The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour

by James D. Hornfischer

At 7:10 the distance from the Johnston to the nearest Japanese heavy cruiser closed to the five-inch/38-caliber’s maximum range of eighteen thousand yards, or about ten statute miles. Evans directed Hagen to target the leading heavy cruiser in the column to starboard. Hagen’s fire-controlmen, George Himelright and James Buzbee, fixed the ship in the director’s sights and fire-controlman Tony Gringheri entered ranges using his stereoscopic rangefinder on the mainmast. The data passed down into the ship’s Mark 1A fire-control computer. Developed by the Ford Instrument Company in the 1930s, the intricate but sturdy array of gears, cams, shafts, and dials was an analog device with no memory as we understand it today. Rather, it was designed only to predict the position of its target and align each of the five turrets to place its shell at the coordinates that the computer calculated the target would occupy at impact. Just as a football quarterback pedaling back in the pocket must place extra zip on his throw to compensate for his own rearward movement, the computer removed the imparted effect of the ship’s own motion from the firing solution. A gyroscopic stable element corrected for the pitching and rolling of the ship. Other critical inputs included the initial muzzle velocity of the ship’s five-inch shells—adjusted for bore wear and current weather conditions; the ship’s current latitude and the relation of its heading to true magnetic north, in order to compensate for the ...