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By Root 1774 0

of a torpedo loaded in the ship’s quintuple mount, which was aimed on the centerline straight ahead. With a hiss of compressed air, liberated by the penetration, the missile launched itself from the tube and wedged in the base of the destroyer’s forward stack. The impact tripped the starter that sparked the torpedo’s motor to life. The motor screamed for a while before burning itself out without exploding. Another shell hit the waterline on the port side, knocking out all power and communications in the forward part of the ship. Water rushed in, and she took a list to port. Altogether Captain Seaward’s tin can was holed at the port side waterline by four American shells. The hits on the Farenholt most likely came from one of Scott’s own heavy cruisers, the San Francisco or the Salt Lake City. Friendly ships shot up the Duncan, too. The destroyer had turned her forward batteries on a Japanese cruiser thirty-three hundred yards off her starboard bow when she took a hit to the bridge that knocked out fire control and set afire the handling room beneath the number two gun. The Duncan’s skipper, Commander Taylor, had no sooner managed to steady on a torpedo firing course and release his first fish when another shell burst forward of the director platform, disabling the director and seriously wounding the torpedo officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) R. L. Fowler. The chief torpedoman fired another torpedo by local control at a target that already had the attention of Scott’s cruisers. “Almost immediately she was observed to crumble in the middle, then roll over and disappear,” Taylor wrote. The Duncan would share her fate.

Another salvo floated in, blasting the chart house, killing the two men on the Duncan’s SC radar, a sonar operator, the bridge radioman, and the yeoman keeping the record of the battle. The main radio room was a total loss with no survivors, the fire there having merged with the blaze from the number one fire room, fed by fresh air pouring through a rent in the overhead. Taylor lost steering control and found himself circling helplessly in a left-hand turn. When the forward portholes were opened to vent the smoke and steam washing into the pilothouse, they served not as an exhaust, but as an intake for flames and smoke coming from the burning number two gun. Trapped in the asphyxiating cloud, Taylor could see little of the battle now but sensed that his circling had carried him out of the line of fire of the American cruisers. But the ship would not be saved. When the boilers in the after fire room lost their supply of feed water, the fire main pumps failed, too, and the flames spread, punctuated by detonations of five-inch projectiles. The crew fought a brave rear-guard action with handy-billy pumps, but Taylor could see it was futile. He helped lower wounded from the bridge level to the deck and then into the water. Then, with flames enveloping the pilothouse on all sides, he found his only route of escape was by jumping from the starboard bridge wing.

The gunfire from Scott’s cruisers was prodigious, and when their lines of fire got clear of the obstruction presented by the van destroyers, they did far worse to intended targets than accidental ones. Tracked by all four American cruisers as she advanced along the axis of Scott’s column, the Furutaka took a series of heavy hits that would prove to be mortal. The Japanese cruiser was hit in her number three turret and in the port torpedo tubes. Several of her Long Lances caught fire, and the flames drew more fire.

It was just a few minutes past midnight when the Salt Lake City swept the beams of her fire-control radar through a wide arc to the engaged side. The extent of destruction wrought by Scott’s ships was reflected in these high-frequency microwaves. All of the ships the radar found were marked in the visible wavelength by fires.

18

“Pour It to ’Em”

AS THE LAST HOUR OF OCTOBER 11 EXPIRED INTO A NEW DAY, GOTO’S squadron awakened to the reality that it faced a formidable enemy battle force. The Japanese cruisers had spent the first minutes of the battle