Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [39]
Sweeping the horizon through his glass, the executive officer of the Vincennes spotted a glow of light and silhouettes on the water, about four miles on his port beam. The “great display of light” blooming in the haze was the product of the high halo of a star shell. The gunnery officer believed it was from the flash of American gunfire bombarding shore. The Astoria’s captain, Greenman, too, was fooled by the evidence before his eyes. When he was roused to a view of Bode’s southern group dying in the dark, he said, “I didn’t know they were shelling the beaches tonight,” and returned to his cabin. But even when the shock of heavy underwater explosions came, the throes of Bode’s squadron could too easily be dismissed by the most plausible explanation: the detonations of depth charges dropped by destroyers hunting submarines.
Captain Greenman was unaware of the discord in his pilothouse concerning purported radar contacts. Had he been awake, he might have heard through the open hatch the argument between one of the two quartermasters of the watch, Royal Radke, who heard a plane overhead and asked permission to pull the general alarm, and the officer-of-the-deck, a young lieutenant, who declared such an action the captain’s prerogative. Radke wasn’t standing on ceremony when a decision might determine life or death. Without further deliberation or entreaty, he pulled the red lever. Some would say that this act of insubordination ended up saving more than a few American lives.
Having dealt with Bode’s force in summary violent fashion, the four Japanese cruisers—the Chokai leading the Aoba, Kako, and Kinugasa—swept along to the northeast. The Kinugasa was still dealing fire at the ruined Canberra when the Chokai ahead fixed her searchlights on the Astoria, last in Captain Riefkohl’s column, and eighty-two hundred yards, or four and a half miles, to the northeast. The Aoba lit the Quincy, and the Kako took the Vincennes.
Mikawa’s gunners were turning their batteries on the American column when the lieutenant in the Astoria’s main battery director, Carl Sander, found himself studying a strange cruiser through his spotting glasses. Recognizing foreign architecture, he shouted into the phones, “Action port! Load.” As Sander coached the boxy bulk of his gun director onto the target, his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Truesdell, in Sky Control high in the foremast, saw searchlights probing out of the darkness to port. He shouted, “Fire every damn thing you got!”
Awakened, Greenman reached the bridge shortly after Astoria had let loose her first salvo. “Who sounded the general alarm?” he demanded to know. “Who gave the order to commence firing?” Greenman thought the worst—not an enemy attack, but a blunder of fratricide. When the second salvo blew, the captain feared his gunners were firing into friendly ships. The quartermaster, Radke, was still catching hell from the skipper when a report came that the five-inch-gun deck was on fire. Only when an experienced voice such as Truesdell’s had confirmed that the ships illuminating them were hostile did Greenman let his gunners do their work. From that moment on, the Astoria roared.
Feeling the lurching of the ship and watching yellow light flash through the slats of the porthole to his sleeping compartment, Joe Custer knew suddenly that he would not escape the battle unhurt. “It was there, as vivid and clear as though someone had told me,” he wrote. For a moment he was frantic to know where the injury would strike him, but then he understood there was little use fretting over what he couldn’t control. “I was suddenly cool and calm: What is to be, is to be.”
Running to the weather deck, a radio department officer, Lieutenant Jack Gibson, was “surprised to see that we were fixed by a searchlight like a bug on a pin.” Like her two consorts, the Vincennes and the Quincy, the Astoria seemed to come to