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By Root 1975 0

surprise of both men, caught Arison and pushed him aside—toward a ladder that led downward. Helpless now, Arison slipped down the ladder and fell onto the deckhouse, facedown in a sizable puddle of water that had welled in a dished-in section of the deck. From his new vantage point, through the tears of pain in his eyes, Arison could see that everything above him was on fire. He struggled to reach a morphine ampule on his belt but discovered he couldn’t bear to use his fractured right arm. “That failure,” he wrote, “kept me alive, for had I reached it and taken an injection I would have most likely passed out and would then have drowned in the water in which I sat.” The constant struggle to reach that ampule kept him conscious and, he thinks, saved his life. Twice he tried to hail passing crew for aid, but couldn’t make a sound, because a fragment in his neck was pressing on his larynx.

This blast caught hold of Cliff Spencer, too. “One instant I was fine and the next I was blasted through the air for about twelve feet, fetching up on the amidships ladder rail, hanging head down, draped over the railing,” he wrote. “Groggy and disoriented, my first thought was, ‘I’m hit.’ I tried to right myself and as I did I felt a sharp blow as shrapnel from below hit me in the lower back. When I put weight on my right foot, the ankle wanted to turn. I reached down and felt that a portion of my right heel had been sliced away as if with a large knife.” He moved numbly forward toward the radar room, was hit again, then found a shipmate from the Marine detachment, Allen B. Samuelson, calling for him from within the wreckage of a gun mount. Spencer saw that a gun recoil spring had impaled him through the neck, “giving the impression of a grotesque bow tie.” Samuelson asked him for a life jacket. “I reassured him we were not sinking and told him that I would be right back with a life jacket.”

On the bridge, Bruce McCandless, stunned, ears ringing, wondered where everyone had gone. Quartermaster Harry S. Higdon called out from the helm, “I’ve lost steering control, sir!” and spun the useless wheel to demonstrate. Making eighteen knots, the heavy cruiser, the helmsman found, was locked into a left turn. The new exec, Joseph Hubbard, contacted Central Station and instructed his first lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Herbert E. Schonland, to shift steering and engine control to Battle Two, the after control tower that had been soaked in flames when the Betty bomber struck it that afternoon. “Hardly had this been accomplished,” McCandless wrote, “when a shell plunged through the roof (overhead) of Battle Two, laying waste to this place for the second time in twelve hours, killing Hubbard and the men around him.” Schonland ordered the ship’s steering and engine control shifted to the conning tower.

Concussed and in shock, McCandless managed to tell Schonland that he didn’t know where Captain Young and Admiral Callaghan were. He said he appeared to be the only officer alive on the bridge. That meant Schonland was the ship’s senior officer. McCandless asked, “What are your orders?” As damage-control officer, Schonland had plenty to do belowdecks. Several holes in the hull were shipping water, flooding the second deck, located near the waterline. The valves that were used to flood the magazines were a problem, too. A shell hit up forward had killed the damage-control party and ruined the control panel used to open and close the valves. Stuck open, the valves let the water flow. The magazines filled and kept on filling. Soon water was pouring through the ventilation system and flooding other forward compartments. Additional water pumped aboard by firefighting crews added to the problem.

The San Francisco had at least twenty-five fires, but the remedy was shaping up to be worse than the disease. The ship faced a serious stability issue. Every time she turned, the water on board rushed the other way, throwing a massive amount of weight into the side of the ship on the outside of the turn. The “free-surface effect” of all this water could capsize