Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [192]
“As we got up even with it—the pall of smoke had begun to rise up from the water—there was a gigantic explosion under the water,” Joseph Whitt said. “They said it was probably the boilers blowing up. She came up just like a big whale. You’ve seen pictures of them as they come up and breech and go back down. It was a big, huge bubble. In that bubble of water was part of the hull of that ship. I mean it was eerie.”
As witnesses struggled to believe, an ocean swell some thirty feet high crested into the San Francisco from the starboard side. “Our ship rapidly keeled over to port until the outboard portion of the well deck was underwater,” Don Jenkins wrote. “One had to hold on for dear life to keep from tumbling across the well deck into the sea. The ship slowly came back to an even keel and then we found that all our shoring and caulking had been knocked out of the waterline shell holes and sea water was pouring in by the thousands of gallons.”
On a day of terrible visions, the sudden death of the Juneau may have been the worst of all. Few witnesses could imagine there were any survivors. The suddenness with which more than six hundred men perished had no analog in other types of combat. The single blast offered none of the emerging trauma of an eroding front line or a sundered and faltering flank. It was an apocalyptic accident, random and undeserved, and paid in a single shocking stroke. Chick Morris observed, “No one moved or spoke.… A man needs some kind of mental and physical reserve to accept such a disaster when not prepared for it, and we had exhausted our reserve during the night.… Many a man aboard Helena walked the decks for the following few hours in a kind of trance, brooding and frightened.”
Robert Howe said, “We often talked about getting hit by a torpedo so we could go back to the States for repairs. Never again after seeing the Juneau disappear under a cloud of smoke.” It was still Friday the thirteenth. “The rest of the day I don’t think anyone took their eyes off the water.”
GIL HOOVER TOOK the Juneau’s loss hard. Her captain, Lyman Knute Swenson, had been a Naval Academy classmate and a close friend. Now he was either gone or, worse, alive, wounded and in urgent need of rescue. Untold scores of the antiaircraft cruiser’s survivors floated on the swells in Torpedo Junction. Though many witnesses professed to see no survivors, they were assuredly there. The crew of an aircraft that happened by later counted at least sixty of them, their lives spared by freak accidents of physics that kept the gusting remains of the ship from breaking their bodies as they flew into the sea.
As Hoover judged it, the logic of the situation required him to foreclose any thought of saving them, or his friend. With just a single undamaged destroyer to chase submarines, with the responsibility to get heavily damaged ships and badly wounded men to base on his shoulders, with an adeptly commanded enemy submarine still at large, he decided he couldn’t risk stopping to search for survivors. Earlier that morning he had ordered the O’Bannon to steam away to the north to transmit a report of the previous night’s engagement to Nouméa. When maintaining radio silence, ships departed formation before transmitting their messages to avoid betraying the group’s location to radio snoopers. The O’Bannon wasn’t due to rejoin him until midafternoon.
Few naval commanders understood the delicate work of rescue at sea as well as Hoover. As commander of Destroyer Squadron 2, he had escorted the Lexington when she was sunk in the Coral