Between 12:44 and 12:54, Japanese lookouts first reported a visual fix on the destroyer Blue at a distance of about five miles. Mikawa ordered a slight northerly course change and cut his column’s speed in order to reduce its bow waves. A few minutes later, lookouts spotted the Ralph Talbot. Both ships (which were supposed to function as the eyes of the Allied fleet) had reached the far northern and southern ends of their patrol circuits, placing them at near-maximum distance from the approaching enemy column. Their lookouts did not see Mikawa’s ships, and their radar sets were apparently foiled by the radar shadow of Savo Island’s volcanic cone. At least a dozen Japanese guns were trained on the Blue, and the little destroyer would have been blown out of the water had she shown any indication of having spotted the enemy. But the cool-headed Mikawa, in order to preserve the element of surprise, allowed her to continue on her way.
As the Japanese column passed into the channel between Savo and Guadalcanal, Mikawa ordered the speed resumed to 30 knots. The still-burning transport George F. Elliott lit up the southern horizon—faintly, but enough to reveal the silhouettes of the two southern group cruisers, Canberra and Chicago. The Chokai’s lookouts were soon able to discern the northern and southern forces simultaneously. The Japanese ships remained undetected. Mikawa’s bold tactics had been dramatically vindicated. At 1:31, he signaled, “Every ship attack.”34
The destroyer Patterson was the first to raise the alarm. By TBS (“talk-between-ships,” a short-range voice radio used for tactical communications) she signaled, “Warning, warning, strange ships entering harbor.”35 But the Long Lances were already away, and the Japanese cruiser planes, circling overhead, dropped flares directly over the two cruisers, lighting them up for the gunners. At 1:44, Mikawa’s ships opened a devastating salvo of 8-inch and 6-inch armor-piercing shells. The Canberra and Chicago, on a course of 310 degrees at a speed of 13 knots, were caught by surprise. Struck by at least twenty shells and two torpedoes, the Canberra blazed all along her length. Most of her senior officers, including Captain Frank Getting, were killed by direct hits on the bridge and superstructure. She lost all propulsion and electrical power, took on a ten-degree starboard list, and shuddered to a stop.36
The Chicago, just astern, steered to avoid her. Captain Bode ordered star shells fired in the direction of the enemy salvos, but they either failed to fire or were duds. Two torpedoes narrowly missed the Chicago, but a third hit and tore open her starboard bow. A gunnery officer recalled, “The deck beneath me came up under my feet, and the turret door to the officer’s booth flew open. . . . Through the open turret door I could see two broad pencil streaks of phosphorescence in the water, parallel to the hull of the ship. They were the wakes of two torpedoes that had missed.”37 Chicago could fight no more. She had no power, her cruiser planes were spilling burning aviation fuel all along her upper works, and her forward compartments were flooding rapidly. Captain Bode apparently made no attempt to radio a warning to the other ships of the task force, a failure for which he would later be censured.
The action south of Savo Island had consumed less than ten minutes. Mikawa’s column, racing east at 30 knots, veered north. While executing the turn, the cruisers Tenryu, Yubari, and Furutaka diverged from the rest of the column and took a more westerly course. Though Mikawa had not intended it, this maneuver had the effect of dividing the Japanese force into two roughly parallel columns that enveloped the three American cruisers and two destroyers of the northern group, which were steaming at 10 knots on a heading of 315 degrees in a column led by the Vincennes. The gunfire to the south had been heard, but officers in the northern cruiser group apparently assumed it must be friendly. The radio rooms on Quincy, Astoria, and Vincennes had each copied the Patterson’s warning, but on the Vincennes it did not reach the captain, who remained fast asleep in his emergency cabin near the pilothouse. Men went to battle stations, but the speeding attackers overtook their quarry quickly.
Flares dropped by Japanese cruiser planes descended through the overcast and bathed the three American cruisers in brilliant greenish-yellow light. A few seconds later, the Chokai’s searchlight flashed over their sterns. Once again, the Japanese launched torpedoes and then—before the fish reached their targets—opened a salvo of devastating and accurate shellfire. One of Mikawa’s officers, Toshikazu Ohmae, observed that the Chokai’s searchlight served the double function of leading the column and spotting targets. As if by an unspoken seaman’s language, wrote Ohmae, the flagship was “fairly screaming to her colleagues: ‘Here is the Chokai! Fire on that target! . . . Now that target! . . . This is the Chokai! Hit that target!’ ”38
On the Astoria, Captain William G. Greenman was shaken awake, but his first order upon reaching the bridge was to cease fire. The bleary-eyed skipper was sure the southern group had somehow blundered into the northern group and was firing on it in confusion. In these critical moments, Astoria was battered by 5- and 8-inch shells on both quarters and peppered along her length by 25mm machine-gun fire. One heavy projectile struck the barbette of turret No. 1, knocking the weapon out of action and killing all personnel in the area. Another slammed home in the No. 1 fireroom, and a third struck a kerosene tank on the starboard side amidships, spilling blazing fuel across the well deck. According to the damage report, the ship quickly “become a raging inferno from the foremast to the after-bulkhead of the hangar. These fires eventually necessitated the abandoning of the firerooms and engine rooms due to intense heat and dense smoke.”39 Steering control was lost on the bridge, but that was moot as the ship soon lost all headway. All the forward fire main risers having ruptured, no water could be pumped to the hoses.
The Quincy was badly mauled on both quarters as her crew was rushing to stations. She was struck several times in the 1.1-inch antiaircraft mounts on the main deck aft. Firing back gamely, her main batteries delivered an 8-inch shell into the Chokai’s operations room, just abaft her bridge. Chokai’s turret No. 1 was knocked out of action, and her floatplanes, mounted on catapults, burst into flame. The Quincy’s skipper, Captain Moore, ordered a starboard turn to avoid colliding with the Vincennes. But another devastating salvo severed the steering leads, jammed the rudder in place, and held the ship in her turn until she was struck by two torpedoes on the port side near her firerooms, killing her propulsion. At 2:10 a.m., the Quincy’s bridge was wiped out by two direct shell hits, killing Moore and most of the senior officers. Upon reaching the scene, an assistant gunnery officer “found it a shambles of dead bodies with only three or four people still standing.”40
The Quincy listed heavily to port. As the sea poured into the shell holes in her hull, her upper decks were soon awash and she rolled onto her beam ends. Survivors threw rafts and other floatable objects into the sea, and then followed. Lieutenant Commander Bion B. Bierer, a supply officer, dived into the sea and swam about a hundred feet away. Treading water, he turned to watch the finale: “She went down by the bow and at a very sharp angle, her stern with propellers and rudder clearly outlined against the fire-lit sky.”41
Captain Frederick Lois Riefkohl of the Vincennes, shaken awake by a crewman, likewise hesitated to engage the searchlights for fear that they might be friendly. Before the ship’s signalmen could send recognition signals, the ship was battered by too many projectiles to count—perhaps as many as seventy-four, fired by four or five different Japanese cruisers. The initial salvos struck the bridge, the carpenter shop, the hangar, and the antenna trunk. All the Vincennes’s gun turrets were disabled by direct or near shell hits. Fires sprang up throughout those areas, the floatplanes in the hangar lit up like tinderboxes, and the enemy fire did not let up for a moment. Direct shell hits were sustained on sky aft and sky forward. To add to her tally of grief, the Vincennes caught two torpedoes on her port side, near the forward magazine. Fires raged out of control all along her length, and great rippling explosions threw sheets of flame into the sky. An analysis published by the navy’s Bureau of Ships later concluded, “It is not possible for
any lightly protected vessel [i.e., a non-battleship] to absorb such punishment and survive.”42 Riefkohl ordered the crew off the ship at 2:14, and the Vincennes went down thirty minutes later.
At 2:16 the Japanese ships, still steaming at 30 knots, cleared Savo Sound and headed up the Slot. The Ralph Talbot, belatedly attempting to join the action, found herself directly in Mikawa’s path. Lit up by searchlights and mauled by five shell hits, her radar, radio communications, and fire control equipment were all destroyed.43 The hull plating on her starboard quarter was torn open at about the waterline, and she took on a 20 percent starboard list. Had a timely rain shower not descended over her, shrouding her from the enemy’s view, she would likely have been blown out of the water.
To the marines on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and the crews of the XRAY and YOKE transports in Savo Sound, the terrific roar and reverberations of the big guns had been accompanied by distant flashes in the mist. A searchlight occasionally stabbed through the night, and red tracer lines spat out here and there, but it was impossible to draw any firm conclusions from what they could see and hear. “We could clearly hear the thunder of guns, and see the sky light up from explosions,” said a witness on Tulagi, “but knew only what the crews of the landing boats told us, that there was a naval battle going on.”44 On the McCawley, Turner and Vandegrift came up on deck to watch the pyrotechnics. Sailors on the flagship cheered wildly, assuming that the American ships were letting the enemy have it. Very soon silence returned, and all that could be seen were a few distant fires, apparently blazing ships. It was not yet known whether they were Allied or enemy.
Richard Tregaskis watched the show from Lunga Point. He had known that a counterattack by sea was likely, but the tremendous cannonading brought home a terrible truth. The marines on Guadalcanal were not in charge of their fate. “In that moment I realized how much we must depend on ships even in our land operation. . . . The terror and power and magnificence of man-made thunder and lightning made that point real. One had the feeling of being at the mercy of great accumulated forces far more powerful than anything human. We were only pawns in a battle of the gods, then, and we knew it.”45
The sea was littered with debris and dead bodies. Hundreds of men who had abandoned the sinking ships clung to rafts or wreckage and struggled to remain afloat. Lieutenant Harry Vincent of the Vincennes, having leapt into the sea about fifteen minutes after Riefkohl’s order to abandon ship, found himself among a group of sixteen sailors, all treading water. The stronger swimmers removed their life belts and gave them to the men who appeared most in need. Vincent recalls, “We discovered we could tread water without a belt for thirty minutes and then hang on to a sailor with a belt for thirty minutes and then do it again and again.”46 The battle and the sinking ships had stirred up the phosphorus in the sea, and men could look down to a depth of 15 or 20 feet. Sharks occasionally patrolled beneath their feet, but none attacked. Fred Moody, also of the Vincennes, was similarly proud of his shipmates. “Even these boys that were wounded out there, I didn’t hear anyone calling for help for himself. Everyone seemed to want to help the other guy. That was my impression. I know certainly it was that way for the rest of the night.”47 They stayed afloat in this manner until daybreak, when the destroyer Chambers came alongside and lowered a cargo net.
MIKAWA ELECTED TO RETIRE AT HIGH SPEED TO THE NORTHWEST, rather than return to Savo Sound to engage the XRAY and YOKE transport groups. That was a fateful decision, and for the Americans a very lucky one. If the admiral had taken the more aggressive course, as some of his officers had urged, Turner’s fleet might have been wiped out. In that case, the logistical underpinning of WATCHTOWER might have collapsed, with bleak consequences for Vandegrift’s marines.
Mikawa’s caution has been criticized, particularly by Western historians. But the admiral later offered a trenchant defense of the decision. He had been informed, incorrectly, that the Japanese air raids on August 7 and 8 had destroyed a large portion of the American transport fleet, so he did not expect to find a great wealth of targets. His column was traveling at high speed, and its formation had become disordered. Herding them back into a coherent formation and charging back into Savo Sound might have taken as long as two or three hours. Most importantly, he could not know that Fletcher’s carriers had retired to the east and posed no danger.
Mikawa had thus far wagered his ships, and won. To renew the attack, he believed, would expose his force to a carrier air attack while he lacked any defense except antiaircraft guns; he would be inviting the same sort of catastrophe that he had recently witnessed at Midway. After the war, the admiral acknowledged that he might have scored a fantastic victory had he chosen differently, but he insisted that he could act only on the basis of what he knew at the time:
Knowing now that the transports were vital to the American foothold on Guadalcanal, knowing now that our army would be unable to drive American forces out of the Solomons, and knowing now that the carrier task force was not in position to attack my ships, it is easy to say that some other decision would have been wiser. But I believe today, as then, that my decision, based on the information known to me, was not a wrong one.48
THE CANBERRA, AFLAME AND LISTING HEAVILY, drifted on the tide. The surviving crew worked valiantly to save the ship, but there was little they could do. The Patterson came alongside, and its crew ran hoses across to assist in quelling the fires, but boxes of ready service ammunition exploded sporadically along the Canberra’s deck, and the destroyer had to sheer off. The Canberra’s fuel was dumped overboard, her remaining torpedoes jettisoned, and her magazines flooded. Her starboard list gradually increased, and the fires worsened. At 5:30 a.m., Turner sent word that the fleet was preparing to depart by Sealark Channel, and if the Canberra could not be navigated safely, she must be destroyed. The ship was abandoned in orderly fashion, with the crew leaping directly onto the decks of the destroyers or into the sea, where they were lifted by cargo nets. The burning, listing Canberra did not succumb willingly to the destroyers’ attempt to sink her. The Patterson and Elliott had to fire 263 rounds of 5-inch shells and four torpedoes before she finally slipped beneath the waves.
There remained some hope of salvaging the Astoria. Shortly after 2:00 a.m., with her fires raging out of control throughout the upper decks amidships, Captain Greenman ordered survivors out of the bridge and foretop and sent them forward into the forecastle. Though the skipper did not yet know it, his executive officer had organized another party of survivors aft, on the fantail. Both groups formed bucket brigades and managed to keep the flames at bay, but between them—on the well deck, hangar, and superstructure—a ferocious inferno consumed whatever fuel it found, including the floatplanes, the boats, the paint locker, the mattresses and furniture in wardroom country, the clipping room ammunition, and shells on the 5- and 1.1-inch hoists. A welcome rainsquall washed over the burning ship at 3:30 a.m., but it provided only momentary relief, and as it passed, the flames flared up more intensely than before. Shortly before dawn, the destroyer Bagley came alongside and began taking men off the bow. The fires advanced relentlessly until 11:30 a.m., when an explosion tore open the ship’s port side at the waterline. The sea poured into the Astoria, and she rolled radically to port. Officers and sailors leapt clear and swam for their lives. The Astoria rolled all the way onto her beam ends, and her stern went under. By a quarter past noon she was gone.49
The transport fleet, ignorant of its salvation, was left in an uproar. Enemy cruiser planes continued to circle overhead for about an hour after the Japanese fleet’s departure, dropping flares off Tulagi and the adjoining islands. It stood to reason, or so it seemed, that the flares portended another round of attacks. Rain showers and shrouding mists made for poor visibility, and recognition signals were difficult to pick out. Landing boats and patrol craft raced this way and that, apparently in distress. Collisions were narrowly averted. Rumors and spurious sighting reports proliferated. Lookouts, believing they had seen periscopes and torpedo w
akes, raised the alarm, and destroyers laid down patterns of depth charges across the heart of Savo Sound (which now took the name “Ironbottom Sound”). Although no friendly exchanges of major-caliber naval gunfire were reported, sporadic “intramural” small-arms firefights persisted until dawn. Men who had been at Pearl Harbor the previous December 7 felt an unpleasant sense of déjà vu.
Among the marines, news spread that the navy had suffered a terrible defeat. As dawn broke, and it finally became apparent that the enemy had left the scene, the American fleet was scrambling to get underway via Sealark Channel. To the west were the drifting, burning hulks of the Canberra and Astoria. General Vandegrift, watching the disorderly scene from the beach on Guadalcanal, wondered aloud, “What’s happened to the navy?” A staff officer replied, “I don’t believe the first team has taken the field, General.”50
The marines urgently needed more vital provisions and supplies delivered to the beaches, but Turner was determined to clear his ships out of the area. The admiral agreed to leave several cargo ships behind until that afternoon, but without air protection the rest of the fleet must go. Beach Red remained congested with unsorted crates. The frenzied state of the fleet—false contact reports, air-raid warnings requiring high-speed maneuvering, boats racing around in search of their ships—repeatedly interrupted unloading operations. An hour after dawn there were no landing barges at work in Lunga Roads. Wounded sailors had to be collected from the stricken cruisers. Fierce Japanese resistance continued on the little island of Tanambogo, and reinforcements had to be put ashore there. The diary of the cargo ship Betelgeuse contained the following observation: “The major part of this time was used up in awaiting orders to land after a beachhead had been secured, ceasing unloading due to orders from the beach, getting underway and coming to anchor, underway at sea to avoid the enemy, manning general quarters stations, scattering and recalling boats, diversion of ship’s boats to assist in unloading of other ships.”51