With promotion I found myself no longer skipper of the old Blue Beetle. I was now “commodore” of a whole destroyer division, my new flagship being a destroyer of the same class as the Blue Beetle, identical in every detail. As such I soon found myself retiring more and more into the little magic circle that surrounds any commander of a group of warships and discovering just what lay within that magic circle. During a maneuver, whether it is in action or only the preparation for action, he is one of the busiest men in the fleet; but most of the time his job is just to sit still and think.
The process carries no implication of leisure. It is the real business of the day— a great deal of straight, hard thinking, which consists mostly of visualizing situations that might occur in the division and figuring out what should be done. What if three enemy heavy cruisers approached us at night from off the port bow?
Modern naval war moves so fast, the guns shoot so straight and hit so hard, that the first two or three minutes of any action are absolutely decisive. The division commander has no time even to do the most elementary thinking in such a situation. He must have the whole thing on tap; every order has to be an almost automatic reaction to a set of circumstances he has long ago foreseen and planned out to the last detail.
On October 13, just after the Battle of Cape Esperance in which Norman Scott’s squadron wiped out a Jap cruiser force, we learned that the enemy had established a patrol line of small surface ships, stretching south from the Gilbert Islands along the 175th meridian. Evidently he felt that his air patrols from the upper Solomons could cover any approach our ships made from the southeast and wanted to keep us from slipping new vessels into the area down from the northwest. It was a case for surface attack; orders came down from Admiral Nimitz to conduct a raid on that patrol line, knock off some of the ships in it, make it expensive for the Jap to maintain, give him the jitters.
I drew the assignment with my relief flagship and another destroyer of the same type, Commander Rodger W. Simpson’s ship, one of my division. We were not far from Baker Island when the orders came through. We filled up to capacity and took off on the raid at 1000 on October 19. There was a long run ahead of us with the distinct possibility that the last leg of it would have to be made at high speed under close pursuit from Jap heavy ships or aircraft. I had to keep fuel consumption down to the most economical figure as we circled out wide to run in on their patrol line.
The essential element of the operation was surprise. We put out extra lookouts and instructed them to keep especially sharp watch for any of those big Jap patrol bombers. If they reported us coming in, the little expedition’s goose would be cooked, for the enemy would either withdraw his patrolling ships or support them so heavily that we could accomplish nothing. We had hoped for overcast to cover us, but most weather predictions in the tropics are pretty useless and the morning of the twentieth, the day of our approach, broke without a cloud in the sky and a bright, sparkling sea. Still, luck rode with us—there were no patrol bombers in the sky either; and we steamed on all day without so much as a smell of the enemy.
I planned to hit the northernmost boat of the patrol line and then run right down the chain, breaking off when I could accomplish no more, toward our rendezvous with the rest of the task force to the south and west. The next day we were closing in on the line; it should have been the twenty-first, but by the vagaries of time around the 180th meridian we had lost a whole day out of our lives, and it was the twenty-second. There were scattered clouds around the sky that morning, thunderheads far away. At 1000 extra sky lookouts were set. We spread out into a scouting line a good 4 miles apart and stepped up our speed. At noon we went to battle stations; at 1300 made the 175th meridian and poured on the oil for 30 knots.
Ten minutes later the lookouts chanted the magic words, “Enemy in sight.”
“Where away?”
“Broad on the port bow, distance about 17 miles.”
It was beyond the range of our guns. We could see her two tall masts first, the radio aerials, and we knew we were being reported. Down below was the hull—a 100-foot hull, for she was one of those tuna clippers that used to be out on innocent fishing expeditions, always exactly in the waters where our fleet was maneuvering. When this war is over, any Jap naval officers left alive need not worry about unemployment; they can go right back to tuna fishing.
This one was turning to get away from us, but the men aboard must have known they didn’t have a chance—not against destroyers tearing down on them at better than 30 knots.
Just then our sister-ship broke out a hoist of flags and the TBS buzzed. She had sighted a patrol bomber, and a moment later we could see it circling above the ship we had taken for a target at at least 18,000 feet. Only one that high up would never bother us. We closed; at twenty-five minutes past the hour our sister-ship was near enough to open fire. The first salvo was over, the second short, throwing up columns of spray that looked beautiful in the sunlight. The third salvo hit her fair, and that was the end of the battle, for a tall pillar of flame leaped at least 200 feet in the air above the patrol vessel. When it came down her stern was gone, the bow was sinking, and there was nothing on the water but wreckage, not a single survivor. She must have been simply full of gasoline, out for a long patrol.
We swung out back to our scouting formation and rushed on south along the patrol line, there being no further point in trying to sneak in on the rest of them since we had been spotted by that patrol bomber. Half an hour later he had worked around into the sun and peeled off in a dive toward us. As he did so we opened fire, and the Jap evidently didn’t like one bit the way the bursts were coming up in his direction, for he side-slipped off, did a series of fancy maneuvers, pulled out of range and finally out of sight altogether, perhaps with empty fuel tanks. I don’t think we hit him.
Thirteen-fifty-five, and the lookouts were reporting again. Another patrol boat? Not this time. As we drew down toward the vessel more and more of her hove above the horizon till she stood clear as a merchant- ship type, about 8,000 tons, with a well-deck, two masts, and a single funnel amidships. There was a gun visible on her poop and another forward; as we closed he put up a string of signal flags, and we could make out through the glasses that she was a naval auxiliary of some kind.
My own opinion is that at the distance the Jap’s captain took us for some of his own destroyers because of our tripod foremast and our two stacks, one with cowl on it. If we had been, we couldn’t have made out his signal anyway; his string of flags was perfectly unrecognizable from the smoke and dirt. For a short time he bore down toward us; then, apparently realizing his mistake, he turned and began to make off toward the northwest at 18 knots, which is plenty fast for a ship of that general type.
We came round and took after her, one on either quarter like the British cruisers after the Graf Spee, everyone on our ship at action stations and leaning forward as though trying to push her faster through the water. By 1424 we had closed in to a point where our guns would just reach. I gave orders to commence firing, for I wanted to find out how heavy those pieces were the Jap had mounted on his decks. The Australians lost their cruiser Sydney by letting a German armed merchant get too close. The first three salvos all missed; the Jap came hard left, then hard right in a series of serpentine zigzags, at the same time opening up with his own guns.
The splashes came in three-gun salvos, by which we knew he had an extra pair of weapons mounted in sponsons on that structure amidships, but they fell well short. From that and the size of the splashes we knew his pieces were small. We continued to close; another salvo from my own ship hit the Jap’s bridge structure amidships and started a fire.
Now both destroyers went into rapid fire, hitting him nearly every time. One landed directly on his forward gun; there was a big puff of flame, and it stopped firing. Another whole salvo went into the well-deck aft, and an awful lot of black smoke came up, so much that Fitzgerald thought they had smoke pots out and were trying to make a screen to get away in; but as we came closer I could make out that the blaze came from a big stack of oil drums he had on the deck.
We kept right on hitting him. At 1440 the Jap was definitely slowed down, not making his turns well, and only an occasional shot was coming from one of the guns amidships. The big range finder on his bridge had been shot away, he had fires fore and aft, and some of the Japs must be roasting in them. I thought of my friends on the Arizona.
Suddenly she was pronouncedly deeper by the head, then more and more; and a big brown screw, still turning, came up out of the water. Down she went, leaving a little debris, an empty lifeboat, and some small objects floating. Our sister-ship closed in, and I could hear her 20-millimeters going across the swell. Later her captain’s report said it gave him a peculiar sense of satisfaction to hear the shells hit metal.
It was now 1500. The chase of the auxiliary had forced us to reverse course for a considerable distance. The patrol boats lower down the line would have had two hours to get clear since that plane reported us attacking the first one, and the light would soon fail. I decided to forget the rest of them in view of the fact that we had picked up more worth while game (the Admiral thought so too— he sent a “well done” through to us) and to go on back to the rendezvous. There was another reason in addition. Our friend the patrol bomber must have called up some of his friends; there were now three of them hanging around us, well out of range.
They were the big Kawanishis; you never saw anything like the size of them. Even at 20,000 feet they looked like enormous hawks. They would get behind the thunderheads now gathering all around, swoop in at us, and then go away—the old German trick, trying to make us use up our ammunition. At 1720 one of them worked up nerve enough to come in out of a cloud astern on a real bombing run. We altered course, so he made it a dry run, came around, and tried again. I said ours was a good gunnery ship. The boys were right on that baby, tickling him up so close that for a moment I thought we had him. He yanked back on that stick so that he came up like a fighter and almost flipped right over; the bombs fell a good 1,200 yards away, and he beat it. About half an hour later another one tried a run on us, but the ships were fairly close together, and both opened up on him so hotly that he dropped far short of the normal release point, and the bombs tumbled a good 2 miles back in our wake.
That was the end of the bombers and the end of our mission. Probably it was the end of the Japanese experiment in setting up a patrol line. I never heard anything more about it, and the Northampton later went up through those waters on her way to bombard some of the enemy positions in the Gilberts without seeing anything of the patrols.
On the twenty-seventh I was called ashore on Guadalcanal for a conference with Captain William G. Greenman who commanded the naval forces in the Solomons area. This meant the PT boats based over at Tulagi, such tugs and barges as were then servicing the harbors, and whatever light craft fell under the captain’s command by reason of their temporary presence—a rather pick-up fleet. His headquarters were in a tent, one of the most elegant on the island—12 X 12 with a wooden floor and a couple of feet of boarding up the sides, the canvas roof painted in camouflage pattern, and a green and-brown camouflage net slung over all.
The place was crowded. All the PT skippers were there. Greenman had been skipper of the Astoria when she went down after the first fight off Savo in August; since taking over his command he had acquired a case of malaria, and he talked lying in his bunk, leaning on one elbow. He was ill and worried, and he looked it under the mosquito bar over his cot, explaining a tense situation to us.
The Tokyo Express was expected to run one of its trains down the Slot that night. The Jap originally had the thought of using these excursions to bring big stuff in and shell the shore, but that idea had been pretty well knocked out of him by our battle- wagons on the fifteenth. Now they were apparently going back to their earlier method of using groups of light ships, moving in fast to reinforce their own men and to pound ours.
“Air reconnaissance indicates they are bringing down a force of five destroyers and possibly a light cruiser tonight,” said Green- man; and the PT men looked at each other, cocking their eyebrows. Five DD and a cruiser constitute light forces according to naval definition, but they were a pretty heavy lot compared to what we had, which were eight PT’s and my pair of destroyers.
Greenman went on discussing the arrangements and giving us our assignments. He set up two search units, one off Komimbo Bay, one off Tassafaronga, each with a pair of PT’s. The other four Petes would work with my destroyers, patrolling between Savo and Cape Esperance. The search units would attack only if they got an especially favorable opportunity. The rest of the Petes were our striking force; they would run in and attack with my destroyers to follow as soon as the little fellows got clear. We would have airplanes to drop flares along the shore, orienting us and silhouetting the Jap. Greenman warned that it was of the utmost importance for all of us to know our own forces and where they were at every given moment; we were to communicate all the time by voice radio.
One of the staff officers stepped over to the administration tent and typed out a set of instructions for us. Everybody was talking about the difference between our own and the Jap gunflashes at night. They have a very good powder, nearly flashless; when one of their pieces goes off all you see is a big round ring of amber-colored light, a click, and then gone, like that. We went over the signals we were to use and the simple code for voice radio; I would be addressed as “Abie.”
As soon as the copies of the instructions came back from Administration, I left and got myself a ride in a PT across the harbor. The situation was tense for me, all right; for it had fallen dark as we talked, my destroyers were 15 miles away over at Tulagi, and before we could go out to the patrol I had to get the captains together and give them the explanations I had just received. One of them, in fact, had to climb into a whaleboat and join me aboard the flagship as we were moving out past the entrance. Most people don’t realize how much time it takes to prepare for a naval action, especially when you are dealing with fast units in narrow waters and at night.
After I had given the destroyer captains their dope, I passed it out to everybody on the flagship by the loud-speaker system so we would all know what we were up against and be able to act without asking questions. As we moved out into Sleepless Lagoon the sandwiches and coffee began to make the rounds and kept up all night.
That place was well named Sleepless Lagoon; figure it out from our own experience. All day we had been on anti-submarine patrol—that is, at action stations with everyone in a state of intense watchfulness, knowing full well with the knowledge gained from experience that in a matter of 40 seconds the decisive event takes place. Now, at the hour when people at home are sitting down to a cocktail and a good rest after a nerve-racking day, we were putting out to spend the night in a state of still more intense watchfulness, with the probability strong that before the day we would be in battle with superior enemy forces. Not only that—the Jap had shore batteries both on Guadalcanal and on Savo; our area of maneuver was circumscribed.
Sure, you can say that it was unfair; the United States should have had more forces in there. But we didn’t; another convoy had come in a couple of days before, unloaded, and been taken out by the rest of the destroyers that morning. Our Navy had more destroyers somewhere and cruisers; but they were needed in those places, they were all working, probably themselves complaining that they too had insufficient rest and inadequate force. So there we were, assigned to do our best with what we had.
Nothing happened.
What I imagine is that the Tokyo Express ran as predicted that night, but only as far as the Russell Islands, where the Jap transshipped whatever troops and supplies he was bringing into small motor barges, which then crawled into Guadal the next night. That was the stunt he was certainly using later.
So we had our sleepless night for nothing, and with the dawn turned back into the channel once more to take up anti-submarine patrol. That night we managed to get a little sleep and again on the next, but on the thirtieth, at about 1830 with dark already coming on, I received a dispatch which said that the Jap was going to try it again, this time with a big outfit, four destroyers, a pair of those big destroyer-cruisers of about 3,000 tons, and a batch of transports. Our land forces on Guadal were pinching them pretty hard by this time, and they were apparently going to make a really strong effort to reinforce.
You will remember that the big Battle of Guadalcanal had taken place only two weeks before. Admiral Halsey had put together another cruiser force and was sending it in under Rear Admiral Carlton H. Wright to knock out this particular train on the Tokyo Express. They were even now on their way; my orders were to take my two destroyers out south and east to join them at sea, conducting a submarine search on the way. Another sleepless night.
As we ran down the channel there was no moon, and it began to rain, with the visibility about 2,000 yards, as black as a hole in hell. I have mentioned the exquisite preparation that has to be gone into before an action. This time there was none for me and my destroyer division. We didn’t know what the Admiral’s intentions were, what special signals and arrangements he had made, what code words were in use for his ships, what our place in the coming battle would be. He had and would have no opportunity to tell us— you can’t put decisions and discussions like that out over the radio without giving them to the enemy, and there was no time to do it anyway. When I met him later he said that he thought it was pretty much a suicide assignment for us to join him that way in the night.
It was already late when we made contact on his ships. He was a trifle early at the rendezvous, rushing along through the dark at high speed. I gave him “This is Larry,” my code name for the night on TBS, and he instructed me to fall in at the tail of his line, but it was so dark I couldn’t find the tail; every time I tried to turn in another big black shape would come tearing past. Finally I had to ask, “How many big boys have you?”
“Five,” he answered, and on the count I swung my own two destroyers in astern. TBS calls were going from ship to ship, quite a lot of conversation, so I opened up the instrument and set myself to listen in the hope of determining from the calls what ships we had. At that time most code calls were the captain’s nicknames. I could hear Jim calling Jack and Tip talking to Bob, but it was very little use, since most of the names were common enough not to mean anything. There were only two I recognized, but both gave me a thrill. One was “Stoney;” that would be Stoney Roper of the heavy cruiser New Orleans. I was a plank-owner of that ship; had helped to put her in commission years before.
The other good number was a call to “Jock”-—that could only be Jock Cooper bringing my own old ship, the “Blue Beetle” back to the wars, somewhere with the destroyer escort covering the fleet up ahead.
A group of transports had unloaded at the Guadal beaches during the day, shoving off just at twilight. On the way out we had had to pass right through them in the dark, as tricky a bit of navigation as ever I saw. I had thought we were through with them, but no such luck. As we came boiling along at the tail end of that cruiser line, the whole parade came down on us on a directly opposite course. The speed of approach was a combination of theirs and ours, and it gave you something to think about in that murk night. It was like doing a toe dance blindfold across a floor covered with live hand grenades; but luck and good navigation carried us through, and at 2200 we were pushing into the entrance to the channel.
We expected to catch the Jap somewhere along the beach between Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance. That’s exactly where he was. My records show that at 2235 the New Orleans, second in line of the cruisers out ahead of us, spoke up: “We think we have four visual contacts on the port bow.” Three minutes later came a general order turning ships left a little to close, and we pushed on into the dark. At 2308 the flag reported two unidentified ships ahead which must be the enemy, but they were still out ahead. Admiral Wright wanted to trap the whole business between us and the coast and so held on.
A few minutes later the destroyers leading the line asked permission to fire torpedoes. One of the cruisers said there was a flashing light on Tassafaronga Beach, and I on the bridge could feel the tension around me grow, expressing itself in remarks clipped short. At 2320 the Admiral’s TBS ordered the destroyers in the van to fire torpedoes; before there was any result, before we could even imagine them rushing through the black water, there was another general order: “Stand by to commence firing.”
The people back in the department whose job it is to examine combat reports set great store by having everything accurately timed. It is the only way they can draw up those precise action diagrams that look so pretty in the histories. I note that the report of my flagship’s captain says at this point: “Times of events during the next ten minutes are estimated. They do not agree with others.”
He had good reason. As the “commence firing!” went out, all the destroyers, all the secondary batteries of our cruisers let go together with star shell. The whole shore with its black jungle behind, the streaming rain, and the fitful shapes of the Jap ships leaped from nothing into glaring day, and into it plunged the level glare from our cruisers’ big guns. I could see the Honolulu up ahead putting out shells from her fifteen guns as though they came from a hose; toward the shore there was a forest of geysers that hit everything till somewhere up toward Esperance a ship blew up in brilliant yellow flame. Then another caught fire; I could see the high loom of her hull through the splashes. She looked like a big cargo ship or transport.
Over there the enemy were shooting back. Beneath the geysers was the characteristic set of amber rings—from about 5-inch, to judge by their size—and a whole salvo flew over us with a scream. Another dropped short into the water on our port quarter. They had us bracketed! But, as so often in naval action, they under-corrected on deflection.
“That bird can’t hit me!” I shouted.
“The Commodore says they can’t hit him.”
“They can’t hit us either, then,” shouted someone else, and a laugh of broken tension went along the deck.
Before it died there was double shock that we felt even through the shock of the guns, and up at the head of our line the cruisers New Orleans and Minneapolis burst into flames that seemed a thousand feet tall. Torpedoes!
We swung leftward to avoid the spread. The Northampton right ahead of us, her identity clear in the glare, swung right; the Honolulu plunged straight ahead past the burning ships. I could hear Admiral Wright on the flagship telling Rear Admiral Tisdale of the Honolulu to take over, quick, before his TBS went out and he could give no more orders. My own ship heeled over and bucked like a colt. If there had been time to think, which there was not with the guns going so fast, the glare, geysers, and burning cruisers, I should have thought both our ships gone for sure. But they were not; under the pillars of flame their guns kept shooting, the geysers kept rising toward the shore, and beneath them Jap ships were burning and sinking.
We found out later that the Honolulu had gone right ahead into the waters beyond Esperance, searching for more enemy ships, but never found any because no Japs got away from that battle. The four destroyers at the head of our line swung right and went clear around Savo Island. Up there somewhere there had been a few flashes that seemed to come from the island itself, possibly a Jap shore battery trying to take a hand by shooting at our burning cruisers, certainly far short and doing no damage; but the destroyer skippers could not know that, and it might have been ships.
We turned again, trying to follow the Northampton. I don’t know exactly what happened next, though I remember our ship twisting violently to avoid the bow of the New Orleans where it had been blown off and was still afloat. But it must have been all of ten minutes from the time the two cruisers were hit before there came a second series of shots, noted in the log of my flagship as “Second ship ahead blown up.”
More torpedoes!
The ship was the Pensacola. I don’t blame anyone for setting her down as blown up; I don’t blame the Jap for claiming her sunk. I would, too, if I had only seen what he did and not the sequel. The whole after part of the cruiser was a mass of flame, a tower of it reaching 200 feet above her masthead. Just ahead of us the Northampton had another torpedo, and she was burning too; but from both ships the guns kept right on shooting.
We had turned again to get clear of the burning ships, and now as we tried to reform a burst of 40-mm. fire came at us from one of the damaged cruisers. We switched on fighting lights for recognition. The firing kept right on, luckily missing us with the distance, small caliber guns, uncertain light, and our own wild movement. I realized suddenly that the Admiral must have set special recognition signals for the night of which we had not been informed because there was no way to get the news to us.
There was nothing to do but turn clear away and go back down the channel out of range of those dangerous friends. I did it and found that my companion destroyer, also under fire from our damaged cruisers, had withdrawn out of range, which is why I know of the last few minutes of the battle only by hearsay. It must have been close to an hour later that word came to us to get back into the area and stand by the Minneapolis, which was making slowly for Tulagi under her own power, with her bow all blown off.
We found her at about 0200 and guided her home, the last of the fleet to get in, watching the Japs burn toward Tassafaronga Beach, a process which they kept up all night in a rather intermittent way, a nice slow blaze going comfortably for a while aboard each of their ships, then a bright flare-up as something exploded. They had been wiped out, and our own ships were in not much better shape.
The Northampton had no luck at all; one of her Diesel oil tanks had been ruptured inward toward the engine-room by the torpedo explosion, and the oil caught fire, gradually creeping forward as it burned through the engine spaces and driving out everyone below, killing off the pumps. She went down about the time we made contact with the Minneapolis. All her crew but those killed in the original explosion were picked up when our four leading destroyers came back around Savo and reached the area just in time for this job of rescue. They also got about twenty-five Japs who were floating around in the water, all of them from the same ship, one of those new cruiser-destroyers.
Both the New Orleans and the Pensacola got in under their own power. The big blaze we had seen on the latter had been from fuel. Her tanks ruptured, and the fuel caught fire on the surface around her and wiped out everyone in the after section of the ship. By this time everybody knows about the New Orleans. At least two fish had hit her right in the bow. It seems her forward magazine went and the gasoline stowage, the ship being blown apart back to No. 2 turret, from the barbette of which you could look right down into the ocean. But she got in too, and now we had the job of hashing over what had happened and of repairing the damages.
People who have never been in one don’t realize that the least of the three important factors in a naval battle is what goes on in the action itself. The speed of everything— ships, guns, torpedoes, planes and the explosives all of them contain—is so enormous that during these moments of actual contact one has to act on a kind of educated instinct, and in retrospect it is often difficult to remember just what one did do or the time when it was done. It takes two or three observers to tell the story of the simplest battle.
The period before the action is extremely important, stretching right back to the time when training begins. It is then that the instinct receives its education; that’s why we took so long over the discussion of the approaching contact on the evening of the twenty-seventh in Captain Greenman’s tent. The lack of similar consultations kept my own division from getting in closer and more effectively on the night of the thirtieth.
But the time after the battle when people are comparing experiences and doing the repair work is the most important of all. That’s where the data come from that will be used in educating instinct for future combat. I had a good example of this on a small scale from my personal mess boy, a lad named MacDonald, whose color denied the Scotch implication of his name, whom I had selected from the ship’s company when I was made Commodore. His battle station was as a loader on the after 5-inch; after the raid on the Jap scouting line I asked him how he liked it.
“Sir,” he said, “I never knew there was so much ammunition aboard this ship.”
The morning after the Tassafaronga battle I repeated the question.
“Well, sir, I’ll take the day action every time, ’cause at night you can’t see ’em cornin’.”
It was the first night engagement for most of us, and I dare say we all felt pretty much the same. Admiral Tisdale certainly did; he was out to the south, whence he signaled the Pensacola to join him under the impression that she was still sound. Eventually he had to go back to Espiritu Santo with only that one ship, one out of five of the fleet that it had taken so much effort to gather. Admiral Wright was normally one of the most impassive of men, but when I went aboard the flagship I found him pacing the deck with his hands behind his back.
The men likewise had little to be happy about. On the badly damaged cruisers they were engaged in clearing out the flooded compartments and finding the bodies of their buddies for burial under the palms of Tulagi, a strange place for an American boy to lie. Some of them had been in those compartments for quite a while before they could be gotten out, dead and soaked in sea water. If a Gallup poll had been taken by secret ballot during the two or three days following the battle, there would have been a sound majority for the idea that we had had our ears pinned back—that is, we had suffered a defeat only outclassed by those in the Java Sea and the first battle off Savo. (I don’t count Pearl Harbor as a true defeat.)
This impression was intensified by the debate that grew up over the Jap torpedoes that hit our ships. The debate was about who had fired those fish. Some of the cruiser men thought the enemy must have had a couple of submarines in there, on the ground that they hadn’t seen the destroyers which hit them. The rest of us, destroyer men ourselves and pretty sure who had done the business, felt gloomy and morose about it. For myself, I couldn’t say I had seen the Jap destroyers either. But then, I was back at the tail of the line, extensively occupied with other things; and when I did glance out of the bridge wings, I had been able to catch no more than a glimpse of anything among all those splashes from the cruisers’ gunfire.
As a matter of fact the torpedoes could hardly have been from anything but destroyers. The number of torpedoes was just about right, and so was the spread of the salvo. If the enemy destroyer or destroyers had made a 180-degree turn after the first two cruisers were hit and had come down the line to fire the second salvo, the timing was just about right too. The Jap had just been prepared for that battle. His instinct was educated in the right way. He had good weapons and he knew how to use them, so he handed us one in the eye.
But as I said, this was the reaction only of the first few days. Then we all began to be busy with what we were doing, and as the battle faded into our background a little we arrived at the realization that maybe it hadn’t been quite so bad a show as we thought. The smart Jap destroyer man who had made the attack with that educated instinct of his was dead. All the Japs were dead. We had lost one cruiser and aboard another, the Pensacola, there were some pretty heavy casualties; but the enemy were wiped out to the extent of two of those big cruiser- destroyers, four destroyers of more normal type, and three cargo vessels and transports. It was a safe bet the cargo ships had not had time to unload, and we were hopeful that the transports had not either.
There was another feature of the situation that was brought home to us only gradually. On the morning after the battle, while it was still only half light, everyone toiled like mad to get those damaged cruisers into concealment. The New Orleans was taken way up to the end of the harbor into a deep-water creek and was there moored to a bank. The Minneapolis got alongside another steep bank inside the harbor at a place invisible from the entrance. The Pensacola was swung around and anchored with her stern to the beach. Over all three ships camouflage nets were spread and extra halyards rigged down from their masts to various points on deck and superstructure. Palm fronds were slung from everything that would carry them. The crews cut lots of brush on shore and distributed it around the deck in various artistic attitudes to make the ships look like part of the jungle; they even got coconuts and hung them around the mastheads, as though this would help the effort at deception!