Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [211]
The battered Kirishima would not be saved. The light cruiser Nagara was nearby and Captain Iwabuchi requested a tow, but it was refused. The captain sent a radio message to Admiral Yamamoto, requesting that he order Nagara to tow the ship, but there was no time for intervention from Truk. The big vessel’s list was just too severe. “An attempt to prevent the flooding of the steering gear room also failing, the ship became hopeless,” Iwabuchi said. The ship alternated listing to left and to right, as the free-surface effect of floodwaters pulled her from side to side. Finally the ship listed to starboard so badly as to make it impossible to stand on the bridge. Iwabuchi ordered Lieutenant Kobayashi to use a flashlight to signal the destroyers Asagumo and Teruzuki to come alongside, one to starboard, the other to port, to remove survivors. Officers in the wrecked and burning ship performed the earnest rituals of defeat—lowering the ensign to shouted banzais, transferring the emperor’s portrait to the Asagumo. As eleven hundred souls were taken off the colossal wreck, the list was so severe that Iwabuchi had no choice but to scuttle her. His engineers opened the Kingston valves, attached to the bottom of her fuel tanks to enable cleaning, and the sea flooded in.
Lieutenant Kobayashi had scarcely hopped over to the Asagumo when the Kirishima rolled hard and unexpectedly to port. The Asagumo freed her lines and pulled safely away. The captain of the Teruzuki had to order an emergency back full to avoid being capped by the turtling battleship’s superstructure. With about three hundred men still on board, the Kirishima joined the boneyard in Ironbottom Sound shortly after 3 a.m. on November 15, about eleven miles west of Savo Island. “My men fought well and displayed the noble spirit of servicemen,” Iwabuchi said. “My only regret is that we could not sink the enemy in exchange for our ship.” Before the two fleets parted ways and returned home, the Atago tried one final time to grapple with the American battlewagons. Captain Ijuin’s ship launched a dozen torpedoes in three salvos, but these, fired at a poor angle astern their retiring target, never had a chance. The cruiser opened fire with her eight-inch main battery on the Washington from fifteen thousand yards, but this was a halfhearted final gesture from a force that had spent its fighting energies. Ijuin ordered a smoke screen and turned away to the north. The Washington’s fire-control specialists tracked the Atago and observed the flashes of her gunfire, but Admiral Lee and Captain Davis had had enough for one night, too. They set course south and departed the battle area.
Lee had good reason to be satisfied with his night’s work. Beyond the hammer blows he had landed on the Kirishima—the only battleship that would be sunk by another, one on one, during the entire Pacific campaign1—he knew that the Japanese troop transports, wherever they were, were too far away to reach Guadalcanal before sunrise, when Henderson Field’s pilots, spared a thrashing from the sea, would be ready with a savage greeting. Lee directed the Gwin and the limping Benham to head for Espiritu Santo, but the Benham would not make it. Her fractured hull put her at risk of floundering and losing her entire crew. The Gwin scuttled her that night.
Finally locating the South Dakota, which greeted them with the signal, “I AM NOT EFFECTIVE,” Lee and Davis formed up with Gatch. Following behind, the Washington plowed seas tainted with the South Dakota’s bunker oil all the way back to Nouméa. Shorn of the company of destroyers, the victorious American battlewagons, one riddled like a can on a stump, with thirty-nine fatalities, the other completely unscathed, rode beam-to-beam toward the comfort of their tropical home.
Later