Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [200]
The first time the South Dakota’s main battery was tested with a full nine-gun broadside, the wave of blast pressure pushed through the passageway where Captain Thomas Gatch was standing, tearing his pants right off him. The vast power of the sixteen-inch guns required a perfect physical apparatus to ensure not only their working order but also the safety of the ship. The bomb that exploded atop turret one during the air attacks of October 25 had gouged two barrels of turret two, which jutted out over the bomb’s impact point. A lieutenant junior grade who served in the turret, Paul H. Backus, said, “As you can imagine, we made all kinds of measurements and sent messages back to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, describing these gouges, their depth, their length, and asked the question, ‘Can we shoot these barrels?’ We never did get an answer that we could live with.” Finally word came back that turret two’s center and left guns were not to be fired.
This powerful but patchwork group, Task Force 64, was Lee’s first seagoing flag command. What he may have lacked in combat experience, he had made up for through the rigorous study of the practical problems of combat in the radar age. Having served as director of fleet training just before the war, he was one of the first naval officers to build a career on the wonkery of modern wave physics. The lingo of transmitters, receivers, double-lobe systems, and ring oscillators was like speaking in tongues to most officers. Imperturbable and capable of solving multiple lines of variables as they shifted, Lee was reputed to know the intricacies of radar systems better than their own operators did.
According to Admiral Kinkaid, a close friend and classmate, “He was not what you would describe as a ‘military figure.’ He was without the straight, taut carriage that that description would imply. Lee walked pigeon-toed and was hard of sight. At Annapolis he fretted the physical examination, memorizing the first two lines of the eye chart.”
A native of Owen County, Kentucky, he was known back home as “Mose” but would acquire a more worldly nickname, “Ching,” for his fondness for the Asiatic theater. According to Ernest M. Eller, a subordinate of Lee’s at the Fleet Training Division, “He looked like an Arkansas farmer, a little like Will Rogers. He had a wrinkled, freckled face. You wouldn’t have known he was very astute until you talked to him a while and learned what he knew.… He had a very mathematical, ingenious mind, and at the same time he talked very simply and very easily.”
Lee matched his fluency in the language of science with a generous dose of Appalachian common sense. Early in his career, a destroyer he commanded suffered from a rat infestation. Tired of seeing the rodents scurrying across the wardroom’s overhead beams, Lee fashioned a trap consisting of a solenoid mechanism and an armature attached to a meat cleaver. Delighted with the contraption, his officers diverted themselves with this minor blood sport, competing to see whose reflexes were quick enough to pull the lever and chop the stowaway rodents in two.
Lee’s understanding of gunnery was world-class. In 1907, at age nineteen, he became the only American at the time to win both the U.S. National High Power Rifle and Pistol championships in the same year. In April 1914, during the U.S. intervention in Vera Cruz, Mexico, his landing force from the battleship New Hampshire came under fire. Wielding a borrowed rifle, Lee assumed a sitting position out in the