Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [175]
A torpedo caught the Juneau in the belly, on the port side near the forward fire room. Joseph Hartney felt his ship leap and shake in the air and fall back down, heavier on the water than before, listing to port. The explosion ruptured internal bulkheads and buckled the deck. The fire-control system serving her eight twin five-inch turrets failed. Oil fumes leaked up from within. Her chief engineer thought her keel was broken.
The stricken cruiser veered toward an unidentified Japanese ship whose duress was similar. Seeing her sailors leaping from her burning decks and struggling to escape her fire-eaten passageways, Hartney called it “a weird, unforgettable pageantry that Dante himself could not have dreamed up.” When a lookout shouted a warning of a collision, the quartermaster in the after control station, on a quick order from the exec, evaded in time. The Juneau’s reward for ducking the impact and opening the range again was another fusillade of gunfire into her superstructure. One of her stacks took a hard hit, casting the ruins of its searchlights from their platform onto the deck below. A fourteen-incher smashed into the mess hall triage, killing all the wounded there and their attendants. In the tangle of remaining steel plating, it was difficult to distinguish bulkhead from deck from overhead.
Throughout the American squadron, a hundred small catastrophes played out. The Portland, torpedoed and circling; the San Francisco, shattered but game. The Atlanta, a leaking, burning wreck; the Juneau, torpedoed and drunk in the keel; the Laffey sinking; the Cushing, still afloat but a lost cause; the Sterett, in a crossfire and burning. On the Laffey, whose propellers had been shorn away with the rest of her fantail, her hull nearly broken in two, a brief argument ensued between Captain Hank and his engineering officer, Lieutenant Barham, about whether the ship could be saved. “Chief, just get me going and I’ll get you out of this,” Hank said. But the engineer recommended abandoning ship. Barham asked for permission to let boats over the side, the least he could do for crew who had already gone over the rail. The captain approved. As Barham left to see about that task, Hank passed the order to abandon ship. Soon thereafter the fires reached a powder magazine. The eruption tore loose the deck, and shattered steel filled the air. “My first reaction was one of surprise—it was as if an old and trusted friend had suddenly hit me with a baseball bat,” Tom Evins remembered. This catastrophe was the last the ship would suffer. Hank was never seen again.
Such catastrophes were often private experiences for their victims, unwitnessed by ships even in close proximity. As Bruce McCandless would write, “That these disasters could occur within such a short distance of the flagship and not be observed from her bridge seems incomprehensible; that this was the case testified to the intensity of the firestorm about the flagship herself.” Whenever things looked bad, the one thing Admiral Nimitz liked to remind his staff was that “the enemy is hurting, too.” And he was.
Once the Hiei finished her pass against the Helena, Abe’s flagship had grappled with virtually the whole American line. Her entire superstructure was a conflagration, fiercely lit from within. That vast steel complex, towering over the two sleek and angular twin-mounted fourteen-inch turrets on her forecastle, looked to Jack Cook, one of Captain Hoover’s Marine orderlies, “like a huge apartment building completely engulfed in flames. It was the most amazing sight I ever saw.” Any number of U.S. ships could take credit for the result. Enough of them had crossed the battleship’s path to make most all claims plausible. Among witnesses the predominant emotion seemed to be awe, not joy. These molten ruins had recently been proud, striving, and human. On a night like this, it was difficult not to relate to the enemy’s plight,