Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [187]
A small fleet of utility craft, known as “mike boats,” began motoring out to the ship. Manned by marines, they pulled alongside and took off survivors. To Mustin’s surprise, one of the boats turned out to have an unexpected crew. “As it came alongside where I was standing at the rail—the rail was not very far above the water at this point—here stood up in the boat a Japanese sailor. He had his white uniform jumper on. His boatswain’s insignia were unmistakable. He was gesturing that he wanted some rags. He showed us that he had about six or eight men there who were wounded in various ways and all covered with oil. He was taking care of them. A couple of them were Japanese, and a couple of them were Americans. They were all immobile. They were perhaps unconscious. This one Japanese boatswain’s mate had taken it upon himself to take care of all those sailors.”
Retrieving the wounded from the clutches of the sea, Atlanta sailors had to content themselves with small victories. Thomas Carroll took a raft out and returned with the only survivor of turret five, a sailor named Stanley Hicks, who had been blown out the side of the gun house when it was hit. Hicks’s reunion with his brother, Benjamin, was tearful.
To hold on to one’s sanity, it helped, Bill Kennedy found, to see the horror in terms of simple physics. Kennedy wrote, “There were not very many parts, arms and legs, that is. I don’t know why, but when arms and legs are blown off, they usually sink—but not the torso; it will float. Doc told us that the torso has cavities which retain and even produce gasses—like the lungs, stomach, bowels, etc. Makes sense.” After several shuttle trips out to the Atlanta, the decks of Kennedy’s boat were blackened with oil. “It took weeks of washing them down with gasoline, over and over again, to dissolve it. With a lot of sweat, we got the boats clean. That is, we got the oil and grime off. Funny thing about the blood stains; much of it remained until we repainted the boat.”
As morning deepened, the risk of air attack returned. The Atlanta’s vulnerability was evident enough. Little remained of her formidable main battery. Her aftermost two five-inch mounts were the only ones that weren’t disabled. But without steam, there were no generators working, and thus no power to train them. It was not an ideal state for repelling a fast-developing air attack. A tug working out of Tulagi, the Bobolink, came alongside, hooked up, and gingerly began towing her toward shore until her anchor, streaming at full extension, finally grabbed the seafloor, holding the ship a few miles off Lunga Point.
The senior assistant in the engineering department, Lieutenant Commander John T. Wulff, realized that the ship’s 250-kilowatt diesel generator could be tied into the switchboard to supply the necessary power, but the superheated compartment needed to be made habitable first. Bill McKinney and others set up a portable blower to remove the tremendous heat from the partially flooded engine room. A submersible bilge pump was next, pumping the water level below the second-level gratings. Then, adjusting the switchboard to take power from the emergency generator, he connected one end of a cable to the 440-volt board, and threaded the other end down several decks to the emergency diesel room, where the generator was. Through trial and error, Wulff and his men got power flowing to turret eight, and soon its guns were barking at the sky as a single Japanese aircraft approached. Ten salvos quelled any ambitions the pilot might have had to finish the crippled vessel, and the plane veered away.
Close by the Atlanta, a larger ship circled like a shark. When she was first seen, “There was a general rush for the torpedo tubes,” McKinney wrote. They stood down when Lloyd Mustin determined that the stranger was the Portland. The men of that ship, too, had been struggling to peg the identities of the smashed ships around them. Seeing a destroyer standing to their north, they quickly identified it as an enemy and trained the ship’s two