Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [97]
“Captain seem to be worried?” Lieutenant Boles asked.
“Not a bit,” Morris said.
“Are we going in?”
“He says it looks like it.”
“I hope so. The men need something to shoot at.”
The prospect of a small steel-enclosed world crashing in around a man has a useful way of concentrating the mind. Men whose stations were in belowdecks compartments, situated below the waterline and sealed in at battle stations by watertight doors, were keenly aware that they already lay in their tombs should a torpedo hit. On untested ships especially, people tended to fidget. The Helena had a fire controlman named Samuel Maslo who reliably predicted the worst. Whenever talk of intercepting the Tokyo Express came up, which was always, he would say things like, “We’ll catch it sure. They got twenty ships to our one. They’ll murder us.” They called him “Sobbin’ Sam the Fire Control Man.” Fretting like that was easy to laugh off, but the echoes tended to linger. Still, one learned through the strenuous pace of shipboard life not to dwell on remote possibilities. Nimitz had found that confidence grew and pessimism waned the closer one got to the combat front.
To sailors and officers whose knowledge of war had come in school, as opposed to the crucible of the actual thing, there was comfort in numbers—and in the open air. On the Helena, Chick Morris and his fellow ensigns and j.g.’s (junior grades) made a habit of gathering on the forecastle. They called themselves the Junior Board of Strategy. Until sunset left them sitting in darkness, they studied the flag hoists by which Admiral Scott sent messages to the squadron, then discussed and analyzed the implications. On the moonlit nights, beautiful to a layman’s eye but fraught with danger for sailors in a war zone, the creamy light was bright enough to play cards by. But it was another kind of contest that held their imaginations captive.
What would it feel like when it finally came? “The Japs would strike—they had to strike—but when?” Chick Morris wondered. “The ship’s officers talked of nothing else.” The young could be forgiven their nerves. Experienced officers would be given less latitude to indulge themselves.
Morris never forgot the otherworldly serenity of the tropical evening of October 11 as the Junior Board of Strategy stood in session, watching the San Francisco’s flag hoists raise the orders for the night. “We were moving west, straight into the sun,” he wrote, “the air so clear and still that the whole visible world seemed splashed with sunset colors. It was good to stand there and watch the ships of our formation steaming through that placid sea. And I was not alone. Other men were thinking the same thoughts. Some were sitting around anchor windlasses. Others were parked on the bitts, quietly ‘batting the breeze.’ One man was asleep on the steel deck, and another, nearby, was deep in a magazine of Western stories.”
With the four cruisers in column and five destroyers arrayed in an anti-submarine screen ahead, the formation covered nearly three miles of ocean. The men in the task force stood in the place that separates the boundless tedium of being under way from the freeze-frame intensity of action. The physical magnitude of what was coming was beyond the ken of everyone except the crew who operated the SG search radar’s graphical scope. The Boise’s rangekeeper operator swept his parabolic transmitter through a continuous 360-degree arc, generating a map-like visual display on the PPI repeaters and distinguishing ship from shore so sharply as to reveal inaccuracies in the ancient charts. The search radar scanned for targets. When they were found, the narrower beams of the ship’s fire-control radars would zero in. The fire-control radars could also be