Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [43]
On the Astoria, Keithel P. Anthony, a water tender, was racing through the machine shop, aiming to reach the ladder that descended to the number three fire room, when a powerful kinetic force seized the whole bulkhead in front of him and swung it into his path. He was standing there perplexed, his way blocked, when a lieutenant named Thompson found him and said, “There are men in the forward mess hall who need help. Will you go with me?” Anthony assented and, strapping a gas mask over the top of his head, was preparing to venture forward when another explosion bedazzled him. “The lights went out and there were millions of sparks everywhere—like electrocution. I was knocked out and don’t know how long I laid there on the deck. When I came to, there wasn’t a soul moving in the compartment.”
When Anthony saw Lieutenant Thompson again, he was dead, “blown clear through a wire mesh and his body wrapped around the main steam stack.” His left arm and leg useless, bleeding and in severe pain, Anthony entered the machine shop and found bodies two-men deep. He wondered how he had survived, and soon found that it was only because he had somehow managed to snap the chinstrap of his gas mask that he would live with the curse of being a sole survivor. Poisonous gases killed everyone else. Anthony pulled himself through an escape hatch to the main deck by the starboard side galley. “I sat there and listened to hits coming in left and right overhead. Everything was burning.”
Lieutenant Jack Gibson described “a roar like an express train in a tunnel” as a Japanese shell hit the main battery director’s control station. “It came right through it, clipping off the steel stem of the sight-setter’s stool and dropping him swearing to the deck. In the half-dark I could see him clawing at the rear of his pants to find out if he was all there.” A voice with a Tennessee twang drawled, “That’ll teach you not to be settin’ when yo’ betters are left standin’ up.”
“We didn’t have long to laugh,” Gibson wrote. “Our director was so jammed we couldn’t move it.”
Bathed in the glare of the enemy’s carbon arcs, Joe Custer was lazily aware of men huddled around him. From them came “an overtone of muffled sounds, like mumbled prayers,” he wrote. “There was a crash of an exploding shell right around my ears, and the sudden rat-tat-tat of unseen fragments ricocheting all about me, like steel popcorn sprayed up against the inside walls of a cage. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them whistling by and spattering off the overhead.”
He remembered his premonition that he would be wounded, but realized then, too, that he would not die. The chief radioman guided him past a large gash in the deck and seated him behind turret two, which provided a loom of shelter even as it shattered his world now and then with blasts from its three muzzles. Then the chief led him down a boom to the main deck, but then turret two raged again, producing “a crushing explosion” right above him. The deck heaved as Custer shuffled down the boom, using his hearing to gauge his progress. “Look out for my leg,” a sailor nearby said. Custer forced his good eye open and saw through his own blood a chubby sailor in dungarees, his right leg hanging by a shred below the knee. As the sailor sat down on the forecastle, soaked in gore, Custer wondered how the end would feel. If I have to go, he thought, let it be quickly.
Lieutenant Gibson, stationed in the main battery director, could scarcely stand from the slippery blood on the metal deck. “In flashes of light I could see some of my men, dead with their earphones still on. They had stepped to the door to see what was happening and had taken shrapnel through the chest. The smoke and