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The officer-of-the-deck for the first dog watch, Lieutenant Jack Bennett, listened to the admiral conversing with Captain Cassin Young as they stood on the starboard bridge wing. “The wind carried their voices to me as I paced the deck and I was able to clearly observe the demeanor of each,” Bennett said. “They were discussing the unannounced fact that there were battleships in the Tokyo Express.… Captain Young … was in an understandably agitated state, sometimes waving his arms, as he remarked ‘This is suicide.’ Admiral Dan Callaghan replied, ‘Yes I know, but we have to do it.’ ” As Bennett saw it, Callaghan was “calm, unemotional, resolute and perhaps resigned to his fate.”

Rumors had a way of sweeping a ship like wildfire. Word spread through the San Francisco that Callaghan deemed his orders a death sentence. “We were all prepared to die. There was just no doubt about it,” said Joseph Whitt, a seaman first class whose battle station was in turret one. “We could not survive against those battleships.”

Callaghan was fifteen years old when, three days after Easter in 1906, the great earthquake struck San Francisco. In the chaos and wreckage, he had done what a teenager could to help the injured. His prep school, St. Ignatius, was destroyed. As the fires consumed the school and its church, one student thought that “all hell seemed dancing with joy.” For the rest of the term Callaghan was left to study Virgil and Dante in a makeshift classroom amid the city’s ruins while the Jesuits rebuilt their school. For the men of the San Francisco and the rest of Task Force 67, it would begin that afternoon. Inbound now at twenty thousand feet, moving swifly toward the island, came a wave of twin-engine Betty bombers and thirty Zeros, fuel burning fast on half-empty tanks.

BELIEVING THAT U.S. CARRIER STRENGTH had been eliminated entirely in the Battle of Santa Cruz, Yamamoto planned to neutralize the last bastion of U.S. airpower in the theater, stubborn Henderson Field, with a one–two punch of air attack and naval bombardment. The Bettys were first spied by a coastwatcher near Tonolei, on Buin, around 1 p.m. The air-search radar on Guadalcanal registered the bogeys when they were still more than a hundred miles out. That was enough time for Kelly Turner to get his transports under way in Savo Sound, where they could maneuver and make themselves much harder targets, and for Callaghan to herd his cruiser task force into a protective antiaircraft ring around them.

Hiding above the cloud bottoms, the torpedo-armed bombers revealed themselves at the last minute, dropping down and buzzing Florida Island, throttles firewalled, descending steadily until they were right down on the water. U.S. fighter pilots were close in pursuit. Captain Joe Foss, leading a flight of eight Marine Wildcats and eight Army Airacobras, pushed over on them from twenty-nine thousand feet. The speed of his dive ripped loose the cockpit hood of Foss’s Wildcat. The Bettys divided into two groups and came in from the starboard beam of Turner’s northerly oriented formation. Unmindful of the heavy five-inch airbursts and twenty-millimeter tracer fire thrown up by the ships, which turned to present their sterns to the attackers, Foss and his boys chased the Japanese bombers right down to the deck, fifty feet above the water.

The Bettys fanned out wide, approaching in line abreast to avoid suffering multiple casualties from flak bursts. Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless in the San Francisco thought the twenty-one planes looked like “an old-time cavalry deployment.” The skies were filthy with the bursts of antiaircraft fire. When the planes were within five thousand yards, the San Francisco and the Helena turned out their main batteries and walloped the sea in front of the planes, intending for the tall splashes to force the pilots to veer away or stop them with a wall of water. This technique seldom if ever worked. Mainly, all the big guns accomplished was to interfere