Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [68]
Fletcher deployed his two carriers in separate groups ten miles apart. The Enterprise steamed at the center of a protective circle four thousand yards across that included the battleship North Carolina, the heavy cruiser Portland, the Atlanta, and six destroyers. The Saratoga was screened by the heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans and five destroyers.
A large burden of any carrier commander was deciding when to strike. At 9:35 a.m., having Ryujo but suspecting larger quarry in the area, Fletcher declined to launch his attack. At 11:28 a.m., a second sighting of the Ryujo arrived. Only two hours later, when aircraft from the Ryujo appeared on the Saratoga’s radar, bound to strike Guadalcanal, did Fletcher order the flagship’s strike planes to launch. He threw most of his air group after the Ryujo, thirty SBD Dauntless dive-bombers and eight TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Soon the Catalinas were reporting more carriers, sixty miles northeast of the Ryujo. Thereafter a flood of sighting reports deluged Fletcher. There were three distinct groups of enemy ships within 225 miles—two carrier groups and a cruiser vanguard. Fletcher knew Japanese snoopers had likely sighted him. Nagumo received a sighting report just after two, and an hour later his aviators from the Zuikaku and Shokaku were loaded and airborne. On the wing, in reciprocal directions, flew the opposing strike groups that would decide the outcome of the day.
After 3 p.m., fliers from the Enterprise found the Shokaku and delivered a hit and a near miss: minor damage. Less than an hour later, planes from both U.S. carriers located the sacrificial lamb, the Ryujo. They dove down and struck. When they departed, the Japanese carrier was heavily damaged and stuck circling, a mass of flames.
The counterstrike arrived quickly. Just past four, the North Carolina’s air-search radar detected bogeys at 180 miles. The new sets indicated not only the range and bearing of targets but also their altitude. The arrival of the enemy provoked a general scramble of all available F4F Wildcats. After the loss of the Yorktown at Midway, each carrier’s allotment of fighters was upped from twenty-three to thirty-six, at a corresponding cost to torpedo bomber strength. And so Fletcher’s two carriers put fifty-three Wildcats into the skies. “Old Lexington and Yorktown had never been half so well protected,” Samuel Eliot Morison wrote.
The Japanese formation absorbed the first runs from the American fighter planes, then bore in against the Enterprise and her escorts. A twenty-millimeter gunner on the Enterprise saw a glint of sun on a metal wing and indicated the direction of the plane with a torrent of tracers.
The radio frequency used by the combat air patrol was a frenzy of voices. American pilots hadn’t learned to separate the urgent from the merely important, and with everyone transmitting on a single channel the vital instructions from the shipboard radar controllers were so many whistles in the wind. Down upon the Enterprise fell rivulets of dive-bombers, the Vals peeling off and dropping as if following a spout, down and down, one following the other every few seconds, through dense hanging fields of black smoke stains from flak. “First ones spotted were just on our port bow, diving in,” wrote Lloyd Mustin of the Atlanta. “The sky was just a solid sheet of tracers and shell bursts—impossible to tell your own.” Reaching the release point, the planes let go their explosives, then pulled out or failed to pull out and plunged into the sea.
The blasts of five-inch guns on the collected ships of the task force had risen in seconds from a scattered staccato to the roll of heavy timpani. “Men on other ships said the Atlanta seemed to burst into flame from bow to fantail and from mast tip to water line,” Edward Corboy wrote. She rode off the Enterprise’s starboard bow. Each turret in the antiaircraft cruiser’s main battery could put out a two-gun salvo every four seconds; fifteen salvos and thirty shells a minute, with eight turrets so engaged. The ship’s mascot,