Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [107]
Mike Moran noted proudly that the men on the port side five-inch battery were keeping their backs turned to the fiery spectacle unfolding to starboard. Their duty was to watch for threats on the disengaged side. A spout of flaming gases shot into the air from the Boise’s forward turrets and a jolt threw men to their knees. The eruption reached as high as the flying bridge and set much of the forecastle deck ablaze. It was followed by a torrent of hot seawater, debris, smoke, and sparks. A storm of sparking splinters and smoldering leather and burning bits of life jackets and life rafts blew across the superstructure. Struggling against fumes, firefighting teams dragged out heavy hoses, fed by mains in the after part of the ship.
In the Helena, high up in Sky Forward, an antiaircraft director station, Lieutenant Jim Baird held a stopwatch and a clipboard, keeping a record of the gunners’ performance. Counting salvos and tabulating hits, he shook his head in disbelieving admiration at what the new light cruisers could throw. His colleagues in Control were coaching the ship’s batteries onto a target to starboard, and splashes landed all around the ship, when a burning vessel was sighted in the U.S. column ahead. Word spread quickly that it was the Boise. As the Helena moved past her burning cousin, a flurry of salvos straddled her. Hoover’s men had gotten to know Moran’s crew at Nouméa, had gone head-to-head with them on the baseball diamonds there, bound by a pride that only the sailors of a fistfighting light cruiser could know. In the exercises under Norman Scott, their sense of squadron identity grew stronger. “The battle had been a game until then,” Chick Morris wrote. This put some fire in their fight. As Moran shouted, “Cruiser to starboard. Shift target!” Lieutenant Warren Boles in Spot One relayed the order coolly: “Set ’em up in the next alley. Pour it to ’em.” Noticing that one of the talkers with him on the fighting bridge was visibly jittery, Captain Hoover put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Take it easy, son. We’ll get you out of this.”
In the Boise, a gunner’s mate named Edward Tyndal pleaded with his superiors to allow him to enter one of the turrets to look for survivors. He refused to believe his younger brother, Bill, was not alive in there somehow, needing his help. When the firefighters tried to play their nozzles into the turrets via the hatches, they found several of them blocked by a grotesque clotting of charred bodies, men who had given their last while trying to escape. The stymied firefighters inserted their nozzles through the case ejection scuttles in the bottom of the turrets instead, and quenched their burned interiors.
As the HMS Hood had learned in her duel with the Bismarck, and as the Arizona had discovered in the sights of Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor bombers, an explosion in a powder magazine was the gravest calamity a warship could suffer. Moran knew he had to flood his forward magazines, but when he issued the order he found that the men assigned to the remote valve-control station were not alive to carry it out. The Boise was spared from disaster by the collateral effect of her gutting: Waves of seawater let in by the underwater hit flooded all the forward hull spaces, including the magazine. The water’s weight on the third deck imparted a wave motion to the long, slender hull that was strong enough to make some of the crew believe a torpedo had struck.
As smoke spread below, men wearing rescue breathers shored up bulkheads against the flood and set submersible pumps to race the waters flowing in through the breached hull. The medical department decided to move the sickbay from the wardroom to the battle dressing station. One of these patients, wearing a cast on his broken leg, limped quickly along on crutches. A sailor who had had his appendix