Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [156]
As time passed, the advantage Callaghan could have seized from the radar faded toward a vanishing point. “When we finally had the whole formation in view, they were about ten thousand yards,” Graff said. “Pretty soon they were within five thousand yards. Then three thousand.” As Chick Morris in the Helena saw it, Callaghan drove ahead in a manner “as uncomplicated as that of a train rushing headlong into a tunnel. Callaghan and his staff had decided to do the unexpected and to do it quickly, and so we steamed into the dragon’s mouth with every man at every gun on every ship holding his breath and waiting for the inevitable eruption.”
AS RANGE DIALS spun downward, destroyermen up and down the line wondered why they hadn’t been released to make a torpedo attack. In the Aaron Ward, the radar officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bob Hagen, expected the commander of Destroyer Squadron 12, Captain Robert G. Tobin, to order his tin cans to prepare their undersea missiles for use. “We knew the bearing, speed and range of the enemy. But I don’t think we ever moved our torpedoes,” Hagen said. “It never occurred to the captain, but this is what destroyers were for in a surface action.”
In the Battle of Cape Esperance, Tobin had served in the Farenholt, as the destroyer squadron commander. That night, both his ship and the Duncan had suffered heavily from friendly fire. The experience might well have made him cautious about the risks of operating destroyers independently of the line. In the gun director of the Sterett, the third ship in the van, Lieutenant C. Raymond Calhoun heard his chief fire controlman call out: “Solution! Enemy course 107—speed twenty-three knots!” From there it would have been simple trigonometry to set a spread of torpedoes on an intersecting course. Calhoun called the solution to the bridge and received silence in return. According to Calhoun, “There was no order from the OTC [the officer in tactical command—Callaghan] to do anything but move right down the middle, between the two Japanese forces.” Destroyer crews at this time were more thoroughly drilled in gunnery than torpedo firing. The Navy had never really urged or rewarded anything else.
Bill McKinney, the Atlanta electrician’s mate, served on a damage-control party belowdecks. His job was to stand by within reach of a large steel locker full of damage-control and rescue equipment: ledges, chocks, lines, rescue breathers, oxygen masks, hoses, lanterns, and flash-protective clothing. He checked in with Central Repair—“Manned and ready”—then dogged the hatches and sat tight as the vibrations of the accelerating engines seized the deck, the bulkheads, the entire ship. When the ventilation system shut down, the predominant sound in McKinney’s space was the metallic whining of the two ammunition hoists that ran from the magazine below him to a five-inch twin mount directly above him. “I said a short prayer and waited,” he wrote.
IT WAS ABOUT 1:40 A.M. when lookouts in the Cushing, leading the American column, saw a strange ship slide past. Captain Parker radioed Callaghan this first visual contact with Abe’s van. “There is a ship crossing bow from port to starboard, range 4,000 yards, maximum.” Another ship appeared, followed by a larger one.
The destroyers Yudachi and Harusame, way out in front of Abe’s formation after the two course reversals in the rain, were the first of Abe’s vessels finally to emerge from the dark. The Japanese destroyers were widely dispersed around the core of the flotilla, the Hiei and Kirishima, led by the light cruiser Nagara. The third and largest of the ships that the Cushing spied was most likely the Nagara.
While the Helena continued