skidded left again, and this time the torpedo ran harmlessly down the ship’s right side.
Plunging down its wake, Enterprise passed the drowning enemy aviators who had launched it. They gazed up at Hardison in frustrated malevolence, and then Big E’s wake thundered over them and they were gone.
Now there were five more Kates attacking Enterprise from dead astern. They maneuvered for a shot at her left middle. Hardison kept turning right to give them his narrow stern, while his force’s gunners spat out a storm of 20-mm shells. Three Kates went down in quick succession, the fourth made a bad drop and crashed, but the fifth launched with good aim from nearly dead astern.
Hardison swung his ship to parallel the torpedo track and watched the enemy missile pass along his left side.
Enterprise plunged along at twenty-seven knots, her men still battling fires, others trying to patch her riddled flight decks, and lookouts watching carefully for periscopes again. Overhead, returning planes from both her own and Hornet’s decks pleaded for permission to land. At last, Commander Crommelin insisted that they must land, holes or no holes, or else run out of gas and crash.
They began coming in, and as they did, South Dakota’s radar picked up a large formation of enemy aircraft to the west. Planes that had not landed pulled up their wheels and banked away with roaring motors. Without altitude, they were out of the fight, and it was up to Kinkaid’s gunners.
Once again, they beat the enemy off. Although the Japanese planes had had the advantage of low cloud cover, they were also denied the opportunity of singling out Enterprise for concentrated assault. Twenty of them attacked in shallow dives that are the delight of antiaircraft gunners, and eight of them were shot down while scoring only one near-miss on Enterprise.
A few minutes later, a handful of stragglers pounced on South Dakota and the cruiser San Juan. A 500-pounder hit the battleship’s Number One turret. Inside that thick steel cocoon no one was aware of the hit, but a bomb splinter struck Captain Gatch in the neck. For a single confused minute, South Dakota spun out of control and made straight for Enterprise.
Once again Hardison was swinging his ship, and then San Juan, also knocked out of control by an enemy bomb, went careening left with whistle blowing, guns shooting, and breakdown flag flying —while the American ships broke formation and went scrambling off in every direction to avoid her.
Finally, San Juan was brought under control. Enterprise sailed on, her forward elevator still jammed, but already beginning to take on planes and turning south at full speed—retiring hastily south to escape the big enemy surface force now rushing down to finish her off.
Northampton had Hornet in tow and was dragging her over the ocean at three knots.
But Admiral Kakuji Kakuta, now in command of the Japanese carriers, had been closing the distance between himself and the Americans, and he had more strikes in the air.
In late afternoon a half-dozen Kates caught the plodding carrier. They came at her in a fast weaving glide. They launched six torpedoes. Only one hit, but one was enough.
It rammed into the aviation store room with a sickly green flash and cracked Hornet open. A tide of fuel oil two feet deep went cascading through the third deck to knock Commander Creehan’s men off their feet, nearly drowning them, forcing them to rescue each other by a hand chain leading to a ladder and escape scuttle. Hornet listed sharply. Gradually the tilt built up to 18 degrees.
“Prepare to abandon ship!”
Hornet’s men stood by, her guns firing on while dive-bombers came at her again, and missed, and a V of high-flying Kates made a horizontal attack, and missed, and then Hornet’s men went over the side.
They left their dying ship in splendid order, going hand over hand down lines hung over Hornet’s sloping sides, or jumping into the water to swim to waiting life rafts. But to a sailor, to leave a ship is to leave home. Many of them had fond memories of the big ship, dying just six days after her first birthday. They left part of their personalities aboard her, part of themselves stuffed into seabags that would now go down with their ship. One man might mourn the loss of his favorite books or his Bible, while another would regret having to leave his wife’s picture or a bundle of dog-eared letters-from-home; others thought ruefully of the candy bar they had been saving for the midnight watch or cursed the loss of a collection of pornographic pictures or a souvenir of Honolulu or a good-luck charm or even a pair of loaded dice. A Marine sergeant going over the side protested that he had no time to save two Alka-Seltzer bottles filled with quarters. Officers and men who had money or valuables in the ship’s safe were also abandoning ship at cost. Commander Gus Widhelm had $600 in poker winnings in the safe, together with the titles to two automobiles, and he was losing a record-player and his fifty-two Bing Crosby records and a collection of Strauss waltzes. Commander Dodson had managed to destroy the ship’s secret papers but he could not save his collection of Greek and Roman coins. They, along with Commander Smith’s lithographs and wood cuts and collection of French literature, would ultimately sink to the bottom of the sea.
Pat Creehan all but refused to leave, working stubbornly at his engines, until, with the water above his shoulders, he cast a last fond look at his turbines, and climbed out the escape hatch.
Out in the water, destroyers which had already taken off Hornet’s wounded moved rapidly among the life rafts to take able survivors aboard. Three of the men so rescued—Richard McDonald, Frank Cox, and Russell Burke—vowed loudly that never again would they light three cigarettes on one match.
Captain Mason was the last to leave Hornet. Silent and impassive, he climbed down a cargo net into a waiting boat, and then destroyers Mustin and Anderson ran in to sink his ship with torpedoes.
Isoroku Yamamoto was elated to hear that Enterprise and Hornet— the two ships which had violated inviolable Tokyo—had been caught and crippled by his fliers. His orders to his fleet were brief: “Chase and mop up the fleeing enemy.”
All ships gave immediate pursuit. Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo sent battleships Kongo and Haruna and a dozen cruisers and destroyers plunging southeast at a furious thirty knots. Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe with battleships Hiei and Kirishima, and another flock of cruisers and destroyers, also poured it on. After both surface forces came Kakuta with Junyo and Zuikaku, hoping to get off a finishing strike at dawn.
But Admiral Kinkaid had wisely taken his ships out of range. The best that the Japanese could do was to find Hornet and to scare off the American destroyers which had failed to sink her.
Mustin and Anderson had fired eight torpedoes each at Hornet. Nine of them hit, yet Hornet remained afloat; proof, if more were ever needed, that America’s shipbuilders were superior to her torpedo-makers.
Only four Japanese fish were needed to do what sixteen American torpedoes could not do. They were launched by destroyers Akigumo and Makigumo and they put U.S.S. Hornet, seventh American ship of that name, beneath the wave.
Only crippled Enterprise now stood between the enemy and Guadalcanal.
In Tokyo a great victory was proclaimed.
But once again, the Japanese failed to understand that if they had won a tactical victory—as they certainly had in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands—they had suffered strategic loss. Although Hornet was gone and Enterprise was damaged, the Americans had once again bought time with blood. Enterprise could be repaired while more ships and aircraft were rushed to the South Pacific.
But for Japan, Santa Cruz meant that Hiyo, Zuiho, and Shokaku were out of the fight for Guadalcanal, and a hundred aircraft, with their precious
