Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [186]
McKinney and another electrician, Bob Tyler, “took a little time to get rid of some bodies that lay in the way of ship’s work.” According to McKinney, “I recall many corpses, badly torn up, but there was not a great deal of blood. Could the white-hot metal that killed them have had a cauterized effect? More probably the massive shock of death stopped the heart and no more blood was pumped.” A particularly grisly place was gun number five, the hip mount on the starboard side. Trained aft, its entire left bulkhead had been torn open and lay nearly toppled over the side. Near the mess of charred metal they attempted to recover the body of a boatswain’s mate, and it came in half in their arms. Another sailor, the mount’s pointer, “hung out of his seat with his head gone from the nose up,” McKinney wrote. “He was jammed in place by a jagged portion of the turret structure which had penetrated his back. We couldn’t get him loose, so I entered the wrecked turret to push him from within. The remains of the Turret Captain hung over his booth railing like a large piece of burnt bacon.” They finally got the pointer out of his seat and tumbled him overboard. As a young sailor walked to the lifeline to throw a dismembered arm overboard, he ate an apple with his free hand. Tyler explored the forward superstructure, which McKinney called “a horrifying spectacle of flesh and bone.” Though most of the remains were beyond recognition, a hand was found wearing a Naval Academy ring engraved with the class year 1911. The navigator, Lieutenant Commander James Stuart Smith, sat in the starboard bridge chair, dead without a mark on him.
With the forward engine spaces gutted and the after boilers swamped, the ship was powerless to resist the currents that moved toward the beach. They threatened to carry the crippled Atlanta within range of Japanese artillery. Commander Nickelson rallied a work party to lower the ship’s remaining anchor to keep her from grounding near the Japanese-held section of the coast. Even with all hundred fathoms of heavy chain run out laboriously by hand, it still did not reach.
As the shoreward drift continued, Captain Jenkins sent Lloyd Mustin to the ship’s armory to issue Springfield rifles to the crew. As daylight came, shots began ringing out all through the ship’s topside spaces when the newly armed crewmen began firing on Japanese survivors paddling in the oil-drenched waters around the ship. “They were so deeply ingrained against capture that they wouldn’t let us rescue them, for the most part,” said Mustin. He ordered the snipers to stand down.
With more than half of her forty-five officers killed or wounded, and 153 of 700 enlisted men dead or missing, the Atlanta was ultimately fortunate to lie so close to Guadalcanal. From the auxiliary radio room, survivors called Naval Base Guadalcanal (a makeshift naval station and encampment commanded by the skipper of the late Astoria, Captain Bill Greenman, who adopted the title Commander, Naval Activities, Cactus-Ringbolt Area) and asked for small boats to take off the wounded. The sailors ashore responded swiftly, manning boats and venturing into the battle-littered sea. Bill Kennedy, a gunner’s mate at the station, wrote, “The entire area was covered with a thick layer of oil; all kinds of debris was floating in it with survivors hanging on to whatever they could grab. They were all so black with oil that we had to come in close to see if they were ours or theirs. American survivors took precedence, of course; later in the day we went back out for the Japs but found