Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [66]
Stunned by shock, badly burned, hands moving with sharp purpose but unguided by active thought, Huffman opened the gun house’s port-side hatch and climbed through it. “I was getting out of there. It was a raging inferno. I didn’t know what I was doing.” With the turret trained out to starboard, the hatch led not to the communications deck but out into a void of space with a ten-foot drop straight down to the main deck. “There was nothing under me but air,” Huffman said. “But I never had that all in my mind. I really wasn’t thinking at all. I was just getting away from all that fire.” He landed hard on the teak. Memory failed him for a time from that point on. According to Ensign Smith, only seven of the fifty-eight men in Turret Two’s assembly—the turret, the magazine, the powder circle, the gun deck, and so on—escaped alive. Aside from Smith, Huffman, gunner’s mate third class James L. Cash, seaman first class Ray Goodson, and some lucky souls inside the officer’s booth, everyone else succumbed to the inferno of powder bags.
When the fires inside the turret grew hot enough to begin cracking the thick glass of his viewing port, Smith and the others abandoned the officer’s booth and scrambled clear of the turret as it burned up from within. Looking back, they were astonished to see the booth hatch open again and seaman first class Henry S. Grodzky stumble out onto the communications deck. Burned worse than Red Huffman was, he collapsed. Smith ran to him and carried him to the lee of the radio shack, where a medical triage had been set up.
On Turret Two’s shell deck, seaman first class William J. Stewart felt a slight jarring impact and saw a bright spark fly through an opening in the top of the barbette. Knowing that the tightly sealed gun housing was not readily permeable to flames, Stewart saw the spark as a sign of a terrible conflagration above. “We knew the turret was on fire and that if we were to survive, why, we had better start getting out,” he said. When he and the six other men on the shell deck wrestled open the four-foot-high watertight hatch, they were met by a pressurized blast of flame. “It was just like coming out of a blow torch and was bouncing off the bulkhead about eight feet in front of us,” Stewart said. He might have made it unscathed, but his dungarees got snared on the hatch and fire washed all around him. Bare from the waist up, he suffered horrible black burns on his exposed torso, face, and ears. His hair, thoroughly drenched with sweat, “burned down to a charcoal mat and apparently protected the top of my head,” Stewart wrote. He worked his dungarees free and, numb but soon to be in need of morphine, escaped with the six others. He headed to the aid station, high on his own adrenaline.
Red Huffman and another sailor were struggling with a fire hose, trying to train it on Turret Two, but it pulled no water. Back near the number-one radio room, Ensign Smith and some others found another hose and played it into the burning enclosure. To Smith’s surprise, the lights were still on inside, but they did not long survive the torrent from the fire hose. The electrical circuit and the lights died with the flames. The firefighters had no inclination to explore the dark turret’s blowtorched innards any further. Terrible fumes from inside drove them back.
The flames churning out of Turret Two had briefly cast the Houston in sharp relief for enemy gunners. In the Mikuma, sailors boisterously celebrated the tall lance of flame that leaped from what appeared to them to be the Houston’s bridge. Although those fires were swiftly quenched, projectiles flew to the ship like flies to a porch lamp,