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By Root 1888 0

traveling an average of sixty feet following penetration. Grievous as those internal wounds were, torpedoes were far worse. Hitting below the waterline, they turned the pressure of the heavy sea itself into a lethal weapon. The quick use of torpedoes was a signature Japanese tactic. IJN torpedo officers were taught to hold their fire until everything, slow fish and fast shells, could hit all at once. According to Raizo Tanaka, a rear admiral who pioneered the proactive use of destroyers in night combat, “An ideal torpedoman is full of aggressive spirit and has a strong sense of responsibility and pride in his work.” IJN destroyer commanders were skilled shiphandlers all—“the Navy’s crack night combat force” and “brilliant torpedo experts.” According to Tanaka, “From top to bottom the training and discipline of the crews was flawless. Operational orders could be conveyed by the simplest of signals, and they were never misunderstood.”

Several torpedoes hit the Vincennes from the port side. The blasts, amplified by the weight of the water, struck at the vital innards of a ship. When inrushing water killed the electrical system feeding the Vincennes’s main battery and silenced her circuits of internal communication, Captain Riefkohl was unable to talk to his engine room, to the officers in Central Station, or the gunnery team in Main Battery Control. He could not signal his following ships. In the course of the short twenty-minute contest, the flagship would manage just two nine-gun salvos, both to port, and two six-gun salvos to starboard. Her battle was quickly and mercifully over. The gunfire of Mikawa’s turret captains was aimed with uncanny accuracy. Six of the nine eight-inch turrets on the three U.S. cruisers were disabled by direct hits. Though Riefkohl must have known that his enemies lurked on all bearings, in the disbelieving first minutes he never quite shook the belief that he was under attack by friendly ships. He blinkered entreaties to them, and hoisted colors, bright in the glare of hostile searchlights, meaning to suggest that this was all a mistake. It all was a mistake, but not the kind the commodore imagined.

From the perspective of Toshikazu Ohmae, Mikawa’s chief of staff in the Chokai, the Americans were like targets in a gallery. “There were explosions everywhere. Every torpedo and every round of gunfire seemed to be hitting a mark. Enemy ships seemed to be sinking on every hand!” About eight minutes after landing their first hits on the Vincennes, the Kako and Kinugasa shifted to the Astoria, last in the staggering American line. The Furutaka and Yubari picked up the Vincennes by the light of her fires and the Furutaka’s searchlight.

Riefkohl’s destroyers, the Wilson and Helm, could do little to save her. When the Wilson, riding on the starboard bow of the Vincennes, turned left to close with the enemy, she found the U.S. cruisers blocking her approach. Tactical prudence kept her from firing torpedoes in the proximity of friendly ships, and their flames blinded her to any targets. With the nearby mass of Savo Island lying in the line of sight behind Mikawa’s ships, the Wilson’s radar could not register accurately. She fired her four five-inch guns in a rocking ladder, back and forth over the range that was shown by her stereoscopic rangefinder: about twelve thousand yards. Most of the rounds the Wilson fired—more than two hundred of them—were antiaircraft rounds with fuzes set on safe. Time rushed by to the point of vertigo, and even the Wilson’s clocks surrendered to the chaos. “Times in the above narrative are approximate,” the captain wrote after the action, “for the hands on the bridge clock fell off on our first salvo and it was not realized that the quartermaster was not making exact time records of the occurrences until some time later.” The Helm, steaming on the port bow of the Vincennes, fired just four rounds at the Japanese for want of visible targets.

Several fires were already burning on the Quincy, courtesy of the Aoba’s third salvo. The ship’s after turret took a hit in the faceplate,