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fighting life when her guns opened up. But enemy gunners were several turns ahead of the Americans in the cycle of loading, fire, and correction of aim. Two hundred yards ahead of the Astoria and five hundred yards to port, a tight group of splashes rose, short. The next group fell a hundred yards closer ahead, five hundred short. The Astoria responded, and then a third salvo fell, directly abeam to port but still five hundred yards short. Tracking targets that were running on a course opposite her own, the Astoria’s director-controlled turrets swiveled aft until they hit the stops that kept them from blasting her own superstructure. The fourth salvo from the Japanese reached out three hundred yards closer aboard. Finally, after the fifth enemy salvo, Admiral Turner’s old ship took one square amidships, in the aircraft hangar.

Order of Battle—Battle of Savo Island

Allied

Task group 62.6

Rear Adm Victor A. C.

Crutchley, RN

Radar Pickets

Blue (DD)

Ralph Talbot (DD)

Southern Cruiser Group

HMAS Australia (CA)

HMAS Canberra (CA)

Chicago (CA)

Bagley (DD)

Patterson (DD)

Northern Cruiser Group

Vincennes (CA)

Quincy (CA)

Astoria (CA)

Helm (DD)

Wilson (DD)

Japan

STRIKING FORCE

Vice Adm Gunichi Mikawa

Chokai (CA)

Aoba (CA)

Furutaka (CA)

Kako (CA)

Kinugasa (CA)

Tenryu (CL)

Yubari (CL)

Yunagi (DD)

(Photo Credit: 7.1)

There was a sublime absurdity to the process by which a U.S. warship roused itself to action. When the general quarters or battle stations alarm rang, men assigned to a particular station on routine watch were replaced by men assigned to that same station to do battle. The replacement of watch personnel by general quarters personnel was wholesale, including key people such as the supervisor of the watch, the officer-of-the-deck, the junior officer-of-the-deck, the helmsman, and all the talkers assigned to the phones on the bridge. Every one of these people changed stations when the general alarm sounded. Though a well-drilled crew could complete the scramble within short minutes, the procedure ensured that officers and crew spent precious, perhaps decisive minutes scrambling, not fighting. It was like a game of musical chairs, begun precisely in that critical moment when seconds weighed most heavily and the marginal cost of a lapse was highest.

A gunner’s mate standing watch in the forward antiaircraft director, known as Sky Forward, had a difficult course to run after the alarm sounded. He had to scramble down a warren of ladders and passageways to the armory, retrieve the key to the five-inch magazine, run to the magazine, unlock it for the handling crew, then run back up to the flight deck and stand by to launch aircraft from the catapult. All of this had to be done in three minutes—“a stupid set up,” an Astoria sailor would say. “By the time I started my descent, the ship had been hit by several salvos and was on fire below.”

Surprise was lethal to a ship that operated under such a system. When ladders between decks were blown away, crews had no way to reach their stations. Lieutenant Jack Gibson, the radio officer, was witness to this absurd and tragic chaos. He was climbing from his watch station on the weather deck all the way up to the main battery director while the first blows landed. “The Astoria was shuddering from heavy hits and the repercussion of her own gunfire,” he wrote. “The air was filled with shrapnel that was clanging against the bulkheads, and the well deck, as I passed over it, was strewn with bodies of fallen men. I crouched down to the level of the metal railing, then clambered up to the hangar deck. Up there I was struck by the full glare of the Jap searchlights—and between that and the whizzings and ringings of metal all around me, I suddenly felt as if the fury of the whole war had been turned on me.”

Gibson bucked up his courage and continued to climb. “One more crossing, another ladder, and I was at my station and out of the light. A burst of shells followed me through the door. They pierced the hangar deck and set the launches on fire. Then