Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [150]
The bomber formation was largely shredded in its five minutes over the task force. Its survivors winged out to the west. Just two of them would return to Rabaul. None of their torpedoes found the mark. The Atlanta found a solution on the departing planes and two more fell. Most of the damage Task Force 67 took from direct fire came from their own muzzles. The destroyer Buchanan, steaming ahead of the Atlanta and San Francisco, was hit in the after part of her stack by a five-inch shell. Excited gunners on the Helena briefly squirted their own superstructure with a twenty-millimeter cannonade, busting up a smoke generator and showering a gun crew with its noxious mix.
The seas around Task Force 67 were a junkyard of broken wings and parts of fuselages and motionless forms of enemy airmen held afloat by their torched life jackets. There was at least one surface engagement that afternoon—a ridiculous duel between a top-turret gunner in a downed Betty and the gunners on an approaching destroyer. It was over in a hurry for the defiant airman.
The Barton passed a downed Betty just as its pilot was climbing out on the wing. The destroyer’s skipper instructed his crew not to shoot, wanting to recover the aviator for interrogation. A chief petty officer ended the discussion by fixing a Thompson submachine gun at his hip and squeezing out a few bursts. “There was no comment from the bridge,” a witness said.
Not far from the Helena, two Japanese hung onto the wing of their plane. The younger of the two, evidently a teenager, was willing to be rescued. As an American boat approached, “almost pathetically he held out his hands,” Chick Morris said. But the boy’s companion, much older, “seized him angrily by the neck and yanked him back, slapping his hands down. When the boy struggled to free himself, the big fellow produced a pistol and shot him. Then, swimming away from the rescue boat, he turned defiantly and shot himself. We saw it very clearly.”
Turner’s transports escaped damage, but the San Francisco’s fire aft was serious. Flames were coming out both doors leading into Main Battery Control, incinerating its critical instruments. Hearing cries for help, Jack Wallace went in and nearly stepped on a man lying on the deck, moaning. It was one of his fire controlmen. “I got him over my shoulders with his clothes still smoldering and I half fell, half climbed down the port ladder and left him on the top of the hangar deck. Then I ran back up the ladder into main battery control and saw a man standing there with his clothes on fire and he couldn’t seem to walk. I led him into secondary conn, and stripped him of all his burning clothing. I asked him if he could walk and then pointed him out the door on the port side to the ladder. I made one more trip into Main Battery Control and picked up a young small kid about seventeen years old named Posh. He was burned horribly. His face was blackened. I carried him down to the deck below and got back to secondary conn just in time to get trapped when more fire came pouring out of both doors leading to Main Battery Control. So, I jumped out of the window in the forward part of secondary conn onto the top of the hangar deck. It was a long drop.”
On the hangar deck, Wallace was assisting some firefighters when he heard a feeble cry coming from a motor launch on the port side. He lifted himself to look over the gunwale and into the boat, where he saw the fire controlman he had rescued from Main Battery Control lying prone wearing nothing but shorts. “How he got into the boat I’ll never know. Large pieces of skin on his back were peeled half off. I yelled for him to climb out, which he did, into my arms, and I half carried, half dragged him to a stretcher out on the forward part of the hangar deck. I gave him a shot of morphine.” He then found several men lying in a passageway near the ammunition clipping room. One of them was Posh, “blackened and burned from head to feet.”
“He must have crawled in from the port side when I left him at the foot of the ladder. I asked ‘How are you doing Posh?