Accordingly, Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, in command of the battleships Hiei and Kirishima, had been detached from Kondo’s Advance Force with orders to deluge Henderson Field with incendiaries again on the night of November 13. The idea of repeating Rear Admiral Takeo Kurita’s performance of October 13 made Abe nervous. He didn’t believe the Americans would allow the same plan to succeed twice. Like Tanaka, he was a destroyer specialist, but Abe was not dashing and audacious. Some thought it was telling that Abe’s task force was named the Volunteer Attack Force, a usage that seemed to suggest a change of psychology in the Combined Fleet. Prior to this, victory was generally assumed. Now, as momentum shifted in the southern islands, sailors were being asked to step forward and offer themselves to the flames. There had to be a way to neutralize the airfield. Soldiers on foot had failed to breach its perimeter. Pilots by wing had failed to beat its fliers in the sky. Ships, too, had failed thus far, but ships would try again. The Combined Fleet’s strategists had never envisioned the decisive battle looking like this.
By midmorning on November 12, three hundred miles north of Guadalcanal, Abe arrayed his force into battle formation. The light cruiser Nagara led the two battleships, with destroyers arrayed like shields off each bow. By 4 p.m., cruising at eighteen knots, they were within two hundred miles of the island. Abe’s flagship, the Hiei, catapulted a floatplane to explore the sound ahead. As dusk fell, Abe’s force pressed ahead into a heavy bank of storm clouds. Then the rain began. Hara, commander of destroyer Amatsukaze, would write, “In all the years of my career, I never experienced such a rain. It was completely enervating.” One of Captain Hara’s ensigns said he would rather fight the Americans than the rain. For a time, the storm drifted south with the task force, concealing it from snooping eyes. Abe dismissed the concerns voiced by his staff that poor visibility would make stationkeeping difficult and risk the integrity of his formation. Abe had confidence in Rear Admiral Susumu Kimura, flying his flag in Destroyer Squadron 10’s lead ship, Nagara. He was reputed to be one of the Imperial Navy’s top navigators. Abe’s vindication came when the floatplane pilot reported more than a dozen enemy warships off Lunga Point—Callaghan’s force. If the rains cooperated, the Japanese force might avoid detection altogether. “This blessed squall is moving at the same speed and on the same course we are,” Abe said. “If heaven continues to side with us like this, we may not even have to do business with them.”
There were practical problems posed by the rain, however. Since Japanese gunnery was optically controlled, Abe would have to be clear of the storm before he opened fire on the airfield. His cloak would soon be a blindfold. The rain on the pilothouse windscreen was almost loud enough to drown out thought as Abe puzzled over what to do. Near midnight, he ordered his ships to stand by to reverse course to get clear of the storm. Normally the order to execute such an order followed within thirty seconds or so, after each ship had acknowledged it was standing by. But two destroyers that should have been on his starboard bow, the Yudachi and Harusame, did not reply. Had they veered from their stations to avoid running aground somewhere? Abe repeated the standby order on a medium frequency. At this Captain Hara shouted, “Has Hiei lost its mind?” He knew the medium-frequency radio band was vulnerable to enemy snooping.
Slowing to twelve knots as a precaution, Abe turned north and held that course for some thirty minutes, until the storm’s cover lifted. As he reversed course again and resumed the approach to Guadalcanal, free of the storm, he knew that he had paid for that freedom in two equally valuable and irreplaceable currencies: time and fuel. And after seven hours of blind steaming and a pair of 180-degree turns, Abe’s once-tight formation was in ragged threads. The battleships still occupied the center of the southbound formation behind the Nagara, but the destroyers to either flank had become scattered.
On the Amatsukaze, the middle ship in a column of three destroyers riding on the Hiei’s port beam, a lookout shouted, “Small island, 60 degrees to port!” Another called, “High mountains dead ahead!” The two islands, Savo and Guadalcanal respectively, were like sentinels standing astride Savo Sound. The Japanese Army observer on Guadalcanal reported that the rain had cleared and no enemy ships were visible off Lunga Point. Twelve miles out, Abe ordered the Hiei and the Kirishima to fill their main-battery hoists with Type 3 incendiary projectiles. They would close with the beach and give the Cactus Air Force another fireworks show.
Captain Hara was looking forward not to bombardment duty, but to a collision with the American fleet. A trembling took hold of him as he peered into the shroud of Guadalcanal’s black mass. The destroyer skipper called to his weaponeers: “Prepare for gun and torpedo attack to starboard! Gun range, 3,000 meters. Torpedo firing angle, 15 degrees.” He was ready for whatever might come.
A SAILOR IN THE JUNEAU, Joseph Hartney, would recall the darkness that night as “a blackness so thick, so heavy, so velvety, you felt you could take the night in your hands and wring it like a rag.” Over the mountains of the islands nearby, flashes of lightning made the clouds jump. From the black curve of Guadalcanal, Hartney heard the soft ringing of gongs and suspected it was marines signaling a warning of a naval bombardment. As he sat at his gun mount in the Juneau’s superstructure, he sympathized with his ground-fighting naval cousins. “ ‘Where in the hell is the fleet?’ they were asking in that hour,” he said. “We were the fleet and we were going out to show them that the navy, too, could face overwhelming odds. We were going to repay them for those weeks of courage when they lay in their foxholes and beat back the enemy.” The scent of gardenias wafting out from the island struck him as funereal.
The eighth ship in Callaghan’s line, the Helena, was buttoned down and restive. Her navigator was practicing shooting stars with his sextant, a couple of young officers on watch were talking Georgia Tech football, and a rummy game was quietly in progress in the coding room. As Callaghan’s thirteen ships passed Lunga Point in single file and turned north, there had been little traffic to report in the radio shack. Ashore, tracers could be seen whipping back and forth as infantrymen shot it out in the dark. When the first sign came of an enemy presence on the sea, it was almost an hour and a half after midnight on November 13. For Lieutenant (j.g.) Russell W. Gash, the Helena’s radar officer, all mystery evaporated as the number, formation, and bearing of the Japanese force appeared in bright relief on the PPI scope of his search radar. The light-echoes registered with metric precision: one group of vessels at 312 degrees true, range 27,100 yards, a second group at 310 degrees, range 28,000 yards, and a third at 310 at 32,000 yards. Judging by the relative brightness of the lumens, Gash believed that the two nearest groups were composed of smaller ships—probably escorts for the farthest group. The Helena’s five triple turrets turned out to port and were raised to their maximum elevation. As Callaghan’s and Abe’s forces advanced toward a collision, the speed at which their separation closed could be gauged by the whirring of the turret motors when the guns lowered to stay on target.
The radio logs documenting the approach showed Callaghan torn between his competing senses, querying his destroyers ahead about what they were actually seeing while the Helena dutifully weighed in, reporting contacts from the radar, which Callghan seemed to ignore. Nearly every question he asked the Cushing, leading the van two miles ahead of him, could have been answered almost instantly by the Helena, following half a mile behind. Callaghan placed his faith in people, not technics, a preference that was expressed by his selection of the ship that led his column. The Cushing’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Edward N. “Butch” Parker, was a veteran of the Asiatic campaign of early 1942, where he had fought in several battles in the Java Sea as a destroyer division commander. This made him one of the only destroyer officers in the Navy with experience in the type of close-range night battle that Callaghan sought. It didn’t seem to bother Callaghan that the Cushing’s fire-control radar hadn’t worked reliably since installation. The cost of that handicap was well compensated for by havin
g a salt like Butch Parker at the head of his line.
In possession of an electronic picture, the Helena’s captain, Gilbert Hoover, and his gunnery officer, Commander Rodman D. Smith, chafed at Callaghan’s evident lack of interest in their electronic scouting. As he watched the wake of the Portland ahead, Hoover did not relish waiting to open fire. At Cape Esperance, Scott delayed until the enemy was a mere four thousand yards away. The fact that only one person at a time could send messages over the talk-between-ships radio made it impractical for Hoover or anyone else to raise questions.
The way Callaghan had arranged his column minimized the value of their most advanced sensors. In the four-ship van, only the last vessel, the O’Bannon, had an SG set. So, too, with the trailing group of destroyers, where the Fletcher, bringing up the rear, was SG-equipped. Among the five cruisers in the “base unit,” the two leaders, the Atlanta and San Francisco, were the only ships not to have it. Still, the Atlanta’s older-model SC search radar caught Abe’s scent at twenty-two thousand yards.
As time passed, the advantage Callaghan could have seized from the radar faded toward a vanishing point. “When we finally had the whole formation in view, they were about ten thousand yards,” Graff said. “Pretty soon they were within five thousand yards. Then three thousand.” As Chick Morris in the Helena saw it, Callaghan drove ahead in a manner “as uncomplicated as that of a train rushing headlong into a tunnel. Callaghan and his staff had decided to do the unexpected and to do it quickly, and so we steamed into the dragon’s mouth with every man at every gun on every ship holding his breath and waiting for the inevitable eruption.”
AS RANGE DIALS spun downward, destroyermen up and down the line wondered why they hadn’t been released to make a torpedo attack. In the Aaron Ward, the radar officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bob Hagen, expected the commander of Destroyer Squadron 12, Captain Robert G. Tobin, to order his tin cans to prepare their undersea missiles for use. “We knew the bearing, speed and range of the enemy. But I don’t think we ever moved our torpedoes,” Hagen said. “It never occurred to the captain, but this is what destroyers were for in a surface action.”
In the Battle of Cape Esperance, Tobin had served in the Farenholt, as the destroyer squadron commander. That night, both his ship and the Duncan had suffered heavily from friendly fire. The experience might well have made him cautious about the risks of operating destroyers independently of the line. In the gun director of the Sterett, the third ship in the van, Lieutenant C. Raymond Calhoun heard his chief fire controlman call out: “Solution! Enemy course 107—speed twenty-three knots!” From there it would have been simple trigonometry to set a spread of torpedoes on an intersecting course. Calhoun called the solution to the bridge and received silence in return. According to Calhoun, “There was no order from the OTC [the officer in tactical command—Callaghan] to do anything but move right down the middle, between the two Japanese forces.” Destroyer crews at this time were more thoroughly drilled in gunnery than torpedo firing. The Navy had never really urged or rewarded anything else.
Bill McKinney, the Atlanta electrician’s mate, served on a damage-control party belowdecks. His job was to stand by within reach of a large steel locker full of damage-control and rescue equipment: ledges, chocks, lines, rescue breathers, oxygen masks, hoses, lanterns, and flash-protective clothing. He checked in with Central Repair—“Manned and ready”—then dogged the hatches and sat tight as the vibrations of the accelerating engines seized the deck, the bulkheads, the entire ship. When the ventilation system shut down, the predominant sound in McKinney’s space was the metallic whining of the two ammunition hoists that ran from the magazine below him to a five-inch twin mount directly above him. “I said a short prayer and waited,” he wrote.
IT WAS ABOUT 1:40 A.M. when lookouts in the Cushing, leading the American column, saw a strange ship slide past. Captain Parker radioed Callaghan this first visual contact with Abe’s van. “There is a ship crossing bow from port to starboard, range 4,000 yards, maximum.” Another ship appeared, followed by a larger one.
The destroyers Yudachi and Harusame, way out in front of Abe’s formation after the two course reversals in the rain, were the first of Abe’s vessels finally to emerge from the dark. The Japanese destroyers were widely dispersed around the core of the flotilla, the Hiei and Kirishima, led by the light cruiser Nagara. The third and largest of the ships that the Cushing spied was most likely the Nagara.
While the Helena continued to report its radar readings over the jammed TBS radio frequency, Callaghan kept his eyes forward and ears closed. He asked Parker, “What do you make of it now?” Gil Hoover was trying to tell him. “We have a total of about ten targets. Appear to be in cruising disposition.” Behind the Cushing and the other three van destroyers followed the Atlanta, the San Francisco, the Portland, the Helena, the Juneau, and the rear destroyers. They plunged toward enemy contact in silence, their reservoirs of potential energy stored deep within, their steel enclosures tense with superheated steam, churning and roaring but held in, like a hidden passion.
When the range had closed to two thousand yards, Captain Parker turned the Cushing to port, to bring his torpedo batteries to bear. The commander of Destroyer Division 10, Commander Thomas M. Stokes, who also rode in the Cushing, requested permission to make a torpedo attack on what were very plainly hostile ships. “Shall I let them have a couple of fish?” he radioed Callaghan. Callaghan denied his request, instructing the destroyers to remain in column, on course 000 true—straight north. The torpedo officer in the destroyer Laffey, Lieutenant (j.g.) Thomas A. Evins, was denied his request, too.
Captain Parker was instructed to maintain a course heading north, but abruptly had to veer to port to avoid hitting the Japanese ships in front of him. So did the Laffey, following five hundred yards astern, and the Sterett, and then the O’Bannon, rushing fast into this mess, turning even more sharply left to prevent a telescopic buckling of the entire front of the line. It was now, at about 1:45 a.m., that some fifteen minutes of electric and uncertain silence ended with the blast of guns from the leading units of the opposing task forces.
The fire-control officers in the Atlanta were the first of the cruisers to glimpse the chaos at the intersection of the vans. Lloyd Mustin said, “There in the starlight, that dim light in which you can see a great deal when you are fully dark-adapted, I saw the target.” Through his binoculars, he made out the silhouette of a light cruiser crossing ahead of the Atlanta at six thousand yards. Close ahead, and startlingly so, the four van destroyers were broadside to his ship’s course, making emergency turns to avoid running into their enemy. Captain Samuel Jenkins swung the helm sharply left. When Callaghan saw the ship heeled over and veering away to the west, he radioed, “What are you doing, Sam?”
“Avoiding our own destroyers,” was the reply.
At 1:46 a.m., Callaghan said, “Come back to your course as soon as you can. You are throwing whole column into disorder.” But the disorder was not Jenkins’s doing. The disorganization of Task Force 67 was irreversible now. It was forced upon it by geometry, by Callaghan’s belated perception of his tactical situation, and by the imperatives felt by individual commanders toward survival of their ships.
Coordinated task force navigation was growing difficult when the American task force commander issued his last meaningful command to his column as it moved north. It was an order to change course ninety degrees to the left—directly into the midst of Abe’s widely dispersed force. The Portland’s quartermaster logged the order with some uncertainty. Other ships did not log it at all. It is possible the order reflected Callaghan’s recognition that, confronted with battleships, cruisers could prevail only at point-blank ranges, where a battleship’s heavier armor was no proof against eight-inch fire.
REAR ADMIRAL ABE’S first indication of an enemy presence came from the destroyer Yudachi. Unsure of his own location, her captain, Commander Kiyoshi Kikkawa, reported an enemy force in the direction of Lunga Point. A minute later,
the Hiei’s lookouts reported four enemy cruisers at nine thousand meters (ninety-eight hundred yards). Abe sent a blinker message to his Bombardment Unit: “PROBABLE ENEMY SHIPS IN SIGHT, BEARING 136 DEGREES.”
Order of Battle—The Cruiser Night Action
U.S.
TASK GROUP 67.4
RADM DANIEL J. CALLAGHAN
San Francisco (CA) (flagship)
Portland (CA)
Helena (CL)
Atlanta (CLAA)
Juneau (CLAA)
Cushing (DD)
Laffey (DD)
Sterett (DD)
O’Bannon (DD)
Aaron Ward (DD)
Barton (DD)
Monssen (DD)
Fletcher (DD)
Japan
BOMBARDMENT FORCE
RADM NOBUTAKE KONDO
Hiei (BB) (flagship)
Kirishima (BB)
Nagara (CL)
Akatsuki (DD)
Ikazuchi (DD)
Inazuma (DD)
Amatsukaze (DD)
Yukikaze (DD)
Teruzuki (DD)
Asagumo (DD)
Harusame (DD)
Murasame (DD)
Yudachi (DD)
Samidare (DD)
(Photo Credit: 27.1)
On contact with the Americans, “pandemonium” broke out within the chain of command of the Japanese force, according to Captain Hara of the Amatsukaze. In the Hiei, Captain Masao Nishida and his gunnery officer debated what type of ordnance the flagship should be loading. Prepared for a bombardment mission, the gunnery officer had Type 3 incendiary and high-explosive projectiles loaded in his hoists. They settled in favor of armor-piercing ammunition. But as crews in the shell decks and turrets of both the Hiei and Kirishima scrambled to remove bombardment rounds from the hoists and ready storage execution, it was clear that execution was more difficult than decision. “There was a stampede in the magazines, men pushing and kicking to reach the armor-piercing shells stored deep inside,” Hara wrote. Evidently the Japanese were unsuccessful switching out their projectiles, judging by the volume of pyrotechnics that burst over Callaghan’s formation that night.