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By Root 1806 0

his own force a match for the Japanese, he had studied the recent night surface actions carefully and instituted what a Marine gunner on the San Francisco, Clifford C. Spencer, called “Night Fighting Course 101.” No peacetime moonlight excursion this. “For the next two weeks we held daily gunnery practice and high speed night tactical maneuvers, every night, all night,” Spencer wrote. “We were at general quarters every night and had mock battles with opposing ships, all moving at flank speed. Some fun! The object of the practice was to have everyone sharpen their night vision and spot the enemy before he saw you. With training, helmsmen were able to maintain ship intervals with more expertise and direct more energy to finding the enemy ships, allowing you to get off those very important first salvos.” Floatplanes towing target sleeves. Flash cards with ship silhouettes. Competitions were instituted to determine the fastest gun crews. “In Texas the battle cry had been ‘Remember the Alamo!’ Here the rally cry was ‘Remember Savo Island!’ ” Spencer wrote. “Fatigue melted away when you thought of the slaughter of friends in the now infamous August 9th ‘Battle of the Sitting Ducks.’ ”

The exercise Norman Scott led on September 22 was the first time some of his heavy cruisers had fired their big guns at all in five months, and the first offset practice they had done in more than a year. Trying to draw a bead on a highly maneuverable destroyer, the gunners of the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City learned the value of alert observation, and of close cooperation between the spotter and the rangekeeper or radar operator. Her officers called it “the best simulation of action it had thus far in target practices.” A few nights later the Salt Lake City was out again, on orders from Scott to duel the Helena. Parameters were loosened, the band of permissible speed widened to fifteen to twenty knots. The Salt Lake City pushed the limits, charging the Helena at twenty-four knots and landing a first-salvo offset straddle from 23,500 yards, more than thirteen miles away. Doctrine called for heavy cruisers to open fire in good weather from twenty thousand yards. Radar could bring even better results, allowing engagements to begin at ranges as great as thirty thousand yards.

In June, after the Battle of Midway, radar was being touted as “the outstanding development of the war in fire control.” In a night exercise, a cruiser drawing ranges with the new high-frequency, magnetron-powered FD fire-control set landed eleven successive straddles on its target. Nimitz’s people looked at those results, studied the reports of battle coming back from the front, and drew the only conclusion: “We are still not getting all that we should out of this splendid instrument.” When his ships were firing on towed sleds, Scott ordered the sleds wrapped with metal and wire mesh, to provide a crisper radar return.

Captain Small of the Salt Lake City knew that technology itself took you nowhere. Understanding and application were everything. Small had made it the “basic radar policy” of the ship that radar was the domain of the gunnery department. Data from the radars was transmitted not only to the bridge and Central Station, as on other ships, but straight to all gun director and control stations as well. This was no trivial modification to standing doctrine. According to the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin, there was “quite a lot of technique involved in transferring a radar target from detection by search radar to acquisition by the fire-control radar.” The search radar’s readings, so laboriously gotten, had to be manually plotted on the bridge before they could be conveyed by telephone to the gun directors. Small’s approach saved critical time by letting the gunnery team do its own plotting and get a direct picture of the situation.

With enough practice, even liabilities could become strengths. Through the drills ordered by Scott, the Salt Lake City’s fire-control teams discovered that faulty circuitry was causing cross-talk between the circuits used by the main and secondary