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By Root 1978 0

that his ships might wander from his grasp. His plan, which called for any stragglers to fall out on the column’s disengaged side, presupposed there would be an orderly engagement and that the stragglers would know where the American column was in the first place. The perils of ambiguous identity were severe. “Do not rejoin,” Scott wrote, “until permission is requested giving bearing in voice code of approach.” That was more or less what Tobin had just done—except that Scott’s ships had no way of knowing at exactly what bearing to starboard the friendly destroyers would appear. The Japanese ships they were tracking were to starboard, too.

As the ten-centimeter waves radiating from the Boise’s and Helena’s parabolic antennae pulsed along, their operators watched as the range between Scott’s broken column and Goto’s onrushing T closed to three miles. But still the muzzles were silent. When a Helena lookout reported to Captain Hoover, “Ships visible to the naked eye,” the ship’s young radar officer remarked to the navigator, “What are we going to do, board them?” A chief wondered aloud, “Do we have to see the whites of the bastard’s eyes?”

Hoover, the commander of the Helena, didn’t know what the problem was. He had commanded destroyers once. In May, he led Destroyer Squadron 2 in the Battle of the Coral Sea and later served in the Yorktown’s screen at Midway. From his time at the Bureau of Ordnance, he had learned about the Navy’s experiments with radar and knew the importance of drilling with his destroyers to get the most out of the new tool. He fully appreciated now, as the pips on his scope blinked toward each other, that a critical advantage was being frittered away by indecision.

The Helena’s skipper instructed his talker to raise the San Francisco and make a request to open fire. The transmission, per the fleet’s General Signal Procedure, went out as “Interrogatory Roger,” with “interrogatory” indicating a question, and “Roger,” code for the letter R, the signal for opening fire. This brought from Admiral Scott a quick affirmative response: “Roger.” Hoover repeated the request, just to be sure. And again came “Roger.”

But Scott thought he was answering a different question altogether. Captivated by his concern for the whereabouts of his destroyers, he was not ready to open fire yet. As he would explain afterward, he misinterpreted Hoover’s message as a request that he acknowledge Helena’s last transmission of a radar contact. Hoover, of course, was beyond caring whether Scott was receiving him. If Scott wanted to rely on what the radar was showing, he would have made the Helena his flagship. Hoover interpreted Scott’s response, “Roger,” in accordance with its standard meaning in the General Signal Book: as a code to commence firing.

With this critical exchange, which prompted the immediate and ferocious discharge of the Helena’s fifteen six-inch guns, a miscommunication compounded a previous miscommunication and the engagement that would be known as the Battle of Cape Esperance spun into chaos, beyond the control of any single commander.

Throwing gunfire against surface targets was what the Helena and her class did best. It was a light cruiser’s first and only business, and so it went, muzzles roaring, spent brass tubes kicking out to the turret deck, projectile hoists whining, shell trays loading, breeches slamming and spinning shut, and the turrets salvoing again. Fire-control doctrine prescribed a more deliberate cadence of salvo fire—all fifteen guns discharging at once—when targets were beyond twelve thousand yards from the ship. At closer ranges, the ship switched to automatic-continuous mode. The experience was elemental. “The night had been still and inky black a moment before,” Chick Morris wrote. “Now suddenly it was a blazing bedlam. The Helena herself reared and lurched sideways, trembling from the tremendous shock of recoil. In the radio shack and coding room we were sent reeling and stumbling against bulkheads, smothered by a snowstorm of books and papers from the tables. The clock leaped from its