Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [224]
Wylie was on the radar when strange contacts began to register. The first one appeared to the radar officer in the Minneapolis like “a small wart on Cape Esperance which grew larger and finally detached itself from the outline of the land mass.” As Tanaka’s force steamed within range of the American microwaves, Wylie reported their bearing, course, and speed to the other destroyers. With torpedoes ready, he radioed Wright, “REQUEST PERMISSION TO FIRE TORPEDOES.” Wylie would call the task force commander’s response “the most stupid thing that I have ever heard of.” It was a single word: “NO.” Wright deemed the range too long.
For four critical minutes Wright mulled the black night from the bridge of the Minneapolis. When he finally granted permission to the destroyers to fire their torpedoes, the radar showed that their targets had already passed them abeam, leaving the American missiles to pursue them from astern, a fruitless waste of fighting power. When Wright ordered the cruisers to open fire less than a minute after the destroyers had let fly, surprise became a casualty of impulsiveness, and what ensued was another confused free-for-all. As cruiser gunfire obliterated the senses, Wright lost sight of his targets behind the walls of water raised in front of them by American guns.
The spectacle was familiar to men observing from the beach. Lloyd Mustin and the others at Captain Greenman’s headquarters saw great flashes of light that were too large to be mere gun discharges. They didn’t know whose ships were out there bursting into flames, and there would be no knowing till morning. Suddenly and anticlimactically, Mustin’s radio went silent. The sober messages that trickled in to Radio Guadalcanal over the next couple of hours told the story. From the Minneapolis came a dispatch before dawn that she had been torpedoed and was under way for Lunga at half a knot. The Pensacola weighed in with a similar report. Then Admiral Wright raised Greenman, asking: “CAN YOU SEND BOATS TOWARD SAVO?” The implications of the request were clear enough. Mustin instructed the Bobolink and four PT boats to sweep the sound, while Wright’s second in command, Rear Admiral Mahlon S. Tisdale, ordered the destroyers to assist damaged cruisers northwest of Lunga Point. Wright then passed along a fuller report of the shattering damage inflicted on his task force and asked him to send it to Halsey.
The news of the rout was shocking to anyone who believed the fleet was at last on the path to victory. Wanting a clearer picture, Captain Greenman ordered Mustin to go up as an airborne observer to survey the sound. Racing to Henderson Field at dawn, the Atlanta survivor climbed into the rear seat of a Dauntless. The Marine pilot checked him out on the dive-bomber’s twin-mounted Brownings, and they took to the skies.
Gaining altitude over Ironbottom Sound, Mustin could see no ships anywhere. He raised the PT boat headquarters at Tulagi, but the mosquito fleet didn’t know much, either. Several long turns over the waters south of Savo yielded no clues until the morning sun reached the proper angle to the water, and then he saw it: a wide sprawling oil slick trailing away to the west with the friction of an eight-knot wind. It marked the resting place of yet another American ship in what some would call the Savo Navy Yard, or Ironbottom Sound. Her identity would be established soon enough. It was the Northampton, gutted by torpedoes fired by Tanaka’s surprised but quick-triggered destroyer commanders.
When Wright’s cruisers opened fire, they erred in concentrating on a single ship, the destroyer Takanami, riding ahead of Tanaka’s group as a picket. As American projectiles straddled her and she returned fire, the cruisers’ salvos, drawn to the light, converged in earnest. With memories still haunting the Japanese of what the Washington and South Dakota had wrought fifteen days before, it was easy for Tanaka to believe