Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [201]
Lee understood the powerful weapons of a battleship not as specialized naval instruments, but as extensions of the universal laws of ballistics that he had wholly absorbed by the time he took command. Most surface officers were obsessive students of gunnery, but few adapted their expertise to an age of new technology. Lee did so by conducting fire-control drills under odd conditions, sometimes requiring turrets be manned by relief crews instead of the first team, and throwing unexpected twists at them, randomly cutting out electrical connections to the mounts and scrambling their links to the fire-control radars, forcing his men to rely on backup systems or local control. Afterward, he gathered with Captain Glenn B. Davis; his gunnery officer, Commander H. T. Walsh; and a coterie of young officers, where his principal theorist, Ed Hooper, would run through the mathematics late into the night. “His conversation was so loaded with calculi and abelian equations,” a historian wrote, “that sometimes Commander Walsh and Captain Davis would begin to look slightly helpless.” That said a lot, seeing as Davis had served as the “experimental officer” at the Dahlgren Naval Proving Grounds, testing guns, armor, powder, and projectiles, and later served as chief of the gun section at the Bureau of Ordnance.
Lee knew that the key to victory lay not only in terms of engineering or mathematics, but in a crew’s ability to adjust psychologically to the unexpected. Said Lloyd Mustin, “It doesn’t take long to learn these things, a few hours. Learn the basics in a few hours and then start thinking in those terms day in and day out. Not everyone seemed able or willing to take the time.” Willis Lee, like Norman Scott, took the time. He worked endlessly, late into the night, before unwinding with a few pages from a detective novel and falling asleep in his clothes a few hours before breakfast.
News of an inbound battleship force commanded Lee’s attention. Late in the afternoon on November 14, he received a report that the submarine Trout had sighted large enemy units, southbound about 150 miles north of Guadalcanal. The Tokyo Express, though operating with changing rosters of ships and commanders, was keeping to its well-established timetable of midnight arrivals. While the Cactus Air Force was preoccupied with hammering Tanaka’s transports that afternoon, Kondo’s heavy surface force—the Kirishima joined by the heavy cruisers Atago and Takao—had avoided daylight air attack. It would be up to Lee’s surface task force to stop them. Halsey had given him complete freedom of action after his arrival in the waters off Guadalcanal.
Japanese search planes had sighted Lee when he was still a hundred miles south of Guadalcanal, but failed to recognize his principal vessels as battleships. They reported Task Force 64 as composed of two cruisers and four destroyers. Later Kondo dismissed a report of a carrier and possibly some battleships some fifty miles south of the island, on grounds that they were not in position to intercept him that night. Like the men in Tanaka’s transport force, Kondo was confident that the bombardment by the cruisers Suzuya and Maya the previous night had put down the Guadalcanal aviators. He had little idea what was in store for him.
As Task Force 64 approached the island’s western shore, the captain of the Washington, Glenn Davis, walked into the chart house and pressed the button on the ship’s intercom. “This is the captain speaking. We are going into an action area. We have no great certainty what forces we will encounter. We might be ambushed. A disaster of some sort may come upon us. But whatever it is we are going into, I hope to bring all of you back alive. Good luck to all of us.” After the epic dustups