The 'Missing' American Cruiser Crew That Hid Behind Japanese Lines Until The Navy Came Back

July sixth, nineteen forty-three. Kula Gulf, in the central Solomon Islands, a few minutes after two o'clock in the morning. The light cruiser USS Helena is firing her fifteen six-inch guns as fast as her crews can load them. Every salvo lights her up like a lighthouse. Out in the darkness, two Japanese destroyers are watching the flashes, and their torpedoes are already in the water.

Three of them hit. Within minutes Helena breaks in half. Her bow and stern rise out of the sea like two steel towers, and the middle of the ship is gone. Nearly a thousand men are in the water, in enemy waters, at night, with Japanese warships still moving through the gulf.

Most of them were pulled out before dawn. But when the sun came up, one group was still out there. They drifted for two days and came ashore on Vella Lavella, an island with a Japanese garrison on it. There were a hundred sixty-five of them, sunburned, exhausted and short of water. To the Navy they were missing. To the Japanese patrols on the coast, they were a target that could not hide.

Eight days later, every one of those hundred sixty-five men walked onto an American ship.

No submarine could have carried that many men. No PT boat could either. And the island they had landed on lay farther up the Solomons than any Allied warship had yet gone in the campaign. So how do a hundred sixty-five sailors disappear on an island held by the enemy, and then come home? The answer is not one ship. It is a network the Navy did not build, run by men who were ordered never to fight.

By the summer of nineteen forty-three, Guadalcanal had been won, and the Allies were moving up the Solomon chain toward the Japanese base at Rabaul. The next step was New Georgia, and its airfield at Munda. The Japanese answered the way they had answered at Guadalcanal. At night, fast destroyers ran troops and supplies down the channel the Americans called the Slot, landed them, and were gone before daylight brought American aircraft.

Rear Admiral Walden Ainsworth's task group had been sent to stop them. On the night of July fifth, his three light cruisers, Honolulu, St. Louis and Helena, with four destroyers, raced back into Kula Gulf. Ten Japanese destroyers under Rear Admiral Teruo Akiyama were carrying twenty-six hundred soldiers to the base at Vila on Kolombangara.

Ainsworth knew these waters were dangerous. Before the campaign he had told his cruiser captains to expect Japanese warships, to be ready to take men off damaged ships, and if necessary to run a badly damaged cruiser aground at Rice Anchorage rather than lose her in deep water. The night before, the danger had become real. In the early hours of July fifth, while American troops were landing at Rice Anchorage, a Japanese torpedo hit the destroyer Strong on her port side aft. The destroyer Chevalier pulled two hundred forty-one survivors from the water. Forty-six men were lost.

Helena was the most experienced ship in the squadron. She had been torpedoed at Pearl Harbor and repaired. At Cape Esperance in October nineteen forty-two, her rapid fire had helped sink a Japanese heavy cruiser and a destroyer. In the first night of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal that November, she had come through a point-blank brawl with Japanese battleships almost untouched. Her crew had fought more night actions than almost anyone in the Pacific.

Helena was a product of a treaty. The London Naval Treaty of nineteen thirty limited how many heavy cruisers, armed with eight-inch guns, each navy could build. American designers concluded that within a displacement of ten thousand tons they could build a better protected ship armed with six-inch guns instead, and that the much higher rate of fire of the smaller gun would let it overpower a cruiser armed with eight-inch guns. When word arrived that Japan's new Mogami class would carry fifteen six-inch guns, the Navy matched it. The Brooklyn class carried fifteen six-inch, forty-seven caliber guns in five triple turrets, three forward and two aft.

Helena was the ninth and last of them, commissioned on September eighteenth, nineteen thirty-nine. She was six hundred seven feet long, with a five-inch armor belt and a two-inch armored deck. She and her sister St. Louis differed from the first seven ships in one important way. Their machinery was laid out in what was called the unit system, with boiler rooms and engine rooms alternating along the hull. The idea was that a single hit could not knock out all of her propulsion at once.

Pearl Harbor turned her into a modern radar cruiser. On December seventh, nineteen forty-one, a Japanese torpedo bomber mistook her for the battleship Pennsylvania, whose usual berth she was occupying, and put a torpedo into her side. Twenty-six of her crew were killed, and five more later died of their wounds. She was repaired at Mare Island, and in nineteen forty-two she came back with SG surface search radar, SC air search radar, and FC and FD fire control radars for her main and secondary guns. Her armored conning tower was cut away and replaced with an open bridge. With radar feeding the fire control, her fifteen guns could find and hold a target in the dark.

In September nineteen forty-two, when the carrier Wasp was torpedoed south of Guadalcanal, Helena had picked up some four hundred of Wasp's survivors. Her crew knew what it meant to pull men out of the sea. Ten months later, it would be their turn.

That night she carried one weakness. The previous night's bombardment of Vila had used up most of her flashless powder. What remained was ordinary smokeless powder, which lit up the sky with every salvo.

At one fifty-seven in the morning, the American cruisers opened radar-directed rapid fire. Between the three of them they fired close to fifteen hundred six-inch shells in about five minutes. The Japanese flagship, the destroyer Niizuki, was smothered. She sank with Admiral Akiyama and about three hundred of her crew.

But Niizuki had carried radar, and two of her consorts, Suzukaze and Tanikaze, had already launched their torpedoes. They were Type ninety-three torpedoes, the weapon the Americans later called the Long Lance. And Helena's muzzle flashes had shown them exactly where to aim.

The first torpedo hit about a hundred fifty feet from the bow, beside the forward turret, five feet below the waterline. The explosion destroyed turret number one, tore the hull open almost to the keel, and cut the bow off the ship. Even then, Helena's after guns kept firing, and she could still make twenty-five knots.

Two minutes later the second and third torpedoes struck, lower down, as much as fifteen feet below the waterline, beneath the belt armor. They hit the machinery spaces, broke the keel, and flooded the forward engine and boiler rooms. Water broke through the bulkheads into the after engine room as well. With two torpedoes in her machinery spaces, the unit system could not keep her moving. The power failed. The ship stopped. Two minutes after the third hit, Captain Charles Cecil ordered abandon ship. He stayed on the bridge while a signalman tried to flash a distress message by lamp, and he had the classified papers thrown overboard before he left.

With the keel broken, the girders that held the hull together buckled. The middle third of Helena sank. The bow and stern stayed afloat, pointing at the sky.

In the smoke and confusion of the battle, Ainsworth's other ships did not see her go. It was around two thirty before he realized that Helena was not answering her radio. At three thirteen, the destroyer Radford picked up a radar contact five thousand yards away. She closed in and found Helena's bow, standing straight up out of the water.

The first rescue was a fight in its own right. Radford and Nicholas reached the men in the water at three forty-one. Survivors signaled with flashlights they had carried off the ship, and the destroyers hung cargo nets over their sides. Then Nicholas's radar picked up a fast contact. Both destroyers left the rescue to face it. It was Suzukaze and Tanikaze, coming back to look for Niizuki. They turned away.

The destroyers came back at four fifteen and lowered their whaleboats. At five fifteen another Japanese destroyer, Amagiri, appeared. Nicholas and Amagiri fired torpedoes at each other, then traded gunfire until Amagiri broke off to the west. A month later that same Amagiri would ram and sink PT one-oh-nine. Around six o'clock a fourth Japanese destroyer, Mochizuki, drove the Americans off again.

By then daylight was coming, and Ainsworth had ordered the destroyers out of range of Japanese aircraft before dawn. Nicholas had pulled two hundred ninety-one men from the water. Radford had pulled four hundred forty-four. Both ships would receive the Presidential Unit Citation. They left four whaleboats behind for the men they could not reach.

Captain Cecil had survived the sinking and refused to be taken aboard a destroyer. He took charge of the whaleboats instead. One had a broken rudder. He loaded the other three carefully so none would capsize, had each one tow a raft, and steered away from Japanese-held Kolombangara. After most of a day at sea they reached a beach at Menakasapa on New Georgia, about seven miles north of the American lines. The next morning the destroyer Gwin, covered by Woodworth, came in as close to the beach as she dared. The men set fire to their whaleboats and went aboard. Eighty-eight more men were safe.

That still left men in the water. Some had climbed onto the floating bow. Others clung to rafts and wreckage. A B twenty-four Liberator flew low over them and dropped three life rafts, and one of those sank. There was little food and water. The sun burned them by day and the cold hit them at night. A group of about fifty men tried to paddle two rafts to Kolombangara, but the current was too strong. Men on one raft rigged a makeshift sail and aimed for Vella Lavella, the next island to the west. The current carried the other groups the same way.

On Vella Lavella, a Japanese garrison held parts of the coast, and its patrols swept the beaches regularly. Men who landed there should have been captured within hours.

What stood between them and capture had been in place since before the war. In nineteen twenty-two, the Royal Australian Navy began organizing a coastwatching service among plantation managers, missionaries and government officers scattered across the islands north of Australia. When the Japanese came, those men stayed behind with portable radios and hid in the hills. Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt, who ran the organization, gave it the code name Ferdinand, after the children's story about a bull who would rather sit under a tree and smell the flowers than fight. Feldt explained that the name was a reminder: a coastwatcher's duty was not to fight and draw attention to himself, but to watch, report and stay hidden.

Their reports had already changed the war. Coastwatchers on Bougainville had radioed warnings of Japanese air raids and warship movements toward Guadalcanal. Admiral William Halsey put it plainly: the coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific.

But the coastwatchers were only a handful of men. The network worked because the Solomon Islanders made it work. They carried the radios, guided the patrols, gave warning when the Japanese moved, and chose which side to risk their lives for.

On Vella Lavella, that network now went to work on a problem it had never faced at this scale. As the Helena survivors reached the coral reef around the island, from late on July seventh into July eighth, islanders waded out and pulled them ashore. They were taken inland, away from the coast the Japanese patrolled. A hundred four men were brought to the house of a Chinese merchant in the interior. Fifty more were hidden at a second site, and eleven at a third. The coastwatchers radioed their superiors on Guadalcanal.

On Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner's staff began planning a rescue. The usual methods for pulling people off an enemy island were a submarine or a PT boat, and neither could carry a hundred sixty-five men. The planners chose two destroyer transports, fast ships built to land troops, escorted by eight destroyers. It meant sending ships deeper up the Solomons than Allied warships had yet gone in the campaign, close to strong Japanese naval and air forces.

There were two landing points. The two smaller groups, in the north, would meet inland and move down to the coast to signal the transports. The main group would go to a second beach. Every man would have to walk through jungle, by night, past an enemy who knew the island and was looking for them.

The operation was set for July twelfth. Then reports came in that Japanese warships were operating in the area, and it was pushed back. Those reports led to another night action, the Battle of Kolombangara, fought in the same waters where Helena had gone down. For the men hidden on Vella Lavella, it meant more days waiting in the jungle.

The rescue force finally sailed on the night of July fifteenth. Four destroyers took up a blocking position to the northwest to stop any Japanese force coming down the Slot. The transports and the rest of the escort went south around Kolombangara, then turned north into Vella Gulf.

At one fifty-five in the morning on July sixteenth, a light flashed from the dark shore. It was the recognition signal. The transports lowered three Higgins boats, and they ran in to the beach. Along with the Helena survivors, they took off a downed American pilot, and a Japanese pilot the islanders had captured.

Then the force moved south to the second beach, and the Higgins boats went in again. This time they brought out the main group of survivors, and with them several Chinese merchants and their families, who could not stay behind once the Japanese learned what had happened on the island.

By that afternoon the ships were back at Tulagi. Every one of the hundred sixty-five men who had come ashore on Vella Lavella was aboard. They were sent on to New Caledonia, where they met the shipmates who had been pulled from the water on the night Helena sank.

The figures tell how the night and the week that followed played out. Helena had sailed with a crew of almost twelve hundred. A hundred sixty-eight were killed, in the battle itself or while adrift. Nicholas and Radford recovered seven hundred thirty-five men under fire. Gwin recovered eighty-eight from the beach at Menakasapa. And a hundred sixty-five came off Vella Lavella, alive, after eight days behind Japanese lines.

On the other side, the Japanese lost two destroyers in the battle and three hundred twenty-four men, among them Admiral Akiyama. The Japanese still landed sixteen hundred troops at Vila, so the reinforcement run was partly a success. But they lost Munda and New Georgia all the same, and within weeks the Americans were landing on Vella Lavella itself.

Look again at who carried the rescue. Not the cruisers, which had already withdrawn. Not the Navy's standard methods, which could not lift that many men. It was two destroyers that broke off three times to fight and came back each time. It was a cruiser captain who would not leave his men. It was a pilot who dropped life rafts from a low-flying bomber. And above all, it was a network of coastwatchers and islanders the Navy had never built, whose whole purpose was to stay invisible, and who spent a week hiding a hundred sixty-five Americans on an island the enemy thought it owned.

The Solomon Islanders who pulled exhausted sailors across the reef were risking their own lives and their villages, with a Japanese garrison on the same island. They helped anyway.

July sixth, nineteen forty-three. A light cruiser breaks in half in Kula Gulf, and nearly a thousand men go into the water in the dark. The official record lists her as sunk. For a week, the Navy lists a hundred sixty-five of her men as missing.

They were never missing. They were in a Chinese merchant's house, in the hills of Vella Lavella, guarded by islanders and a coastwatcher's radio, waiting for a light on the water. When it came, at one fifty-five in the morning, they walked down to the beach and went home.