Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [196]
The direction of the wind was another problem. With a southerly prevailing wind, Kinakid had to reverse course 180 degrees and head south, into the wind, in order to generate a headwind strong enough to launch or recover aircraft. This was one of the reasons Task Force 16 was farther south than many thought it should have been.
When a SOPAC staff officer, Charles Weaver, informed Halsey and Miles Browning that Lee could not reach the battle area on the night of November 13–14, he was met with a furious response. “You can well imagine the blast I got from my seniors who were sure that Lee was in a good position to intercept.” Having pledged to Vandegrift that he would support the marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal with everything he had at his disposal, Halsey was chagrined to be forced to notify the general that neither his battleships nor any American naval units would be on hand that night to defend Guadalcanal from naval attack.
At the survivor camp on Guadalcanal that night, Bill McKinney, the Atlanta electrician, was resting underneath a tent he had been given by the marines. He was too exhausted to celebrate with the victorious pilots, too exhausted even to set up his tent. So he used it as a blanket. He was awakened once when the heavy rains leaked underneath the canvas, turning the ground to mud. Around 2 a.m. he was awakened again, this time by a rain of fire. Two heavy cruisers, the Suzuya and Maya, arrived offshore that night to shoot up the airfield.
Men were shouting, running everywhere, as heavy explosions rolled in from the sound. Those who had endured the shelling by battleships a month earlier would say this one paled in comparison, but a bombardment from the sea was always terrifying. A sailor who had survived the sinkings of the Wasp and the Barton came sprinting into a bunker during the bombardment, mute with terror. McKinney took the assault by the two Japanese cruisers personally. “I had the feeling that they knew where we were and planned to finish us off,” he said. He could see the “little winking pinpoints of blue light as their salvos thundered toward us. It was a fearful experience.”
The closest large U.S. warship at hand in Savo Sound that night was Captain DuBose’s Portland, tied up and concealed near Tulagi’s shore across the sound as her crew worked on repairs. DuBose spotted the two enemy ships as their searchlights explored the anchorage off Lunga. Every faithful hand in the Portland prayed the lights would not find them. DuBose knew there was no way he could tackle two fully primed opponents with his ship barely navigable. So he watched the searchlights and instructed Commander Shanklin to fire only if they fixed in his direction. In due course Calvert’s PT boats threw their weight at the Japanese cruisers, making several torpedo runs to no effect.
Firing five hundred shells apiece in an unmolested half hour, the Maya and Suzuya destroyed eighteen planes and damaged thirty-two more on Henderson Field. Frightful though it was, this bombardment paled with what the Hiei and Kirishima might have wreaked, and underscored the significance of Callaghan’s sacrifice.
WHEN THE MORNING ROSE on Savo Sound on November 14, it was still Friday the thirteenth in Washington. The first dispatches of the events off Guadalcanal the previous night traveled quickly by radio from Nouméa to Pearl Harbor to the Navy Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The tension I felt at that time was matched only by the tension that pervaded Washington the night before the landing in Normandy,” James Forrestal would write. Later, when a Japanese invasion force was reported in the Slot, President Roosevelt began to think the island was lost. But from Washington the president did not have contemporaneous knowledge of what the Cactus Air Force was doing. Japan’s most important effort to send troops to the island was under way and now, thanks to the success of Callaghan