Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [84]
The Helena’s turret crews learned as rapidly as any in Scott’s task force. They were “quick and slick as precision machinery,” Chick Morris wrote, “swinging their arms with the grace of ballet dancers to maintain the flow of ammunition from magazines to guns.” They got good. They expected to hit, every time. The gunnery department acquired, Morris wrote, a “bull’s-eye complex.” Against Mikawa’s sharp-eyed shooters, they would need it.
The light cruiser had recently taken aboard a new skipper. When Captain Gilbert C. Hoover was swung over in a canvas bag from a destroyer to the larger ship, the crew liked what they saw. Waving to his crew, the forty-eight-year-old native of Bristol, Rhode Island, wore an aviator’s leather jacket and a jaunty overseas cap. He had a Navy Cross, too. The consensus was, “He’ll be a Helena man the minute he puts a foot on our deck,” Chick Morris recalled. Hoover had smarts and sophistication—he had been an aide to President Herbert Hoover (no relation), and served on the first government committee formed by Franklin Roosevelt to study nuclear fission. Those qualities were evident in his bearing and attitude. “They liked the way he came over the side. They liked his looks and his grin. They liked the cut of him. His expression plainly said he was proud to be coming aboard, and that was all they needed to know,” Morris wrote.
At the change of command ceremony, a culture shift became apparent. His predecessor was dressed in the traditional whites. Hoover was ready for work, wearing slacks and short sleeves. “We knew things were going to be different aboard ship,” a Helena sailor named Robert Howe said. “Captain Hoover had been overseas since the war had started. We didn’t know it then, but he knew how to handle a fighting ship.”
When Morris saw Hoover poring over the ship’s blueprints in his sea cabin, he noted that he wasn’t a big man. Neither short nor tall, stout nor slender, he seemed measured and balanced; smart, reliable, and steady in every respect. “In his leather jacket he looked a little like a middle-aged suburbanite about to go for a walk in the woods, with a trout rod tucked under one arm. But that room was a calm and confident place, mellowed already by the captain’s personality.” It was just what the Helena would need in the days ahead.
After the loss of the Wasp, the Helena, one of her escorts, took aboard some four hundred survivors. It was not her crew’s first encounter with a capital ship loss. They had had nine months to process the events of December 7 into a righteous and productive brand of anger. Their ship had been berthed at Pearl Harbor right where Japanese agents had reported the battleship Pennsylvania would be. Pier-side at the 1010 Dock, the Helena took the first torpedo of the war. Dropped from a plane, it burrowed through the sea, passed underneath the shallow-draft vessel moored alongside the Helena, and smashed into the cruiser’s forward engine room. The blast killed forty and wounded one hundred. But it completely did in the Helena’s berth-mate. The old wooden-hulled minelayer Oglala was lost to the underwater detonation close aboard. Her crew would say she was the only warship ever to sink from fright.
Whether they arose at Pearl Harbor or off Savo Island, the debilitating effects of defeat had a certain half-life and it took special measures to exorcise them from the bilges. Repaired at Mare Island as the carrier battles of May and June were fought, the Helena left San Francisco on July 23, 1942, escorting six supply ships for the South Pacific. As the deep swells took hold of her en route again to Pearl, a desire for revenge animated her crew. “The Helena craved action,” one of her officers, C. G. Morris, wrote. “Her men talked