The Helena’s Tragedy and Glory

U.S. Navy light cruiser USS Helena (CL-50) off the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California, following battle damage repairs and overhaul, 1 July 1942. This image has been retouched to censor radar antennas from the gun directors and masts. Naval History and Heritage Command photo NH 95813.

by C. G. Morris, Lieutenant, USNR as told to Hugh B. Cave

In the coding room of the USS Helena the hours that afternoon dragged interminably. I had gone on watch at twelve. It was now nearing two, and I would not be relieved until four. The ship steamed at moderate speed south of San Cristoval, to rendezvous with a tanker and replenish her fuel supply.

The heat was unbearable. You felt it seeping through the steel bulkheads, smothering the air to the deck as under a blanket. The men sat in their undershirts, listless, tired from the grind of the past twenty-four hours, but full of a satisfaction that showed in the occasional quick lift of sagging shoulders or the flash of a grin.

Because we had done a good job last night. A hell of a good job. On one of the trickiest missions of her fiery career, the Helena had lambasted Kolombangara and Bairoko Harbor on New Georgia Island and put troops ashore there to exterminate the last remaining Japanese defending Munda airfield. It had been a dangerous job, loaded with elements of potential disaster, and we had come through without a scratch.

It was July sixth, and as the Helena steamed along, proud and satisfied, her radios buzzed with the usual routine reconnaissance reports, weather reports, the hundred and one items necessary to keep a fighting ship informed and ready for action.

The storm which later exploded into the great Kula Gulf naval engagement began for us with a brief lightning flash in code from the pilot of a reconnaissance plane hundreds of miles away, telling that an enemy task force had been sighted. Twenty minutes later the message came through again, this time urgent.

To the north of us, the Japanese were determined to stall our New Georgia campaign, and a force of enemy ships in the Shortlands could mean but one thing. The Tokyo Express was on the move again. But it was not our concern this time. We were too far away.

Then swiftly the storm clouds gathered, as messages sped across South Pacific skies to marshal American forces to meet the Japanese thrust. Through the maze of routine in the radio room flashed "urgents" from the men who shape history. The storm was bigger than we had thought. Hundreds of miles separated the Helena from its core, yet the skies above us blackened, grew ominous, and we held our breaths. We no longer talked of last night's affair at Bairoko Harbor. We no longer felt the heat. We waited. Then, with a thunderclap, the storm broke. There was a message for us, and I waited impatiently for it to be decoded.

We were going in again! The message was an order to reverse course and return to Kula Gulf.

I set my own course at top speed for the bridge, but stopped short. You don't barge in on the captain of a warship in your skivvies, no matter how unendurable the heat. I snatched my shirt and wriggled into it en route, keeping the message crushed in my hand so that the crew, if made curious by my haste, would not see it and do any guessing.

Captain Charles P. Cecil, USN, of Flat Rock, North Carolina, stood looking across at the flagship, and when I handed him the message he nodded as though preoccupied. The flagship, of course, had received it too. The entire force was coming about, and with all boilers on the line at flank speed, those big, beautiful, deadly ships, bristling with guns and mobbed with fighting men, thrust their jaws at distant Kula Gulf.

As the flagship passed us close to port, I saw the admiral of the task force pacing his bridge. My fingers were still mechanically fumbling with the top button of my shirt. The admiral was magnificent in an undershirt.

The Helena throbbed sweetly as she ate through the sea to keep her appointment. In Captain Cecil's cabin I looked excitedly at the charts while he spoke of our chances. A big man, Captain Cecil. A kindly, lumbering man with a voice that rolled and soothed and was tonic for jumpy nerves. He was anxious. We might not get there in time.

He traced our course on the charts. "We've enough fuel," he thought aloud. "Looks like we'll make it." The Helena had been through twelve engagements, and had sunk more than her share of enemy ships. "See that all heads of departments are notified immediately," he ordered.

As radio officer, I went over the ship, rounding up the department heads and reading them the dispatch. They were relaxed, some of them sleeping, all of them tired from our job at Kolom­bangara and New Georgia. Now the ship came awake with almost comical quickness. There were quick conferences. The sleepy, satisfied Helena became a beehive of fighting men. Turbines and men vibrated together.

I wondered, as we passed Guadalcanal with the sun setting redly into her 9,000-foot peaks, how many more times, if ever, we should see that familiar shoreline again. We had hated the island once. For months it had been a background for violent actions in which the Helena had played a major role. No man had ever expressed a yearning to see Guadalcanal again. Now the hated island was a symbol of security, the most familiar and therefore the most profound symbol we possessed. We watched in silence as the Helena steamed westward, past Savo, past the Russell Islands.

The weather had roughened; the sky was overcast and dark. We wanted that. Darkness was a thing we prayed for. And with all information now in hand and the entire ship informed that we were moving up The Slot to intercept the Tokyo Express in Kula Gulf, there was time for praying.

It was seven p.m. Relieved of further duties, I went to my room and hit the sack for three hours, and read my Bible. I read the Twenty-third and Ninety-first Psalms over and over … "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night … A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee …" Those are comforting words. When I went on deck, I saw men thumbing worn pages of the little Bibles that many of them carry. Toughened old seadogs, veterans of many a battle and many a crap game, were unashamedly praying.

By ten p.m. the order had been given to dog all doors and stand by at battle stations. In a total blackout now, the ship rushed through the night, following the broad boiling wake of a ship ahead. In Radio I, my battle station, all equipment was manned, all frequencies covered. An incredible amount of stuff poured in—information, battle plans, instructions. I fed it to Captain Cecil on the fighting bridge as we neared our destination. That night could not last forever, even with each of its hours drawn endlessly through the teeth of tension and the Helena racing at full power through the dark. The Japanese were due in. We had passed the tip of New Georgia some time ago, and now from the navigating bridge came the telephoned report that we were entering Kula Gulf.

The ship held its breath. Kula Gulf was Japanese; it was a tricky, treacherous area, night-shrouded now, in which anything might happen. The men were quiet.

The next hour was the longest. We were inside Kula Gulf and still no contact. For hours there had been no talk on the TBS—talk-between-ships. Now, over Radio I's communication circuit, came the voice of Lieutenant Russell Gash, of the Helena. He was calm and almost matter-of-fact as, on TBS, he called the flagship. His message was for Admiral Ainsworth—Rear Admiral Walden L. Ainsworth, USN, of Wonalancet, New Hampshire, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his Kula Gulf defeat of the Japanese.

"Enemy sighted," Gash reported.

The palms of my hands itched and I stood up. No one spoke. Men who had held their breath let it out in unison, and the sound was a vast sigh of relief.

Quiet orders were issued over TBS as the formation changed course and closed range. The admiral asked each ship if she was ready, and the replies were prompt. A few minutes later, at 1:55 a.m., the order was given to open fire. The Helena let go her Sunday punch.

She had plenty. This 10,000-ton "fightingest ship in the Navy" was armed with fifteen 6-inch guns, and they spoke with a thunder that shook the night apart.

In the radio shack there was a steeling of minds against the thought that some Japanese shell might come screaming through the steel plates by which we were hemmed in. But you know what such thoughts can do to you, how quickly they can shake a man, crack him, and you have shut them out so often that it now becomes automatic—muscular, not mental—and the men are outwardly quite calm. There is a continuous deafening thunder from the guns, while the ship leaps like a shingle in heavy seas.

Just thirty seconds after the first defiant bellow, a report reached us from the bridge, "One down!" The speaker might have been watching workmen fell trees in a forest. "Two down! … There goes another!"

Other ships in the American task force loosed their thunder in salvos, but the Helena's fire was continuous and for nine minutes not a heartbeat of silence interrupted the bellowing of her guns.

An enemy cruiser, smothered under that avalanche of 6-inch shells, came apart as though made of paper and burst into raging flames. She sank in a matter of minutes. Then the Helena's batteries, both main and secondary, concentrated on two more ships, mauling them severely while Japanese destroyers darted through the inferno to launch torpedoes. In nine minutes the Helena's veteran gun crews fired more than a thousand rounds.

Suddenly, in the radio room, I was flung into the air by a louder roar. At 2:09 the Helena had caught a Japanese torpedo. In a heap on the deck of the shack I looked about in total bewilderment, unable to believe we had been hit. I reached for my radiophone; it was sprawled on the deck. The ship was trembling—a curious, fluttering tremble, almost dainty, like that of a young girl frightened in the dark.

I picked myself up slowly, and so did the others, piled atop of one another in a fantastic heap. The Helena's guns had ceased firing. The silence was a smothering thing that made breathing difficult. In that whole room there was but one sound—the soft and stealthy settling of dust disturbed by the torpedo's impact.

I had located the earphone and put it back on, and now returned to my post, stiff-legged and strange, as a man learning to walk again after a shock. The others went back to their posts, too. No one had spoken. The radio was silent. TBS had nothing for us. There was only the terrible trembling of the ship, and now for the first time a sensation of being afraid. Not of the Japanese, but of the unknown.

We were getting over that, becoming calm—waiting, I think, for someone to speak and break the spell—when the second torpedo hit. The explosion slammed us to the deck again in the same grotesque heap. But no one cried out. The lights died and for a moment we struggled in darkness to extricate ourselves. Then the battle lights came on, a dim, weird glow through which the shaken dust swam redly in space.

The Helena was done for. I knew it. We all knew it. The second explosion had cleared my mind and I saw things very clearly. But it had to be official before orders could be issued, and so I went out to be sure. She was listing badly, her back broken. There was water over the quarter-deck, midships. Men stood at their stations, restlessly at attention, awaiting the command to abandon ship. The ship herself, trembling in torment, struggled to warn us time was short.

Returning to the radio room, I found the men there on their feet, strapping on money belts and fastening life jackets. They were bruised, shaken, their eyes glazed, but none needed assistance. We went about destroying important papers and publications. When I ordered the bulkheads undogged, officers and men filed out as they had a thousand times before when going off watch. It was then 2:20, just eleven minutes after the first torpedo hit.

The abandon ship order had been given when I stepped on deck, but there was no panic, almost no noise. And now, strangely, there seemed less need for haste. That warning tremble in the ship had ceased. Men picked their way carefully through the piles of ammunition cans strewn over the deck. Others were lined on the rail, watching the battle in the distance. Some had gone overside and I saw hundreds of heads in the sea—small white blurs bobbing about in the black night, seemingly suspended in space. It was hard to think of them as men. It was harder to realize that the Helena was no longer in action. Beyond us the battle of Kula Gulf raged to its climax, and the horizon was garlanded with looping streamers of fire. Like Brooklyn Bridge, I thought.

The ship was sinking midships, her bow and stern high, belly sagging, but there was no hurry. I stood at the rail, gazing at the eerie display of fireworks over there across the gulf, and the echoing thunder of the guns made me feel better about the Helena. We were giving the Japanese a beating.

There's time enough, I thought, to go to your room for the papers you want. The ship herself had said so. She was not trembling. "Go ahead," she said. But the way was cluttered. I had to go slowly, with a hand half lifted in front of me. On the starboard side of the foc'sle I came upon a man sitting cross-legged on the deck, and I said, "Well, it's all over." He didn't know it was all over. He was dead.

My room was at the bottom of the ladder, forward of No. 2 turret. I reached for the ladder and caught myself just in time, lurched backward and stood shaking, cold and scared again. Another step and I should have fallen into the sea, headlong. Because nothing was there now. The Helena's bow had been blown off just where my room had been. The torpedo had gone through my room. This is how you feel, I thought, when you come home one night and find only a heap of ashes where the house had stood. And the fear took away that foolish feeling of security. Get off the ship, I thought frantically. Get off now.

She was going down fast. On the foc'sle, some of the men were trying to cut away the big life rafts, and I ran to them and tried to help. We got the rafts into the water while the sea swirled in an ugly, oily whirlpool over the quarterdeck.

It was time to go. Before leaving the radio room I had snatched up my life jacket and officer's cap, and now, automatically, I jerked the cap hard on my head and leaped. It was not a tremendous jump. The water was but five feet or so below the deck. And it was warm, almost pleasant. But my weight carried me deep into it, and when my mouth filled with the warm water, it was not clean and salt, but foul with oil. A man jumped on top of me with heavy shoes, and his heels bit deep below the edge of my cap. The pain was unbearable. For a moment I blacked out.

Around the bow, where I had jumped, the suction of the sinking ship was greatest. It gripped and clung, exerting a steady downward pull. With every gasping breath you drew the sickening oil into your stomach, and up it came with a rush. As we struck out to one of the life rafts, some of the men were terribly sick. We helped as many as we could. Others, exhausted by the agony of vomiting, went under. Not many, but a few.

On the raft we had more trouble. The suction pulled us, raft and all, toward the Helena's sinking hull. We found a line holding us fast to the ship, and cut it, but still the suction held us. When thrown from the deck, the raft had turned in mid-air and was now upside down, the paddles lashed beneath it. In that sea of oil no man could stay under long enough to release them.

And so, as senior officer, I organized a hand-paddling detail—"Push, paddle, kick! Push, paddle, kick!"—which took us away from the danger.

We saw the Helena go. It was a sad, an unbelievably sad moment. What does one say? Not what you might expect. Nothing smart or slick. Just the so-called corny phrases you have heard time and again in the movies or read in fiction:

"She was a grand ship."

"She sure was swell."

She went down gracefully and quickly, like the queen that she was.

There were hundreds of us somewhere in that crowded, night-black sea, clinging to rafts or bits of debris, floating in life belts or swimming aimlessly in the dark. Our little group clung to the overturned raft and looked at the place where the Helena had vanished, and felt alone, deserted, and it was the end of all the world.

And then the sea began bubbling, boiling, above the grave of our ship. We watched it, wide-eyed and alarmed. Up from the depths lurched a strange, awesome shape, a metal island, all wet and gleaming, the sea pouring from its sides as it emerged.

Fifteen feet high, this gleaming thing loomed above the sea in the dark, while the sea rocked it and the waves from its resurrection rolled out to bring us its message.

It was the Helena's bow, her white "50" proudly standing out against the wet gray steel. Down there on the floor of Kula Gulf, under forty or more fathoms, our ship had broken in two. The strakes or keel holding her together midships had let go. This much of her—a ship's spirit proudly encased in steel and bravely holding aloft her identifying numerals—had returned to comfort us. We were not alone.

Those of us who still clung to the raft gazed at her in silence. Here was something no man could fail to feel, whatever his faith. It was not a question of religion. I have talked to some of those men since, to be sure of that. By recalling lessons in ship design and compart­men­tation, one can explain readily why she came up. But there in the darkness of Kula Gulf, surrounded by death and loneliness and fear, such material explanations were inadequate. The Helena had risen in her death agonies to be sure that we were not left alone to face our fate.

It was with a sense of gratitude and humiliation that we pushed and paddled our raft toward the risen remains of the ship. Other rafts, too, sought security in the Helena's presence. When the battle ended, the Helena would be missed. Our destroyers would surely come seeking her.

Ringed about her, we made ourselves as comfortable as possible, some in the water, some on the rafts. Lieutenant Commander James Baird, the senior officer present, took charge, but there was little to do but wait. It was 2:30 a.m., the sea calm, the water warm, the oil thick and slippery and strangling. But we did not curse the oil too bitterly. Without it, there might have been sharks.

The battle continued. American and Japanese ships hurled shells across the darkness, and Japanese batteries on Kolombangara thundered intermittently as the hours passed. I was not conscious of fear. For about four hours I clung to a short piece of rope which hung over the side of the raft, and was not aware of exhaustion or even of any great expenditure of effort. But when at last I tried to let go the rope, my fingers had stiffened so rigidly about it that they had to be pried loose.

The battle ended. Our ships retired. There was silence and a strange peace. The flagship asked for a roll call.

We learned later the story of that roll call. One by one, the ships' names were read over TBS and checked off. But there was silence when the Helena's radio name in that engagement was spoken. Again and again the call went out. Then at last the truth had to be faced. In a heavy voice, the TBS officer said, "I'm sorry to report, sir, —— doesn't answer."

"—— doesn't answer." Twelve times in the triumphant aftermath of major engagements the Helena had promptly answered the roll. This time—silence.

On orders from the admiral, a pair of destroyers slipped back into the gulf, feeling their way through the dark. On the alert for two Japanese ships thought to have escaped destruction, they circled the area on a sweep. Before long, one of them sighted the bow of the Helena.

What happened then was not the fault of the destroyer men. It was no one's fault. The object which had been sighted could not be the Helena; it was too small. Since nothing else American was in the gulf, it had to be Japanese.

One destroyer opened fire. Huddled about the Helena's bow, crowded on the lashed rafts or hanging wearily in the water, we had been unaware of any movement in the darkness until the destroyer's guns opened up on us. Then the night was ripped by flame. Shells screamed into the sea all about us.

Some of us groaned. Others swore. No man's eyes were sharp enough to identify the ship, and most of us thought she was Japanese. We knew what that meant, if she steamed up to us.

A little while ago, despite weariness and the fatalistic feeling that perhaps, after all, we were not going to be rescued, the men had been amazingly cheerful. They had swapped names, told where they came from, helped one another to fight off the increasing weariness. There had been the sharp, witty exchange of gags and double-talk.

Now the night was a thundering hell and the sea all about us was tortured with explosions. Shells crashed into the steel monument about which we were clustered. Our little world was being hammered apart. There was no panic, even then. One or two men let go and struck out into the darkness; the rest stared steadily at the black hulk of the destroyer. Was she Japanese? Or was she one of ours, confused by the floating remains of the Helena?

What took place then was a kind of town meeting of the sea—a polling of opinions, orderly and without undue haste, despite the destruction that felt for us from the ship's batteries. There was calm discussion of the several possibilities. If we signaled, and she was American, would she believe us? If Japanese, would she strafe us?

Commander Baird called for a vote. Should we signal or not? The "ayes" won it. One man—one only—had a flashlight and, miraculously, it was in working order. From hand to hand it went until it reached the fingers of Lieutenant Commander V. W. Post, Communications Officer. On a lurching raft Commander Post was raised to the shoulders of two sturdy men, and the light blinked its message, "Five-Zero. Help!" And then we waited.

There are no new ways of saying how long a minute can be. It was a long time, a very long time, because we didn't know. If our luck had run out, the answer to our signal would be not the small red flashes for which we prayed, but almost certain death in the roar of the destroyer's guns—men against a wall of sea, facing a firing squad of Japanese 4.7's.

We waited, and the answer was a series of quick red blinks in the dark. And then we cheered. But there was still danger. In the darkness of the gulf, two escaped Japanese ships had lain in hiding, awaiting an opportune time to slip out and run for safety. These two ships, giving up the fight, had undoubtedly crept close to shore and sought security in silence. Our task force knew of their existence, but not where they were. Kula Gulf is big. The night was dark.

Now, as our two destroyers steamed up and stopped dead in the water to take us aboard, the sea about the Helena's bow was suddenly alive with torpedoes. Those Japanese ships—and probably some lurking enemy submarines also—were seeking revenge.

It was a ticklish business. The Japanese had only to point their tubes at stationary targets. Our destroyers could not linger long in such a perilous area; they could but rush in, snatch a few of us from the sea and speed out again, with all hands alert for those telltale white feathers of phosphorus in the wake of enemy fish. Time and again, they raced in and out again, while the Helena's men scrambled up ladders or clung to trailing lines and were pulled aboard.

Then the Japanese, recklessly bold, showed themselves in a dash for freedom. It happened as my turn came, and I was dangling on a line midway between the sea and the deck of the destroyer, which had slowed in passing to take me aboard.

The little destroyer reared in the water like a kicking mule, and I swung there against her throbbing plates, helpless, battered, hanging on with God knows what. But that, too, passed. As the ship leaped forward at top speed to pursue the fleeing Japanese, I was hauled aboard and assisted to the wardroom, where others from the Helena had found haven before me. There we sat, aware now of what we had gone through. Aware, too, of the awful noise of the destroyer's guns, as she and her sister ship engaged both of the enemy. It was almost more than we could endure.

But it ended, as everything else had. There was a brief, violent skirmish in the dark—our two American cans slugging it out in a running battle with the Japanese. The torpedoes that streaked through Kula Gulf were American now, and our destroyers' gun crews were superb in their marksmanship. The Japanese were sunk as they fled.

When these two settled to the floor of Kula Gulf, the battle was over. There were no more of the enemy.

The United States cruiser USS Helena (CL-50), c. 1940. Naval History and Heritage Command photo NH 95812.

 

The U.S. Navy light cruiser USS Helena (CL-50) at a South Pacific base, between battles, circa in 1943. This image has been retouched to remove radar antennas from the gun directors and masts. Naval History and Heritage Command NH 95814.

The stern of the USS Nicholas (DD-449) moving at high speed during the Battle of Kula Gulf, northwest of New Georgia Island. In the background, left to right, are the USS Honolulu (CL-48), the USS Helena (CL-50), and the USS St. Louis (CL-49), 5-6 July 1943.

Battle of Kula Gulf, 5-6 July 1943. Helena in action at Kula Gulf, seen from the light cruiser Honolulu. USS Helena (CL-50), center, firing during the battle, just before being torpedoed and sunk. The next ship astern is USS St. Louis (CL-49). Photo taken from USS Honolulu (CL-48). Note: Bright flashes of gunfire are due to use of older gunpowder for the main armament. At this time flash-less powder was in short supply. These flashes gave the Japanese a target for their torpedoes. NARA photo 80-G-54553.

Helena (CL-50) survivors after their ship was sunk on 6 July 1943.

Survivors of the USS Helena (CL-50) sunk in the Battle of Kula Gulf, New Georgia Island, on board the USS Honolulu (CL-48) after their rescue. A movie in the mess hall, July 1943.

Helena (CL-50) survivors after their ship was sunk on 6 July 1943. Transfer of injured first from Nicholas (DD-449) to the Honolulu (CL-48).

Helena (CL-50) survivors after their ship was sunk on 6 July 1943.

Helena (CL-50) survivors after their ship was sunk on 6 July 1943. They are debarking at Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, for a period of relaxation before shipping out for the battlefront again. July 1943.

Helena (CL-50) survivors after their ship was sunk on 6 July 1943 being transferred after arriving in Tulagi.

Some of the 150 survivors of the USS Helena (CL-50) from the Battle of Kula Gulf rescued from Vella Vella drawing small stores at a South Pacific base after rescue.

Survivors from the USS Helena, sunk during the Battle of Kula Gulf 6 on July 1943, line-up for new clothes and gear on Tulagi after their rescue from Vella Lavella.

To Tulagi, Solomon Island, the USS Nicholas (DD-449) brings survivors of the USS Helena (CL-50) sunk in the Battle of Kula Gulf (northwest of New Georgia Island); photo taken from the USS Honolulu (CL-48), July 1943.

The USS Nicholas (DD-449) with survivors of the USS Helena (CL-50) sunk in the Battle of Kula Gulf (northwest of New Georgia Island) taken from the USS Honolulu (CL-48), July 1943.

At Tulagi, Solomon Islands, men wounded in the Battle of Kula Gulf, New Georgia Island, are transferred from the USS Nicholas (DD-449) to the USS Honolulu (CL-48), July 1943.

Helena (CL-50) survivors after their ship was sunk on 6 July 1943 hold a funeral service for Irvin L. Edwards. Edwards died of his wounds after being rescued. Admiral Walden L. Ainsworth, cap off center, provided an eulogy.

Funeral services aboard the USS Honolulu (CL-48), for Irvin L. Edwards who died aboard the USS Nicholas (DD-449) after being picked up when the USS Helena (CL-50) was sunk in the Battle of Kula Gulf (New Georgia Island), July 1943.

Helena survivors greeted by Admiral Walden Ainsworth, with cap. Commander Charles L. Carpenter, senior officer of the first group of survivors rescued, is behind the Admiral.

Survivors of the USS Helena (CL-50) from the Battle of Kula Gulf arrive home. Most of them are headed for a 30-day leave after being away for more than a year and having taken part in 13 engagements with the enemy. 17 August 1943.

The Reverend A. W. E. Silvester, Methodist missionary on Vella Lavella during World War II, helped hide 165 survivors from the USS Helena for eight days until they were rescued in July 1943.

U.S. Government War Bond Poster: "Avenge Montana's Glorious "Helena" - Buy WAR BONDS to replace her! 3rd War Loan." The light cruiser USS Helena (CL-50) was lost on 6 July 1943 during the Battle of Kula Gulf.