Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [208]
The chaplain, James Claypool, recalled hearing men praying. Some were so scared they couldn’t remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer. “At such times everything you do is a prayer,” a chief petty officer said. “Even your cuss words are prayers.”
The South Dakota was designed for a different kind of fight, conducted at distances to the horizon and beyond, where her huge guns could kill at standoff range. At close ranges, the variables were too many to manage and the risk was great. When an eight-inch shell exploded near an ammunition hoist, flashing through the opening and igniting some life jackets, a fire rose in a passageway adjacent to a handling room serving the five-inch battery. This small fire was a dangerous one. But it and the rest of the South Dakota’s belowdecks fires were quickly extinguished, and a disastrous secondary explosion was forestalled. It was Gatch’s good fortune especially that none of the many torpedoes fired his way struck his ship, as her design was vulnerable below the waterline. Several Long Lances exploded prematurely on the way in. Topside, the flames danced.
WILLIS LEE IN THE Washington had been patiently tracking a large target on his starboard hand, but since he had lost track of the South Dakota, owing to his blind spot astern, he dared not turn loose his big guns on this bogey, the Kirishima, until her identity could be verified. When the Japanese opened their searchlight shutters on the South Dakota, however, he had his answer. Lee’s flagship enjoyed momentary concealment as she slid behind the burning Walke and Preston, which blinded Kondo to his presence. Here was an hour of truth, and the truth was this: Willis Lee was the contemporary master of radar fire control, and Washington’s SG system gave him a clear electronic view of the oceanic battlefield under almost any circumstances.
While sailors in open-air stations saw the horror of naval combat in the machine age with their own senses—steaming through the debris fields of the sunken destroyers, shouting out to sailors bobbing on rafts nursing ghastly wounds, smelling the sweet tang of burned flesh—inside, officers with access to a radar image watched an abstract painting of the battlescape unfurl in a remorseless electric light. It was a picture cleansed of horror and emotion. Lee knew how to operate by it. He trained one group of his starboard side five-inch dual mounts on the Atago, and his main battery and the other group of five-inch mounts on the larger blip on his scope, the Kirishima. The Washington’s unblinking electronic eyes nudged the main battery on target. From eighty-four hundred yards—“body punching range,” as a Washington lieutenant put it—the South Pacific’s battleship gunslinger emerged from the cover of his burning destroyers and turned loose with everything he had. Naval engineers who designed protective armor schemes for battleships calculated from the need to stop large-caliber direct gunfire from around twenty thousand yards. But at close ranges, stopping a sixteen-inch projectile was hopeless. One of the South Dakota’s turret officers, Paul Backus, exclaimed, “Throwing fourteen-inch and sixteen-inch shells at that kind of range—Jesus.” Willis Lee had won the draw on the Kirishima.
The last time Lee had held night spotting and gunnery practice was in January 1942. But since then, he had drilled his crews in target selection and fire-control procedures so thoroughly that it did not really matter whether it was night or day. An ensign named Patrick Vincent, stationed in the Washington’s armored conning tower, said, “I was amazed at how well Captain Davis and