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The message was from Callaghan. The Portland had just fired a pair of nine-gun salvos at a cruiser that could not be positively identified when the perplexing order came. Captain DuBose asked his admiral, “What is the dope, did you want to cease fire?”

From Callaghan came, “Affirmative.” That response, documented in the Portland’s radio log, seemed to refute the idea, floated later, that an order meant only for the San Francisco got accidentally transmitted to the whole group. Clearly the flagship, like the Portland, had just fired on a ship of uncertain nationality that made the order necessary. It was identified in records only as “a small cruiser or a large destroyer.” Murky identifications were unavoidable in the night and smoke. It very well could have been the Atlanta.

The gunners on the San Francisco were firing at shadows. Said Edgar Harrison, a fire controlman on a five-inch director, “We fired at so many targets, what I was doing was have my trainer train on shadows. I’m running the range dial on the computer, and I could see the red-hot bullets go out, then I changed the range up and down until the bullets were disappearing into the shadow. Then I’d check fire and find another target.”

In the Helena’s chart house, Ray Casten kept a close eye on the PPI scope as he did navigational piloting and managed the dead-reckoning plot. “I watched, almost transfixed, as our ships interleaved with those of the enemy,” the young officer would write. “I actually counted a total of twenty-six blips within the 5,000-yard sweep radius on our PPI scope. Would anyone, could anyone, ever believe this? Even when Captain Hoover asked where our ships were, I was only able to inform him of apparent concentrations.” Amid the confusion of the interlaced formations, it was left to individual captains to decide who was friend and who was foe. Most of Callaghan’s captains, if they ever heard the cease-fire order, ignored it, having arrived at their own diverging views of the priorities of life and death.

30

Death in the Machine Age

HE MUST HAVE SMOKED TWO PACKS OF CIGARETTES THAT NIGHT. Pacing the decks of his flagship, gray brows beetling, nerves afire, he found himself hardly able to stand it, knowing that his fleet was in action and he was not. The bustling pace of Nouméa by day had quieted down, leaving Halsey’s imagination in overdrive as his watch officers in the Argonne brought him the radio intercepts. There would be little or no sleep for him or his staff that night.

To be a commander in the machine age was to suffer the barrier of distance and live in immediate ignorance of the outcomes of battle. With the Enterprise in the war’s early months, he had awaited the returns of his air groups in the Marshalls and the Gilberts and off Honshu. The stakes then were nothing like they were now. He passed the time poring over charts in Flag Plot, walking the decks, and smoking, and conferring with his staff, and diverting himself, when he could stand no more, with the trashiest magazines in the wardroom, and smoking, always smoking. “I drank coffee by the gallon,” he wrote. The men of his South Pacific Forces were at a moment of decision. All that the dispatches could tell him, again and again, was that another battle was under way. Which way it was going was anyone’s guess.

The action was more cinematically enthralling for the young men watching from Guadalcanal’s northern shore. It was a diversion from their life in a diseased, death-ridden combat zone. As far away as Aola Bay, almost fifty miles east of Savo Sound, “The concussion could be felt as it came in on the airways, and the explosions seemed to rock the ground under our feet,” recalled a U.S. Army infantryman on Guadalcanal. “One could see the bellows of black smoke over the battle scene, shooting high into the air; at night these smoke clouds were capped with red flames.”

A marine, Robert Leckie, wrote, “The star shells rose, terrible and red. Giant tracers flashed across the night in orange arches.… The sea seemed a sheet of polished