Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [182]
Then a flare popped overhead and began swinging down on a parachute. It was “like sitting under a big streetlight,” Howe said. Studying the ship more closely, he noticed sailors in foreign white uniforms. “We had no trouble telling that it was a Japanese battleship,” he said.
After a few minutes following astern the enemy monster—likely the Kirishima, scarcely damaged at all and withdrawing at high speed—Hoover broke away and turned east. His PPI scope showed a scattering of green blips sliding north. Abe’s force was withdrawing in disarray.
Soon another phantom loomed in the night, pressing in on the starboard bow. Bin Cochran identified it as a cruiser of the Atlanta class, knifing straight for the Helena’s midsection. Since the Atlanta lay dead in the water, this had to have been the Juneau. Hoover ordered a hard right rudder, and as the stern started swinging left, Cochran tensed for an impact on the starboard quarter. Somehow the blow never fell, and soon the Juneau was gone again in the night.
That ship was consumed with her own problems. The Juneau had no fire control to her turrets. Her fantail was broken and buckled all the way forward to the hip-mounted five-inch gun on the starboard deck. Her electrical devices were subsisting on thin gruel from the emergency diesel generator. Several large belowdecks compartments were full of the dead, snuffed out by the blast of a torpedo in her engineering spaces. Having lurched through the enemy formation with a broken keel and a crippled main battery, the Juneau’s sailors came out badly shaken. They were no more rattled and no less gallant than any other men in the task force, but under fire, men could feel the impulse to claw at the steel decks with their hands to escape the killing hail, or vomit on deck, or weep.
According to Allen Heyn, a gunner’s mate stationed on the Juneau’s fantail near the depth charge mount where the oldest of the five Sullivan brothers, George, stood watch, “It seemed like everyone was giving it to us, you know. There was a big flash, and the salvos would hit the water on one side of the ship and splash all over and then they would hit on the other side.… Then something hit up forward. I don’t know what it was because it hit again and the ship shook all over. The ship seemed to be out of control kinda.” With most of that behind them, they found refuge in the night. The Juneau’s skipper, Lyman Swenson, thought he might find shelter near Malaita, hole up to see about repairs.
The majority of Callaghan’s ships—now Hoover’s ships—had taken as heavily as they had given, but the Helena’s own damage was slight: just five hits, none of serious consequence. With a single man killed and two hospitalized, she was deeply lucky. Slugging through two first-order nighttime brawls in two months, she had taken scarcely a scratch. Smart reliance on SG radar had allowed Hoover to refrain from the standard but generally suicidal act of opening searchlight shutters within gun range of an alerted foe. He wisely chose to illuminate his targets on invisible frequencies, with his radars.
At length, late in the night, the O’Bannon, the Fletcher, and finally the Sterett checked in on the radio. The Sterett’s captain, Jesse Coward, bristled at first when he was asked if he intended to retire. “We’ll fight her until we sink!” he said. He had two torpedoes left in the tubes. When his torpedo officer informed him the mount was inoperable, Coward turned to his exec, Lieutenant Frank Gould, and said, “Frank, let’s get the hell out of here.” As the destroyer left the area, six or seven burning pyres dotted the sea behind her.
Belowdecks, firefighting crews played their streams over smoldering bedding and red-hot shell