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By Root 2020 0

truck. Her after handling rooms were set afire, causing powder in ready service storage to ignite. Though the fires were horrible, it was the crew’s great good fortune that the ship’s engines were undamaged. With just two guns operable and a pair of torpedoes stuck precariously in damaged tubes, Captain Coward found he had to slow occasionally to lighten the breeze stoking the topside fires, which were threatening to rage out of control. Twenty-eight of his men were dead, another thirteen seriously wounded. Four leaped overboard to extinguish their burning clothes. Those who stayed aboard and saved the ship braved burning compartments to turn flood valves and remove wounded from impossible places. They defied smoke to soak powder, gird bulkheads, patch holes, fix pumps, run hoses, and keep electricity flowing. They allowed their hands to melt while connecting superheated brass hose couplings to fight fires. Braving flames that would not otherwise have been beaten, they threw well-baked projectiles overboard and lowered rafts to save their brothers.

They were cool, efficient, leaderly, and unselfish, according to those who saw them and wrote the reports. “The following men are deserving of commendation”—and this would be written many times in the coming days and weeks—“for the accuracy of his control of the gun battery … at great risk he entered the smoke filled handling rooms #3 and #4 … and directed the damage control parties … for his courage in personally supervising the fire fighting below decks … without thought to his own safety … worked continuously all night and the next day reinforcing shores and operating pumps … it is recommended that this man be advanced to chief … for his heroic action in entering the flames … when after being struck in the neck by shrapnel, although he could in no way determine the extent of his wounds except to feel blood soaking his shirt, calmly identified silhouettes as they appeared … and removing casualties from gun #3 and getting #7 life raft into the water … for his tireless effort and continued excellent performance of duty … directing the fire party to successfully extinguish the fire which helped the ship continue fighting … and rendered valuable aid putting out a fire in compartment C-203-L … for fine assistance in handling casualties of gun #3 … and for helping extinguish fires on clothing.… ”

Feats like these would be easily lost, along with the names of their authors, men like Byers, Burris, Morris, and Lovas; Keenum, Kozak, Conn, and Hammack; Kelly, Wholley, Fray, and Mayefsky; Lastra, Dean, Weller, and Talbot; Seymour, Boudreaux, Blankenship, Spence, and Shelton; Hall, Hanna, Hodge, Homer, and Robinson. They were men without rank to have monuments but whose names shine out from the haze of reports and deserve to be held up for notice. Not just the men of the Sterett, but all of them, American and Japanese, striving and desperate and frightened and riled and tender and human, in fateful collision on Friday, the thirteenth of November, 1942.

29

The Killing Salvo

CALLAGHAN’S SINGLE COLUMN RESEMBLED A WORLD WAR I–VINTAGE battle line of yore. But it echoed a weapon more ancient still as it thrust into the body of Hiroaki Abe’s force: a piercing long sword, or perhaps a lance. The American commander might have employed it as an archer firing arrows, standing off, using his advanced sensors, killing by surprise out of the dark. Instead, he ran straight ahead, blade fixed, and plunged straight in. The delicate tip of his sword broke on first contact, the van destroyers penetrating momentarily before fracturing, and throwing reverberations back toward Callaghan, riding in the hilt. What followed was a melee, Colosseum-style, with the lights out, and a heavy fog blown over the fighting arena. What can be settled and known is the time of first contact, and the time, ultimately, of disengagement. The terrible middle became a swirl of slash and thrust, ship against ship, captain against the enemy of the moment, which, battered then vanishing, was replaced by a new enemy who