Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [39]
At 4:30 the Naka and the seven destroyers with her had closed to within sixteen thousand yards of Doorman’s force. They swung out to port and the torpedoes began hitting the sea. The Haguro joined this volley too, sending eight Long Lances bubbling toward the Exeter. The Japanese ships fired forty-three in all. Admiral Doorman also favored closing the range. His destroyers had torpedoes, but more urgent was the need to bring into the fight his light cruisers’ six-inch guns, the one category of arms in which the Combined Striking Force had superiority.
While the Exeter threw salvos at a light cruiser, broad on the starboard beam, the Houston’s forward main batteries slammed away at a heavy cruiser. After the sixth salvo Lieutenant Skidmore announced, “Straddle.” Four salvos later, flames and enemy blood flowed. Supervising his crew as they rammed the breeches by hand, Lieutenant Hamlin in Turret One couldn’t see much from within his shuddering armored gun house. But through the turret periscope he did see “a dull red glow of the exploding shells” on an enemy cruiser. “I saw us hit this enemy cruiser one very good wallop indeed. I saw flames shoot up from her after high turret and smoke and flames come up in the waist in the neighborhood of the ack-ack battery.” Hamlin recalled:
I whooped lustily and dashed for the voice tube to the gun chamber. The gun crews there do a job requiring closer timing and teamwork than any other game in the world. They have no time to watch the show. I shouted, “We’ve just kicked hell out of a ten-gun Jap cruiser.” The boys came back with a short cheer and I turned to find the talker happily occupying the periscope.
Commander Maher, the gunnery officer, whose vantage point was considerably better than Hamlin’s, observed that the Houston’s target was “put on fire early in the engagement” and mentioned “a fire in the vicinity of the forward turrets.” According to Maher, at 4:55 p.m., a little over half an hour into the battle, “the target was aflame both forward and amidships. The target ceased firing and fell out of column under the cover of the smoke from the fires and from her own funnel.” Ray Parkin, the Perth quartermaster, wrote, “Clouds of black smoke poured out of her top up to three-hundred feet high, but she kept firing.” Captain Gordon of the Exeter, his gunnery officer, and members of his fire-control team saw hits around the “lower bridge structure.” An aerial photo taken by an American P-40 pilot around this time shows a fast-moving Japanese ship trailing an outsize column of black smoke. When men on the Houston heard that a Japanese ship had ceased fire, turned, and withdrawn, spontaneous cheers rose.
With the apparent momentary withdrawal of one of the enemy heavies, the Houston turned her guns on the second. But she would score no further hits on the Japanese cruisers. A frayed electrical lead in the forward main gun director, coupled with the whipping back and forth of the towering foremast housing, led to problems with the Houston’s gunnery deflection adjustments. “The range was perfect,” the turret officer in Turret Two, Ens. Charles Smith, recalled, “but as we continued to fire on this second ship, we could not tell just exactly where the salvo was going to land. Sometimes it would be five mills to the left, sometimes on and sometimes ten mills to the right.” To a ship that prided itself on gunnery, the failure was intolerable.
The Japanese machinery of war was far from perfect too. As more than forty torpedoes were racing toward the Allied cruisers, several were seen to explode prematurely, rending the sea just a few minutes out of their tubes. Captain Hara on the Amatsukaze lamented the defective mechanisms. And he marveled at the apparent professionalism of the Allied captains. They seemed to know just when to throw the helm, combing the wakes of the Japanese torpedoes and presenting