Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [170]
Despite some claims to the contrary, the U.S. destroyers likely never got their torpedoes effectively into play. Opportunities to fire them occurred at such close range that the weapons seldom had time to arm. The destroyer O’Bannon, last in the van, spied the Hiei close on her port bow, burning but still roaring salvos over the mast of the American destroyer at unknown targets behind her. Commander E. R. Wilkinson loosed four torpedoes, the third of which coincided with the battleship’s complete envelopment “from bow to stern in a great sheet of flame.” The Sterett claimed a pair of torpedo hits on the Hiei as well, but Japanese records, which chronicle gunfire damage in detail, suggest that the damage went unnoticed. Very possibly these claims arose from the battering the Hiei was taking from the San Francisco around this time.
As burning particles from the Hiei fell on the O’Bannon’s forward decks, Captain Wilkinson, deeming the Japanese battleship “killed” and finding that no further targets offered, ordered the rudder right until his destroyer was on an easterly course. Swinging the helm again to avoid the shattered Laffey, the O’Bannon passed through waters dotted with U.S. sailors. Wilkinson’s crew tossed life vests, some fifty of them, to the men in the water as they passed. As the O’Bannon steamed away to the east, “attempting to locate either definite targets or definite friends,” five unidentified vessels—probably the Cushing, Sterett, Atlanta, Hiei, and Akatsuki—were seen burning or exploding in her wake.
It was the San Francisco that had the full attention of the Japanese heavy ships now, the Hiei to starboard and the Kirishima, less vividly noticed, moving across to port. It would be estimated that the San Francisco took some forty-five shell hits, twelve of them major-caliber. One fourteen-incher struck the barbette of turret two, opening its seams, and shattered the flood-control panel. This activated the flooding system in the forward magazine and the lower handling room. The crew in the turret stalk, believing the ship was sinking, began pouring out of the top of the turret, into the open air and a storm of flying metal. Airbursts from fourteen-inch anti-personnel and incendiary rounds were shattering. What they did to people in topside stations was unspeakable. Wherever a shell struck armor, the projectile broke up, denting the plating and smoking up the paintwork. The airbursts hurled incendiaries and fragments in all directions. “Seemingly everywhere,” Bruce McCandless wrote, “we found short lengths of what looked like gas pipe about an inch in diameter. A few contained unburned incendiary, a mixture of powdered aluminum and magnesium, with fuzes at both ends.… This stuff was responsible for many of our casualties and much of our damage.” The crews on the starboard secondary battery were cut down virtually to a man. “The smell of burning flesh.… These are recollections that will last my life,” Bennett said. “That’s something you don’t get over.”
An armor-piercing projectile bulled into wardroom country, where the ship’s executive officer, Mark Crouter, was convalescing after his legs had been burned in the afternoon air attack. He had insisted on remaining on board. This decision cost him his life. The shell killed him where he lay. This third-hitting salvo from the Hiei was costly. Four fourteen-hundred-pound projectiles crashed into the San Francisco’s bridge and forward superstructure, smashing the chart house and propelling the navigator, Commander Rae Arison, over the port side of the superstructure. He made two complete turns in the air before crashing three decks below onto the barrel of a five-inch mount. The impact broke both of his legs. The gun captain, to the considerable