Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [191]
The radio, meanwhile, carried hopeful tidings—the excited transmissions from U.S. pilots as they swarmed a Japanese battleship, the Hiei, dead in the water near Savo Island. The running report was vastly entertaining for sailors who had just finished their own turn in the battle zone and had had a hand in leaving the aviators this first-class prize.
It was about 11 a.m. when a lookout noticed a disturbance on the surface of the sea to port. He said at first that it resembled “the usual eruption made by a porpoise.” Then a Helena gunner on a port side mount spotted it, a thin wake and a fin breaching the surface, just inside the wake of the Sterett, riding on the Helena’s port bow. A torpedo. He watched as it passed astern. The navigator shouted, “Hard right rudder, De Long!”
On the San Francisco, a bridge lookout, speechless, grabbed Lieutenant Commander Schonland by the shoulder and pointed at no fewer than four wakes approaching the ship’s port bow. Schonland ordered, “Full right rudder, emergency full ahead.” Seeing the white wakes burning toward the ship, Joseph Whitt starting running aft to escape the explosion. Leaping over a large gash in the deck, he caught his foot and went sprawling. He gathered himself quickly and looked forward to find the wake. The torpedo passed under the ship on the starboard side. He found himself looking directly at the Juneau.
There was no way to send warning to Captain Swenson’s ship. With all of the San Francisco’s steam lines broken, she could not give voice to her siren or her whistle, and with her flag bags burned, her TBS transmitter out, signal halyards cut, and all but one large searchlight wrecked, it was impossible to raise an effective alarm. Fate had placed Hoover’s formation in the periscope crosshairs of the submarine I-26, the same boat that had hit the Saratoga in August. Lying along the eastern flank of the column’s southerly line of travel, the IJN boat had three torpedo tubes flooded and ready.
As the Helena came right, De Long watched the Juneau through a porthole but soon lost her to the shifting line of sight. Then, unexpectedly, the navigator hollered, “Hard left rudder!” De Long reversed the helm, and the ship shuddered for several seconds and slowly came back. That was when the ocean shivered.
A Helena signalman was watching his counterpart on the Juneau through a glass, taking a blinker signal. One moment the man on the Juneau was standing there, sending Morse, the next he was gone, snatched up from the field of view as if by a giant hand. Removing the glass from his eye, the Helena man saw his counterpart hurtling through the air.
Joseph Whitt in the San Francisco heard a “loud crrrrrack, like a lightning strike nearby.” On the bearing that the antiaircraft cruiser once occupied, all the Helena’s George De Long could see was a large cloud swelling low on the water. “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? I don’t want to ram her!” he said. No one remained in the Helena’s pilothouse. Everyone had raced out onto the bridge wing. A sailor ducked back into the pilothouse and said, quietly, “De Long, she ain’t no more.”
Even after the unprecedented blooding of the previous night, never had anyone witnessed a blast such as this. Bruce McCandless wrote, “The Juneau didn’t sink—she blew up with all the fury of an erupting volcano. There was a terrific thunderclap and a plume of white water that was blotted out by a huge brown hemisphere a thousand yards across, from within which came the sounds of more explosions.” As Hoover would report to Admiral Turner, “Debris fell to such extent and volume as to cause belief of high level bombing attack.”
What fraction of the Juneau’s steel plates and hardened armor belts were launched skyward and fell back to earth in shards is anyone’s guess, but the shrapnel rain was heavy and voluminous.