Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [209]
It had been just six minutes since the Kirishima’s gunners had lost a solution on the South Dakota and checked their fire. Lookouts on the Atago, spotting the Washington, shouted, “There is another ship forward of the first, a big battleship!” Short seconds later the lookouts were crying, “Kirishima is totally obscured by shell splashes!” According to Lee, the Washington’s fire control and main battery “functioned as smoothly as though she were engaged in a well-rehearsed target practice.” The first salvo probably hit, and the second one certainly did.
Ashore, roused from sleep by the heavy hammering of main batteries in the sound, Bill McKinney was among a team of Atlanta electricians stationed on a searchlight installation that stood watch over Guadalcanal’s northern coast. Defended by a detachment of marines, the facility consisted of a tower of sixty-inch searchlights with a diesel generator and a remote-control director station. It was inoperable because its power cable had been slashed by overzealous foxhole diggers. Now, awakened, they were seized by the sight of battle. There was no telling who was friend or foe. It was like watching a baseball game without lineup cards, with everyone in the same colorless uniform. Ships revealed themselves suddenly with long gouts of flame and the bright parabolas of tracer rounds lazing through the night. The luminous red globes that seemed to float across the water knew no nationality. A few of them seemed to hover and disappear into the silhouette of a large ship, which stopped firing.
The Kirishima took a frightful battering from the Washington. The first hit destroyed the forward radio room located at the base of the foremast pagoda, below the main deck. Shells smashed into the barbettes of her two forward fourteen-inch turrets, starting fires that threatened the magazines. The battleship’s assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Horishi Tokuno, ordered a forward powder magazine flooded to prevent fires. The rush of water caused the ship to list slightly to starboard. Another projectile hit the steering machinery room, flooding it and leaving the rudder jammed to starboard. After this, only the ship’s inboard shafts were working, making it impossible to steer by reversing the outboard shafts. When hydraulic pressure failed in the after part of the ship, her two after main gun turrets were left inoperable.
Heat and smoke from topside fires, sucked into the ship by ventilation turbines, forced the evacuation of the engine rooms. A pair of thirty-foot holes yawning in her deck amidships were the scars of this massive assault. On the Kirishima’s bridge, Lieutenant (j.g.) Michio Kobayashi noticed the ship slowing and turning in a circle.
The Kirishima’s main battery managed to roar several times in return. The commanding officer, Captain Sanji Iwabuchi, thought his first salvo scored two hits, one of them blowing off the bridge of his target. “At least ten hits were made upon them, but the enemy could not be finished off,” he said. It was the familiar optimism of a warrior lost in a battle larger than he can comprehend. The fourteen-inch armor-piercing rounds passed like giant subway cars over the Washington’s rigging. “They must have been mighty close,” a Washington sailor said, “but an inch is as good as a mile.” Ed Hooper’s remorseless radars would have allowed no escape, even if the enemy ship retained the ability to maneuver. As the radar automatically lay the big rifles, the Washington’s gun trains kept rolling and the night rained murderously with heavy metal. The U.S. flagship’s rapid-firing secondary battery popped five-inch rounds into the Kirishima’s pagoda foremast, stacks, and superstructure, causing