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1 The IJN battleships Yamashiro and Fuso, sunk during an engagement with U.S. battleships in Surigao Strait on the night of October 24–25, 1944, were done in mostly by destroyer torpedoes.

38

The Kind of Men Who Win a War

THAT MORNING ON GUADALCANAL, IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE battle in the sound, the outcome was still in doubt. Word went around to everyone holed up on the north shore that if the Japanese had prevailed, their troops would be storming ashore before dawn. The news passed like a current among the electricians working to repair the power cables serving the remote-control searchlight battery. “This ruled out any further sleep,” Bill McKinney wrote. When the familiar throaty rumble of U.S. PT boats rolled in from the sound, it was safe to presume a victory. And when a report came in from the waterfront of enemy corpses floating in the water—uncountable multitudes of them—a sense of reassurance spread about the outcome. McKinney and his pals returned to work splicing cable, “like ladies in a sewing circle.”

There were more than a few Americans out there on the swells. Survivors from the Walke and the Preston were among the oil-soaked throng revealed by the sunrise. Fighters on the morning patrol dipped down for a closer look, buzzing them to indicate their location to rescue boats. More than once, the pilot of an Army P-400 Airacobra bore down on a cluster of bobbing heads with his finger tensed on the trigger in case the survivors were enemy. The Guadalcanal campaign marked the onset, as far as U.S. servicemen were concerned, of “total war.” Marine Raider units among others were slaughtering prisoners rather than hauling them around. At sea and in the air, the same brutal ethic prevailed, no matter what the international accords required. These sailors breathed considerably easier after noon, when the destroyer Meade arrived from Tulagi, lowered boats, and began taking them aboard. A pair of floatplanes left behind by Callaghan’s cruisers puttered around, inviting survivors to grab a pontoon strut for a ride to safety. Taken to the Meade, they fouled the destroyer’s well-kept wardroom, now a triage, with their blood.

But the worst traumas of November reached waters far from Savo Sound. Most of the American sailors who were still missing in action at that time were beyond the reach of helping hands from Guadalcanal. An appreciation of the ordeal suffered by the survivors of the USS Juneau would be gained only in retrospect, when nothing remained to be done for them. The fact that as many as 140 men had lived through the ship’s sudden loss to a submarine torpedo on the morning of the thirteenth would surprise all who had witnessed her loss. The detonation of the Juneau’s powder magazine killed nearly everyone in her forward sections. Almost all those who survived were stationed in the after part of the ship. The survivors may have been spared by the fractured keel, whose wobbly state might have dissipated the blast wave as it flowed aft along the ship’s spine.

Spared was the wrong word for most of the men. Beneath a cloud of fuel oil vapors and powder smoke, they hit the waters in a squall of shattered steel, flying hatch covers, and tumbling gun barrels and radar antennae, the hard gore of a warship that tore flesh and broke bone. One Juneau survivor would estimate that two-thirds of his surviving shipmates who hit the water alive had received serious wounds. According to Allen Heyn, “Some of them were in very bad shape. Their arms and legs were torn off. And one of them, I could see myself his skull. You could see the red part inside where his head had been split open you might say torn open in places.” The next morning, Heyn noticed that “his hair had turned gray just as if he was an old man.”

Shortly after the Juneau’s loss that morning, Gilbert Hoover had signaled her final coordinates to the pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress that happened by overhead, with a request to relay the information to Nouméa. The pilot