Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [12]
The Atlanta’s assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Lloyd M. Mustin, showed visitors this thick grove of firepower “with the same pride a mother would introduce her children,” said Edward Corboy, another Atlanta officer. A new ship was a complex system full of small flaws to fix. Mustin found that the Atlanta’s SC radar transmitter couldn’t send signals powerful enough to survive transmission through the foremast’s eighty-foot run of coaxial cable, bounce off a target, and return back through the receiver and the long cable to the radar room and produce a usable echo. He arranged for preamplifiers to boost the signal and, with adjustments to the receiver’s sensitivity, found that he could detect aircraft at fifty to sixty miles and surface ships at fifteen to twenty. He also saw to it that the Atlanta was outfitted with the new Mark 37 gun director. Coupled with the new high-frequency model FD fire-control radar, whose narrow beams returned a precise range on a target after it was located by the search radar, and a late-model power-drive gunsight that enabled him to slew rapidly to acquire targets, they were a powerful package. In impromptu training sessions, director crews zeroed their sights on subway trains carrying oblivious commuters across Manhattan’s East River bridges.
Three months later, on the day before Christmas, the ship was finished and ready for commissioning into the fleet. Under overcast skies at the New York Navy Yard, Margaret Mitchell was on hand again. As soon as she finished her remarks, the sun broke through over Brooklyn, catching sharply on the swords of officers and flashing on the gray sides of all those gun turrets. “A rather dull tableau suddenly was a scene of splendor,” Edward Corboy said. For the plankowners on the first U.S. warship commissioned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was an auspicious sign.
Under command of Captain Samuel P. Jenkins, the Atlanta shook down in the Chesapeake Bay, ran speed trials off the Maine coast, and was headed for the Pacific before many of her systems were complete. One didn’t have to be a veteran, or even a man, to admire her hard, monochromatic elegance. Elizabeth Shaw, the wife of one of her lieutenants, would write, “To my artist’s eye she was a thing of beauty and a true oceanic lady.” The wives had followed her on the journey from Atlantic to Pacific coast. At each place they were forbidden to board the ship, just as their husbands were forbidden from going ashore. Secrecy was the byword of the wartime Navy. Rumors were floated that arctic-weather clothing was due to arrive—“a glorious hoax,” Shaw wrote, “to keep the ship’s destination a secret even from the officers, for fear someone would tell a wife who would gossip.”
When the Atlanta arrived at Pearl Harbor on May 6, with orders to join Task Force 16, the Enterprise carrier task force, the Arizona’s commissioning pennant could still be seen flying above the wreck in mournful defiance. Death was persistent still. A thousand and a half bodies were believed to reside within the sunken battleships. The triumphs of Japanese airpower strongly suggested the need for task force defenses bolstered by ships like the Atlanta.
After taking part in the defense of Midway, the Atlanta returned to Pearl Harbor and soon found herself with new orders. When Jenkins announced to his crew that their destination was Tongatabu, the Navy’s South Pacific fueling base south of Samoa, all hands wondered why. “I think the answer lies in the Solomons,” an officer speculated.
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ON JUNE 22, 1942, thousands