Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [174]
“We had good interior communications (despite a shortage of talkers) over the sound-powered battle telephones, but because of indoctrination and training, little coordination between departments was necessary: officers and enlisted men assumed leadership, saw things that needed to be done and got about doing them without waiting to be told. This is not the best way to run a ship, but it is surprising how far the momentum of a well-trained outfit will carry when its leaders are cut down.”
31
Point Blank
THAT NIGHT THE TORPEDO MARKSMANSHIP OF THE JAPANESE HAD been practiced to the usual high professional standard. Long Lances gutted the Laffey and the Atlanta. Now the hull-busting weapons found the middle of the American line.
It was nearly 2 a.m., barely fifteen minutes since first contact. Captain DuBose of the Portland had settled on a northerly course. He was blowing salvos at a target on his starboard beam when a torpedo, probably fired by the Yudachi, bubbled in and struck aft on the starboard side. The blast chewed into the cruiser’s fantail, leaving a rough, semicircular bite about sixty feet in diameter. The blast destroyed eighteen compartments, sheared off the inboard screws, and disabled turret three by heaving it from its roller path. A large piece of hull plating, torn out, extended into the sea and scooped a cataract of water, forcing the ship into a sharp right turn that the jammed rudder was helpless to correct. As the ship began circling, nothing the helmsman did with the rudder or the engines could straighten her course.
After the Portland finished staggering through her first clockwise circle, the Hiei appeared at four thousand yards dead ahead. As his ship came right, Lieutenant Commander Shanklin’s forward eight-inch turrets engaged, firing four salvos as they trained left through the cruiser’s swing to the right, planting an estimated ten to fourteen hits into the ship. As flames washed through her superstructure, the Hiei boomed in return, hitting the Portland with a pair of fourteen-inch bombardment projectiles that squandered most of their force by exploding on contact with the armor instead of penetrating.
An exact chronicle of events was beyond anyone’s reach now, although a collage of impressions was indelible and immediate to all within the tempest. DuBose saw an unidentified large ship sundered by a great blast. He saw the San Francisco burning. The Helena steamed by close aboard to starboard, drawing clear, her six-inch batteries fast-cycling at targets in the dark. Chick Morris was caught in the spell of what the engines of naval war had wrought. “Other ships, blazing just as brilliantly, rushed through the night like giant torches held aloft by invisible swimmers. It was a picture too vast for the imagination, and even when it was over no man could quite put the flaming bits of the puzzle together or be sure of what he had seen.”
The Hiei, fires raging all through her now, drew abeam the Juneau. The Japanese battleship was “wallowing there like a wounded monster, spouting a hell of flame, but still very much in action,” the Juneau’s Joseph Hartney would write. “Her searchlights flashed on, fingered across the 2,000 yards of water and seemed to waver and then clamp down on us.” Hartney swiveled his fifties at the light. “I felt nothing now. I was just part of the gun that was bouncing in my hand.” The antiaircraft cruiser’s five-inch batteries slashed into the enemy warship. The tracers looked from afar like “a bridge of red-hot steel between us and the target.”
The trio of Japanese destroyers from the disengaged side of Abe’s formation entered the mix after the Hiei and Kirishima cleared their lines of fire to the south. The Asagumo,