Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [183]
Ahead lay the outline of Florida Island. “We had not seen an American ship for a long time, and I began to wonder if we were the only one left,” the Sterett’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant Cal Calhoun, wrote. Surveying the wreckage of his ship, which held the remains of twenty-eight men, Calhoun felt “strangely detached, as if I were on another planet surveying the earth in miniature.” The feeling persisted till the ship reached Lengo Channel, where she would eventually catch up with Captain Hoover’s survivors.
STILL TRYING TO GATHER his surviving vessels, Hoover sent the instruction “Answer” to the San Francisco, but none came. Where was Callaghan? Norman Scott and the Atlanta were unaccounted for, too. Finally a lookout announced the sighting of yet another unidentified ship on the port bow. The Helena’s killing train was set quickly rolling. Hoover ordered, “Shift target!” and Rodman Smith, the gunnery officer, coached his turrets on the new bearing. This ship, spectral and suspicious, had been shattered. Not a pane of glass remained in her. Fires glowed in several places on deck.
The officer-of-the-deck of the damaged mystery ship was studying the Helena through his binoculars as she overtook him to starboard. From about two thousand yards away, he could make out her twin stacks and five sleek turrets—all trained right at him. Then, in the Helena’s superstructure, a light signaled the letters “H-I-S H-I-S.” An encoded challenge signal required a prompt reply, but neither of the two officers up forward on the battered vessel’s navigation bridge, Bruce McCandless nor John Bennett, knew what reply to give to this challenge. The dispatch containing the reply codes assigned for use that day had been lost in the fires. Though the codes had also been scrawled with chalk on the bulkhead of the flag bridge, the metal where they had been recorded was thoroughly punctured and scorched. Any attempt to memorize the codes had been “driven from my mind by the events of the last hour,” McCandless wrote. “In seconds, unless the correct reply was given, fifteen six-inch and four five-inch would fire into us.” Virtually all of the principal means of communication—TBS radio, searchlights, signal flags and halyards, fighting lights—had been destroyed or made inoperable. The steam line to the flagship’s siren and whistle had been punctured by splinters. The signalmen had a blinker light, but they hesitated to respond because they knew something their officers didn’t: that the three-letter reply code specified for that day was “J-A-P.” One signalman, Vic Gibson, told a colleague who was holding a blinker gun, “If you don’t want them shooting at us, you’d better send them J-A-P.” Nothing doing. The signalman felt that a response that like was as likely to invite gunfire as forestall it. The Helena’s batteries were seconds from turning loose when a San Francisco signalman, on order from McCandless, blinked a message in Morse from the bridge. “C38 … C38 …”
Seeing this signal—a reasonable approximation of the San Francisco’s hull number, CA-38—Rodman Smith relaxed his grip on the firing key and the Helena’s gun captains stood down. “Thank God the Helena accepted that,” Jack Bennett said. “Captain Hoover, may he live forever, took a second look before letting us have it,” McCandless wrote. The sad news quickly followed via the flashlight that the San Francisco was bereft of its senior leadership. On hearing this, Gil Hoover signaled that he would take command of the remnant of Task Force 67 for the journey home.
By 3:45 a.m., in the company of the Fletcher (untouched despite the numerological odds against her), Hoover’s survivors cleared Sealark Channel. The O’Bannon