Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [30]
At noon the next day, the Japanese naval air corps staged an encore. Once again, given advance warning from an alert coastwatcher, the transports and their screen were maneuvering at battle speed when the air strike arrived. Approaching from the northwest in a loose, diamond formation, skimming over Florida Island and Tulagi, they hedge-hopped over the transports and broke up into smaller groups, looking for targets. Their orders were to strike the American carriers, suspected to be operating east of Tulagi. Their secondary target was the landing force. The latter was all they could find, and more than they could handle.
Kelly Turner’s fleet, maneuvering in four columns abreast, led by his own flagship, the McCawley, offered its assailants few opportunities except to die. Admiral Crutchley marveled at how the “magnificent curtain of bursting high explosive was put up and enemy aircraft were everywhere crashing in flames.” Rear Admiral Norman Scott’s flagship, the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan, a sister of the Atlanta, was built for the job, with a battery of sixteen five-inch guns arrayed in eight twin turrets. Her officers got good solutions and had plenty of time to train and aim. The heavy cruisers, including the Astoria, worked over the incoming planes with their older batteries. Planes with red meatball insignia plummeted to the sea, pancaked in single forward flips, caught wing to wave and cartwheeled into pieces, or struggled on by, drawing black contrails in steepening downward arcs.
While under attack, the Astoria’s gunnery officer, Commander William H. Truesdell, found some time to explain the fine points of antiaircraft fire control to the journalist Joe James Custer during this live demonstration of the state of the working art. Technology was part of it, but the unpredictable way of the human heart was part of the system. Hearing one of his gunner’s mates wheezing into a harmonica as the bullets flew—Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home—Truesdell chuckled and asked, “How can you beat those kids?”
The impact of the ship’s defensive gunfire was terrific. When Custer returned to his stateroom, he found it a wreck: the telephone torn from the bulkhead, lightbulbs popped, personal effects scattered across the deck, including his chief weapon, his typewriter. The performance of the gunners was redeemed by the fact that most of the Japanese bombers ended their missions rather worse off than the journalist’s cabin. Only five Bettys returned to base. It was a far cry from their devastating turn against the Royal Navy’s heavies, the Prince of Wales and Repulse, eight months before.
Even with reliable warning, it was still a considerable trick to launch and vector fighter planes from aircraft carriers to intercept at the right place and time. As a result of the difficulties of communication and coordination among the carrier groups, the combat air patrol was paltry on the second day. A dozen and a half Wildcats, ten from the Enterprise and eight from the Saratoga, belatedly intercepted the Japanese and harassed them halfway back to their base in New Georgia. For the Japanese, the returns of their second air attack were meager: The destroyer Jarvis was hit by a torpedo and the transport George F. Elliott crash-dived by a damaged bomber, scuttled and left burning in the shallows off Tulagi.
The first two collisions of the Watchtower fleet with Japan’s world-beating naval airpower punctured the impression of invincibility the latter had earned over the past year. A number of Japanese bombers were seen to break off their attack and fly away to the north. “Either these are Army pilots, or the Japs are down to their second team in the Navy,” scoffed an Astoria officer. “I’ve never seen them that bad before. Those crack Jap Navy pilots—the ones we tangled with in the Coral Sea, and at Midway—they don’t let up. Never. They come right at you, and they keep on coming until you get them or they get you. These punks—running away …”
Joe Custer got a close look at their kind when he found himself appraising five enemy