Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [166]
Pounding on the forward bulkhead, McKinney got a return knock, and by shouting found out that several of his shipmates were in the dark as well. Damage-control doctrine forbade them from opening the hatches. Doing so could compromise the watertight integrity of the gravely damaged ship. The question, as on all dying vessels, was whether the doctrine still applied—whether the collective enterprise of fighting as a crew had given way to the pursuit of individual survival. It was anybody’s guess whether Captain Jenkins had ordered them to abandon ship. Through the thin steel overhead, McKinney could hear men choking and coughing and more undetermined noises, and he would have many measureless moments in which to think about such things.
Around this time, the foundering Atlanta was taken under fire by a heavy cruiser, about thirty-five hundred yards abaft her port beam. Mustin attempted to return fire with the only turret that was responsive on the intercom, turret seven aft, which had to be fired manually. But her crew stood down when the light of their target’s own gun discharges revealed her to be a friendly vessel. Lloyd Mustin recognized the flash of her smokeless powder and the deliberate cadence characteristic of American eight-inch gunfire. The U.S. cruiser’s gunners were all too adept. A series of heavy hits shivered the Atlanta’s forward superstructure and decks.
Jenkins was with Admiral Scott, standing on the starboard bridge wing looking north, where the battle seemed to have drifted, when there was “some alarm on the port side,” Lloyd Mustin said. “Captain Jenkins went around the catwalk to the port side to see what was going on. When he came back, there was no starboard bridge wing.” Seven large shells had pierced the Atlanta just below the bridge deck. The four-inch armor plating protecting the pilothouse couldn’t stop them. They penetrated and exited forward. The bulkhead door flew from its hinges and slammed into Jenkins from behind, but he was spared the worst of this violent shock to the pilothouse, which killed sixteen of the twenty men stationed there.
Robert Graff, riven with shrapnel in his legs, hips, arms, hands, and face, the biggest of the pieces about the size of a walnut, crawled from the port signal bridge into the pilothouse, over innumerable bodies, and continued through to the starboard signal bridge. There was a huge hole in the bulkhead there. Graff thought he might climb through it and let himself down to a gun platform, then the main deck. He didn’t remember how he got there, but he would never forget something he realized in the pilothouse along that way: that one of the officers he had crawled over was high ranking and familiar.
My God, they got Scott, Graff thought.
“I remember a quick twinge of sadness as I crawled by him. I remember thinking, Oh, shit, that’s a terrible loss.”
Lieutenant Stewart Moredock, Scott’s operations officer, saw his admiral take his last steps. He would dredge up this memory later, after his recovery from his injuries, recalling how Captain Jenkins had approached him, saying, “Let’s get below. There’s nothing we can do up here.” Unable to find a ladder to the main deck, Moredock, the only one of Scott’s staff to survive, hugged the bridge railing and swung his body over. With his right hand broken he found he couldn’t hold his entire weight with his left, and he plummeted down, falling some twenty feet into a gun tub. “I hit, I’m pretty certain, a bunch of dead bodies on that gun emplacement,” Moredock said. “I heard the noise of their, you know, their lungs, whatever. It was a shattering kind of feeling.”
The dead were everywhere but they registered only faintly, the sight of their scattered remains too horrific to bear, though indelibly seen in the periphery, like dim stars. Robert Graff, in a state of