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By Root 2010 0

in that half second where a vital decision must rise instantly from habit. A ship full of pilothouse philosophers, sailors’ lieutenants, and colorful China hands who inspire great fiction will lose a fight in an eye’s blink to a quick, tight, fast-firing crew who snaps their weapons on target and delivers direct fire by the express route. The victors in every battle from Pearl Harbor to El Alamein to Stalingrad had learned this important truth, and now Admiral Scott was among them. On the other side of the world, the Wehrmacht was locked in a death grip with the Russians at Stalingrad. In North Africa, British forces were winning a decisive victory over the Afrika Korps at El Alamein. Such a turning point was soon to be at hand in the South Pacific.

Seasoned under fire and wise to how he might have won previous fights still more convincingly, Scott knew what tools worked best. Like Turner, he had had time to think through the lessons of experience against the Tokyo Express. “FOR OPERATIONS AGAINST JAP LIGHT FORCES,” Scott wrote Halsey on the eighth, “SUBMIT NECESSITY FOR GUNS LARGER THAN FIVE-INCH. JAP STRENGTH IN TORPEDOES NECESSITATES EARLY EFFECTIVE HITS WHICH CAN ONLY BE MADE BY LARGER GUNS. EFFECTIVENESS OF FIVE-INCH AA FOR SINKING DD IS DOUBTFUL. ATLANTA CARRIES ONLY ABOUT 10 PERCENT COMMON MARK 32. IN ORDER MAKE BEST USE OF OUR DOUBTFUL TORPEDOES DDS WITH TWO OR MORE MOUNTS SHOULD BE ASSIGNED STRIKING GROUPS.”

Good men had died for Scott to gain these insights. Given his emphasis on larger guns, he must have lamented the order that detached Pensacola from the area. Having won at Cape Esperance largely on the blowtorching output of the Helena’s and Boise’s six-inch batteries, he preferred heavy-gunned ships to antiaircraft cruisers. But the Pensacola had her problems. The first of the new eight-inch-gunned cruisers built to treaty restrictions, she had a tendency to roll even in moderate seas, which compromised the accuracy of her guns. Her seams tended to pop whenever a full salvo was fired. So while the Juneau or the Atlanta might have seemed better suited to protecting SOPAC’s last aircraft carrier, the Pensacola got that job and the antiaircraft cruisers were thrown into the line despite Scott’s wishes.

The Atlanta didn’t have the additional space that other flagships had for an admiral and his staff, but Scott didn’t mind. “He spent a great deal of time on the bridge just as a unit commander does in a destroyer flagship,” Lloyd Mustin, the Atlanta’s assistant gunnery officer, said. “The captain’s chair was in the traditional starboard corner of the pilot house. There was a similar chair on the port side. Admiral Scott inhabited that through many long hours, day and night. The officers of the deck spent hours with him in the pilothouse. Sitting inside the door to the bridge wing, feet up on a chair, he was accessible, friendly, and conversational. He discussed anything and everything.” Typically an admiral kept his own staff apart from the captain’s wardroom. But Scott didn’t mind mingling with the leadership on his host flagship. “We were the eyes and ears of the captain of the ship. We were also Admiral Scott’s eyes and ears when he was not on the bridge,” Mustin said.

Then a dispatch came down from Kelly Turner’s headquarters. It was a shocker. It said, in effect, that when Callaghan’s and Scott’s forces merged into a single force, to be designated Task Group 67.4, Scott would take second seat to Callaghan. Halsey was personally close to Scott. But because Callaghan had held the rank of rear admiral for fifteen days longer than Scott, tradition forced an absurd result: Callaghan, the chief of staff to a theater commander who had been removed for his lack of battle-mindedness, was relieving Scott, the only proven brawler in the American surface fleet admiralty, as officer in tactical command of the striking force.

When Callaghan served in the heavy cruiser New Orleans, he befriended a medical officer named Ross McIntire. When McIntire became President Franklin Roosevelt’s personal physician, he recommended