Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [160]
The large vessel’s dark form was massive, eldritch, as it loomed off the Cushing’s port bow in the flash-lit darkness. This was the Hiei. The recognition of the battleship spread down the van, from the Cushing to the Laffey to the Sterett to the O’Bannon. Parker came right, with his crews swinging the rudder by hand, and fired six torpedoes by local control. The range to their big target was about twelve hundred yards—too close to miss, but also too close for the torpedoes to arm themselves en route. A destroyer’s life expectancy within hailing distance of a battleship was short. The Hiei’s secondary guns and several destroyers tore into the Cushing, landing accurate fire on each of her gun mounts, and blasting her engineering plant with medium-caliber ordnance. She shook from the impact of hits from ships all around her, and very quickly her loss of steam power was complete. The other ships of the van, passing her on both sides, carried the battle forward, moving in and among Abe’s ships. Lieutenant Julian Becton, the executive officer of the Aaron Ward, wrote, “It was disorganized. It was individual, with every ship for herself. Perhaps if Tennyson had seen it he would have called it magnificent.”
The Laffey now found herself leading the American van. Tom Evins, her torpedo officer, was deafened by the ship’s battery as it fired on a destroyer ahead—“a roar so constant as to create the impression that there was no noise at all.” Though the ship had ridden in Scott’s van at Cape Esperance, each battle seized the mind in unique ways. For the sailors in the Laffey, that signature image was the Hiei, closer to hand now than anyone might ever have wished. The great vessel’s proximity registered stunningly on Evins through the time-slowing numbness of five senses strained by overload. “There, bearing down on us on a collision course from the port side, was what seemed to be the biggest manmade object ever created,” he said.
Richard Hale, the pointer in gun two, was startled to see the battleship’s bridge and superstructure through his pointer’s scope. “It was so close we could throw hand grenades and hit it.” The five-inch guns trained out and started a brisk cadence, joined soon, Hale recalled, by the chattering twenties. “The flight of our shells to the target was instantaneous,” he wrote. “We saw them penetrate their bulkheads and explode inside.”
“She was only about a thousand yards away, and there was clearly not a second to lose,” said Tom Evins. “It seemed like an eternity before I was able to launch our single spread of five gas-operated steel fish. Meanwhile the great battleship came relentlessly on, as if to crush us.” The effect from the destroyer’s point of view was like the head of a great ax slicing toward them through the water.
The Laffey’s captain, Lieutenant Commander William E. Hank, rang emergency full astern. Cross-connecting his engine and fire rooms, with burners full open, he then signaled emergency full ahead. The captain’s shiphandling had been a source of consternation and embarrassment to the crew when he showed a willingness to use emergency engine orders during routine docking. Now the circumstances required it. The destroyer leaped forward as her screws bit into the seas. Surging just past her fantail went the Hiei, “so close Hank could have hit her with a slingshot,” Julian Becton wrote. The destroyer’s gunners riddled the Japanese ship with guns of all calibers. A sailor named John H. Jenkins, impressed with the opportunity at hand, ran to a twenty-millimeter