Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [185]
By the first blush of dawn, Lloyd Mustin saw evidence of the astonishing volume of ordnance that flew over the ship that night. The mainmast near his aft air-defense station, only eight inches in diameter, was riddled with holes. All three forward turrets were knocked out, several of their six barrels sliced away. Like a cavern in a gray sea cliff, her forward engine room was a void. Filled with black water, it was a grave for a fine engineering department headed by Lieutenant Commander Arthur Loeser and chief machinist’s mate Henry A. Wolfe. In the mess compartment above it, a heavy serving table had been “plastered flat against the overhead” by the force of the torpedo’s blast.
A few rapid tugs on a flywheel spinner was all it took to get a gasoline-powered handy-billy pump growling. Dropped over the side, the inch-and-a-half-diameter suction hose could draw on a limitless supply of seawater to fight fires, with pressure enough to play a stream high into the superstructure, or anywhere else something was burning. On the Atlanta that morning, almost everything was burning.
“It is a matter of wonder to observe, at close hand, a steel warship on fire,” wrote Bill McKinney, the electrician’s mate. Having rushed topside up ladders and through compartments that were scorched and baking hot, he found that his rebreather expired much more quickly than the fifteen minutes it was rated for. Emerging on the main deck, he confronted a landscape aflame. The shipboard fires illuminated a bleak, steel-gray landscape that seemed deserted. “What is burning that makes the jagged edges around shell holes white hot?” he wondered. “Paint, other combustibles, but more possibly that the type of enemy shells contained thermite, contact with which makes almost anything burn.” Ammunition didn’t need help. Below, magazines full of rounds for the twenties were popping away, small heavy box by small heavy box, and so fiercely that they set the deck burning, melted right through it, spilled down into the compartment below, and set it on fire, too. It was unfortunate for the antiaircraft cruiser that she stored such a large volume of ammunition.
When the forward gun director was hit, the thick mass of wiring running down through the trunk was set aflame, another avenue for the fiery contagion. A locker containing pyrotechnics—flares and smoke markers—had taken a direct hit, too, producing a spectacular runaway blaze. As flames aspired to the top of the steel foremast, the fires devoured its base, melting through its thirty-inch diameter and felling the eighty-odd-foot-high tower to port, trapping men in the 1.1 clipping rooms. Damage-control parties managed to cut the foremast free, righting some of her starboard list.
According to McKinney, a terrified shipmate ran past him at one point shouting, “Get off. She’s going to blow!” But the executive officer, Dallas Emory, had already countermanded an order to abandon ship, and McKinney was just as happy to stay aboard. “Better to be blown up than eaten up,” he figured. Then McKinney happened upon “a bright idea”: opening the fire main in his compartment and allowing seawater to flood the deck. He thought this would provide a buffer between the fires above and the magazine below. Emory, in his cabin writing a report by the light of a battle lantern, approved the request. “Just don’t sink the ship,” he advised. As McKinney opened the main, no one on board seemed to understand that the same free-surface effect that was plaguing the San Francisco could have capsized the Atlanta had the seas gotten rough.
Searching the ship for wounded, Raymond Leslie came upon a hole in the boat deck caused by an explosion from below. The steel plates, blown upward into a jagged rise, had to be carefully negotiated. Razor-edged hunks of steel, most of them the size of anvils, some as large as small cars, were scattered across the decks.