Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [164]
It was a mystery to participants then and to analysts in decades to come why Callaghan never issued a written battle plan to his commanders. As Bruce McCandless, the San Francisco’s officer-of-the-deck, saw it, a slight turn to the right at the outset, away from the oncoming Japanese swarm, would have “crossed the T” of Abe’s force, bringing the American formation on a course perpendicular to that of the Japanese. This textbook naval maneuver, performed by Norman Scott at Cape Esperance, would have enabled all the U.S. ships to fire full broadsides and the destroyers at either end of Callaghan’s line to attack with torpedoes on the bows. It “should have sufficed to derail this Tokyo Express,” McCandless would write. This was the clarity of hindsight. In the present, there had been no tactical planning. There is no evidence Callaghan ever communicated his expectations to his subordinates. At the moment of contact, he ordered his column left, steering it directly into the enemy’s midst, on a path that the laws of the indifferent universe always seemed to urge, as inertia devolved into entropy.
After the bloody encounter of the van destroyers with the leading elements of Abe’s force, and after the early battering of the Atlanta, the next ships into the maelstrom were Callaghan’s cruisers. When the Portland made her turn to the west, following the San Francisco, Captain Laurance DuBose saw five evenly spaced searchlights ahead and to starboard, stabbing across the water toward the American line. His five-inch batteries lofted star shells, aiming to shed light on the situation. Then, at murderously close range, sixty-two thousand yards, his main battery lashed out. Though the forward fire-control radar was out, a casualty of short circuits, the “Sweet Pea” scored a first-salvo hit with eight-inch fire. “At least four bursts of flame leapt from the enemy vessel,” wrote the gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Elliott W. Shanklin. After the second salvo, the target, a destroyer, blew up and was left sinking. It was probably the Akatsuki.
Astern of the Portland, the Helena was worked up to a servo-mechanical rage with her six-inch main battery, targeting a searchlight just forty-two hundred yards to her west. It must have belonged to the Hiei; it appeared too high and large to belong to a destroyer. The officer in a spotting station high overhead reported that the tracers were perfectly aimed in deflection and that “practically all of our shots appeared to hit.” One of her turret officers, Lieutenant Earl A. Luehman, observed, “The tracers from fifteen guns looked like a swarm of bees heading for a target you couldn’t see.” Cycling rapidly with the firing keys closed, the ship’s broadside was like a gigantic combustion engine with mistimed pistons. Nodding up and down, driven by their director-controlled motors, the guns laid a “rocking ladder” of fire across a two-hundred-yard-long path centered on the range given by the radar. No ship, no matter how stout its armor, would want to be in the path of what she was sending out: more than two hundred 130-pound shells per minute, according to Bin Cochran. As the Helena reached the turning point for the left column turn, the light that her gunners were shooting at faded to black. The superstructure of the enemy ship was a “smoky orange bonfire,” Chick Morris recalled. “How high into the sky that tower of