miles from Rabaul to Tulagi, and the 11th Air Fleet was having trouble finding planes to commit to Guadalcanal in any event. Trouble loomed. From intercepted radio traffic, he knew Fletcher’s carriers were out there somewhere. He lacked friendly air cover to save him from American planes in a daylight sprint back to base.

En route to surprising Bode and Riefkohl, it had been keen navigational skill that enabled Mikawa to hug Savo’s black coast. Proceeding into the littorals of an anchorage without good charts—incinerated when his flagship’s chart room was hit—would have been perilous. Besides, what was the hurry? Victory had been easy. Other opportunities would come. The Army had long been saying it would be no great chore to unseat the Americans from their small beachhead.

Eight months earlier Mikawa had been second in command to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the Pearl Harbor strike force. Mikawa had command of Battleship Division 3, the mighty Kirishima and Hiei. When a decision loomed then about whether to retreat or attack again, Mikawa had urged further attacks against Oahu’s oil storage and repair facilities. Now he evaluated similar if smaller risks and chose discretion—and withdrawal. The irony of that decision was considerable: As Mikawa departed to the north, the U.S. aircraft carriers whose wrath he feared were preparing to get under way in the other direction.

“We were all shocked and disconcerted momentarily,” wrote Ohmae. “We were still absorbed with the details of the hard fight just finished and had lost track of time. I was amazed to discover that it was just shortly after midnight, and then we were headed in a northerly direction. As we continued northward, we ran the risk of going ashore on Florida Island, so a change of course was made to the left. I asked the lookout if there was any sign of pursuing ships. There was not.”

*   *   *

THE FIGHT TO save the Astoria was at a fever pitch. With hundreds of sailors marshaled as a bucket brigade, heaving water with buckets and spent eight-inch shell casings, many of the fires raging throughout the ship began to yield. Countless small acts of gallantry marked the morning. A lieutenant, Walter Bates, dove overboard to push a life raft containing a portable pump closer to the ship. When he noticed a shark trailing him, he leaped into the raft, grabbed an oar, and splintered it over the predator’s skull. Then Bates was in the water again, pushing the raft into position. The pump coughed to life and water flowed for a brief while. When it died again for good, Bates climbed up on deck and joined scores of others removing wounded. “He was everywhere, working feverishly,” Joe Custer reported. “And he came out with only a sprained ankle.” A first-class petty officer named C. C. Watkins had the kind of commanding presence that rallied the bucket brigade. “Men naturally responded to his confidence, actions, and commanding voice,” wrote Lieutenant Commander John D. Hayes, the engineering officer. When Frank Shoup, the exec, first noticed a sailor trapped between a whaleboat davit and a gash in the starboard side of the upper deck, he thought the man was dead. He had only a moment to register the slight wave of the hand the sailor gave before Watkins, joined by two other sailors, Wyatt J. Luttrell and Norman R. Touve, were picking their way through the flames to bring him down. The rescuers found two other sailors while saving this first man, including one who was clinging to the bulge in the cruiser’s torpedo belt as the ship was threatening to capsize. “The rescue of these three men,” Shoup wrote, “was a heroic action, and was the finest deed I witnessed in a night when high courage was commonplace.… I would not have ordered anyone in to make this rescue, as I did not think it could be done.”

When Shoup heard a pump motoring in the forward part of the ship, beyond the no-man’s-land of the amidships fires, it was his first indication that people were alive on the other side of the hangar deck. Within an hour the persistent labor of the bucket brigades had quenched the fires as far forward as the well deck. Only a stubborn lube-oil fire in the starboard forward corner of well deck was evidence of the great conflagration that had been.

Shoup and Hayes were optimists. But a hotter blaze was worming its way deeper in the Astoria’s belly, a severe fire in the wardroom that was unapproachable by hand or by hose. Notified of it, Greenman ordered the forward magazines flooded to prevent an explosion. Enterprising sailors tossed a couple of preventive bucketfuls down the ammunition hoists, then turned open the seacocks. As the powder bags were swamped, one danger vanished and another rose in its place. The weight of the water accumulating below threatened to increase the modest port-side list.

It was around 3:30 a.m. when the rain came, and for about an hour it fell, heavy and cold. Custer remembered some folklore he’d heard that said rain always came after a big naval battle because the concussion of big guns unhinged the equilibrium of the atmosphere.

Topside the rains fell hard. Though they did little against the blaze in the well deck, the superstructure cooled, steamed, and smoked. The blackened foremast turned to solid steel again after buckling under the heat. Hoses lay about, withered down to their coils like discarded snakeskins. The forward turrets, manned now by corpses, were still trained in the direction of the last known target. The ship, coughing flames from her belly, shook occasionally from the muffled thump of five-inch projectiles exploding in superheated hoists. In the midst of it all, men were nearly stuporous. “I stood for a moment of silence in memory of the men I had known,” Jack Gibson said. “Then voices roused me. They came from a destroyer coming up alongside.”

When the Bagley first appeared ahead at around four o’clock that morning, the ship was blacked out and identification impossible. The Astoria’s survivors mistook the flashes of her signal lamp for the muzzle of an enemy rifle firing into their shipmates adrift. Captain Greenman ordered a signalman to climb atop turret two and challenge the newcomer with a blinker gun. “Shaking with cold and fright,” recalled signalman Vince Furst, “I sent out AA and the familiar SOS.”

The voice that came in reply was unmistakable, the New England twang of the Bagley’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander George A. Sinclair, well known in the Astoria from his recent tenure as her engineering officer. His destroyer approached bow-to-bow in a well-executed “Chinese landing” and held fast to the vastly larger cruiser. The wounded were taken from the Astoria’s forecastle by triage, stretcher cases first, crews working in the darkness by voice and touch. When Joe Custer’s turn came, he began descending to the destroyer’s deck, then heard Greenman call from the bridge, “Able-bodied men stay aboard! We are not abandoning ship!” A spontaneous cheer went up.

The effort to save the Astoria called Kelly Turner’s battered screening group to a proud new purpose. The Bagley took aboard seventy of her wounded. Playing searchlights on the water, looking for more, Sinclair’s tin can shoved off and drew alongside aft. She took off more wounded and sent aboard a salvage crew of several hundred men. As the sun rose low over Florida Island, the destroyer-minesweeper Hopkins approached and backed up to the Astoria, fantail-to-fantail. Captain Greenman, blood all over him, arm in a sling, asked for a tow. A cable was tied to the base of the smaller ship’s towing winch and fastened tight. A 120-volt electrical lead and a fire hose followed. Shoup and Hayes were glad for the help. If power could be restored, steam might be raised, too.

Then the Wilson came alongside, sidling up on the windward beam to starboard, pumping water into the fires forward. The work never proceeded without thought of a renewed enemy attack. The destroyers were repeatedly called away to investigate sonar contacts.

With the Hopkins towing from astern and the Wilson’s deck force hosing fires in the wardroom, the list steadied. Bucket brigades redoubled their back-straining labors. It was not enough. When fires below reached the shell hoists, seized by shell damage and full of ordnance meant for enemy targets, a series of explosions began weakening the ship from within like small strokes. As several of these breached the hull, the Astoria’s list slowly grew more serious. At ten degrees it was difficult for men to walk on deck.

Further on into the morning, the Astoria suffered a particularly heavy explosion deep within, probably in the forward five-inch magazine, which precautionary flooding never reached. From a deep and inaccessible void, its detonation was felt more than heard. There was a muffled cacophony of collapsing bulkheads. Bubbling to the surface on the port side came an exhalation of yellow gas, detritus of a burned-out powder magazine. Sailors on the other ships could see tendrils of smoke leaking from nearly every rivet on the ship, thousands of them. When the list grew to fifteen degrees, the shell holes above the waterline started shipping water. The makeshift bandages of mattresses and pillows shored up with timber could do only so much. When the list reached thirty degrees, all her sailors could do was watch the Astoria yield.

Shortly after noon, the port side gunwales were awash. The bucket brigades stood down as all hands were ordered aft. The Buchanan, alongside to fight fires, secured her hoses and began taking off survivors. Sailors without life jackets floated on the sea gripping discarded powder cans. Destroyers stood by to retrieve them. A survivor of the Astoria’s forward turrets, Charles C. Gorman, saw a man in the water near the fantail of a destroyer screaming for help. The deckhands threw him a line, but as they did so, the destroyer accelerated, evidently called away to pursue a submarine contact. The man grabbed the line but missed, and the sharks were soon on him. Gorman called it “one of the most horrible sights of all the wars I have been in.”

Many more-fortunate souls were already aboard the tin cans, lying prone on their steel decks. The decks of the Bagley were filled with Astoria wounded; limbs, heads, and torsos wrapped in bandages and gauze. On the Bagley, those who could manage it stood at the rail, attention fixed on the floundering carcass of their onetime home. The Astoria was rolling to her port side, bow deep and stern raising high. On the afterdeck, a sailmaker and a special working party wrapped bodies for burial at sea until the list forced them to disband.

“Off her slanting side, men were walking slowly, deliberately, into the calm water,” Joe Custer observed from the Bagley. “Some of them went into shallow dives, like kids off a raft. Others just walked off the edge and started their arms in motion. Some wore life jackets, others didn’t. Officers’ khaki mingled with seamen’s dungarees. There were hundreds of heads bobbing in the water. And now the great group went into a mass crawl, like so many porpoises, toward the destroyers and lifeboats hovering nearby.”

“The day was beautiful, the sea like glass and the ship was slowly overturning and sinking,” a sailor on the transport Alchiba wrote. “Men were in the water, boats were picking them up. It would have made a gripping picture.” It was just past noon on the ninth when the Astoria began settling by the stern. Then she was gone. The inventory of enshrouded dead piled on the afterdeck entered the sea without ceremony. For the third time within twelve hours, the temperate waters of Savo Sound absorbed the heat of an American man-of-war’s incandescent ruins.

AT HIS HEADQUARTERS in Nouméa, Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley was awaiting news of the landings, about which he knew nothing, nor about the explosive events that followed. “These were endless hours and days for us,” the commander of SOPAC wrote. Evidently, however, he felt no urgency to end them. He did not ask his commanders for updates. “I did not want to interfere with the operations by demanding reports when I did not know the local conditions as to ability to send dispatches,” he would write. Ghormley was wise to assume the worst of his patchwork radio setup. But it would strike some as curious that he, a theater commander, equated inquiry with interference and used his unfamiliarity with the forward area to justify his continuing detachment from it.

When news of the disastrous fate of the cruisers filtered down to the landing area that morning, unloading accelerated to a frantic pace. Turner’s plan was to withdraw his troop transports and cargo ships on August 9, getting them under way at first light. That decision looked more urgently necessary than ever. Already they were unguarded by carrier planes. Now their cruiser screening force had been wiped away, too.

Supplies were needed ashore, and shipboard deck space was in demand for the wounded. As stores and arms flowed to the beach, the vacated stowage was used to accommodate casualties of battle. A transport officer recalled, “Most of them were young kids sitting numbly, their semi-naked bodies black from burns and the oil of sunken ships. I doubt I will ever forget that sweet smell of burned flesh.”

Before sunrise on Sunday morning, August 9, the remnants of Task Force 62 gathered for their march of shame. The antiaircraft cruiser San Juan, Rear Admiral Norman Scott’s flagship, used her new surface radar to form up in the dark. If the new equipment was useful in retreat, there was no telling how it might have performed in battle. As the battle raged the San Juan stood idle, several miles to the southeast, patrolling outside the Tulagi transport anchorage. “If the San Juan had been up there,” said Lieutenant Commander Horacio Rivero, her assistant gunnery officer, “we would have picked up [Mikawa’s] ships coming down.… We had the only radar that could do that. And we weren’t in the area where it could be used. They didn’t realize what it could do.” Turner was indeed unaware that the equipment in the destroyers on picket duty, the Blue and Ralph Talbot, was inadequate to cover the breadth of their patrol line. Though Admiral Ghormley had questioned the idea of using just two destroyers as pickets, he was assured that they would detect the approach of any enemy ships within twelve to fourteen miles with their SC search radar. Its range was just five thousand yards, or about half of what Crutchley believed it was, and half of the “conservative estimate” given to Admiral King by the commander of the Pacific Fleet’s destroyer force, Rear Admiral Walden L. “Pug” Ainsworth.

As the sun rose, Task Force 62 steamed eastward through Lengo Channel, older, smaller, and, soon enough, wiser for the disaster of the preceding six hours. The broken-bowed Chicago led the Patterson, Mugford, Ralph Talbot, Dewey, and five destroyer-minesweepers along with several transports. In the second group went the rest of the transports, with the Australia, San Juan, and Hobart escorted by the destroyers Selfridge, Henley, Helm, Bagley, Blue, Ellet, Wilson, Hull, Monssen, and Buchanan. Shortly after the first dog watch (i.e. 1600–1800), the amphibious force, unloaded to the degree possible, got under way for Nouméa, too.

Officers on all ships struggled to comprehend what had transpired the previous night. The skipper of the Monssen, Commander Roland N. Smoot, saw the missed opportunity as a disgrace. “I couldn’t help but keep saying to my gang around the bridge, ‘Why in the devil don’t we get into this? What are we doing down here waiting to be picked off one at a time? What’s the matter with us?’ ” Smoot’s comments had hindsight’s clarity. As the battle raged, the only American flag officer within range of the scrap, Norman Scott, believed he was watching the two American cruiser groups firing on each other. Scott’s thinking appears to have mirrored that of the five heavy cruiser commanders, four of whom, all but Captain Bode in the Chicago, were asleep in their sea cabins when the bugles rang. Despite the revolutionary radar eyes available to him, Scott was, according to Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, “without information except for what he had seen indistinctly.” As Mikawa’s cruisers were rounding the bottom curve of their counterclockwise circuit of Savo Island, Scott’s group had just reversed its patrol course to the south and was only fifteen thousand yards south of Mikawa’s fast-firing Chokai. Opportunity arrived at twenty-four knots and soon was gone again.

Combat readiness simply wasn’t the order of the day. Captain Riefkohl would acknowledge that he had received reports of an approaching Japanese force on the afternoon of the battle, and that he had even calculated it could well arrive that night. If that was the case, it is hard to explain why, after noting this in his night order book, he retired to his cabin.

The commanders on duty that night would have years to sort out the questions of culpability and innocence. Those whose ships had gone down fighting at least had that much honor left to hold on to. Captain Bode of the Chicago wasn’t given such a reprieve. Had the Chicago been sunk, leaving him a gallant survivor, it might have discharged some of the shame. Payment for his sins of omission and commission would come due in time.

ADMIRAL KING WOULD CALL it the “blackest day of the whole war.” More than a thousand Allied sailors died on the night of August 8–9. The tally grew every hour through the day on the ninth as the badly wounded succumbed. Reporting the disaster to his president, King promised that the new battleships South Dakota and Washington, as well as the light cruiser Juneau, would help make up for the shortage of surface combatants. They were due to arrive at Tongatabu the first week of September. King asked Nimitz to send three to five of the repaired older battleships to shore up the battered South Pacific surface fleet. Nimitz, always a serious student of costs and benefits, was eloquent by his inaction. In the meantime, Vandegrift and his men stood essentially alone.

Turner knew that the most essential need for the invasion force ashore was food, followed by land-based aircraft, ammunition, antiaircraft guns, barrage balloons, and radio construction personnel. Turner planned weekly convoys from Nouméa to keep them supplied. Running the convoys without air cover would be an unavoidable risk.

Recuperating in the President Jackson en route to Nouméa, Captain Greenman was surprised to find two familiar faces from the Astoria, his executive officer, Frank Shoup, and the newsman Joe Custer. Lying on his back in his bunk, the skipper gestured to Custer and said to his exec, “Look what we’ve got here!”

“A ghost!” said Shoup. The exec’s entire face was thick and black with burn jelly, as were his forearms and hands, except for his fingertips. “Well, aren’t we a lovely looking pair of sailors?”

“We’ve just been discovering we still belong to the living,” Greenman said. As they lit smokes, Shoup found he couldn’t bend his middle three fingers. He held the butt with his pinkie and thumb. For a week he would be under medical orders to keep his arms high, to prevent blood from flowing into the burned flesh of his hands and forearms. Greenman had eleven pieces of shrapnel in him, including one that had struck in the small of his back and missed his spine by less than an inch. While the doctors took X-rays and picked shrapnel, he began reconstructing events to prepare his after-action report, making a list of the dead, the wounded, and the living and interviewing his officers and men.

At Nouméa, Greenman forgot his own wounds and checked on his orphaned crew, asked after them, concerned himself with their mental state. He attended many of their burials at sea. As a chaplain intoned the Lord’s Prayer, two men would lift the cot with crisp ceremony. The hiss of the shroud sliding over canvas was “a sound that I felt go through my bones,” Joe Custer wrote. “This was the memory, I knew then, that I would never forget: the sound of bodies sliding on canvas.… The battle itself didn’t convey the despair, the hopelessness of this sound, for in the turmoil and the thunder of that battle night there were sounds of life all about, of men’s voices, of leather pounding steel decks: There was Life—and here was Death.”

The Astoria’s junior chaplain, Matthew Bouterse, was haunted ever afterward by one corpse in particular: the one he had seen suspended in the mainmast, cooking above the flames. “That body burned in my dreams for weeks and it was almost completely consumed both in my dreams as it was in reality, and it came near consuming me with it.”

Army personnel were generous, giving rescued sailors new shoes and olive drab fatigues. The crew of the transport American Legion would raise a fund to provide each survivor with a carton of cigarettes with matches, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a dollar’s worth of coupons to the ship’s store.

One of the high-ranking naval officers in the area paid a visit to the hospital ship Solace. Walking between bunks, he talked quietly with every sailor he saw, many of them from his old ship. “When he got to me,” said Keithel P. Anthony, a water tender, “he knelt down and asked, ‘What ship, sailor?’

“I said, ‘Astoria.’

“And he asked, ‘Were you on there when I was captain?’

“Then I saw his name and said, ‘Oh, Captain Turner. My God, yes. You were the captain when we went to Japan.’ ”

The Savo disaster struck him personally. He grabbed Anthony by the hands, tears rolling down his cheeks, and said, “This should never have happened. If I had been aboard that ship it would never have happened.” And Anthony believed him.

The Navy would do its best, for a time, to pretend it hadn’t. When transports carrying survivors of the Battle of Savo Island finally returned home, the men were sent to quarantine, removed from public circulation. They had stories to tell that Admiral King would be quite happy not to see in the newspapers. Some five hundred survivors of the Astoria, Vincennes, and Quincy were held under virtual house arrest in a barracks that had been constructed on Treasure Island for the 1939 World’s Fair. Marines were detailed to prevent the sailors from leaving. “Don’t you say one word about the battle,” they were told.

When rumors reached the detainees that their officers had been allowed to go home, they rioted. After the sacrifice they had given, it was intolerable to be treated as security risks. And so the chairs flew. According to Astoria survivor John C. Powell, it took more than a hundred guards to settle them down. Stories about the August 9 defeat would not hit the papers until the middle of October. It could be said that the naval high command was still learning how to calculate its risks.

THE UNITED STATES finally drew blood in the opening chapter of the Guadalcanal naval campaign when the submarine S-44 torpedoed the heavy cruiser Kako as she was returning to Kavieng.¹ The loss of the ship did nothing to dim the mood at Truk. Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki, was filled with a sense of prideful vindication. He would write in his diary that “the conceited British and Americans who regard the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway as supreme victories cannot say anything now.… The enemy must be feeling the autumn in the fortunes of war.” Such verdicts were always debatable. By leaving the area, Mikawa would allow the U.S. Navy to say that the defeated American cruisers had, at the end of the day, kept the enemy from his objective.

In early August, autumn had arrived for no one quite yet. The campaign for Guadalcanal had only begun. All the same, the first battle between major naval forces in the South Pacific left no doubt whose navy was master and whose was student. For Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and U.S. commanders all the way down the line, the residual sweet smell of the victories of spring had been borne away on a fell new breeze.