Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [87]
Destroyer captains were known for their esprit. Off Balikpapan, Borneo, in January 1942, the old four-stack tin cans of the now-disbanded Asiatic Fleet had made the first offensive surface-ship foray of the war. In a quick nighttime raid against Japanese shipping at rest in an anchorage, a quartet of destroyers pressed in, turned out, and left several cargomen ablaze. For the first time, the night had been seized from the victory-sotted empire.
Chester Nimitz was well acquainted with this spirit. In 1907, as an ensign in command of the destroyer Decatur, he ran his ship into a sandbar off Bataan. After turning himself in like the George Washington of legend, he faced a court-martial for incaution and negligence. His defense turned on his observation, calmly articulated during the proceedings, that the commander of a destroyer was supposed to have a devil-may-care attitude and that was precisely what he had given his Navy. In view of his spotless (if thin) record, and the handicap of having outdated charts, he was forgiven the offense and his path to the stars remained open.
It was in this tradition that the Monssen went hunting on the morning of September 27. Smoot’s ship had been shepherd to a large cargo ship, the Alhena, on a run from Nouméa to Guadalcanal. As the Alhena was being unloaded, the Marine command decided to take advantage of having a modern destroyer in the area. A 1,630-tonner of the Benson class, the Monssen was ordered to cruise along the western shoreline and bombard targets of opportunity. She was a veteran of the North Atlantic convoy runs, of Jimmy Doolittle’s Tokyo raid, and of Coral Sea and Midway, but Smoot had never been involved in something like this, where the enemy was standing so near, taunting him with his proximity.
The Japanese garrison had been making good use of the reinforcements the Tokyo Express was bringing them. They no longer underestimated the Marines. As they learned to fight smarter, U.S. patrols into the jungles and hills near Henderson Field found their days becoming increasingly dangerous. When the Marines asked the Monssen for a hand, Captain Smoot gladly answered the call.
The Monssen’s patrol line took her close to the mouth of the Matanikau River, the western boundary of the beachhead, about three miles west of Lunga Point. For several hours, the Monssen’s gunners fired on small Japanese landing craft on the beach, suspicious structures that might shelter the enemy, and anything resembling a fuel or ammo dump.
Then, cruising off Lunga Point, Smoot spied through his binoculars an American tank climbing a hill and a small group of Japanese soldiers emerging from a cave nearby. For a warship on a fire-support mission, the margin of victory in an encounter like that was defined by the flight time of a salvo to the beach. As far as the men in that tank were concerned, the gulf separating them was unbridgeable. The soldiers began running toward the tank. They climbed atop it and doused it with gasoline. Then a torch was produced and that was that. But the exchange was a total loss for the Japanese, too. “My gunnery officer saw those Japs running back,” Smoot said, “and he turned the whole broadside of the ship on that cave and blew it to smithereens.” Everybody burned.
Overhead, a high-flying V of Betty bombers arrived and began a run on the airfield. The Monssen pointed her batteries high and engaged them until several Marine Wildcats arrived. Smoot and his men watched as the last Betty in the formation was assaulted by the fighters, began falling, and exploded. One of its wings struck the water just a hundred feet from the ship. Ashore, the bodies of the Japanese dead could be seen wasting in the sand at the mouth of the Matanikau River. This was not distant. It was personal.
Late in the morning, as sounds of battle echoed through