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By Root 1853 0

night. The skipper of the Monssen, Commander Roland N. Smoot, saw the missed opportunity as a disgrace. “I couldn’t help but keep saying to my gang around the bridge, ‘Why in the devil don’t we get into this? What are we doing down here waiting to be picked off one at a time? What’s the matter with us?’ ” Smoot’s comments had hindsight’s clarity. As the battle raged, the only American flag officer within range of the scrap, Norman Scott, believed he was watching the two American cruiser groups firing on each other. Scott’s thinking appears to have mirrored that of the five heavy cruiser commanders, four of whom, all but Captain Bode in the Chicago, were asleep in their sea cabins when the bugles rang. Despite the revolutionary radar eyes available to him, Scott was, according to Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, “without information except for what he had seen indistinctly.” As Mikawa’s cruisers were rounding the bottom curve of their counterclockwise circuit of Savo Island, Scott’s group had just reversed its patrol course to the south and was only fifteen thousand yards south of Mikawa’s fast-firing Chokai. Opportunity arrived at twenty-four knots and soon was gone again.

Combat readiness simply wasn’t the order of the day. Captain Riefkohl would acknowledge that he had received reports of an approaching Japanese force on the afternoon of the battle, and that he had even calculated it could well arrive that night. If that was the case, it is hard to explain why, after noting this in his night order book, he retired to his cabin.

The commanders on duty that night would have years to sort out the questions of culpability and innocence. Those whose ships had gone down fighting at least had that much honor left to hold on to. Captain Bode of the Chicago wasn’t given such a reprieve. Had the Chicago been sunk, leaving him a gallant survivor, it might have discharged some of the shame. Payment for his sins of omission and commission would come due in time.

ADMIRAL KING WOULD CALL it the “blackest day of the whole war.” More than a thousand Allied sailors died on the night of August 8–9. The tally grew every hour through the day on the ninth as the badly wounded succumbed. Reporting the disaster to his president, King promised that the new battleships South Dakota and Washington, as well as the light cruiser Juneau, would help make up for the shortage of surface combatants. They were due to arrive at Tongatabu the first week of September. King asked Nimitz to send three to five of the repaired older battleships to shore up the battered South Pacific surface fleet. Nimitz, always a serious student of costs and benefits, was eloquent by his inaction. In the meantime, Vandegrift and his men stood essentially alone.

Turner knew that the most essential need for the invasion force ashore was food, followed by land-based aircraft, ammunition, antiaircraft guns, barrage balloons, and radio construction personnel. Turner planned weekly convoys from Nouméa to keep them supplied. Running the convoys without air cover would be an unavoidable risk.

Recuperating in the President Jackson en route to Nouméa, Captain Greenman was surprised to find two familiar faces from the Astoria, his executive officer, Frank Shoup, and the newsman Joe Custer. Lying on his back in his bunk, the skipper gestured to Custer and said to his exec, “Look what we’ve got here!”

“A ghost!” said Shoup. The exec’s entire face was thick and black with burn jelly, as were his forearms and hands, except for his fingertips. “Well, aren’t we a lovely looking pair of sailors?”

“We’ve just been discovering we still belong to the living,” Greenman said. As they lit smokes, Shoup found he couldn’t bend his middle three fingers. He held the butt with his pinkie and thumb. For a week he would be under medical orders to keep his arms high, to prevent blood from flowing into the burned flesh of his hands and forearms. Greenman had eleven pieces of shrapnel in him, including one that had struck in the small of his back and missed his spine by less than an inch. While the doctors