Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [51]
When Shoup heard a pump motoring in the forward part of the ship, beyond the no-man’s-land of the amidships fires, it was his first indication that people were alive on the other side of the hangar deck. Within an hour the persistent labor of the bucket brigades had quenched the fires as far forward as the well deck. Only a stubborn lube-oil fire in the starboard forward corner of well deck was evidence of the great conflagration that had been.
Shoup and Hayes were optimists. But a hotter blaze was worming its way deeper in the Astoria’s belly, a severe fire in the wardroom that was unapproachable by hand or by hose. Notified of it, Greenman ordered the forward magazines flooded to prevent an explosion. Enterprising sailors tossed a couple of preventive bucketfuls down the ammunition hoists, then turned open the seacocks. As the powder bags were swamped, one danger vanished and another rose in its place. The weight of the water accumulating below threatened to increase the modest port-side list.
It was around 3:30 a.m. when the rain came, and for about an hour it fell, heavy and cold. Custer remembered some folklore he’d heard that said rain always came after a big naval battle because the concussion of big guns unhinged the equilibrium of the atmosphere.
Topside the rains fell hard. Though they did little against the blaze in the well deck, the superstructure cooled, steamed, and smoked. The blackened foremast turned to solid steel again after buckling under the heat. Hoses lay about, withered down to their coils like discarded snakeskins. The forward turrets, manned now by corpses, were still trained in the direction of the last known target. The ship, coughing flames from her belly, shook occasionally from the muffled thump of five-inch projectiles exploding in superheated hoists. In the midst of it all, men were nearly stuporous. “I stood for a moment of silence in memory of the men I had known,” Jack Gibson said. “Then voices roused me. They came from a destroyer coming up alongside.”
When the Bagley first appeared ahead at around four o’clock that morning, the ship was blacked out and identification impossible. The Astoria’s survivors mistook the flashes of her signal lamp for the muzzle of an enemy rifle firing into their shipmates adrift. Captain Greenman ordered a signalman to climb atop turret two and challenge the newcomer with a blinker gun. “Shaking with cold and fright,” recalled signalman Vince Furst, “I sent out AA and the familiar SOS.”
The voice that came in reply was unmistakable, the New England twang of the Bagley’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander George A. Sinclair, well known in the Astoria from his recent tenure as her engineering officer. His destroyer approached bow-to-bow in a well-executed “Chinese landing” and held fast to the vastly larger cruiser. The wounded were taken from the Astoria’s forecastle by triage, stretcher cases first, crews working in the darkness by voice and touch. When Joe Custer’s turn came, he began descending to the destroyer’s deck, then heard Greenman call from the bridge, “Able-bodied men stay aboard! We are not abandoning ship!” A spontaneous cheer went up.
The effort to save the Astoria called Kelly Turner’s battered screening group to a proud new purpose. The Bagley took aboard seventy of her wounded. Playing searchlights on the water, looking for more, Sinclair’s tin can shoved off and drew alongside aft.