Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [159]
But guns were the USN’s weapon of choice. By the white light of his carbon-arc fixtures, Mustin could see his own salvos hitting the water just short of the Akatsuki’s searchlight. He called corrections to his spotter, who upped the pointer elevation and walked the next one right in. As their target, followed by another destroyer, crossed Atlanta’s bow heading north, “You couldn’t help but see our projectiles were just tearing into it,” Mustin said. “Shooting into a destroyer-size hull from six hundred yards, you just don’t miss. You just don’t miss.”
The Akatsuki paid the price of all vessels that uncloaked themselves first in the night. Gunfire from the Atlanta, the San Francisco, the Helena, and several destroyers converged on her. Soon she was wrecked and afire, her steering, power, and communications gone, her deadly torpedoes still in their tubes.
The destroyers Inazuma and Ikazuchi, trailing the Akatsuki just ahead of the Hiei’s starboard beam, exited the rain squall and took over the lead. Japanese naval doctrine generally dictated the firing of torpedoes prior to the opening of bright, position-revealing gunfire. Conning his ship past the battered Akatsuki, Commander Masamichi Terauchi, captain of the Inazuma, saw silhouettes of American ships ahead, blinking with flashes of gunfire. He had had no instructions from Abe. The first signal that came from the Hiei conveyed not orders, but requests for information. In the absence of orders, Terauchi and his torpedomen would do what they did best. Launching at angles to lead the American line, they were as prodigious as ever. Each of the destroyers loosed six torpedoes toward the Atlanta, their closest target, before the Ikazuchi was hit hard, taking at least three eight-inch shells around her forward gun mount. The burning ship was forced to retire.
Soon after the shooting started, Callaghan ordered, quite superfluously, “Odd ships commence fire to starboard, even to port.” Given that steel was already flying, and that the American column was in the midst of executing a sharp turn, the use of a command based on ships’ relative headings—starboard and port—was “a display of futility,” Mustin thought. “Starboard was north with us and port was south, but it was east for other people and so on.” Though Callaghan was trying to avoid wasteful concentrations of his gunfire, micromanaging a captain’s decisions in battle was risky business. A ship’s own officers usually knew what they should be shooting at, especially after the shooting had started.
Commander Jesse Coward, the captain of the destroyer Sterett, third in line, had all guns and his torpedo tubes trained on an approaching target to port. But when Callaghan’s order came, requiring odd ships to fire to starboard, he complied begrudgingly, swinging his weapons to the opposite beam. Lieutenant Cal Calhoun, the gunnery officer, ordered his fire controlmen to seize hold of the closest enemy target to starboard. A light cruiser, the Nagara, filled that bill.
Several of the Sterett’s mounts were loaded with star shells. From four thousand yards their effect was spectacular if ineffective, detonating on contact and enveloping the light cruiser’s forecastle in magnesium-phosphorous pyrotechnics. The next four-gun salvos from Coward’s tin can were common projectiles. These packed a harder punch, and Sterett fired a dozen such salvos at the Nagara as she passed by. Life and death had been set loose on their own schedule, and task force commanders no longer had much to say about it.
When the Cushing opened fire on a destroyer skitting away to the east, probably the Yukikaze, Captain Parker