The Conquering Tide (31 page)

The abandoned
Cushing
drifted and burned out of control. The O'
Bannon
steered wildly to get out of the way of her sister, the badly stricken
Laffey
. A torpedo struck the destroyer
Barton
and tore her in half. Her bow section bobbed one way, her stern the other, and both sections sank within seconds. About forty of her crew survived and swam through her debris and the oil slick she had left on the surface. Some were overrun and drowned by other ships, or killed or injured by depth-charge explosions in the water nearby.

Both the
Portland
and the
Juneau
were struck by torpedoes and made their way out of the action as best they could. The
Portland
circled aimlessly, her steering and propellers damaged, but she still managed to fire a few salvos at a damaged
Shiguri
-class destroyer south of Savo Island. The
Helena
, in better shape than most of her sisters, fired at strange ships off her starboard beam.

The
San Francisco
drifted through the center of the action, bruised but
not knocked out, firing everything she had at the
Hiei
. In turn, however, the
Hiei
planted several large-caliber shells on the
San Francisco
, including one that struck the bridge on the starboard side and killed Admiral Callaghan and most of his staff. Both Captain Young and his executive officer were grievously wounded and died within a few hours. One of the senior surviving officers went up to the navigation bridge and found not a living soul, then went looking for Admiral Callaghan or his staff and “found them all in one heap on the starboard side of the signal bridge, all apparently dead.”
⁵⁵
Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless, officer of the deck, took the conn and made for Cape Esperance, taking the badly mauled cruiser out of
the line of fire. But the
San Francisco
's main battery continued pumping out one salvo after another until the
Hiei
silenced her entirely.

Dawn revealed an awful scene. Ironbottom Sound was littered with burning wreckage, oil, and floating bodies. Hulks of ships drifted and burned, their smashed superstructures leaning drunkenly over the sea, their gun turrets collapsed and hanging over the hulls. Hundreds of oil-saturated survivors clung to debris and called for assistance. Small boats plied to and fro, picking them up. With rare exceptions, the Japanese sailors in the water refused to be picked up, and some attempted to drown themselves rather than be taken prisoner. The
Hiei
was seen brightly afire, moving slowly north of Savo Island, apparently without control of her rudder, accompanied by several smaller ships. Lieutenant George of the
Pawnee
, detailed to take survivors off the
Atlanta
, described the mortally wounded ship: “Her entire superstructure had been shot away and her three forward turrets were like shattered egg crates out of which stuck distorted and twisted guns. Her main deck was almost awash and on it huddled the grimy and dazed remnant of her crew.”
⁵⁶
The survivors were taken off by landing boats, and a demolition party went aboard to set charges in the engine room. She sank shortly after 8:00 a.m.

The
Helena
, least damaged of the American cruisers, led a column of six smashed ships toward Sealark Channel. The
San Francisco
appeared so badly maimed that it seemed incredible she could make way at all—one witness on another ship counted twenty-six shell holes in her side.
⁵⁷
Dead men were buried at sea in hasty ceremonies. Crewmen, utterly exhausted, snatched short periods of sleep wherever they could find a place to stretch out.

The
Juneau
was running low in the water, her decks almost awash. She could make only 13 knots and was slow to answer her helm.
⁵⁸
At 11:01, some miles east of Guadalcanal, a torpedo fired by Japanese submarine
I-26
struck the ship in the port side and touched off the torpedo warheads in her magazine. The blast was so powerful that it blew men standing on the
San Francisco
flat on the deck.
⁵⁹
Men glancing up from the other ships saw entire 5-inch gun barrels and large sections of the
Juneau
's superstructure hurled high into the air. An enormous cloud of mostly yellow smoke hung there for several minutes, obscuring her position. Gradually, as the cloud rose off the surface, observers on the other ships scanned the sea and saw nothing. “There was not a stick, or a spar, or a boat, or a life buoy; nor was a single
man visible,” recalled an officer of the
Sterett
. “I strained to see a head, or a body; but as the smoke cleared, I could see absolutely nothing.”
⁶⁰
Lieutenant Graham C. Bonnell of the
San Francisco
agreed: “I looked over to the spot where the
Juneau
had been and saw only a large cloud of smoke. . . . And in a short space of time this smoke had completely cleared and you could see nothing but a wake going along and immediately stopping.”
⁶¹

The destroyers could establish no sonar contact on the submarine, nor was there any sign of it. Captain Gilbert Hoover of the
Helena
, eyeing the danger posed to the other ships, made the hardheaded decision to keep the remnants of the task force on course and underway. Officers would later say that they did not believe a single man on the
Juneau
could have survived the attack, and that impression was echoed by dozens of witnesses. In fact, 120 of her crew did survive the sinking. They drifted at sea for five days, clinging to three rafts connected by life nets, and dying one by one. Ten survivors washed up on Santa Catalina Island on November 18.

A
DMIRAL
K
INKAID
, on the
Enterprise
about 270 miles south of Guadalcanal, launched his dawn search on a wide arc from north to west, with the planes ordered to fly to a range of 200 miles. The still-wounded flight deck of the
Enterprise
was kept “cocked” to launch a large airstrike should enemy carriers be discovered. But the search found nothing. Later that morning, Kinkaid decided to send his torpedo planes on an offensive sweep up the Slot, with orders to land at Henderson Field and place themselves at the disposal of General Vandegrift's air department.

The Cactus Air Force, thus reinforced, turned its attention to the burning, listing
Hiei
, which was drifting north of Savo Island. The once-mighty battleship had absorbed about eighty-five shell hits and six or seven torpedoes. Her after turrets were smashed and hanging limply over her side. Smoke poured out of ruptures in her upper works and her forward turret. The
Enterprise
Avengers dropped torpedoes on her, scoring two hits on the port side and one on the starboard side. Several more flights from Henderson of both marine and navy planes assailed the smoking hulk, but she was a remarkably tough customer. At sunset she was not only still afloat but still making way. At dawn on the fourteenth, however, there was nothing to be seen but an enormous oil slick almost two miles in diameter.
⁶²

Henderson Field had come under bombardment that night by cruisers and destroyers, but the shelling was not particularly unnerving to men who had endured much worse. PT boats operating from Tulagi fired torpedoes on the hostile fleet and apparently drove them away. The Japanese ships were chased and taken under attack the next morning by
Enterprise
and Henderson-based planes, which probably scored some hits on one of the cruisers. Most important, however, was a sighting report at 9:49 that morning. An
Enterprise
scout spotted a large Japanese force north of New Georgia island, headed toward Guadalcanal at 14 knots. The pilot saw destroyers and “many enemy transports.”
⁶³

This was Tanaka's latest attempt to land a major reinforcement—eleven troop-loaded transports screened by eleven destroyers, on a course of 140 degrees. By decree of Vandegrift, the transports were the overriding target for all Allied aircraft that could reach them. Throughout the afternoon, every plane that could fly from Henderson was fueled, armed, and sent up the Slot to attack. The pilots ignored the destroyers and concentrated all their efforts on the troopships. One
Enterprise
aviator judged that afternoon to be “the most hectic, frantic period of many that took place at Henderson Field. A coordinated effort between the Navy carrier pilots and their Marine brothers-in-arms, combined with a superhuman effort from the aviation ground support personnel, kept a steady stream of SBDs and TBFs carrying bombs and torpedoes shuttling back and forth from the field to the convoy targets.”
⁶⁴

The slaughter was cold and meticulous. Jimmy Flatley's VF-10 fighters dived at 60-degree angles and raked the crowded troopships with their .50-caliber machine guns. Japanese soldiers leapt over the sides to escape the onslaught.
⁶⁵
Army B-17s flying from Espiritu Santo got into the act later that afternoon. A torpedo dropped by a TBF ripped out the bowels of a 10,000-ton transport, which rolled over and sank in minutes. Planes circled overhead, then flew low over the debris and strafed the troops struggling to stay afloat. “There were rafts and boats all over the sea floating on an oil scum amidst chunks of wood and other stuff,” recalled one of the Avenger pilots. “There were three transports still afloat when we opened up with our guns. We strafed the transports, the boats in the water, and everything else we saw, and so did the fighters.”
⁶⁶
It was hideous work, even “sickening,” as one pilot said.
⁶⁷
But not all the aviators were so squeamish; some proudly hailed themselves as the “Buzzard Brigade.” The
Enterprise
action
report observed that the work was done “with methodical and devastating effect.”
⁶⁸
By the end of the day, four troopships were sunk, and three more were on fire and limping back up the Slot toward Rabaul. Two more sank that night. Admiral Tanaka later reported that only 400 troops were killed, but that number seems unrealistically low.

I
N SHARP CONTRAST TO THE METHODS OF HIS PREDECESSOR
, Admiral Halsey chose to move the chess pieces around the board on his own initiative. By his prior instruction, the partially disabled
Enterprise
and her screening vessels remained well away to the south of Guadalcanal to avoid crossing paths with enemy aircraft or submarines.
⁶⁹
At 3:42 p.m. on November 14, Halsey detached the
Washington
and
South Dakota
and directed them to proceed north, skirting the western edge of Guadalcanal, to take station south of Savo Island. The two big battlewagons, accompanied by four destroyers, were designated Task Force LOVE, commanded by Admiral Lee. They were to intercept enemy surface forces expected to enter Ironbottom that night.

Zigzagging north at 23 knots, Lee's force rounded the western shoals off Guadalcanal and arrived off Savo at midnight. He did not have to wait long for the enemy fleet to reveal itself. Strange lights were seen in the sky above the horizon to the west. Officers speculated that they might be the fires of burning ships around the Russell Islands. Radio monitors tuned in to the enemy's low-power ship-to-ship frequencies and caught some excitable Japanese chatter. Tulagi-based PT boats zoomed around Ironbottom Sound, and Lee's staff radioed urgent identification messages to avoid taking a friendly torpedo in the hull of one of his ships. It was another calm night. A light breeze blew from the south. A quarter moon was setting in the west, and visibility at sea level was good.

At midnight, the newly installed SG search radars began to pick up blips in the northwest. As the enemy ships came down the Slot, they entered the radar shadows of the landmasses of surrounding islands. Soon the American spotters, peering through optical sights, made out distant shapes moving on the horizon. Admiral Lee altered his course to 300 degrees and ordered the
South Dakota
to open fire once she obtained a good firing solution.

At 12:16 a.m., when the first ship in the enemy column was at a range of 18,500 yards, the
Washington
's 16-inch batteries spoke up. Her first salvo
of 16-inch armor-piercing shells straddled the target. The splashes could be seen on radar, and the gun elevations and trains adjusted accordingly. The second (or at least the third) salvo connected. The
South Dakota
opened up about a minute after her sister. With the benefit of radar fire control, she landed her first or second salvo on one of the closer ships in the Japanese column at a range of about 15,700 yards. The target blazed fiercely, providing a gratifying spectacle to the spotters.
South Dakota
turned her guns to the second ship in the column and scored several more hits. The Japanese task force was slow to respond and scored no hits in this first phase of the action.

The four American destroyers had held fire because the range was near the extreme limit of effectiveness of their 5-inch guns. At 12:20 a.m., a column of Japanese destroyers and light cruisers emerged from the southwestern edge of Savo Island. The
Walke
, the first destroyer in the American van, opened fire first, followed quickly by the
Benham
,
Gwin
, and
Preston
. One or more targets appeared to burst into flames. But the quartet of American destroyers soon took heavy punishment in turn. Several 6-inch projectiles landed on the
Preston
, laying waste to her fire rooms and killing dozens of her crew. The
Preston
's stack collapsed, crushing the ship's searchlight. A Japanese heavy cruiser managed to sneak up on the port side of the four destroyers and added several 8-inch rounds to the
Preston
's tally of woe. The little ship burst into flames, listed deeply to starboard, and began going down by the stern. Her captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. As the men were going over the side, fires reached her magazine and she went up in a yellow thunderclap. Debris rained down around the ship.