Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [44]
The sixth salvo hit Astoria’s turret one, forward-most on the forecastle. It absorbed three projectiles, including two to the barbette below the gun house, and one straight through the eight-inch-thick Class B armor on the faceplate, killing almost everybody inside. The hits came fast and furious for the next few minutes, slowly disabling the ship’s fire-control apparatus. When turret two jammed in train, Captain Greenman found he could only direct his guns by turning the ship’s rudder. As he ordered the helm around to enable the jammed battery to match bearings with the director, the Astoria’s twelfth and final salvo was fired, rather futilely, by local control.
The Astoria’s engineers struggled to coax full battle speed out of the besieged ship. The chief water tender, Milton Kimbro Smith, had just lit off the two standby boilers in the number three fire room. He was still looking to bring them online when an explosion rocked the compartment. Shrapnel rained down through the gauges of a control panel. Smoke washed over him, funneled down through the ventilation blowers.
At the main generator board in the forward engine room, chief electrician’s mate Gilbert G. Dietz heard scuttlebutt that the topside decks were awash with flames. The compartment directly above him was trembling from repeated impacts. The blowers were fighting a losing battle to bring breathable air below. Sparks showered around him, and circuit breakers jumped out. The engineering spaces, fully dependent on forced ventilation, were choked from above. The Astoria had reached fifteen knots when her power plant began to fail.
Men without masks gasped and fell to the deck grating, struggling. Smith cut the supply of fuel oil to the burners and sounded the emergency alarm. Crew in the number two fire room succumbed to waves of smoke. Shrapnel rained in a hail down the blower trunk. The heat forced the crew in the after engine room to abandon station. When a shell penetrated a kerosene tank en route to exploding in the after mess hall, the combustible liquid leaked all over the well deck. It caught fire and flowed through a hole in the main deck, spreading below. A fire room, an engine room, two more fire rooms, and another engine room—they died in that order. Soon the Astoria was coasting to a tortured stop.
Matthew J. Bouterse, the Astoria’s junior chaplain, described a din of “steel piercing steel in a shower of fire and lightning bolts and the groans of a great ship in her death throes.… The steel bulkheads were alive with that lightning as they bled streaks of fire.” Smoke was everywhere, and it overcame him. “I became aware I couldn’t hold my breath any longer,” Bouterse recalled.
By 2:08 a.m. Greenman’s ship was down to seven knots. He could see the Vincennes in the lead, brightly ablaze amidships, just as bad off as his ship was. On the port bow, swinging right, appeared the Quincy. A wholesale mass of fire, Captain Samuel N. Moore’s ship was still firing intermittently. Greenman could see that as the Astoria drew ahead of the Quincy, he was at risk not only of moving into her line of fire, but of a collision, too. He ordered a hard right turn to let the Quincy draw ahead. With the turn, the Japanese ships the Astoria was firing on passed astern. Tracking them, Commander Truesdell in the forward main battery director found he couldn’t see past the large fire amidships. He ordered control passed to director two aft, but they were blind as well.
Just as the Astoria passed the Quincy to starboard, a salvo struck the Astoria on the starboard side of the bridge superstructure, hitting the pelorus. Quartermaster Donald Yeamans was thrown ten feet