Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [134]
Just minutes later, the Japanese strike reached the Enterprise group. From high above the six-thousand-foot cloud ceiling, from astern the Enterprise, fell a waterfall of Vals, unopposed by U.S. fighters.
The newly outfitted South Dakota, the heaviest ship in the Enterprise’s screen, joined by the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan and the heavy cruiser Portland, put up a staggering volume of fire. “As each plane came down,” an American pilot reported, “a veritable cone of tracer shells enveloped it. You could see it being hit and bounced by exploding shells.”
Radar-directed five-inch gunfire was lethal. The South Dakota and the San Juan led the screen in downing a total of thirty-two enemy planes bearing down on Task Force 16. An officer on the Junyo was stunned by the paltry number of aircraft that returned. “The planes lurched and staggered onto the deck, every single fighter and bomber bullet-holed.… As the pilots climbed wearily from their cramped cockpits, they told of unbelievable opposition, of skies choked with antiaircraft shell bursts and tracers.” A bomber squadron leader would return to the Junyo “so shaken that at times he could not speak coherently.” But no defense could be perfect. Between ten seventeen and ten twenty, the Enterprise took three bombs through her flight deck. It was only by deft shiphandling that her new captain, Osborne B. Hardison, who had replaced Captain Arthur C. Davis just three days before the battle, evaded the deadlier missiles released by the torpedo planes. Good work by firefighting and damage-control crews prevented the bomb explosions from burning the carrier beyond salvation.
At ten twenty, a pilot returning from attacking the Japanese fleet crash-landed his damaged Avenger near the South Dakota. Mistaking the aircraft’s stout, cylindrical fuselage for a surfacing submarine, gunners on the battleship and nearby destroyers took the plane under fire. The destoyer Preston, maneuvering to rescue the pilot and his crew, had to veer away to escape being raked by fire from the battleship’s secondary guns.
No feat of shiphandling that day surpassed the one turned in by the captain of the destroyer Smith. During the air attack, a stricken Japanese torpedo plane, hotly pursued by a Wildcat, fell smoking toward the ship and crashed into her forecastle. As the flames engulfed the entire forward part of the destroyer, her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Hunter Wood, steered his burning vessel into the voluminous spray thrown up by the wake of the fast-stepping South Dakota ahead of him. The cascades of froth washed over the decks, bringing the fires under control.
The stricken Hornet’s chances were not helped by a signal that her captain had issued around noon via blinker light: “GO TO ENTERPRISE.” Her commander had intended the signal for the many American pilots overhead who were looking for a place to land. When the Northampton’s signal department repeated the signal, the Juneau’s commander, Captain Lyman K. Swenson, believed the message was meant for him. At once the antiaircraft cruiser turned out of formation and rang up full speed to join Task Force 16 over the horizon. Task Force 17 badly needed the Juneau’s heavy antiaircraft battery. In the thirteen-minute-long air attack that morning, her gunners claimed credit for a dozen of the many Japanese planes that were seen to fall around the task force.
The American command’s insistence on operating its carriers separately doomed the Hornet to a lonely death. At 1:35 p.m., having recovered his returning strike aircraft, Kinkaid elected to withdraw south with Task Force 16. The Enterprise, with the South