Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [114]
Then, somewhere offshore, fire was checked. The great armored turrets were brought in to the centerline, hoists stopped, and rudders turned so that the marauders could escape the coming of daylight. Morning revealed the results of the bombardment. In the foxholes and tents and covered pits around Henderson Field, forty-one men lay dead.
Littering the torn earth were hundreds of small tubes. The length of a finger, an inch in diameter, they were innocuous enough when inspected up close. Packed in large projectiles and showered in from a few miles out to sea, designed to fall at a certain angle and burst at the height of a telephone pole, their incendiary and fragmentation payloads dismembered aircraft and men within a wide radius of the airfield and its dispersal areas. The storm over the airfield played havoc with the camp and its infrastructure.
“Daylight disclosed what we had feared but dared not say,” Soule remembered. Tent camps shredded, gear ruined, and large holes scooped from the ground all across the encampment. “Atop our shelter were two big pieces of shrapnel, three inches thick, two feet long. Two men could barely lift them. A little jigsaw work showed that they were parts of one shell fourteen inches in diameter! Whole salvos had landed around us. The airfield had been clobbered.” Just one of the coastwatcher station’s three aerial masts remained standing, an Australian coastwatcher named MacKenzie wrote, “but luckily the teleradio transmitting aerial, in falling, had caught up in the head of a palm. We called 20J for a test report on our signal strength and readability. The answer came back at once: ‘Seems much improved. Have you been making adjustments?’ ”
Still, the raking that the battleships Kongo and Haruna delivered that night was no laughing matter. Until then, young marines had learned to strut with disregard for the Japanese howitzers hidden in the hills. Their shells seldom reached the airfield. A journalist assigned to the area wrote, “The Marines at the airport treat its shells the way city-wise pedestrians treat taxicabs—with caution, but without nervousness.” But these same men were thunderstruck by the heavier throw-weight of fourteen-inch guns. It wasn’t the weight of steel that got under their skin. “It was the hopelessness, the feeling that nobody gave a curse whether we lived or died,” said Lieutenant Commander John E. Lawrence, one of the Cactus Air Force’s air combat information officers. “It soaked into you until you couldn’t trust your own mind. You’d brief a pilot, and no sooner had he taken off than you’d get frantic, wondering if you’d forgotten to tell him some trivial thing that might become the indispensable factor in saving his life.” The physical and emotional penetrations of the 973 large-caliber projectiles would be felt for a long time to come. Some would call this bombardment “All Hell’s Eve.” It was the heaviest and most concentrated artillery shelling a fighting man had to that time ever endured.
The use of battleships in direct support of the Army was a rare departure from the typical Imperial Japanese Navy way. Guided by its old doctrine of seeing a decisive battle against the enemy fleet, it preferred to hoard its heavy combatants until they could be loosed for the lethal, war-ending blow. Rear Admiral Takeo Kurita had protested his orders to bring the two 762-foot-long monsters into Savo Sound so vehemently that Yamamoto had to threaten to lead the mission himself before he finally relented.
Covered by fighters flying from Buin, an airfield south of Bougainville, the battleships arrived in an audacious gamble. And it paid off. Up in smoke went all of Henderson Field’s Avenger torpedo bombers, a dozen of its forty-two fighter aircraft, and all but seven of its thirty-nine dive-bombers, along with nearly all of