Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [102]
The Salt Lake City’s heavier guns lashed out to starboard, planting a straddle just short of what was identified as a cruiser, probably Goto’s flagship, the Aoba, four thousand yards away. The director was ranged up three hundred yards and another salvo went out. “The second never touched the water,” the cruiser’s action report declared. “All hits.”
As the night blossomed in flames, Captain Moran of the Boise, wired for sound wearing headphones and a steel helmet, shouted to his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander John J. Laffan, “Pick out the biggest and commence firing!”
The Boise’s directors were fixed on the same ship the Salt Lake City was targeting, the leader of the Japanese column, the Aoba, a mere forty-five hundred yards distant, forward of the starboard beam. In the Boise’s depths, in Central Station, the damage-control officer, Lieutenant Commander Tom Wolverton, decided it was time to relieve the tension. Recalling his four-year-old son’s panicked response the first time he rode on a roller coaster and clanked his way to the summit, he gathered his deepest baritone and shouted so that everyone could hear him: “Daddy, I want to go home now!” The effect worked magic as grins spread over a dozen faces and his crew settled back and relaxed. When Captain McMorris in the San Francisco saw a destroyer-sized target to starboard and persuaded himself that the ship could not possibly belong to Tobin’s squadron, he opened fire, too. Task Force 64’s cruiser column was fully engaged, opening fire from rear to fore.
In the aborning age of radar, the stately traditional method of firing ranging salvos first, then walking shells to their target by progressive correction was a thing of the past. In Mikawa’s blitz against Riefkohl, the Japanese performed the old ritual well. Four salvos were fired short of the Vincennes and Quincy before blood was finally drawn. Now, with microwave radar laying the guns, fire controlmen tapped the power of Newtonian physics. With electron beams cleansing their equations of errant human perception, opening salvos usually yielded immediate straddles and hits. Several outlying shells from the Boise’s first broadside were seen to hit a heavy cruiser. After a correction of “up one hundred” was dialed in to the rangekeeper, extending the reach of the guns by a football field’s length, the next salvo registered more heavily and the Japanese ship was soon buckling and burning under a radar-controlled barrage. It happened so fast, the Japanese never knew what hit them.
Variations in the efficiency of individual gun crews soon turned the structured cadence of full-salvo fire into a continuous staccato as single guns waged their own fights in parallel trios from turret to turret. When the firing cycle reached full tilt, Moran’s and Hoover’s capacity to monitor the action with their own senses was obliterated by their ravenous muzzles, turned out and blasting away just forward of their bridge stations. When Scott led his cruisers in an unsignaled turn to the northwest, Moran’s conning officer could make out the San Francisco ahead only by the flashes of her gunfire and the periodic blinking of her fighting lights.
Ensign Weems in the destroyer McCalla, at the end of the American column, mistook the output of the cruisers for machine-gun fire. The rolling stream of six-inch tracers looked like the fire from the 1.1-inch “Chicago pianos.” The Japanese, witnessing this from the business end, would discuss the appearance of these “machine-gun cruisers.” Through the flash and concussion of the McCalla’s number three gun, firing directly over him, Weems had fleeting glimpses of the enemy. “I felt a wildly exultant joy in watching us let them have so much at such murderous range. If you stop and think—2,500 to 3,500 yards is point-blank