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By Root 1954 0

gun mounts and the rudder. A warrant officer on the rangefinder had his skull split by a sliver of steel. That same hit tossed Hara’s gunnery officer over the side. In the radio room below him, everyone was dead. Gil Hoover’s gunners had about ninety seconds to batter the Amatsukaze—firing 125 six-inch rounds—before the San Francisco interfered with their line of sight and Hoover ceased fire. The only damage the Helena suffered in the exchange appeared to have been a five-inch hit on her high-mounted after turret, which blew away the leather bloomer from the center gun and gouged its bronze chase so that it could not recoil. The next time the gun was loaded, Lieutenant Earl Luehman, the turret officer, found it would not fire. Confronted with a hot, live round in his breech, he quickly ordered it ejected. When the six-inch round hit the deck, its powder scattered and caught fire, raging briefly until a firefighting team mustered.

In the San Francisco, damage-control parties were working furiously to keep the floodwaters from overturning the ship. No pumps were available to fight them. There were no drains on the ship’s second deck, where the flooding was worst. With free surface water sloshing back and forth with each rudder movement, changing the ship’s center of gravity unpredictably, the water level was rising by the minute. There was nowhere to send it. The first challenge was to stop the inflow. A crew led by Ensign Robert Dusch crawled forward through the flooded passageways and compartments, feeling for the valves that controlled the magazine flooding and groping with reach rods to turn them shut. They struggled like run-blocking offensive linemen to prop mattresses against holes in the hull, no small task on a ship maneuvering at battle speed.

When Schonland climbed out of Central Station to see what could be done, the water was threatening to spill over the top of the hatch coaming that led down to his belowdecks compartment. His men, trapped in the dark and relying on handheld lanterns for light, were sorry to see the popular officer leave them. When some water came sloshing over the coaming, they feared they might be drowned by a deluge from above.

To get rid of the water, Schonland and Ensign Dusch directed the crew to position mattresses in the port passageway from the Marine compartment to serve as a sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch to the air lock leading down to the number one fire room. Warning the men below that “We’re going to take water down there, a lot of it, and fast,” he proceeded to drain the second deck compartments into the lower decks of the ship, to serve as ballast. From there bilge pumps could begin discharging water out of the ship.

Noticing his ship’s drunken gait as she turned in a lazy circle, Lieutenant (j.g.) Jack Bennett returned forward and found Bruce McCandless lying unconscious outside the conning tower. A large shell had struck atop it, about two feet over McCandless’s head. The thickly armored overhead held fast, but flames roared in through the viewing slits through which the lieutenant commander had been peering with his binoculars. The device probably saved McCandless’s eyes, but the concussion laid him out flat. How long the quartermaster, Floyd Rogers, had been conning the ship alone, passing orders (his own) to the after steering station, was impossible for Bennett to tell. “Rogers couldn’t see the compass and the gyro was fifteen degrees out anyway. He couldn’t see. It was pitch black, and with a headset on he couldn’t hear. But he kept his cool,” Bennett said. Callaghan and his staff lay scattered around the deck, their bodies without a mark of violence on them, soaked by water leaking from a cooling tank on a 1.1-inch mount.

Since the loss of electrical power had disabled the flagship’s sprinkler system, bucket brigades went to work battling the two dozen fires within the ship. All the water they might have needed was sloshing around in the ship three decks underfoot, but with the pumps and mains out of order, they had to lower buckets into