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By Root 1776 0

a large audience ashore. Searchlights stabbed and intersected, playing briefly on their targets then blinking out when the opposing gunners caught on. From on high floated star shells and flares. There were moments when the men in the ships, too, indulged themselves as onlookers and marveled. Commander Coward of the Sterett noted that the Japanese were firing “a form of firecracker or sparkle effect with brilliant white flashes fired low between the two forces with the apparent intention of blinding our cruisers.” These were surely the airburst incendiaries loaded in the hoists of the battleships and meant for the men of Henderson Field.

At the start of it, the exec of the Sterett had told his gunners not to bother manning their weapons, as he didn’t think a destroyer’s small guns would have any work this night. But this battle had no precedent in their experience. Ahead, they could see the Nagara delivering a beating to the Cushing, whose engineers were trying to use the lull to get her engines going again. The Laffey was in a crossfire, too. The Sterett’s gun crews concentrated on the Nagara for a while, until they found a larger target, the Hiei, within range. Looming to port, the great ship drew their fire in to two thousand yards, by which time the battleship underwent a sudden transformation from “a ghostly gray” to “a brilliant orange” as flames seemed to take hold of her from stem to stern.

While the formations surged through one another, a Japanese destroyer, possibly the Harusame, appeared a thousand yards on the Sterett’s starboard bow. Coward launched two torpedoes at this vessel, and his gunners turned loose several full salvos at eight hundred yards. Though the torpedoes never could have armed, somehow the enemy ship was seen to rise from the water by her stern. This gut punch, probably landed by another ship, left the enemy’s after mounts swallowed in flames and her stern glowing a cherry red. Watching from the director, Lieutenant Calhoun found himself shouting, “Oh, you poor son of a bitch!” As he recalled, “The water around her seemed to boil, and her hull threw off steam with a hiss that we could hear aboard the Sterett.” Calhoun passed news of this to his gun captains over the phones. “I told them to send their powder monkeys up the ladder to the main deck so they could see what they had just done.” But there was little time to celebrate.

Around this time the Sterett fell into a withering enemy crossfire from her port side. “It was as if a huge star shell had burst and illuminated the sea. It was like noon on a bright sunny day,” Perry Hall recalled. The Hiei and other ships were focused on her. The foremast buckled as radar and radio antennae were carried away. Shrapnel peppered the gun director, felling most of the fire-control team. Cal Calhoun took a shower of steel into his kapok life jacket and battle helmet but emerged, improbably, no worse for the wear.

As fires ignited and began to spread, the firefighters discovered that the mains lacked pressure. Shambling about in their flashproof clothing and asbestos pullovers, they played weak streams from torn hoses on the conflagration aft. Keeping a good footing on decks slick with blood was difficult when the ship was veering to and fro. A shell slammed into the galley locker, scattering potatoes about. The screams of the wounded pierced the night and mingled with more sober voices directing the firefighting. “The number-four handling room was a near holocaust,” Perry Hall said. “Bits of burning bedding smoldered on the bunks, burnt bodies were scattered about the decks, and water poured into a shell hole, just above the waterline, whenever the ship wheeled to port or starboard.… The stench of burning flesh and powder made breathing difficult.”

The Sterett took eleven direct hits, all on her port side, all above the waterline, and sustained severe shrapnel damage from many near misses. Her after deck house and number three gun, an unshielded open mount back aft, were engulfed by flames that brightly illuminated the flag on the small ship’s mainmast