Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [184]
Simple navigation was a challenge for ships that had been through a bender such as the night action of November 13. Down twelve feet by the bow, listing slightly to port, the Juneau was swerving and skidding as if her long hull were jointed somewhere below. The swells crested near the gunwales, her one screw knocked from a bent shaft, water seeped through seams in the stress-fractured hull, and her auxiliary electrical generators were helpless to power all the pumps. By dawn her technicians had patched things together well enough. They even restored local control to one of her five-inch mounts. Swenson decided to press on south for Espiritu Santo.
Through the last hours before dawn, bearing the burden of 83 dead and 106 seriously wounded sailors, the San Francisco tailed the Helena’s dim silhouette ahead. “I hung on, occasionally calling her by blinker gun and steering for the answering flash of light,” McCandless wrote. The San Francisco’s engines were good for twenty-eight knots, but steering the damaged ship was a more serious problem. In Sealark Channel, between Guadalcanal and Florida Island, Bennett relieved McCandless and quickly noticed that his quartermaster Rogers was having to repeat his orders over the sound-powered phones. The other quartermaster, Higdon, had gone to the smoky emergency steering compartment below, where the helm orders were being manually executed. Seeing the sluggish response from steering, Bennett suspected Higdon was woozy from smoke inhalation and told Rogers to keep him talking so he wouldn’t pass out and leave the ship unnavigable.
When a lieutenant stationed in Sky Forward, Dick Marquardt, called down, “You’re about to run aground on Malaita!” Bennett understood that he might be a little groggy himself, having lost sight of the Helena when she turned south while obscured in the island’s silhouette. As he righted his course and fell in line again with Hoover, the decks heeled and a warning came from Bob Dusch, the damage-control whiz, that the rush of free surface water was wiping out the wooden shoring that held several critical mattress patches in place near the bow. When Bennett’s relief finally arrived, Bennett scrawled the zigzag plan in chalk on the conning tower door and handed the newcomer a watch that he had taken from one of Callaghan’s slain staff officers. Then he went to look for Bruce McCandless.
Bennett found him in the captain’s emergency cabin, sitting on the edge of the bunk, eyes glazed and with blood trickling down his face from shrapnel wounds in his forehead and ear. Bennett picked out as many bits of steel as he could before determining that McCandless didn’t need emergency attention. He left him there, went down to the gun deck, and sprawled on the steel deck, using a Great War–era tin hat for “a wholly unsatisfactory pillow.” There were no words for what they had just been through, and none for the fresh horrors they would find topside when sunrise came.
33
Atlanta Burning
THE NIGHT OF NIGHTMARES PASSED. AS THE SUN DREW BACK THE long shadows of Tulagi and Florida Island from Savo Sound, the remains of the night’s struggle were revealed in all their ragged trauma.
Broken through the keel, her bow and stern drifting in different directions with the currents, the Atlanta lay dead in the water a few miles off Lunga Point. Still heavily afire, she was kept from breaking apart only by the latent tensile strength of her decks and the fickle mercy of a calm morning sea. Every heavy apparatus on the ship that was removable was jettisoned: an anchor and its