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By Root 2054 0

appearance of the junior officer led them to change the subject, but that was easy enough. Callaghan recognized Bennett from the ship’s basketball team. Callaghan, a fan, had attended the team’s every game at Honolulu’s Aiea High School gym. The skipper was their only spectator, and his boosterism helped them battle to a first-place tie with the team from the battleship West Virginia, whose officers, Bennett contended, arranged with friends in the Bureau of Navigation to have the best athletes assigned to their ship. As the two recalled old times, Young noticed blood leaching through the sling on Bennett’s elbow, a minor wound inflicted by a wingtip of the Betty that hit them. “You’re in no condition to stand a watch,” Young said. “Go on below and get it looked at.” Bennett protested briefly that he’d just stood a watch, but orders were orders. According to Bennett, “I went below but I didn’t stay below. Having heard about the battleships, there was no way was I going to be in my bunk when this went down. I took a lap around the wardroom, then reported to Willie Wilbourne.” The gunnery officer told Bennett to take over a 1.1-inch mount on the fantail.

When the moon set, the starscape swelled. “I was praying to God to watch over us,” said Robert Howe in the Helena. “It is hard to explain how you feel looking out over the water into the dark of night knowing soon you would hear the report from the radar room, ‘Contact, ships.… ’ It was hard to keep from shaking.”

27

Black Friday

THE JAPANESE FAILURE TO DESTROY THE U.S. BEACHHEAD HAD BEEN worrying the emperor. Though he had recently praised his Navy’s efforts in an Imperial Rescript, a newer telegram told of Hirohito’s anxiety concerning this place, Guadalcanal. “A place of bitter struggles,” he called it. According to Matome Ugaki, “He expressed his wish that it be recaptured swiftly.”

Swiftness was certainly Raizo Tanaka’s style. The destroyer commander didn’t enjoy being a hostage to the squat, slow troop carriers. A destroyerman, he had pioneered the use of swift escorts as transports. Because they had the speed to approach, unload, and depart under cover of night, their use kept American pilots from blocking the reinforcement effort all by themselves. But the architect of the Tokyo Express no longer enjoyed the freedom to do things his way. The payloads carried by the small ships weren’t large enough to satisfy the ravenous needs of the Army. That was why now, churning south in the destroyer Hayashio, Tanaka sailed with the sows. His slow-footed transports were assured of facing air attack come morning if the infernal U.S. airfield was allowed to remain in business. The only way they would make it through was if the Combined Fleet’s heavy units could deliver more of what the Haruna and Kongo had given the American aviators less than a month ago.

Accordingly, Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, in command of the battleships Hiei and Kirishima, had been detached from Kondo’s Advance Force with orders to deluge Henderson Field with incendiaries again on the night of November 13. The idea of repeating Rear Admiral Takeo Kurita’s performance of October 13 made Abe nervous. He didn’t believe the Americans would allow the same plan to succeed twice. Like Tanaka, he was a destroyer specialist, but Abe was not dashing and audacious. Some thought it was telling that Abe’s task force was named the Volunteer Attack Force, a usage that seemed to suggest a change of psychology in the Combined Fleet. Prior to this, victory was generally assumed. Now, as momentum shifted in the southern islands, sailors were being asked to step forward and offer themselves to the flames. There had to be a way to neutralize the airfield. Soldiers on foot had failed to breach its perimeter. Pilots by wing had failed to beat its fliers in the sky. Ships, too, had failed thus far, but ships would try again. The Combined Fleet’s strategists had never envisioned the decisive battle looking like this.

By midmorning on November 12, three hundred miles north of Guadalcanal, Abe arrayed his force into battle