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By Root 1908 0

you felt you could take the night in your hands and wring it like a rag.” Over the mountains of the islands nearby, flashes of lightning made the clouds jump. From the black curve of Guadalcanal, Hartney heard the soft ringing of gongs and suspected it was marines signaling a warning of a naval bombardment. As he sat at his gun mount in the Juneau’s superstructure, he sympathized with his ground-fighting naval cousins. “ ‘Where in the hell is the fleet?’ they were asking in that hour,” he said. “We were the fleet and we were going out to show them that the navy, too, could face overwhelming odds. We were going to repay them for those weeks of courage when they lay in their foxholes and beat back the enemy.” The scent of gardenias wafting out from the island struck him as funereal.

The eighth ship in Callaghan’s line, the Helena, was buttoned down and restive. Her navigator was practicing shooting stars with his sextant, a couple of young officers on watch were talking Georgia Tech football, and a rummy game was quietly in progress in the coding room. As Callaghan’s thirteen ships passed Lunga Point in single file and turned north, there had been little traffic to report in the radio shack. Ashore, tracers could be seen whipping back and forth as infantrymen shot it out in the dark. When the first sign came of an enemy presence on the sea, it was almost an hour and a half after midnight on November 13. For Lieutenant (j.g.) Russell W. Gash, the Helena’s radar officer, all mystery evaporated as the number, formation, and bearing of the Japanese force appeared in bright relief on the PPI scope of his search radar. The light-echoes registered with metric precision: one group of vessels at 312 degrees true, range 27,100 yards, a second group at 310 degrees, range 28,000 yards, and a third at 310 at 32,000 yards. Judging by the relative brightness of the lumens, Gash believed that the two nearest groups were composed of smaller ships—probably escorts for the farthest group. The Helena’s five triple turrets turned out to port and were raised to their maximum elevation. As Callaghan’s and Abe’s forces advanced toward a collision, the speed at which their separation closed could be gauged by the whirring of the turret motors when the guns lowered to stay on target.

The radio logs documenting the approach showed Callaghan torn between his competing senses, querying his destroyers ahead about what they were actually seeing while the Helena dutifully weighed in, reporting contacts from the radar, which Callghan seemed to ignore. Nearly every question he asked the Cushing, leading the van two miles ahead of him, could have been answered almost instantly by the Helena, following half a mile behind. Callaghan placed his faith in people, not technics, a preference that was expressed by his selection of the ship that led his column. The Cushing’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Edward N. “Butch” Parker, was a veteran of the Asiatic campaign of early 1942, where he had fought in several battles in the Java Sea as a destroyer division commander. This made him one of the only destroyer officers in the Navy with experience in the type of close-range night battle that Callaghan sought. It didn’t seem to bother Callaghan that the Cushing’s fire-control radar hadn’t worked reliably since installation. The cost of that handicap was well compensated for by having a salt like Butch Parker at the head of his line.

In possession of an electronic picture, the Helena’s captain, Gilbert Hoover, and his gunnery officer, Commander Rodman D. Smith, chafed at Callaghan’s evident lack of interest in their electronic scouting. As he watched the wake of the Portland ahead, Hoover did not relish waiting to open fire. At Cape Esperance, Scott delayed until the enemy was a mere four thousand yards away. The fact that only one person at a time could send messages over the talk-between-ships radio made it impractical for Hoover or anyone else to raise questions.

The way Callaghan had arranged his column minimized the value of their most advanced sensors. In the