Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [104]
The San Francisco’s errant turn had been a mystery to the officers in the lead destroyer. As the Farenholt’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Alcorn G. Beckmann, watched the flagship lead the other three cruisers in a turn inside the Farenholt’s own, he wondered at his ship’s own lagging pace. Scott’s cruisers, it seemed, were outrunning some of his destroyers. He had heard Captain Tobin respond to Scott’s query, “Affirmative. Moving up on your starboard side.” They would need to hustle to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between the American and Japanese lines.
Settling into a westerly course as the Farenholt led the destroyers in their separate column, the destroyer Duncan, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Edmund B. Taylor, plotted an unidentified radar contact eight thousand yards to the west and rang up flank speed to pursue it. The U.S. cruiser line was in full voice now, and by the light of the fires they were planting on his target, Taylor could see it was a cruiser. Soon another enemy ship appeared, following close behind the first. As Taylor brought the Duncan broadside to the enemy ships and prepared to launch torpedoes to starboard, he found himself in the difficult position of standing between Scott’s cruisers and their prey. To port, he saw the familiar silhouette of the Helena. As he overtook the light cruiser, he steered right standard rudder, looking to stay clear of the light cruiser’s line of fire.
Knowing that he had lost control of events, Scott tried to raise Tobin on the TBS. “How are you?” Scott asked the commander of Destroyer Division 12. “Were we shooting at Twelve?”
Tobin replied, “Twelve is okay. We are going up ahead on your starboard side. I do not know who you were firing at.”
Scott then ordered Tobin’s ships to display their recognition lights. They flashed momentarily in a proscribed pattern of green and white. With friends having declared themselves to friends, Scott directed his group to open fire again to starboard. Tobin would soon know all too well which ships Scott’s cruisers were targeting.
Ford Richardson, stationed in the Farenholt’s main battery director, “stood there transfixed watching the pyrotechnics. Our cruisers on one side of us were firing at the Jap ships on the other side of us.” Standing out of the hatch of the gun director, Richardson’s gunnery officer steered the fire of the forward five-inch battery into an enemy ship that had been brilliantly illuminated by star shells. When he dropped back down inside the director, Richardson, as his talker, followed him. “At that very instant,” Richardson recalled, “we were hit by a six- or eight-inch shell at the cross arm of the foremast, some twenty-five feet over my head!”
Tobin had just ordered his squadron to fire torpedoes at targets of opportunity when the airburst rattled the Farenholt’s decks. Shrapnel cut down several men in exposed topside stations. The heavier shards penetrated the rangefinder, slicing through a man standing forward of it. The wounded man was passed down from the rangefinder to Richardson. With a penlight he saw that the shrapnel had entered the man’s body behind the collarbone, exited below his arm, and reentered his body near the groin, leaving a big hole in his upper leg. Then it went through the deck. Richardson stopped the heavy bleeding by stuffing a T-shirt into his shipmate’s gaping wound and using his belt as a compress.
The hit sliced the Farenholt’s radar antenna from the foremast, exploding spectacularly and sending a shower of fragments that pierced the air flask