Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [100]
It was on this basic curriculum, elementary to any course in naval shiphandling, that Scott’s battle plan foundered. As the SG radar showed, a well-executed reversal of course would have brought his column right across Goto’s—a perfect “crossing of the T”—allowing his formation to rake the Japanese column with their full broadsides and leaving Goto to reply with only his forward batteries. But Scott’s notion of the timing of the engagement and the spacing of his ships was thrown into disarray as soon as his van destroyer, the Farenholt, threw her rudder over.
Quite unexpectedly, the conning officer of the San Francisco turned simultaneously with the Farenholt. This error threw a hot potato to Captain Moran in the Boise. Following astern of the San Francisco, he faced a critical decision that had to be settled in a snap: Should he continue as ordered and make a column turn, holding his rudder until he reached the spot where the Farenholt turned? Or should he turn immediately and stay with his flagship? Either choice would have sundered Scott’s column in two. The first would leave the San Francisco on her own. The second would cut loose his vanguard destroyers. Perhaps realizing that keeping the cruisers together was the more urgent priority, Moran chose the latter course. As the Boise turned, and as the Salt Lake City followed her, Scott’s leading trio of destroyers forged out into the night alone.
As the cruisers settled into their southwesterly course, the order passed for the turret crews to match up with the bearing of the turret directors as they sought to pin down targets broadly located by the search radar. On the secondary batteries, star shells were locked into their breeches. The SC search radar of the Salt Lake City was the first to make contact with the Japanese. The Boise’s radar picked them up soon afterward, sketching their approach in electron beams, the vertical stem of the T just fourteen thousand yards to the northwest. When Moran’s talker reported these contacts as “bogeys,” some listeners wondered whether he might be referring to aircraft.
Scott had instructed his commanders to open fire as soon as they had a confirmed fix on the enemy. With the destroyers lost in the night, nothing could be confirmed now. Flying his flag in a ship that had no SG radar and was forbidden from using its SC set, Scott certainly had no ready picture of the unexpected geometry of the fight. The contact reports he was hearing from the other cruisers might well be Captain Robert G. Tobin’s destroyers, spun off from his column by the San Francisco’s error. His fears were firmly underscored when the Boise reported a cluster of ship contacts bearing sixty-five degrees. Moran meant to report contacts at sixty degrees relative to the Boise’s own course heading. Standard tactical doctrine, however, required ships to report contacts as true bearings, with 0 degrees indicating the north and 180 the south.
The difference was critical to Admiral Scott. A report of strange ships at sixty-five degrees true would have been consistent with his notion of where he believed the Farenholt, Duncan, and Laffey were located. Captain Tobin, dismayed to find himself separated from the battle line, somewhere off the starboard quarter of the cruisers, ordered his tin cans to ring up flank speed. As the commanders in the cruiser line prepared to open fire, the Farenholt was steaming about nine hundred yards abreast of the Boise; the Laffey was following, even with the Helena. At eleven forty-five, Scott didn’t have a clear picture. He radioed Tobin, “Are you taking station ahead?” Tobin replied, “Affirmative. Moving up on your starboard side.”
In his battle plan, Scott allowed for the possibility