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By Root 1845 0

men in the class,” in part no doubt because of his prowess in a hand-to-hand fight. An expert fencer, he had won “immortal fame,” as the irrepressible yearbook scribes wrote, by beating West Point en route to becoming an intercollegiate champion. He was a warrior; he always wanted his sword in the fight. According to Admiral Raymond Spruance, Scott’s tour of duty in the CNO’s office was an unhappy one. Sent there after commanding the heavy cruiser Pensacola, Scott “made things so miserable around him in Washington that he finally got what he wanted—sea duty.” Robert Graff of the Atlanta thought Scott was “kind of like a junior Halsey.” But fighters don’t always find their fight. It had been Norman Scott’s fate to sit idly by in the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan off Tulagi as the Japanese sliced through Captain Riefkohl’s cruiser screen on the night of August 9. Scott spent the next day, his fifty-third birthday, reflecting on what little he had seen of the Battle of Savo Island. He could claim some prescience for the screen’s unpreparedness for combat. He had warned Crutchley about the “grave inadequacies” of Condition Two, the state of partial battle readiness whose circuitous personnel shifts underlay the slow-footed response to Mikawa’s appearance.

When he was named as Carleton Wright’s successor as commander of Task Force 64 in mid-September, one of his first acts was to return to tradition. In the late thirties, the U.S. Navy borrowed a training regimen from the Royal Navy, the so-called offset gunnery exercise. In these drills, ships squared off as they would in battle, fixing their gun directors on one another but setting off the alignment of the turrets by several degrees. As the guns fired askance, a second director measured the precision of the offset. Any shot that landed a calculated distance behind the ship, projected in accordance with the range and the degree of the offset, was deemed a hit. Such drills were generally more orderly affairs if one ship did the firing and another served as target, rather than having both duel and maneuver simultaneously at full battle speeds. Precautions notwithstanding, the exercises were acts of faith: With fears of a catastrophic accident always present, they were conducted with a flinching caution that could keep officers up the rest of the night.

Greater cause for insomnia lay in not knowing the proficiency of one’s crew. Admiral Ghormley had been hampered by this uncertainty. He didn’t know what his ships and commanders were capable of. He hadn’t spent time with them, or among them; hadn’t been physically present to assess critical variables, from their intangible esprit to the physical soundness of their machinery. He was candid about this. “I did not know, from actual contact, the ability of the officers, nor the material condition of the ships nor their readiness for battle, nor did I know their degree of training for warfare such as was soon to develop in this area. Improvement was acquired while carrying out combat missions,” he would write. This was a startling admission of a leadership failure. Norman Scott wasn’t about to emulate it, and certainly wasn’t satisfied to leave the education of his men to the enemy.

After the damaging of the South Dakota, North Carolina, Enterprise, and Saratoga, the U.S. Navy had more capital ships on the sidelines than it had in the forward area. The loss of the Wasp left just one carrier, the Hornet, in the entire South Pacific. Battleships would find their moment, when fortune and necessity conspired. Until then, the “light forces”—cruisers and destroyers—would hold the line. The Slot would be their battlefield. “It was the way the Japs would come. We talked about it constantly,” wrote the Helena’s Chick Morris. “The talk was always of the impending clash with the enemy’s warships. Were we good enough? None of us knew. We had never been through the real thing.”

In the last two weeks of September, during moments stolen from the drudgery of escort duty, Scott arranged for his cruisers to practice their craft. Determined to make