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obsidian on which the warships seemed to have been dropped and been immobilized, centered amid concentric circles like shock waves that form around a stone dropped in mud.” From Tulagi’s hills, “all you could see were the tracers and the muzzle flashes, and the hits. But you didn’t know who was getting hit,” a sailor wrote. Tracers looked like glowing red blobs, moving slowly through space to their target, then crashing into larger flashes and fires when they struck. There was a three-beat delay before the wave of thunder arrived over the water.

Infantrymen who had fought bitterly for months were often callous. The novelist James Jones, an Army soldier who arrived later, developed a perverse outlook. Having resolved that he would die, he could root for death’s reign everywhere. “Consciously or unconsciously,” Jones would write, “we accepted the fact that we couldn’t survive. So we could watch the naval battle from the safety of the hills with undisguised fun. There was no denying we were pleased to see somebody else getting his. Even though there were men dying. Being blown apart, concussed, drowning. Didn’t matter. We had been getting ours, let them get theirs. It wasn’t that we were being sadistic. It was just that we had nothing further to worry about. We were dead.”

CALLAGHAN’S AND ABE’S heaviest ships, the “base units,” came to grips just before 2 a.m. Tracking four enemy ships in column to her northeast, the Helena asked Callaghan, “Can we open fire if we have targets?” The task force commander replied, “Advise type of targets. We want the big ones.” That’s exactly what he got. According to John Bennett, the San Francisco was closing with three formidable opponents: a cruiser abaft her starboard beam, the Hiei approaching forward of her starboard beam, about twenty-two hundred yards away, and the Kirishima about three thousand yards sharp on the starboard bow. According to Bruce McCandless, “The duel about to begin in which flagship fought flagship was like something out of the past.… The action was brief but violent,” as the Hiei and San Francisco approached on opposite courses.

With Cassin Young designating targets for the gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander William W. Wilbourne, McCandless swung the helm left to unmask the after turret. As the San Francisco’s eight-inch turrets roared, the Hiei’s great turrets answered in kind. “Two four-gun salvos hit the water short of us, bursting on impact and projecting vivid greenish pyrotechnics—incendiaries,” McCandless wrote. Wilbourne had little more to do than close his firing key and pray. In close and brutally fast was his only chance, given that his salvos had 20 percent the throw-weight of her enemy. “Had anyone timed our loading crews that night, he doubtless would have seen some new records set.” The crew of the San Francisco’s turret three was operating in local control after the destruction of the after control station by the Betty that afternoon. From twenty-two hundred yards, it was hard to miss. The San Francisco lashed out with all three turrets, battering the Hiei all along her length. The turret officer in turret one shouted over the voice tube to his crew, “We just put a nine-gun salvo into the side of a Jap BB!” At this range not even a battleship’s armor was proof against cruiser fire. The San Francisco would claim “at least eighteen hits” on the Hiei. From amidships, near the Hiei’s waterline, came a blast that “caused plates and wreckage to fly about,” the San Francisco’s action report would state. Stationed on a five-inch mount on the starboard side of the San Francisco, Cliff Spencer was awestruck. “With a pagoda-like superstructure, the big ship was so close she looked like the New York skyline. As our stream of shells hit, you could see men or debris flying off the [searchlight] platform, it was that close.… When my vision returned I looked out upon the battle scene to starboard.… The magnitude of the battle was almost unbelievable.”

As the time approached 2 a.m., life in Savo Sound was a violent blur, with ships up and down the line fighting