Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [180]
The Barton’s survivors, a mere 42 of her complement of 276, were splashing into the sea even before they could grasp what had happened. Only two officers survived, and just one man from the hundred-odd men stationed belowdecks, a radioman named Albert Arcand, who narrowly escaped the after radio compartment through a surge of seawater that plunged through the overhead hatch as he spun it open. They were soon set upon by the O’Bannon, speeding east, away from the battle zone and right into their midst.
The experience was terrifying for the survivors in the water. The bow wave tossed them up and away, then the suction of the passing hull, clearly emblazoned with the number 450, drew them back in toward her, the wake marking the path of the churning twin screws. There followed an explosion, probably caused by depth charges detonating. The blast lifted the O’Bannon’s stern out of the water as she steamed by, leaving untold casualties among the men in the water.
Bob Hagen was still thunderstruck by the demolition of the Barton off his starboard quarter, helping Captain Gregor distinguish friend from foe, when the Aaron Ward made the passing acquaintance of an enemy destroyer, probably the Yudachi. The American ship got the better of the fierce, brief exchange, leaving the Yudachi dead in the water. A few minutes later, the Aaron Ward caught a big one. A fourteen-inch bombardment round tore a thirty-inch hole in the bulkhead outboard of the galley on the port side and exploded, swirling up a gust of shrapnel that flew in all directions. Hagen was cut down by a concussion that burst upward at him, suffering multiple wounds from fragments of silverware and shards of glass. His left bicep was minced. A four-inch-long bolt stuck in his thigh. Dazed and bleeding badly, he tried to turn away the pharmacist’s mates who tended to him, but both put a syrette into him. One of them fixed him a tourniquet around his left arm, and before long he was in “la la land,” asleep in his own blood.
Steaming behind the Barton, second to last in line, the destroyer Monssen loosed five torpedoes, one at a time, at a battleship off her starboard beam. A few minutes later, after counting several hits on that target, Lieutenant Commander Charles E. McCombs, her captain, fired five more torpedoes in succession at a destroyer. Ahead to port, he could see a U.S. destroyer, probably the Aaron Ward, getting the worst of an exchange with a Japanese ship at close range. His gun boss turned the Monssen’s four guns in the American ship’s defense and let loose until the enemy ceased firing.
As star shells popped overhead, McCombs turned his rudder full right and saw a destroyer ahead to starboard, less than a thousand yards away, unmistakably Japanese with double white bands painted around her stack. The Monssen’s starboard twenties laced into her, throwing a thousand rounds into her topside stations. McCombs’s after five-inch gun added half a dozen more. McCombs cursed the illumination from the star shells fired by what he suspected were friendly ships. As a precaution, he switched on and off the trio of colored lights on his superstructure that signaled his identity as an American vessel. And that was when a wave of hellfire washed over the small ship.
At around two twenty-five, the Monssen absorbed a fusillade. A five-inch shell hit the forward gun, killing the entire crew. The handling rooms serving guns two and three took hits that put them out of action. Another shell struck the Monssen in the engineering spaces, cutting steam lines and rupturing a throttle manifold. Off the starboard bow, a larger enemy ship was letting go in a deeper, statelier rhythm. One of these heavier projectiles seems to have been an incendiary.