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By Root 2014 0

Chief among the admiral’s worries was the question of time and daylight. If he pressed on into the American anchorage, he doubted he would escape before daylight. He estimated it would take half an hour to finally reassemble his force, another half hour to close up into battle formation, and still another half hour to regain battle speed. From there, the anchorage was a sixty-minute sprint at high speed. The total time of those processes, two and a half hours, meant that Mikawa’s task force would hit the anchorage just an hour before sunrise; it would be impossible to escape under cover of the night.

The shadow cast by naval aviators was long and dark. The outcome at Midway, like Coral Sea before it, had taught Mikawa that land-based airpower was usually the master of its surrounding seas. “To remain in the area by sunrise would mean that we would only meet the fate our carriers had suffered at Midway.” It was six hundred miles from Rabaul to Tulagi, and the 11th Air Fleet was having trouble finding planes to commit to Guadalcanal in any event. Trouble loomed. From intercepted radio traffic, he knew Fletcher’s carriers were out there somewhere. He lacked friendly air cover to save him from American planes in a daylight sprint back to base.

En route to surprising Bode and Riefkohl, it had been keen navigational skill that enabled Mikawa to hug Savo’s black coast. Proceeding into the littorals of an anchorage without good charts—incinerated when his flagship’s chart room was hit—would have been perilous. Besides, what was the hurry? Victory had been easy. Other opportunities would come. The Army had long been saying it would be no great chore to unseat the Americans from their small beachhead.

Eight months earlier Mikawa had been second in command to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the Pearl Harbor strike force. Mikawa had command of Battleship Division 3, the mighty Kirishima and Hiei. When a decision loomed then about whether to retreat or attack again, Mikawa had urged further attacks against Oahu’s oil storage and repair facilities. Now he evaluated similar if smaller risks and chose discretion—and withdrawal. The irony of that decision was considerable: As Mikawa departed to the north, the U.S. aircraft carriers whose wrath he feared were preparing to get under way in the other direction.

“We were all shocked and disconcerted momentarily,” wrote Ohmae. “We were still absorbed with the details of the hard fight just finished and had lost track of time. I was amazed to discover that it was just shortly after midnight, and then we were headed in a northerly direction. As we continued northward, we ran the risk of going ashore on Florida Island, so a change of course was made to the left. I asked the lookout if there was any sign of pursuing ships. There was not.”

* * *

THE FIGHT TO save the Astoria was at a fever pitch. With hundreds of sailors marshaled as a bucket brigade, heaving water with buckets and spent eight-inch shell casings, many of the fires raging throughout the ship began to yield. Countless small acts of gallantry marked the morning. A lieutenant, Walter Bates, dove overboard to push a life raft containing a portable pump closer to the ship. When he noticed a shark trailing him, he leaped into the raft, grabbed an oar, and splintered it over the predator’s skull. Then Bates was in the water again, pushing the raft into position. The pump coughed to life and water flowed for a brief while. When it died again for good, Bates climbed up on deck and joined scores of others removing wounded. “He was everywhere, working feverishly,” Joe Custer reported. “And he came out with only a sprained ankle.” A first-class petty officer named C. C. Watkins had the kind of commanding presence that rallied the bucket brigade. “Men naturally responded to his confidence, actions, and commanding voice,” wrote Lieutenant Commander John D. Hayes, the engineering officer. When Frank Shoup, the exec, first noticed a sailor trapped between a whaleboat davit and a gash in the starboard side of the upper deck, he thought