Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [197]
At first light on Henderson Field, the ground crews of the 1st Marine Air Wing began a long day of work fueling and arming planes to strike at enemy targets in the Slot. The pace was so desperate that all hands from the mess tents were pressed into service. There would be time aplenty to eat after more pressing appetites had been sated. Soon the pilots were scouring the waters within two hundred miles of the island. The Enterprise, steaming two hundred miles south-southwest of Guadalcanal, was delayed in launching her dawn search, thanks to squalls. But most of the Enterprise’s sixty-two planes, including twenty-three Dauntlesses and nine Avengers, got in on the attack.
Winging north and west with varied responsibilities for search and strike, they found the ships that had hit them the previous night southwest of Rendova Island, New Georgia. The Suzuya and Maya, which had rendezvoused with the heavy cruisers Chokai and Kinugasa, were set upon violently. A flight of Dauntlesses led by Marine major Joseph Sailer fell on the Kinugasa, which was trailing oil from torpedoes hits landed by Marine Avenger pilots shortly after first light. The Enterprise Dauntlesses hit her hard, damaging her grievously with a heavy bomb. Two Enterprise pilots, Ensign Richard M. Buchanan and Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert D. Gibson, delivered the coup de grâce, leaving the Kinugasa to capsize and sink later that morning, taking down fifty-one men. Ensign Paul M. Halloran of the Enterprise’s Bombing Squadron 10 dove on the Maya but missed with his bomb. As he pulled out, the wing of his Dauntless struck the cruiser’s mainmast, spilling gasoline into the superstructure. The resulting fires killed thirty-seven sailors. Halloran was never seen again.
But the pilots’ principal objective was Tanaka’s lightly defended transport force. Slugging south on Saturday morning, passing between New Georgia and Santa Isabel, the troop carriers were set upon by Cactus Air Force and Enterprise planes around the same time the Japanese cruisers were coming under attack. Tanaka’s transports scattered, turning in slow circles to avoid the fall of bombs and torpedoes. By midafternoon, seven of the eleven transports had been sunk, along with all of their cargoes and a great many of their men.
Amid the catastrophe of these terrible losses to their amphibious capability, Admiral Tanaka salvaged what he could. In a remarkable feat of improvisational seamanship, he brought his destroyers alongside the foundering transports and transferred thousands of soldiers on the fly.
As they did so, Rear Admiral Kondo, riding in the light cruiser Nagara, took command of a makeshift but powerful bombardment force—the Kirishima, joined by the heavy cruisers Atago and Takeo, the light cruisers Nagara and Sendai, and nine destroyers. They moved south again to lay their guns on Henderson Field, quickly overtaking Tanaka’s four surviving transports and taking station ahead of them. Owing to the intensity of the air attacks directed at the Japanese cruisers and transports that day, the Kirishima and her consorts avoided detection from the air.
THE SURVIVING SHIPS OF Task Force 67 arrived at Espiritu Santo on the afternoon of November 14. Entering the channel, the San Francisco followed the Helena closely. A monument to the danger of haphazard navigation stood for all to see: the wreck of the luxury-liner-turned-troop-transport President Coolidge, which several weeks earlier had blundered out of the safety of the channel into the harbor’s defensive minefield.
As the San Francisco came into the harbor, she passed, port-side-to-port-side, four other cruisers anchored in a line, the Minneapolis, New Orleans, Pensacola, and Northampton. “It was pretty awe-inspiring,” Jack Bennett said. The crews of the anchored ships manned the rail and offered three rousing cheers to the battle-scarred counterpart. “Hip, hip hooray—three times, that was something emotional,