• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1758 0

Fleet’s eleven heavy cruisers, the Chicago ranked lowest for engineering performance, a fact that may have arisen in part from the unwillingness of his engineers to fudge fuel records—a technique sometimes used to mask actual consumption but which might well have invited a stickler’s wrath. He was bound for flag rank, had shaped his career toward that goal ever since he had survived some unpleasantness as a senior midshipman at the Naval Academy: a disciplinary proceeding for hazing, all of it duly reported on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. It was mortifying, but it didn’t hold him back. He was a star, bound to command task groups and wear gold stars.

The scuttlebutt on the Chicago had it that Bode was from money. The son of a Cincinnati judge, he had married into the Dupont family and thus would have known the glamour of overseas capitals even had his prewar service as a naval attaché not taken him around the world. In that capacity, and later as a section chief in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he had become an expert in foreign intelligence. When Bode urged the disclosure to Pearl Harbor’s commander of certain evidence that the berthing locations of vessels within the base were under scrutiny by Japanese agents, he reportedly clashed with Admiral Turner—a gambit for only the stoutest of heart. Turner, it was said, shut him down. His next assignment was to command the battleship Oklahoma. On December 7, it was only through chance that he was ashore when Mitsubishi crosshairs found his ship. The Oklahoma was heavily hit and capsized, killing almost half of her 864-man peacetime complement. Bode’s absence spared his life. He and ten other men from the battleship transferred to the Chicago.

On the night of August 8, when Admiral Crutchley took the Australia out of the southwestern screening force to confer with Turner, he signaled the Chicago by light, “TAKE CHARGE OF PATROL. I AM CLOSING CTF 62 AND MAY OR MAY NOT REJOIN YOU LATER.” With mere hours between the end of the conference and the rise of dawn, when the Australia and the other cruisers were supposed to go south to protect the transports, Crutchley saw no point in returning to his nighttime patrol station. And so Bode was alone again, in temporary command of a two-cruiser squadron guarding one of two routes into Savo Sound. The elevation to commodore-for-a-night was, he no doubt thought, a foretaste of duty to come.

Bode had reckoned with the possibility of a ship-to-ship fight against the Japanese on the night of August 8. According to a sighting report from an Australian plane out of Milne Bay, New Guinea, the Japanese fleet was on the move. Recorded at ten twenty-five that morning but delivered near dusk, the report read: “AIRCRAFT REPORTS 3 CRUISERS 3 DESTROYERS 2 SEAPLANE TENDERS OR GUNBOATS 0549 S 15607 E COURSE 120 TRUE SPEED 15 KNOTS.”

It was a curious report, vague as to ship type. When the Chicago’s navigator plotted the coordinates of the enemy naval squadron, Bode’s executive officer, Commander Cecil Adell, determined that it was too far away to reach the Chicago’s patrol area before midmorning on the following day.

So it will be a quiet evening after all, Bode thought.

Because the narrow waters between Guadalcanal and Savo Island were poorly charted, Bode had elected not to take the lead as befitted his command. Bringing his six-hundred-foot-long heavy cruiser to the head of the truncated column would have required him to conduct a minuet of giants in perilously confined waters after dark.

The Chicago’s crew was on the brink of exhaustion after several days at battle stations. As soon as one attack ended, a warning of the next one usually followed. There would be a warning this night as well, or a hint of a warning, but it would be cried only faintly, and no one would seem to hear it, or fathom it, until it was too late.

ADMIRAL MIKAWA WAS AWARE he had been spotted. One of his lookouts saw the plane that had betrayed him. Its appearance in the cloud gaps overhead persuaded him to reverse course in order to deceive the pilot that