Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [161]
Having momentarily “blinded the Cyclops,” in Becton’s words, the Laffey pulled away to the north, under heavy fire but opening the range. Her narrow escape from a collision with a ship eighteen times her weight was only the first of her hurdles. As the ship headed for Savo Island, looking to use the island’s silhouette as camouflage, the trio of destroyers on Abe’s northern flank of his van, the Asagumo, Murasame, and Samidare, began crossing ahead of her from port to starboard and took the Laffey under fire. “The whole world suddenly seemed to burst into the brilliance of an eerie blue midday as the star shells exploded over our heads,” Tom Evins recalled. “The Laffey was designed for 37.5 knots but we were making in excess of forty,” wrote Lieutenant Eugene A. Barham, her engineering officer.
The battleship Kirishima, steaming on the Hiei’s port quarter, fired on the Laffey. Two shells bit into her bridge and her number two gun mount. According to Evins, “The next second I was hanging onto a stanchion, trying to keep myself from being thrown from the ship. She seemed to pitch herself into the air and then nosedive for the bottom. Tons of water poured down over our superstructure; it was difficult to stand under the weight of it and every man topside was drenched to the skin.” This particular excitement—a straddle by a fourteen-inch salvo—was followed by a shell that penetrated the deckhouse below his station in the torpedo director, passed through the ship, and hit the water, exploding in a mess of blue dye.
Around this same time, a torpedo hit the fantail. The explosion ripped loose fifty feet of the Laffey’s stern, all the way forward to gun number four, which was folded up onto the mount located just forward of it. The destroyer’s after fire room and electrical workshop were a gutted shambles. Up from within this deep wound swirled a terrible oil fire. Just forward of the blast, in the machinery spaces, the ship’s propeller shafts began spinning wildly as her screws, along with her rudder, were shorn away. According to Richard Hale, “I could see that a fire of that magnitude meant the magazine could blow at any time. I went back up to the bow to get as far away from that fire as I could.”
The crew of the Laffey’s gun number four were dead at their stations. Sailors looking to rescue them found a fuze setter still alive in his seat, but trapped by the shell hoist, which had been bent in over him. The smoke was overcoming him, and he was nearly unconscious. According to Ensign David S. Sterrett, only a skilled shipfitter with a blowtorch could have cut him out of the metal prison. “The air was full of thick, dark smoke,” Sterrett said. “There was nothing we could do. We handed him a gas mask so he could have a few more breaths of air.”
THROUGH THE SPRAY kicked up by his bow wave, Captain Hara in the Amatsukaze, advancing with Abe’s left-hand vanguard, saw five or six American ships 5,000 meters (5,450 yards) away on his starboard bow. They were silhouetted in the yellow-white light of airborne flares. “I gulped. My heart bubbled with excitement,” he wrote. Most likely these were Callaghan’s rear echelon: the Juneau leading the Aaron Ward, the Barton, the Monssen, and the Fletcher. Lieutenant Masatoshi Miyoshi, his torpedo officer, shouted, “Commander, let’s fire the fish!” Hara ordered, “Get ready, fisherman!” Ordering the helm left, he let fly with eight of them.
The Savo Sound fireworks show commanded