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Contemplating a world without a USS Astoria, Bouterse found he could not take his eyes from a ghastly sight. “One of our crew had been killed at his battle station at After Control, the tall superstructure just abaft the hangar, which contained some of our fire control equipment. His body had caught on the rail and was hanging there. The fire from below was coming closer and closer to him as I watched transfixed.

“I know I wasn’t the only one of that group of dazed survivors who noticed our shipmate’s body slowly shrinking as the flames consumed it. The thought never crossed my mind that I should try to climb up and pull that body down, and no one else moved either … a funeral pyre seemed symbolically appropriate in the last moments of our ship’s existence, and, for all we knew, ours. One must only watch in dignified silence and say farewell.”

One sailor who was sent below to find some life jackets returned with a box of cigars. Bouterse knew the kid. He had been trying to teach him to read and write. As he offered smokes to men clustered around turret three, the kid swelled a little, as if he knew he had won a small battle. He shouted to the chaplain, “Hey, man, I just made chief the hard way!” The sight of this sailor, cocky despite the circumstances, struck Bouterse in the heart. “I was back in a more familiar world where sailors could do crazy things like that, throwing the butchery of battle right back into the face of the enemy.… The bitter laughter tasted good.”

8

Burning in the Rain

IT WAS ABOUT 2:40 IN THE MORNING WHEN ADMIRAL CRUTCHLEY, from the bridge of the Australia, observed a trio of objects burning on the sea between Savo and Florida islands and wondered what calamity he had missed. The muzzle flashes he had seen earlier had stopped. His commanders had reported no victory, yet no attack on the anchorages had ensued. The pieces of a strange puzzle floated all over the sound.

To his interim squadron commander, Captain Bode in the Chicago, the British officer sent a terse imperative: “REPORT SITUATION.”

Bode was quick with a reply: “CHICAGO SOUTH OF SAVO ISLAND. HIT BY TORPEDO, SLIGHTLY DOWN BY BOW. ENEMY SHIPS FIRING TO SEAWARD. CANBERRA BURNING ON BEARING 250 FIVE MILES FROM SAVO. TWO DESTROYERS STANDING BY CANBERRA.”

Crutchley pondered this incomplete report and passed what he could to Kelly Turner: “SURFACE ACTION NEAR SAVO. SITUATION AS YET UNDETERMINED.”

Among the transports off Tulagi, nerves were tight as tow cables. The Hunter Liggett went to general quarters at about 2 a.m. at the first sign of trouble. Her skipper, a Coast Guard captain named Lewis W. Perkins, leaned on the front rail of his bridge and peered into the night, studying the flashes of gunfire. Then he heard the uneven gurgling of an aircraft engine, and suddenly it was like daytime as a flare popped overhead. “Its searing light revealed the transports and destroyers, grotesquely naked. On the horizon, firing began again.” Perkins shouted, ‘Hold on! If we’re going to get it, this is it!’

“We stood breathless, gripping the rail. The shells, if they were coming, were on the way. The white light glared down on us. Our ships just sat there: fat, stupid ducks in the blinding glare.”

Mikawa’s arrival had been a surprise to all. Joe Custer, who interviewed several of the observers, recalled their confusion and fear. There was no comprehending the horrible truth behind the pyrotechnics that flashed in the night. “Huge balls of red fire would leave one ship; they could watch them winging in an arc straight for the other ships, then the spurting of flames as they hit. Then, answering balls of fire would retrace the arc, and explode in flaming geysers.”

“We’d automatically move our heads from left to right, from side to side, at the exchange,” the navigator on one of the transports said. “It was like watching a tennis match—in hell.” That officer made out one large ship in particular, very possibly Mikawa’s Chokai,