SCRPIT:

March 26th, 1943. The North Pacific, 100 nautical miles south of the Komandorski Islands and 180 nautical miles west of Attu. The sea is flat. The air is near freezing. Visibility runs to the horizon, which almost never happens in these waters. At 8:40 in the morning, the Japanese heavy cruiser Nachi opens fire at 20,000 yards. Behind her come the heavy cruiser Maya, two light cruisers, and four destroyers. Between them they carry twenty 8-inch guns and dozens of tubes for the Type 93 oxygen torpedo, the longest-ranged torpedo in the world. Their target is an American task group built around a single heavy cruiser. USS Salt Lake City is thirteen years old. Her armor belt is no thicker than the plating on a light cruiser. Half her crew had been in boot camp a few months earlier. She has ten 8-inch guns. Her only other cruiser is USS Richmond, a light cruiser commissioned in 1923. Four destroyers screen them. For the next three and a half hours, these ships fight one of the longest gun duels between surface warships ever recorded, and they fight it without a break. No aircraft take part. No submarines. Just guns, torpedoes, smoke, and range. By 11:54, Salt Lake City has been hit four times. Her after engine room is flooded four feet deep. Seawater has reached her fuel lines, every boiler fire is out, and she lies dead in the water in front of two Japanese heavy cruisers with 85 percent of her ammunition gone. Minutes later, the Japanese admiral turns his entire force west and runs. The convoy he is escorting never reaches Attu. The Japanese Navy never again tries to supply its Aleutian garrisons by surface ship, and the admiral is relieved of his command and forced into retirement. How did a cruiser her own Navy had starved of armor, stopped and drifting and running out of shells, turn back a force with twice her firepower? The answer is not in her armor. Her armor failed exactly as the designers said it would.

The problem began in June 1942. During the Midway operation, Japanese forces landed on Attu and Kiska at the western end of the Aleutian chain, the only American territory in the Western Hemisphere that Japan occupied during the war. The garrisons were small, but they sat on American soil, and Washington wanted them back. The Japanese held them from the sea. Every ton of food, ammunition, and construction material for the garrisons came by ship from Paramushiro in the Kurile Islands, far to the west. On Attu, Japanese engineers were building an airstrip. If it was finished, Japanese bombers could reach the American bases at Adak and Amchitka. The American plan for 1943 was to land the 7th Infantry Division on Attu in May and take the island back. Before that could happen, the convoys had to stop. Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, commanding the North Pacific Force, had bombers on Adak and Amchitka, but the Aleutian weather grounded them for days at a time. He needed a surface blockade. He gave the job to Task Group 16.6 under Rear Admiral Charles McMorris, and he gave McMorris what he could spare. One heavy cruiser. One light cruiser twenty years old. Four destroyers. Their orders were to patrol the water west of Attu and sink anything that tried to get through. The Japanese knew the blockade was there. Vice Admiral Boshiro Hosogaya, commanding the Fifth Fleet, decided to push the next convoy through with everything he had. Two transports, Asaka Maru and Sakito Maru, would carry the supplies. A third, Sanko Maru, would follow. Escorting them, Hosogaya brought the heavy cruisers Nachi and Maya, the light cruisers Tama and Abukuma, and the destroyers Wakaba, Hatsushimo, Ikazuchi, and Inazuma. If the convoy got through, Attu would be reinforced before the American landing. If Hosogaya sank McMorris's cruisers, the blockade was gone.

On paper, Hosogaya could not lose. Salt Lake City was one of the two ships of the Pensacola class, the first cruisers the United States designed under the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. The treaty capped cruisers at 10,000 tons and 8-inch guns. American designers wanted the maximum firepower that limit allowed, so they gave the class ten 8-inch guns in a layout no other navy used. Two twin turrets sat on the main deck. Two triple turrets sat two decks above them, superfiring over the twins. To pay for the guns, the designers cut everything else. They welded the hull instead of riveting it to save weight. They gave the ship an armor belt between 2.5 and 4 inches thick, a deck between 1 and 1.75 inches, and turret armor that ran from 2.5 inches on the face down to three quarters of an inch on the sides. The belt was no thicker than the armor on cruisers carrying 6-inch guns. It could not keep an 8-inch shell out of the ship's vitals, and the Navy knew it. When she was completed, she came in at 9,100 tons, 900 tons under the treaty limit. That was 900 tons of armor she could have carried and did not. The Navy rated her as a light cruiser until July 1931. Then came the stability problem. Putting the heavier triple turrets high above the lighter twins, together with a heavy tripod foremast, made the class top-heavy. The ships rolled badly. Low freeboard forward made them wet and poor sea boats, and the Navy had to modify hull and superstructure in the 1930s to correct it. The crew looked at the pronounced sheer of her hull, rising at bow and stern, and called her Swayback Maru. Her guns had their own history. The 8-inch, 55-caliber Mark 9 was designed for a muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second. At that velocity, barrel life was only about 500 rounds, and the shot seated badly in the bore. Early salvos scattered over patterns as large as 2,000 yards. Ten guns that could not group were ten guns that could not hit. The Navy built two Pensacolas and moved on to the Northampton class with three triple turrets and more freeboard. Salt Lake City had already learned what an 8-inch shell did to her. At Cape Esperance on the night of October 11th, 1942, she took three major hits from Japanese cruisers and went back to Pearl Harbor for repair. The force coming toward her now was led by Nachi, a Myoko-class heavy cruiser commissioned in November 1928. Nachi displaced 13,300 tons, 4,200 more than Salt Lake City. She carried ten 8-inch guns in five twin turrets, a main belt of 3.9 inches, 130,000 shaft horsepower for 36 knots, and twelve 24-inch torpedo tubes. Maya, of the Takao class, carried another ten 8-inch guns. Twenty heavy guns against ten. Behind them, the light cruisers Tama and Abukuma each carried seven 5.5-inch guns, and every Japanese cruiser and destroyer carried the Type 93. That torpedo ran on pure oxygen instead of compressed air, carried a warhead of more than 1,000 pounds, and reached 22,000 yards at 49 knots. On its slow setting it ran more than 40,000 yards, farther than any gun on either side could shoot. Then there was the crew. By the ship's own account, half her men had joined straight from boot camp. She had been given one week of intensive firing practice before she was sent north. Add the cold, the distance from any dockyard, and the nearest American bombers hours of flying time away, and the arithmetic ran one way. Salt Lake City would fight for a while and then die.

What the arithmetic missed was a series of corrections made in the years before the battle, none of them visible from the outside. The first was the gun. After the dispersion problems of the early 1930s, the Navy reduced the Mark 9's muzzle velocity from 3,000 to 2,800 feet per second. That cut the strain on the bore, raised barrel life to about 715 rounds, and tightened the patterns. At 2,800 feet per second, the 260-pound armor-piercing shell still reached more than 31,000 yards at the 41 degrees of elevation the Pensacola mountings allowed. The gun could fire three to four rounds per minute. Ten of them, properly grouped, could put thirty to forty 260-pound shells into the air every minute at a range of eighteen miles. The dispersion problem that had made the class a joke on the gunnery ranges was gone by the time it mattered. The second correction was the layout itself. The triple turrets sat high enough to fire over the twins on almost any bearing. More important for what was about to happen, one triple and one twin turret, five guns, pointed aft. If Salt Lake City had to run, she could run and still shoot half her main battery at whatever was chasing her. The third was the machinery. Her turbines delivered 107,000 shaft horsepower and 32.7 knots on trial. In a stern chase against a cruiser rated at 36 knots, that was not enough to escape. It was enough to keep the range open, to move faster than any transport, and to give her captain choices. The fourth was that one week of gunnery. Captain Bertram Rodgers had spent it firing his main battery, and the first salvos of the battle would show whether it had been enough. The fifth was doctrine. McMorris knew he could not fight a stand-up gun duel against twenty 8-inch guns. His plan, if the Japanese came in strength, was to keep the range long where the Japanese torpedoes were at their weakest, use his destroyers to lay smoke whenever the Japanese found the range, and pull the Japanese cruisers away from the transports they were supposed to be protecting. It was not a plan to win. It was a plan to survive while making the convoy's mission impossible. The sixth would only become visible when it happened, and it belonged to her engineers. On March 26th, all six would be tested in the same morning.

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The American ships had been zigzagging at 15 knots since 6:00 in the morning. The Japanese destroyer Inazuma sighted unknown ships at 27,000 yards at 7:00. Japanese lookouts had the light behind the Americans and were chosen for their eyesight. They saw first, and they saw by forty minutes. American radar picked up five contacts at 7:40. McMorris read them as the convoy with a light escort and turned to attack. At 8:11, lookouts identified two transports, two light cruisers, and a destroyer. Four more ships came into view behind them at 8:20, and by 8:35 they had resolved into two heavy cruisers and two destroyers. The convoy McMorris had come to kill was escorted by a force twice his strength. He turned to course 240 and went to 25 knots. At 8:38, the Japanese transports turned away to the northwest. Two minutes later, Nachi opened fire on Richmond at 20,000 yards and catapulted a floatplane to spot for her guns. Richmond replied at 8:41. At 8:42, Salt Lake City opened on Nachi at 21,000 yards. By the ship's own record, her third and fourth salvos hit. One week of firing practice had produced hits at nearly twelve miles on the third salvo. At 8:45, Nachi launched eight Type 93 torpedoes at the American line. Every one of them missed. Between 8:46 and 8:52, shells struck Nachi's signal bridge and her torpedo compartment. Her radio communications were cut. The hits killed men on the bridge and severed power to her ammunition hoists and gun mounts. For a period in the first half hour of the battle, the Japanese flagship's main battery went silent. Japanese records credit those hits to 5-inch shells. Salt Lake City's gunners credited themselves. Either way, Nachi was not shooting. Then Maya found the range. At 9:10, an 8-inch shell struck Salt Lake City's starboard aircraft amidships. The plane burned. Lieutenant Commander Winsor Gale and Fireman James David were killed. The ship kept shooting. At 10:02, the shock of her own gunfire damaged the hydraulic unit of her steering gear, and her rudder was limited to 10 degrees either side. She could no longer turn hard. At 10:10, a high-trajectory shell came down through the main deck and passed out through the hull below the waterline. Water came in. The ship began to list, and the engineers shifted water across the ship to bring her back upright. She was still shooting. She had been shooting for nearly ninety minutes by now, and the forward magazines were the ones being emptied. When the after turrets ran short, men carried 8-inch shells, 260 pounds each, by hand through the ship from the forward magazines to the after guns. They moved nearly 200 rounds that way. At 11:03, the fourth shell struck. It flooded the after gyro room and the after engine room to a depth of four feet. At 11:25, the after fireroom went out of commission and her speed fell to 20 knots. Her armor-piercing ammunition ran out. She switched to high-explosive rounds, 26 of them, everything she had left of that type. At 11:50, seawater from the flooding reached the fuel lines. Arctic water sprayed into the burners. One by one the boiler fires went out. The main engines stopped. At 11:54, USS Salt Lake City lay dead in the water, listing, with two Japanese heavy cruisers in range, her rudder limited to 10 degrees, and 85 percent of her ammunition gone. Her executive officer turned to Captain Rodgers and said, "Looks like this is it." McMorris ordered the destroyers in. Bailey, Coghlan, and Monaghan turned toward the Japanese cruisers and ran at them through the smoke to make a torpedo attack, the kind of attack that had been getting destroyers sunk since Jutland. Below decks on Salt Lake City, the engineers did not wait to see how the attack came out. They got clean oil to the burners and relit them, and at 11:58, four minutes after she stopped, the forward engines began to turn. At 12:02, she was making 15 knots. She built to 23 as the after engines came back. Before the day was over, with five feet of water in the after engine room bilges, she would make 30. Bailey pressed her attack to 9,500 yards and fired five torpedoes. Two 8-inch shells hit her, and five of her men were killed. Coghlan was hit once. The torpedoes missed. It did not matter. Hosogaya turned away. By 12:30, the entire Japanese force was steaming west, and the battle was over.

The numbers show what had happened. Salt Lake City fired 806 armor-piercing shells and 26 high-explosive, 832 rounds of 8-inch in all. Nachi fired 707 rounds of 8-inch. Maya fired 904. Together the Japanese heavy cruisers put 1,611 heavy shells into the water around two American cruisers and hit Salt Lake City four times. More than 200 of those shells landed within 50 yards of her. The Japanese fired 42 Type 93 torpedoes during the action and scored no hits. Bailey took two shells and Coghlan one. The Americans lost 7 men killed and 20 wounded. Five shells hit Nachi. Japanese records list 14 killed and 26 wounded, all but one of them on the flagship. Nobody sank. On the tactical scoreboard, the battle was a draw with the Japanese slightly ahead on damage inflicted. That is not what the Japanese admiral saw. Hosogaya turned away for reasons that all pointed the same direction. His destroyers were low on fuel. His cruisers had fired more than 1,600 heavy shells and were running out. Forty-two torpedoes had produced nothing. His spotter plane could not see through the American smoke screen and never reported that Salt Lake City had stopped. He had been in action for nearly four hours, well within reach of the American bases, and he expected bombers to arrive at any moment. When Salt Lake City switched from armor-piercing to high-explosive shells, the splashes changed shape, and Japanese officers read the new bursts as bombs falling from aircraft they could not see. Salt Lake City's radio operators added to the impression with deliberately misleading transmissions. The bombers never came. But Hosogaya was making decisions on what he could see and hear, and everything he could see and hear told him to leave. Salt Lake City's log for that day records, "This day the hand of Divine Providence lay over the ship. Never before in her colorful history has death been so close for so long a time."

The strategic result was not a draw. Hosogaya took his convoy back to Paramushiro. The supplies never landed. He was relieved of command, replaced by Vice Admiral Shiro Kawase, and forced into retirement. The Japanese Navy never again sent a surface convoy to the Aleutians. From that day, the garrisons on Attu and Kiska were supplied by submarine, in loads measured in tons rather than shiploads. The airstrip on Attu was never completed. On May 11th, 1943, the 7th Infantry Division landed on Attu, and by May 30th the island was back in American hands. On July 28th, the Japanese evacuated Kiska by night without a fight. The occupation of American soil that had begun in June 1942 was over, and the sequence had started with a stopped cruiser drifting off the Komandorskis. Captain Rodgers received the Navy Cross. Salt Lake City was repaired and went back to the war. She bombarded Iwo Jima and Okinawa. She finished the war with eleven battle stars and a Navy Unit Commendation. In July 1946, she was anchored at Bikini for the atomic tests and survived two nuclear blasts, on July 1st and July 25th. She was sunk as a target on May 25th, 1948. Every Japanese ship that fought her off the Komandorskis was on the bottom before the war ended.

The men who designed the Pensacola class were right about the armor. It was too thin. On March 26th, 1943, four Japanese shells came aboard, and one of them flooded an engine room to a depth of four feet. The armor did exactly what the paper said it would do, which was almost nothing. What the paper did not measure was everything else. It did not measure a gun whose dispersion problem had been engineered out in the 1930s, so that a green crew hit a Japanese flagship on their third salvo at 21,000 yards. It did not measure five guns that could fire astern, so that a ship being chased could still fight. It did not measure sailors carrying 260-pound shells by hand through a listing ship. It did not measure engineers who could relight a dead boiler plant in four minutes under fire. It did not measure three destroyer captains who charged two heavy cruisers, one of them to 9,500 yards, to buy those four minutes. And it did not measure an admiral who understood that he did not have to win the gun duel. He only had to keep the Japanese from finishing it. The designers who called her armor inadequate were right. The Japanese officers who counted twenty guns against ten were right. The arithmetic that said she would fight for a while and then die was wrong. Salt Lake City fought for three and a half hours, stopped, restarted, and watched a fleet twice her size sail away from her. No Japanese convoy ever tried the passage to Attu again.