Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [194]
Nervous lookouts scanned the waters for torpedo wakes. In the ambient light of the moon and star field overhead, here they came: two white bubbling lines in the deep, passing ahead. The PT skippers had evidently overestimated their target’s speed, perhaps seeing the vigorous churn of her counter-turning screws but not appreciating its waste.
The commander of the PT boats in the area, Lieutenant Commander Alan P. Calvert, saw the absence of heavy U.S. ships in Savo Sound that night as an opportunity for his command.
According to Charles Melhorn of the PT-44, he gave the briefing to the “Peter Tares” that night, and it amounted to: “There is a Japanese task force due in about midnight, and we may have a battleship task force due in about midnight. Go out and get the Japs.” Until that moment, when they emerged as the lone U.S. naval force in Savo Sound, they had been held on a leash, skirmishing indecisively with Tokyo Express destroyers now and then, but ordered to stay in their base as the November 13 battle approached.
Melhorn saw right away how it could be suicide, in such a vulnerable craft, to issue the standard blinker challenge to an unidentified ship. “If you challenge the wrong group, that’s the end of you,” he said. That may be why one of the boats, PT-48, dispensed with diplomacy and sent four fish churning toward the U.S. cruiser.
The gunners on DuBose’s ship didn’t appreciate the attention and according to Melhorn returned fire at their harassers. “We thought that was pretty dirty pool,” Melhorn said. It was no dirtier than anything else a ship’s crew might do at night, when friend and enemy alike are skulking phantoms.
The drama of the PT boat encounter passed. After midnight, in the first hours of November 14, the Portland reached Tulagi and anchored in thirty-nine fathoms. The steep drop-off near shore allowed them to tie up to a palm tree and run a gangway from the ship to the shore. They camouflaged the ship with netting to prevent being spotted from the air. “Then we all dropped in our tracks and fell asleep,” Harold L. Johnson said. “We had been at general quarters over fifty hours by this time.”
The peace would last for only about an hour. With the remnants of the American cruiser force limping away toward Espiritu Santo, the way was open for the Imperial Japanese Navy once again.
35
Regardless of Losses
ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO, LIKE HIS STAFF AND COMMANDERS throughout the South Seas fleet, was shocked by the savagery of Abe’s fight with Callaghan. The grinding of steel tooth and nail was like nothing they had seen from the U.S. Navy. The Americans weren’t known to be such fighters. At Cape Esperance in October, Goto had lost a cruiser but gave, in death, nearly as good as he got en route to accomplishing his larger mission, unleashing two battleships against Henderson Field. A month later now, Callaghan had done what his Navy had not been able to do thus far in the war. He had crippled a battleship, the Hiei, and left her to Henderson Field’s vultures. The 36,600-ton warship was to the Imperial Japanese Navy something like what the HMS Hood had been to the Royal Navy before her loss in May 1941: older, smaller, and less powerful than the state-of-art newcomers to whom she played second chair, but an object of nostalgic affection because of her link to the Imperial palace. Hirohito himself had sailed in the Hiei. Her loss was a heavy blow.
After Callaghan thwarted Abe on the night of November 12–13, inflicting the loss of the Hiei and two destroyers, the Akatsuki and Yudachi, Henderson Field