Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [135]
“With our air cover gone, the Japs had it pretty much their own way,” gunner’s mate Alvin Grahn recalled. “Dive-bombers and torpedo planes, like I say all mixed up. There were destroyers and cruisers zig-zagging all over the place and firing their guns like mad, and the Jap torpedo bombers had trouble trying to line up on the Hornet with so many other vessels in the way. The torpedo planes finally were able to find an opening along our starboard side and that’s when we really caught hell. One of them dropped a torpedo and then swooped up and over the flight deck. Somebody hit him good and he caught fire. Just a mass of flames, with the landing gear falling off and all. The pilot layed his plane right over and made a tight circle and came back and smashed into the port side.… The plane’s engine and fuselage penetrated four or five staterooms and kept right on going and ended up in the forward elevator pit. All this punishment left us without power or water pressure, dead in the water and fighting fires with bucket brigades.”
The Enterprise task force came under a final attack, too. For all the withering resistance their brothers had met over the American carrier task forces, the pilots who flew on Kondo’s final strike of the day, launched by the late-arriving Junyo, braved the gauntlet once again. They put a five-hundred-pound bomb into the San Juan that penetrated her thin decks and exploded beneath her, wrecking her rudder. Another bomb hit the forward turret of the South Dakota. Exploding atop the heavily armored roof, this blast had nowhere to go but up and out.
Every officer on the battleship’s bridge except one hit the deck. That officer was Thomas Gatch. The ship’s captain was standing on a catwalk forward of the conning tower, watching the Enterprise ahead of him through the evening mist. The popular commander, who prized a certain kind of honor from studying Napoleon’s wars, the literature of Shakespeare, and the history of the War Between the States, would say later that “it was beneath the dignity of a captain of a U.S. man-of-war to duck for a Japanese bomb.” The reward for his bravado was a spray of shrapnel that nicked his jugular vein. As the chief quartermaster hastened to pressure the wound, the ship’s doctor made his way to the bridge. Rumors flew that Gatch was near death. For him, readiness to do battle put everything else belowdecks. Spit and polish—out. Regimentation for its own sake—out. Discipline as a means of encouraging anything other than fighting efficiency—out. His medical condition was the chief topic among the crew for days.
As the Hornet foundered and listed, her fires out of control, carrying 111 dead, two American destroyers were detailed to ease her into death. The Mustin and the Anderson trained out their torpedo batteries on the carrier and fired, but each failed to put her under. The destroyers then turned to their guns, popping five-inch rounds into the Hornet’s waterline. After several hundred rounds, her fires were all the hungrier, but still she refused to go. It was after the Americans had left her to the night—around 1:30 a.m., with fires raging so badly that she would be of little use even if the Japanese seized her as a war prize—that Kondo’s men-of-war closed with the hulk. It was Japanese destroyers that finally put the Hornet under with their torpedoes.
The foregoing, evidently, was enough drama for one day. Disliking his chances with one damaged