Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [52]
Then the Wilson came alongside, sidling up on the windward beam to starboard, pumping water into the fires forward. The work never proceeded without thought of a renewed enemy attack. The destroyers were repeatedly called away to investigate sonar contacts.
With the Hopkins towing from astern and the Wilson’s deck force hosing fires in the wardroom, the list steadied. Bucket brigades redoubled their back-straining labors. It was not enough. When fires below reached the shell hoists, seized by shell damage and full of ordnance meant for enemy targets, a series of explosions began weakening the ship from within like small strokes. As several of these breached the hull, the Astoria’s list slowly grew more serious. At ten degrees it was difficult for men to walk on deck.
Further on into the morning, the Astoria suffered a particularly heavy explosion deep within, probably in the forward five-inch magazine, which precautionary flooding never reached. From a deep and inaccessible void, its detonation was felt more than heard. There was a muffled cacophony of collapsing bulkheads. Bubbling to the surface on the port side came an exhalation of yellow gas, detritus of a burned-out powder magazine. Sailors on the other ships could see tendrils of smoke leaking from nearly every rivet on the ship, thousands of them. When the list grew to fifteen degrees, the shell holes above the waterline started shipping water. The makeshift bandages of mattresses and pillows shored up with timber could do only so much. When the list reached thirty degrees, all her sailors could do was watch the Astoria yield.
Shortly after noon, the port side gunwales were awash. The bucket brigades stood down as all hands were ordered aft. The Buchanan, alongside to fight fires, secured her hoses and began taking off survivors. Sailors without life jackets floated on the sea gripping discarded powder cans. Destroyers stood by to retrieve them. A survivor of the Astoria’s forward turrets, Charles C. Gorman, saw a man in the water near the fantail of a destroyer screaming for help. The deckhands threw him a line, but as they did so, the destroyer accelerated, evidently called away to pursue a submarine contact. The man grabbed the line but missed, and the sharks were soon on him. Gorman called it “one of the most horrible sights of all the wars I have been in.”
Many more-fortunate souls were already aboard the tin cans, lying prone on their steel decks. The decks of the Bagley were filled with Astoria wounded; limbs, heads, and torsos wrapped in bandages and gauze. On the Bagley, those who could manage it stood at the rail, attention fixed on the floundering carcass of their onetime home. The Astoria was rolling to her port side, bow deep and stern raising high. On the afterdeck, a sailmaker and a special working party wrapped bodies for burial at sea until the list forced them to disband.
“Off her slanting side, men were walking slowly, deliberately, into the calm water,” Joe Custer observed from the Bagley. “Some of them went into shallow dives, like kids off a raft. Others just walked off the edge and started their arms in motion. Some wore life jackets, others didn’t. Officers’ khaki mingled with seamen’s dungarees. There were hundreds of heads bobbing in the water. And now the great group went into a mass crawl, like so many porpoises, toward the destroyers and lifeboats hovering nearby.”
“The day was beautiful, the sea like glass and the ship was slowly overturning and sinking,” a sailor on the transport Alchiba wrote. “Men were in the water,