Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [173]
WHEN JACK BENNETT reported to the San Francisco’s bridge, having seen most of the gun crews he was supervising cut down by gunfire, McCandless departed the conning tower. “Leaving Higdon at the forward slit and Rogers steering, I went back up to the navigation bridge to have another look for Captain Young and get him into conn where he could exercise command of his ship if he were still alive.”
To a young officer whose training had never prepared him for the vertigo and shock of this butchery, restoring his captain to command must have seemed like a sensible way to set right a careening universe. McCandless found that his head had stopped a few small pieces of shrapnel. The ringing in his ears would not quit, but he was crisply alert to his surroundings. “Against a midnight-blue backdrop brilliant starshell flares drifted down to go out in the sea,” he would write. “Red, white and blue tracers interlaced. Searchlights stabbed the darkness; the Hiei put a cluster of three on us, only to have them shot out by a hail of automatic weapons fire from half a dozen ships. Guns flashed yellow flame. Shell hits kicked up hot red sparks, often a flash; misses threw up splashes. Aboard the Hiei a shower of luminous snowflakes rose above her masthead and fell like a waterfall.
“The navigation bridge was a weird place indeed in the intermittent light of gunfire,” McCandless continued. “It had been hit several times more during my brief absence. Bodies, helmeted and life-jacketed, limbs, and gear littered the deck. The siren was moaning and water was raining down through holes in the deck above from the ruptured water-cooling system of the forward 1.1-inch quads. I could not identify Captain Young in my hasty search of the navigation bridge, but left convinced that neither he nor anyone else up there would take further part in this action.” He would not. Nor would Admiral Callaghan or any of his staff. On the starboard side of the flag bridge, McCandless found all of them. A battleship projectile had struck the underside of the navigation bridge from slightly abaft the beam and burst directly overhead. Littering the deck were the bodies of Callaghan and three lieutenant commanders on his staff, Louis M. LeHardy, Damon M. Cummings, and Jack Wintle. A fourth, Emmet O’Beirne, was unconscious but alive, the only survivor among the senior staff.
While making this grim discovery, McCandless stepped into a jagged hole in the deck, fell through, and stuck fast. As he wriggled free, he found himself looking out through another shell hole in the port bridge screen. Through it he could see a Japanese destroyer just a few hundred yards away, racing down the port side on a reverse course, firing into his ship. “Her first shots hit the forward part of the bridge just as I arrived on its after end, but she conveniently shifted to our port five-inch battery, which had taken her under fire. In this mutual mayhem one of our open mounts was hit directly, the others were swept by a storm of fragments. But one gun, firing in local control under chief boatswain’s mate John McCullough, with the last round it got off, caused a large explosion on the destroyer’s stern that looked like depth charges going off.”
Around this time McCandless reached Schonland on the battle telephone and confirmed that Schonland was the senior surviving officer. With this fragile chain of command, the ship was, according to McCandless, “fighting by departments, each headed by a lieutenant commander. Schonland,