Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [210]
When the officer in Main Battery Control ordered the guns to cease fire, based on an erroneous report that his target had sunk, Captain Iwabuchi tried futilely to conn the Kirishima away from the Washington, but “we couldn’t make way at all,” he said. “In the meantime, the engine rooms became intolerable because of the increased heat, and most of the engineers were killed though they had been ordered to evacuate. Only the central engine could make the slowest speed. Fires brought under control gained strength again, so that the fore and aft magazines became endangered. Orders to flood them were then issued.”
Ninety seconds later, Captain Davis ordered his main battery, “If you can see anything to shoot at, go ahead,” and the great guns opened up again on the Kirishima, whose gunners were able to respond with only her after turret. “More hits obtained,” the action reported declared.
More than two hundred sailors lay dead in the Kirishima, victims of a stem-to-stern pummeling by at least twenty sixteen-inch shells from the Washington. Lieutenant Kobayashi believed the ship took half a dozen torpedoes as well, but these were most likely underwater hits. Many of the great twenty-seven-hundred-pound American projectiles struck short but plowed under the sea on flat trajectories to strike below the waterline. Admiral Lee, seeing their splashes, most likely counted these as misses. But they did, by far, the greatest damage to the Kirishima, all along her length. These underwater hits were Willis Lee’s answer to the Long Lance torpedo.
After midnight, Kondo ordered his battered Bombardment Unit onto a westerly course. Only the Atago, lightly damaged, and the Takao, unhit, could comply. The Washington’s radars tracked the Japanese ships as they withdrew—a light cruiser was fixed for the forward turrets, and a destroyer for the after turret. But Lee, unsure of the South Dakota’s location, would not allow the main battery to fire.
Captain Gatch was fortunate to escape with a seaworthy battleship. The South Dakota had taken twenty-six hits, including eighteen by eight-inch projectiles and one by a fourteen-incher. The damage wrought to the upper works was serious. With all of the ship’s lights out, working parties operated by feel as they searched for the dead in the darkened foremast tower. They would not soon forget the things they found.
Having lost track of the Washington, Gatch decided that his night was over. His battered ship, alone, was unable to carry the fight any longer. He elected to retire. This decision came as a relief to Willis Lee, who had pursuit on his mind and didn’t need a wounded compatriot to worry about. The last report from Cactus Control at 7 p.m. put five Japanese transports dead in the water about fifteen miles north of the Russell Islands, and four more limping northwest with a small combat escort.
His big rifles not yet cool, Lee steered a course to intercept them the next day. The Washington had come through virtually unscratched by enemy fire. A five-inch hole in her giant “bedspring” air-search radar transmitter was her only wound. She took a much worse thrashing from the blast of her own guns: bulkheads caved in, compartments violently tossed, and a floatplane left in ruins, suitable only for parts. Her only human casualties were a punctured eardrum and an abrasion to the back of a hand. She was the most powerful ship in these waters, but any ship alone is a vulnerable one.
Shadowed by several of Kondo’s destroyers, Glenn Davis rang the Washington’s engine room to make emergency power, and his raging boilers piped enough steam to whistle up the four shafts to nearly twenty-seven knots. At that speed, the 44,500-ton battleship, accelerating through a turn, cleaved wakes from her bow and stern that, in collision, generated wave peaks high enough to register on radar and spook her plotting officers that enemy ships were close in pursuit. When the Washington’s radar registered real phantoms—small blips, presumably destroyers, on the starboard bow—and when a smoke screen