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By Root 1894 0

the Tokyo Express west of Savo in accordance with its faithfully kept delivery schedule. His destroyers would illuminate the enemy ships immediately upon radar contact and attempt a torpedo attack. His commanders would be free to open fire on first contact, without requesting his permission. Fire first and ask questions later would be the order of the day. His leading cruisers would close rapidly and fire at short range in continuous-fire rather than salvo mode. The two rear cruisers, the Salt Lake City and the Helena, and the rear destroyers would keep watch on the formation’s disengaged side. A particular challenge for the leading destroyers would be to stay alert for course changes blinkered from the San Francisco behind them. Improvised maneuvers were likely to be frequent once the action started.

Unlike the Navy brain trust in the campaign’s inaugural days, Scott based his doctrine not on sunny assumptions, but on grave possibilities. Whereas Kelly Turner and his commanders had once assumed the Japanese could not reach Savo Sound before morning on August 9, Scott set himself to face the worst. His plan was no stroke of brilliance, nor was it even American in origin—he was more than willing to learn from the success of his enemies. His approach resembled nothing quite so much as a defensively oriented version of the one that Admiral Mikawa had prevailed with two months earlier.

One thing Scott’s tactical instructions didn’t adequately clarify was how his destroyer captains would bring their torpedoes to bear. Torpedoes were the killing weapons of naval war, and much easier to aim than guns were. The art of gunnery, of firing projectiles at a moving target, entailed difficult calculations, including the problem of physically stabilizing guns on a rolling sea and the vagaries of three dimensions. Torpedo solutions were expressed in just two dimensions. If you knew your own torpedo’s speed, it was a simple matter to trace the enemy’s crossing angle and estimate the intersection point. “Any qualified watch officer accustomed to maneuvering a destroyer in formation can estimate the lead angle accurately enough to produce a collision course [for a torpedo],” an experienced destroyerman wrote. “At the short ranges of engagement being reported, a destroyer’s hull length would cover almost any error in estimate.” Aside from that oversight—Scott intended to rely on his guns—he had ably applied common sense, and the standard tactics for surface battle that every professional graduate of the Naval War College should have known well.

IN THE HELENA, as in all the ships of the SOPAC force, runners hustled decoded message traffic to Captain Hoover and his department heads. Three or four times an hour, Ensign Morris ran to Hoover’s cabin behind the bridge with messages and battle plan dispatches from Scott. There was no doubting the pace of activity within the skipper’s mind. His bulkheads were papered with charts of the southern Solomons area, marked in red where enemy submarines and ships had been reported. Whenever Hoover received a new dispatch, he studied it quietly then turned to his chart, tracing his finger over the track marking the progress of the Japanese ships. “The two lines on the chart were twin fuses, smoldering toward each other,” Morris wrote. “When they met there would be an explosion.”

Despite that, Hoover “was without question the calmest man on the Helena,” Morris continued. “It was, in fact, something more than simple calmness. On entering that cabin from the feverish bustle of the ship, you sensed a kind of loneliness. You felt the pressure of the responsibility upon the man who sat there hour after hour, thoughtfully planning the attack of his ship—our ship.… Her officers and men were already waging that battle within themselves, measuring their mettle, wondering how they would shape up in action.” Hoover told Morris that he expected action that night and asked him to show the reports to all the Helena’s department heads.

Commander Rodman Smith, Hoover’s gunnery officer, was tall and husky and not given