Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [38]
On a night when the American fleet would need all the best virtues of its commanders, officers, and men to join together, Bode had committed the first in a swift accumulation of errors. Admiral Mikawa had won the draw and, continuing to the east, found Frederick Riefkohl’s cruisers, majestic on patrol but no more alert than the wayward watchdogs of the southwestern force had been despite the spectacular catastrophe of the preceding four hundred seconds.
7
The Martyring of Task Group 62.6
EAST OF SAVO, TWENTY MILES ASTERN OF CAPTAIN BODE’S WESTWARD-charging warship, the nighttime cloud cover was cast into gray relief by intermittent lightning and the distant flashing of gunfire. On a calm sea, the cruisers Vincennes, Quincy, and Astoria were tracing the northwesterly leg of a box-shaped patrol pattern five miles on a side. Their officers were alert to the light but unaware of its source. They did not know that a critical alarm had already been raised.
Captain William Greenman of the Astoria was steaming as closely as he thought prudent to the Quincy ahead, in order to get maximum protection from his threadbare anti-submarine screen. With only two destroyers, the Wilson and the Helm, leading them in the van, his greatest fear was submarine attack. On August 6, Nimitz had sent “ultra secret” warnings to all his Operation Watchtower commanders regarding the submarine threat. On the evening before the battle, Turner had instructed Crutchley to discontinue using his shipboard floatplanes to search the Slot for enemy ships. The undersea menace loomed largest.
Now came a radio warning delivered by a destroyer from the southern screening group, the Patterson, “WARNING—WARNING—STRANGE SHIPS.… ” What to make of this?
Transmitted at 1:47 a.m., the warning had been missed altogether by Captain Riefkohl in the Vincennes. The TBS frequency was clogged with commanders exchanging the administrivia of the midwatch. It had been burdened most of the night by the chatter of destroyer officers wondering how to approach the task of scuttling the transport George F. Elliott, hit in the afternoon air attack. Though the bridge watch on the Quincy received the warning and sounded general quarters, the reason for the alarm was not immediately conveyed to the ship’s gunnery-control stations.
In the Astoria, a petty officer named George L. Coleman, stationed in the plotting room beneath the bridge, trained his search radar to the west and reported a bogey approaching on the surface at twenty-nine miles. Though Savo Island’s mass blocked the radar’s field of vision within a twenty-five-degree arc off either shore, Coleman registered contacts and reported them to higher command. The fire-control radar was out of order at the time, but Coleman had faith in his longer-range search set. “The search radar was operating as well as it ever had,” Ensign R. G. Heneberger, the Astoria’s radar officer, would write. When the officer-of-the-deck refused to sound general quarters, Coleman pressed his case. “The more I insisted that the enemy was out there, the more I got excited,” Coleman wrote.
Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it. “The OOD and the other officers tried to tell me that I had a double echo on my scope and that we had a destroyer in that area,” Coleman said. He made such a nuisance of himself after his relief by the midwatch that someone finally threatened to send him to the brig if he didn’t let the next watch settle in and do their jobs.
The first irrefutable sign that enemy ships were near came when searchlights fixed on Riefkohl’s slumbering formation and a heavy salvo