Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [37]
Watching from the starboard side of the Houston’s signal bridge, Walter Winslow is awestruck by the sight of the fabled Exeter in action, her forward eight-inch twin turrets engaging a light cruiser just coming within range nearly dead ahead. His reverie ends a moment later when he is seized as if by a great hand and thrown against the signal bridge’s gray steel bulkhead, his battle helmet skittering across the deck. The Houston’s own main battery has let loose. Lieutenant Skidmore in Spot One watches the salvo’s flight all the way to its laddering impact, red-dyed splashes rising amid the Japanese cruisers. Via sound-powered phones he sends word from the foretop: “No change to opening range.” Winslow dares to rejoice: Though the first salvo has drawn no blood, it is right on target.
The Houston had a reputation as one of the best gunnery ships of her type. However, as in the gunnery departments of the other members of the Northampton class, things were done the old-fashioned way. She carried no radar to automate the gunlayer’s craft, no remote-control servo motors to take muscle and sweat out of the business of training and elevating guns. Ranges were triangulated by eye, as the fire-control officer optically centered his twin scopes on the target, their angle of convergence registering on a mechanical indicator dial that showed the range in yards. That datum was shouted down a voice tube to the plotting room, or Central Station, deep belowdecks, where the plotting room officer, Lt. Cdr. Sidney L. Smith, operated the ship’s mechanical analog computer. Smith cranked other vital data into the machine—the target’s bearing from the gun director, estimates of its course and speed, and the Houston’s own course from the gyrocompass repeater and her speed from the pitometer—and as the guns lashed out and shells landed, observers spied the shell splashes and called down to Commander Smith gun angle corrections, or “spots.” “Our first shots were fired almost ahead, only about twenty degrees on the starboard bow,” wrote Lieutenant Hamlin, “and with the ship charging ahead at twenty-eight knots the backward kick of those two forward turrets shook the old Houston like a leaf.”
The spotters on the Houston had a clear enough view of the forces arrayed against them: two heavy cruisers just ahead of their starboard beam, and two light cruisers, each leading a pack of destroyers, closer in but farther to the west, bearing about thirty degrees relative.
As the pointer in Turret Two, James W. Huffman sat on a brass bicycle seat in a tight corner of the gun house, sweating in the dim red glow of the battle lanterns. Gripping a two-handled wheel that elevated the three guns, “Red” Huffman kept his eyes fixed on a large synchro-driven indicator dial within which a pair of small illuminated lightbulbs, or “bugs,” revolved in concentric tracks indicating the guns’ actual and on-target elevations. When the turret officer—Ens. Charles D. Smith commanded Turret Two—ordered him to “match bugs,” he would crank his hand wheels to align the bug showing the battery’s actual elevation with the outer bug showing the elevation needed to bring it on target. At the sound of a buzzer activated by the turret captain (a chief petty officer) Huffman would jerk the trigger built into the grip of his left-hand elevation wheel and the big guns would fire. The roar and recoil of the triple eight-inch rifles arrayed beneath him could unhinge the five senses. “Jesus