Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [143]
Three U.S. convoys were en route to Guadalcanal. Having returned to Espiritu Santo, where they hauled aboard new stocks of five-inch ammunition to replenish their depleted magazines, the men of the Atlanta found themselves ordered back to sea. At 8:30 a.m. on November 9, with Norman Scott aboard as task force commander, the Atlanta led four destroyers, the Aaron Ward, Fletcher, Lardner, and McCalla, out of Espiritu Santo escorting three cargo ships. Before dawn on the tenth, another group left Espiritu Santo—the San Francisco, embarking Rear Admiral Callaghan and commanded by Captain Cassin Young, who had relieved Captain Charles H. McMorris with the heavy cruiser Pensacola, the Helena, and the destroyers Cushing, Laffey, Sterett, Shaw, Gwin, Preston, and Buchanan. Admiral Turner himself was under way from Nouméa leading a group labeled Task Force 67. His flagship, the transport McCawley, led the transports President Jackson, President Adams, and Crescent City, escorted by the cruisers Portland and Juneau and the destroyers O’Bannon, Barton, and Monssen. After the transports had safely reached anchorage, Turner decided to assemble the cruisers and destroyers into a single striking force.
On the morning of the eleventh, Scott’s Atlanta task force reached Guadalcanal, and its three transports started unloading troops near Lunga Point. After dark, Scott’s warship escort joined Callaghan’s. Turner’s amphibs landed six thousand men, bringing the U.S. garrison on Guadalcanal to twenty-nine thousand. Halsey ordered the Pensacola and two destroyers, the Preston and Gwin, to return and fortify the Enterprise task force. That night the combined cruiser force swept Savo Sound but found nothing. At dawn on the twelfth, another group of transports arrived and anchored off Kukum. As these vessels came under fire from a Japanese shore battery after sunrise, the Helena, Shaw, and Barton silenced it.
The quiet of early morning was a surreal time, the sea glassy calm, the clear sky warmed by a bright sun. Inbound Japanese planes were still hundreds of miles away. On the Helena, blasting unseen targets ashore, “The gunners fired as though at rehearsal—as though Guadalcanal were a target being towed past for their convenience,” Chick Morris wrote. “For more than an hour our bombardment mowed down the island’s coconut trees and drilled tunnels in the jungle. Seabee bulldozers might have done the job as well, but hardly with such fantastic speed. As the shells burst upon impact, spraying shrapnel for yards around, we watched enemy troops scrambling in panic up the hillsides. We watched them die.” The destroyers Buchanan and Cushing razed the shoreline westward, destroying several dozen small barges lying along the beach and enemy ammunition and supply dumps farther inland.
Valuable though this work was for the infantry, the Navy’s greatest challenge lay at sea. And in Norman Scott, the fleet had the right man available to meet it. In the Battle of Cape Esperance, he had stared into the void of night, squinted at the flash of enemy powder, studied the silhouettes of unknown ships, and carried his force through to a victory. Though it wasn’t a resounding victory, it had put vital seasoning into a man who was by nature already a fighter. Afterward, Scott had the sole claim to status as a victorious surface-force commander. He had absorbed the lessons of his experience and acted on them with a focused seriousness.
One lesson arrived swiftly: that war is the craft of putting ordnance on target decisively, and it is really nothing else. This lesson was being learned the world over in more than a dozen languages. The rigmarole of military life, after all, was designed in part to shape the character of men to respond effectively