Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [152]
Naval tradition is ever rife with superstition, but sometimes the ill signs are so powerful that they operate in the other direction. In Callaghan’s force, the number thirteen was so prevalent—thirteen ships from Task Force 67 were headed to tangle with the Japanese on Friday the thirteenth—that the tide of superstition shifted. When the commander of the Portland, Captain Laurance T. DuBose, read the instructions Turner had given Callaghan, he showed them to his exec, Commander Turk Wirth, who made virtually the same remark Callaghan had on receiving them: “This is suicide, you know.” Talk of battleships inspired that kind of thinking. DuBose called Wirth’s attention to the date, November 12, and added, “If we can get across midnight into tomorrow, we may make it.” Wirth got what his captain was driving at. DuBose had been president of the Naval Academy class of 1913 and considered thirteen a lucky number.
The last ship in Callaghan’s column had additional cause for concern as Friday the thirteenth approached: the USS Fletcher was the thirteenth ship in line, named in honor of Frank Friday Fletcher, and had the hull number 445, whose sum was 13. But the destroyer’s Georgia boys weren’t spooked. The signs were so luridly ominous as to become a source of general amusement. The Fletcher’s exec, Commander Wylie, referred to the giddy hilarity that accompanied their anticipation as “triskaidekaphilia.” Let the night come, whatever it may bring. They were U.S. Navy sailors and the 91st Psalm was their shield: “You will not fear the terror of night.… A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” More worrisome than numerical coincidence was the sense Wylie was getting that Callaghan didn’t seem to know fully what he was doing. At least he didn’t seem to appreciate what the newest tools of his trade could do. The Fletcher, the O’Bannon, the Helena, the Juneau, and the Portland all had the new high-frequency SG search radar. Callaghan’s flagship, the San Francisco, had not yet been modified. Wylie tried to point out the need for the flag commander to have access to an SG, but never got a response.
“If Callaghan had had any understanding of things, he would have given fairly serious thought to moving over to the Helena,” Lloyd Mustin said. “There had been opportunities for Gil Hoover to make known to Callaghan that he had this capability and give him some outline of what it amounted to.… But if any such exchange had occurred it was not known to us in the Atlanta.… If he really had stopped to recognize what he had there in his SG radar capability, he would indeed have given important thought to transferring his flag.” Just as Callaghan had ascended to command—by tradition—he selected his flagship the same way: Tradition held that the heaviest ship in a force serve as its flagship. Norman Scott had made the same decision in October, riding in the San Francisco in the Battle of Cape Esperance. Having served as Scott’s flagship recently, she was fitted with a complete flag suite. These factors encouraged her selection now, even though another heavy cruiser in the group, the Portland, had the SG radar, too.
As Lieutenant (j.g.) Bennett left the San Francisco’s bridge at the end of his watch, he recalled that exactly a year ago, on November 12, 1941, Bruce McCandless had led a clinic for officers in the gunnery department. The handout he prepared analyzed matchups between the San Francisco and various enemy ship types. A Kongo-class battleship was included “only to show disparity of their fighting strength,” Bennett said. “It was considered an unlikely encounter” and scarcely worth game-boarding, for the weight of a full salvo from such an opponent was five times that of an American heavy cruiser.
Callaghan and Captain Young were hunched over the chart desk with the navigator, Rae Arison, when Bennett joined them. The