Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [108]
Observers throughout Scott’s task group believed the Boise was doomed. But despite the evisceration of her forward stations and the pyrotechnic display that bloomed overhead, her boilers and engines were intact. Moran’s engineers responded quickly to his order to flank speed. Down by the bow and listing to starboard, the ship sheered out of line to port, accelerating to thirty knots, just as another salvo from the Kinugasa raised a cluster of splashes right where the Boise would have been had Moran not changed course. All the while, her after turrets kept up the cadence in continuous fire. Soon her expenditure of six-inch ordnance topped eight hundred rounds.
To avoid the Boise ahead, Captain Small ordered the Salt Lake City’s rudder hard right and threw the starboard engine into reverse to sharpen the turn. This placed Small’s ship between the Japanese and the burning Boise. Silhouetted by the ship he was thus shielding, Small paid the price almost immediately. An eight-inch shell struck the Salt Lake City’s starboard side and exploded, dishing in the plating of the armor belt. Another penetrated the hull, passed through the supply office, and settled with a heavy clang on the deck plating of the fire room before exploding with a muffled, low-order blast. Though several men standing just six feet from the point of impact were uninjured, saved by untold failures of mechanics or chemistry within the powder charge, this explosion still managed to sever electrical cables, disable a boiler, and start a fire in the bilges that, fed by twenty-six thousand gallons of fuel oil leaked from a ruptured transfer line, grew hot enough to warp one of the ship’s heavy longitudinal I-beams and buckle the armored second deck.
As the Salt Lake City came clear of the burning Boise, which was falling out of line and limping away from the action, Small rang up full speed again as his battery trained on an enemy heavy cruiser forward of his starboard beam. The amidships secondary guns coughed a spread of star shells to a perfect bursting point beyond their target, a Japanese cruiser, three miles distant. The heavy cruiser’s searchlight shutters opened, shone briefly, then closed, and a ten-gun salvo roared out. When it landed—straddle, over—a correction was dialed into the rangekeeper, and the next four salvos touched nothing but steel. But for the Salt Lake City’s gallant interposition, the Boise might have been finished. The Boise would remain a burning beacon, and a pyre for more than a hundred dead, visible for miles, until her firefighters finally prevailed over the turret fires. At that point the ship, alone, seemed to vanish into the night.
On the Salt Lake City, circuits failed throughout the ship as the salvos hit. Captain Small lost steering control from the bridge. Receiving a mistaken report of fires forward, he preventively flooded his forward magazines. As steering was transferred to the after emergency steering cabin, the Salt Lake City’s engineers, bereft of steam from the forward fire room, closed the throttles to the outboard engines, leaving the two inboard screws to carry her load.
WITH THE FURUTAKA and the Aoba rent by shattering blows, Admiral Goto dead, and the sharpshooting and undamaged Kinugasa, too, turning a course north, the Japanese force began its retirement. At 12:16 a.m., Norman Scott brought the San Francisco onto a northerly heading as if to pursue. Wondering how many ships would be in a position to follow, he then thought twice about it and decided to retire. He recalled later, “The enemy was silenced and our formation at the time was somewhat broken.” A clear recognition of who was friend and who was foe had been the first casualty of battle, and from that followed much of the tragedy of the night. The Battle of Cape Esperance ended as if by tacit mutual assent.
It seemed that at least one Japanese captain was looking to exploit the confusion. From