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By Root 1885 0

too sensitive in punishing commanders for their incapability in carrying out operations,” Yamamoto conferred with his chief of staff, Matome Ugaki, and the two composed a letter to the chief of the personnel bureau: “If we do not approve of the skipper surviving when his ship goes down after hard fighting, we shall not be able to carry through this war, which cannot be settled soon. There is no reason why we should discourage their survival, while we are encouraging the fliers to survive by means of parachute. In a war which must be carried out against tremendous odds, I, as commander in chief, could not help feeling reluctant in issuing orders if I had to ask our skippers not to return alive when their ships sink.” A modern fleet, he felt, could go nowhere but down in the grip of such primitivism. The Imperial Navy would improve through experience and prevail over the decadent Americans only if its delicate sense of honor was kept somehow intact and experienced commanders were not required to immolate themselves on the dubious altar of pride.

Twenty-two miles northwest of Savo Island, the Furutaka went dow stern-first. Thirty-three officers and crew went down with her, with 225 more missing in action. The two other heavies, the Aoba, badly mauled, and the Kinugasa, scarcely scratched, set course for Shortland Island with their destroyers.

IT WAS NEARLY 3 A.M. when the Boise was finally located again. Captain Moran’s battered light cruiser fell in with the San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Helena, Buchanan, and Laffey and headed south. Off the western end of Guadalcanal, heading for his own preset rendezvous point, Admiral Scott wanted to ring up maximum speed to elude the radius of enemy bombers and pull his ships farther under the covering shelter of the aircraft of the South Pacific Force. But the Boise was nearly a cripple. Rescue and recovery crews were exploring the burned-out forward turrets. Scores of men had been trapped in those flames. A few were revived with artificial respiration, but nine in ten were dead of asphyxiation or concussion. Mike Moran slowed to twenty knots to reduce the sea pressure on his shored-up forward bulkheads. The Farenholt survived her bashing by American cruisers. She extracted herself from the vacated and bloodied battlescape with some deft and rapidly applied damage control: tossing heavy gear—whaleboat, depth charges—over the listing side, transferring fuel from port to starboard, and running portable pumps and a bucket brigade to lighten the load till her waterline holes were dry. She trailed the cruisers by fifty miles but reached Espiritu Santo under her own power.

Lingering behind while a repair party went aboard the Duncan in a futile attempt to salvage her, the McCalla searched Savo Sound for survivors and recovered 195 of them, nearly the entire crew of the wounded ship. When a dawn patrol of Wildcats from Henderson Field found the Duncan abandoned near Savo, her entire topsides melted by the fires, the flight leader noticed two big holes in her hull and remarked that her “bow end looked cooked.” With the arrival of dawn, American planes found the rest of Task Force 64 by its trail of bunker oil and followed it all the way home to the anchorage at Espiritu Santo.

Despite the carnage, much of it self-inflicted, Scott’s task force had plenty of cause for celebration, and that was just what the veterans of the battle did after they returned to Espiritu Santo on October 12. “As we pulled into harbor, we were a cocky bunch,” Laffey signalman Richard Hale recalled. “We wanted to paint a couple of cruiser and destroyer symbols on the side of our mount to let everyone know that the Laffey was a real fighting ship. We lost all fear of battle at that point, and getting away without a scratch while pounding the enemy meant that we were ready to win the war.” As turret crews mustered to clean powder residue out of their barrels, with two pairs of sailors, one inside the turret, the other out, pulling hard wire back and forth to scrub them clean, they relived the battle and recalled its