Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [106]
The Boise was struck by an eight-inch shell that dented and ruptured her side plating above her waterline armor belt, shattering the sleeping compartments used by the ship’s junior officers. A minute later, two or three smaller rounds registered, blasting Captain Moran’s cabin and leaving it a wreck of twisted metal. A clock was knocked from the skipper’s desk and shattered on the deck, frozen at five minutes to midnight as the flames spread.
Tom Wolverton, the Boise’s damage-control officer, was providing a play-by-play to crew belowdecks that was “getting hotter than a Joe Louis fight broadcast.” Up to then, Wolverton had little to do in his assigned capacity. Scott’s fast-firing cruisers had been delivering an overwhelming one-way barrage. But in battle, circumstances are usually temporary and perception almost always fragile. A short lull followed in which Scott tried to reassemble his straggling line behind the San Francisco. As he called course changes over the radio, the Japanese used the reprieve well. They continued removing bombardment rounds from their hoists, replacing them with armor-piercing rounds engineered to kill ships.
As the Boise plunged along in the San Francisco’s wake, Moran found that his radars were becoming almost as badly impaired as his own vision. It was hard to pick out targets in the abundant intermingling of ships. Many shell splashes were large enough to return an echo to his scopes. Though other ships made good use of star shells to silhouette their targets, Moran chose to use his searchlights now. Locating a target off his starboard beam, he ordered his searchlights on. As his turrets raged out at what he thought was a light cruiser, fires sprang to life on that ship. The Boise was revealed in bright relief by her own mirrors. The Japanese ship returned fire and scored at least four times.
Ahead, on the Boise’s starboard bow, there appeared a larger ship whose directors pegged Moran’s ship cold. This vessel, probably the heavy cruiser Kinugasa, “fired at Boise unopposed,” Moran would write in his action report, “shooting beautifully with twin eight-inch mounts. She straddled us repeatedly along the forward half of the forecastle, and made two known hits.” The first struck the barbette underneath turret one, crashed through a deck, and lay in a compartment near the turret stalk, an explosive-laden steel time bomb with a defective fuze fizzing along. Alive to the pending catastrophe, the turret officer, Lieutenant Beaverhead Thomas, pushed open the turret’s small escape hatch and ordered the crew to exit. As he guided the gun house gang to safety, he reported to Commander Laffan, his gunnery officer, that he had abandoned station. He said, “The fuze hasn’t gone off yet. I can still hear it spluttering.” They were his last words. The muffled blast of the 250-pound projectile vented through passageways, hatches, and vents, incinerating or asphyxiating a hundred men in a flash.
The survivors of turret one, eleven men, exited to the deck just in time to be batted down by two more hits. One plastered the faceplate of turret three, just forward of and below the bridge, gashing the barrels of its trio of rifles and spackling the superstructure with shrapnel. Another shell from the Kinugasa entered the water short of the Boise, precisely as intended. This projectile was designed with a protective cap that broke away on impact and enabled it to retain its ballistic properties underwater. It hit close enough aboard to swim downward and penetrate the hull nine feet below the waterline. Bursting through the hull and