Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [79]
The Wasp and the newly arrived Hornet were assigned to provide air cover to the transport force. En route north to their operating area on the afternoon of September 15, the carrier task force got its hardest shock yet. Admiral Noyes was turning the Wasp out of the wind as flight operations ended for the day. She was making sixteen knots, about 150 miles southeast of San Cristobál, when a periscope broke the water and crosshairs settled on the carrier. The Japanese submarine I-19 maneuvered, lined up on the carrier, and loosed six torpedoes.
It would go down as the single most devastating torpedo spread of the war; the I-19’s torpedoes struck three ships. The Wasp absorbed two of them, producing a series of blasts fed by aviation fuel and stored bombs. In minutes the carrier was a pyre, her pall visible for miles. The torpedoes that missed boiled onward, toward the Hornet task force six miles away. The destroyer O’Brien was struck, too, and lost part of her bow. The battleship North Carolina was the third victim, taking a torpedo forward on the port side that opened a thirty-two-foot-wide hole in her hull, buckled two decks, and disabled her number one turret, killing six.
The dying Wasp drew in her escorts in a feverish rescue effort. It was the way of the South Seas that episodes like this were well attended by sharks. As the escorting vessels moved in with cargo nets thrown over the gunwales, the sailors were horrified. “Sharks were everywhere,” wrote Ford Richardson, a sailor from the destroyer Farenholt. “Dozens. Hundreds. A shark would catch a man by an arm or a foot and pull him under, cutting off his screams. The poor devil would pop up again, and again, like a cork on a fishing line. Each time his scream would be weaker than before. Finally, he would come up no more. Sometimes the shark would grab a poor man in the middle and shake him like a dog shaking a rat. Then the shark would back off, dragging the dying man’s entrails behind him. The water would turn milky with blood.” The rescuers worked until nightfall shrouded the scene of the horror. The ordeal was never more luridly horrifying than for a pair of brothers whom the deck force of the Farenholt tried to rescue. “Just at dark, a sailor came drifting by just out of range of a heaving line. He was holding up another sailor, but that man’s head was drooped over and his face was under water. He was dead. We shouted to the sailor, ‘Turn him loose and swim to us. He’s dead!’
“ ‘He’s my brother,’ he replied.
“ ‘He’s dead, Let him go and swim closer!’
“ ‘He’s my brother! He’s my brother! He’s my brother … !’
“Helplessly we watched as the current swept him by us, and on into the darkening gloom. The last we saw of him, he was still holding onto his dead brother. The last we heard faintly ‘He’s my brother.’ ”
Although her escorts pulled aboard more than four hundred survivors, jamming them into all available spaces and passageways, the Wasp went down in the Coral Sea with 173 men. Though quick work by her damage-control crews kept her at full speed, the North Carolina would need six weeks at Pearl Harbor for repairs. The O’Brien was patched up, too, but she sank when her hull buckled en route to the West Coast.
Next to the loss of the Wasp, the costliest casualty of the I-19’s attack was the Navy’s confidence in its commanders. Nimitz took a dim view of how Leigh Noyes had handled the carriers, operating at speeds that CINCPAC believed too slow to stay clear of prowling submarines. (Destroyer commanders preferred to operate below thirteen knots to enable best use of sonar.) Noyes was quietly removed and returned to the States to take a shore command, and placed before a board of inquiry that explored the culpability for the loss of the carrier. He was exonerated by a 1943 inquiry into the loss of the Wasp, but was never recognized for his combat service.
The loss of the ship was kept a closely guarded secret. “They didn’t want anybody to know the