by Ian W. Toll
The Shokaku, according to a VB-8 radio-gunner, was lit up all along her length by antiaircraft fire, “like a Christmas tree,”14 but the Dauntlesses plunged through the flak and released their 1,000-pound armor-piercing bombs. Three smashed through the flight deck and exploded in the interior of the ship, with spectacularly destructive effect.15 From the bridge of a screening destroyer, Captain Tameichi Hara saw “two or three silver streaks, which appeared like thunderbolts, reaching toward the bulky carrier. . . . The whole deck bulged quietly and burst. Flames shot from the cleavages. I groaned as the flames rose and black and white smoke came belching out of the deck.”16
By 10:30 a.m., the Americans had knocked two Japanese carriers out of action, an impressive score even if neither ship was destroyed. In the meantime, however, more than a hundred Japanese planes were converging on the Hornet and Enterprise. The American radar sets first detected the incoming Japanese strike at 9:05 a.m., and the task force raised speed for evasive maneuvering. The combat air patrol first made contact with the enemy planes at 9:59, when they were at 17,000 feet altitude, about forty miles northwest of the task force. The Enterprise managed to take cover in a passing rainsquall, but her disappearance diverted the full brunt of the enemy air attack to the Hornet.
“Stand by for dive bombing attack,” warned the Hornet’s loudspeakers at 9:09, and down came a long convoy of steeply diving Aichi “Val” dive-bombers. Tearing through the sea at 28 knots, the carrier S-turned radically and her antiaircraft guns threw up a dense barrage, but several planes made accurate releases at the near-suicidal altitude of 800 feet. Three 250-kilogram bombs crashed through the Hornet’s flight deck in quick succession and exploded in the lower decks. A damaged Aichi dived vertically into the island, its pilot apparently determined to trade his life for a chance to destroy the ship’s brain center. The burning plane glanced off the stack, sheered through the signal bridge, and crashed into the flight deck amidships.17 Saturated with burning aviation gasoline, the Hornet’s entire superstructure burst into flames. According to Alvin Kernan, stationed in a repair shack just below the island, “a bright red flame came like an express train down the passageway, throwing everything and everybody flat.”18
At about the same time, low-flying Japanese torpedo planes approached on the starboard and port sides simultaneously. They attempted to fly over or around the screening ships to get to the Hornet. One of the South Dakota’s 40mm quad mounts destroyed an oncoming Nakajima when it was just thirty yards away—“sawed the wing right off it,” a witness recalled.19 Another enemy plane hopped over the South Dakota and crashed, apparently deliberately, into the port side of the Hornet. Burning wreckage skittered across the flight deck and fell into the No. 1 elevator pit.20 Two aerial torpedoes slammed into the wounded carrier’s starboard side, lifting the entire hull and shaking it violently. Propulsion, fire main pressure, power, and internal communications were lost, and the Hornet listed 10 degrees to starboard.21
At 9:50, the Enterprise CXAM radar detected a second wave of incoming enemy dive-bombers. The Enterprise and her nearby escorts put up a prodigious barrage and destroyed half the Aichis in that first dive, but the survivors pressed the attack with skill and determination and planted three bombs on the flight deck. The first struck near the bow, destroying one airplane and ejecting another off the Enterprise, then punched through four layers of steel plating before detonating just outside the bow.22 A second hit just aft of the forward elevator on the centerline of the flight deck and exploded below the hangar deck. A third bomb was a near miss to starboard, causing the entire ship to shudder and tossing another plane overboard.
Those heavy blows did not slow the Enterprise at all, and even while maneuvering radically, the ship somehow managed to recover several of her returning planes. But the second explosion jammed her forward elevator in the up position, reducing her plane-handling capabilities by at least 50 percent. Damage-control parties put hoses on the fire and fitted steel plates over the holes on the flight deck. The hangar was a mess, however—the entire deck was bulged upward and strewn with bodies and parts of bodies and blazing aircraft wreckage.
Fifteen dark-green “Kate” torpedo planes approached the Enterprise at 11:35. They divided into two groups and maneuvered to set up an “anvil attack” on both bows. Captain Osborne B. Hardison ordered the helm hard right, turning the Enterprise toward one group and leaving the other far astern. Floyd Beaver watched from the signal bridge as the second group attempted to overtake the ship, flying parallel on the beam at about 1,500 yards’ range, “strung out like tin ducks in a shooting gallery.”23 The 40mm Bofors quadruple-barrel mounts cut them down methodically, one by one. The second group released their torpedoes, and Hardison deftly turned the ship toward the oncoming tracks and threaded them neatly. Men in the port gun galleries looked down and watched one of the long black cylindrical shapes speed away in the opposite direction, just beneath the surface. At 12:20, the injured Enterprise took cover in another passing rainsquall.24
With the Enterprise severely damaged and the Hornet crippled, and with new Japanese airstrikes arriving every thirty to sixty minutes, Admiral Kinkaid sensibly chose to put some distance between Task Force 61 and the enemy. All ships but the Hornet and a cohort of her screening destroyers and cruisers steamed away to the southeast and disappeared over the horizon.
The Hornet was a blazing, listing, foundering wreck. Her engineering spaces were heavily flooded, and her propulsion gone. At half past noon, the cruiser Northampton was summoned to tow the ship. A steel cable, run from the cruiser to the carrier’s anchor chain, promptly broke. Two hours later, another attempt was made with a two-inch cable stowed on the Hornet, muscled up to the bow by the sweaty, backbreaking effort of more than 500 men. “With a 15-degree list then on the ship, this was pretty difficult,” one officer remarked. “There was foam all over the hangar deck, so it was slippery as hell.”25 The Northampton gradually got the listing giant underway at 3 to 4 knots, but in the ensuing seven hours a relentless series of air attacks fell on the ship.26
When the last torpedo hit the Hornet, at 6:15 p.m., Commander E. P. Creehan was in one of the repair shacks below: “The deck on the port side seemed to crack open and a geyser of fuel oil which quickly reached a depth of two feet swept all personnel at Repair V off their feet and flung them head long down the sloping deck of Repair V compartment to the starboard side. Floundering around in the fuel oil, all personnel somehow regained their feet and a hand chain was formed to the two-way ladder and escape scuttle leading from the third deck to the second deck.”27
The escorting destroyers drew in close and began removing wounded men from the fantail. Pitching and rolling on the waves, the little ships clanged violently against the carrier, and their rigging fouled into the Hornet’s catwalk, tearing away their radar and fire control equipment.
With the list increased to 25 degrees, posing an imminent danger of capsize, the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. Most went over the side, either down knotted lines or by simply swimming from the hangar deck, which was awash along the length of the starboard side. In the water, the swimmers stayed together and kept excellent discipline. One officer was impressed to see thirty men on a small life raft, paddling toward a destroyer, singing “Sidewalks of New York” at the top of their lungs and badly out of tune.28
The destroyers Mustin and Anderson were given the grim order to scuttle the ship. But it was no easy task to sink an aircraft carrier, even one as badly damaged as the Hornet. The two tin cans put at least sixteen torpedoes into the ship, nine of which detonated. They followed with hundreds of rounds of 5-inch ammunition, antiaircraft fire, and even star shells aimed at the avgas storage tanks. These efforts set the ship ablaze, but they also apparently flooded the port side of the ship, because she returned to an even keel, albeit much lower in the water. At last, the two destroyers were called away to the south so that they would not be sitting ducks for a morning air attack. The Japanese destroyers Makigum
u and Akigumo finally delivered the coup de grace, putting four torpedoes into the burning ghost ship at 1:25 a.m. on October 27. As the enemy sailors watched, she slipped beneath the waves and set out on her journey into the abyss.
THE BATTLE OF THE SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS, as it would be called, was the fourth carrier battle of the war and the last until the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. As at Coral Sea, the contest would go into the books as a tactical victory for the Japanese but a strategic victory for the Americans. The destruction of the Hornet left the Allies with just one carrier in the theater. In exchange, the Americans had damaged two Japanese carriers but destroyed neither. Plane losses were roughly comparable—eighty-one for the Americans, ninety-nine for the Japanese. But the Americans, as usual, did a much better job of recovering their downed aviators. They lost only twenty-six airmen while the Japanese lost 148, and among the latter’s dead were twenty-three squadron or section leaders, all prized veteran flyers who could not be easily replaced.
The Japanese claimed and apparently believed they had inflicted catastrophic losses on the American fleet. Admiral Nagumo, in his post-action report to Yamamoto, stated that four American carriers had been “attacked and sunk.”29 The commander of Cruiser Division 8 (CruDiv8) reported three carriers sunk, including the Enterprise, the Hornet, and “a third vessel [that] may be the Saratoga.”30 The CruDiv8 report also claimed sinking the South Dakota, three cruisers, and a destroyer. (In fact, the Americans had lost the Hornet and the destroyer Porter, and suffered damage to the Enterprise, the South Dakota, the cruiser San Juan, and several destroyers.)
The Japanese press reported another triumph, and the rank and file cheered another fantastic victory. But the senior commanders of the navy privately acknowledged that the result had been, at best, a pyrrhic victory. Cumulatively, in the four carrier fights that took place in the five months between the Battles of the Coral Sea and the Santa Cruz Islands, the Japanese had lost more than 400 carrier airmen, more than half the number that had been on active duty at the start of the war. Admiral Nagumo was well aware that the recurring carrier slugging matches were draining away the Imperial Navy’s strength. “Considering the great superiority of our enemy’s industrial capacity,” he told Tameichi Hara, “we must win every battle overwhelmingly. This last one, unfortunately, was not an overwhelming victory.”31 Nagumo was relieved of his command and transferred back to the home islands, where he would assume command of the Sasebo Naval Station on the southern island of Kyushu.
The encounter ended as all previous carrier duels had ended, with a mutual retreat of all naval forces from the area. The Enterprise, severely damaged though she was, was patched up in Noumea and put back into action in time for the climactic naval battles in Ironbottom Sound less than three weeks later. The two injured Japanese flattops, Shokaku and Junyo, had to limp back to Japan for repairs. Shokaku, the more valuable of the two, would not return to action until June 1943, half a year after the campaign to recapture Guadalcanal had been abandoned. With postwar hindsight, Halsey summed the battle up thus: “Tactically, we picked up the dirty end of the stick, but strategically we handed it back.”32 The judgment seems incontrovertible.
TANAKA’S INDEFATIGABLE “TOKYO EXPRESS” managed to put more than 20,000 troops ashore in mid-October and the first week of November. Those reinforcements brought Japanese and American troop strength to approximate parity, although the Japanese chronically underestimated the size of Vandegrift’s force and by November believed they had superior numbers. But the rapid buildup of Japanese troop strength also left them more vulnerable to air and sea attack, because it was no easy task to hide 20,000 men and their supplies under jungle canopies and in dark ravines. Day after day, the Cactus Air Force worked over their encampments, fortifications, and supply dumps with bombs and lethal strafing runs.
Since September, the Japanese had often brought their big naval guns into Ironbottom Sound to shell Henderson Field and the American positions on Lunga Plain. On the night of October 29–30, the Americans gave their adversaries some of the same consideration. The light cruiser Atlanta and four destroyers shelled Japanese camps inland of Point Cruz for eight hours. Five nights later, the cruisers San Francisco and Helena trained their guns on Japanese positions east of Koli Point and laid waste to newly landed supply dumps. Troops bivouacked in the area were forced back into the jungle, where the harsh toll of starvation and disease would gradually cull their numbers. The Japanese army now had many more mouths to feed on Guadalcanal, but it lacked the logistical capability to provide for them. Men living on fewer than 500 calories a day could not be expected to work or march, let alone fight.
On November 1, Vandegrift ordered an offensive to the west, aimed at overrunning the headquarters of the Seventeenth Army (located near the coast just west of Point Cruz) and capturing enemy supplies recently landed at Tassafaronga. Six battalions of the 5th Marines, led by Colonel Merritt Edson, crossed the Matanikau River on pontoon bridges and attacked the Japanese army’s Fourth Infantry Regiment. In two days of hard fighting around Point Cruz, some 400 Japanese were killed, and the rest retreated across the Poha River. The rout secured Henderson Field from the enemy’s artillery fire. But Tanaka’s destroyers continued to land troop reinforcements on the island’s western beaches—and these fresh troops, not yet weakened by hunger and tropical diseases, were deployed to positions around the mouth of the Poha. For the moment, that stymied any further near-term progress in that direction.
The marines remembered October 25 as “Dugout Sunday.” The sirens churned two or three times an hour, signaling “Condition Red” (enemy planes approaching). Japanese bombers were overhead for much of the day, and the Zeros flew a relentless series of strafing runs, riddling the parked planes and dugouts and field installations with incendiary ammunition. Torrential rains in the preceding days and nights had made a mud bath of the landing fields and prevented the fighters from getting aloft until midday, after the sun finally dried the field. When the Wildcats managed to take station at high altitude, however, they gave a good account of themselves, and the army P-400s pounced on Zeros winging in at 10,000 feet or less. Clemens fondly remembered the sight of a Zero blown to pieces above Henderson Field: “The tail plane floated down, turning over and over like a falling leaf. And so it went on all day.”33
The balance of power in the air war had shifted gradually but decisively in the Americans’ favor. The long daily “milk run” from Rabaul wore the Japanese airmen down and reduced their chances of returning to base. They were no less susceptible to fatigue than were the Americans, but the Japanese navy did not systematically rotate their veteran pilots out of the combat zone. “They won’t let you go home unless you die” was an unofficial motto of the Japanese naval air corps.34 The Yamato spirit, a nationalist creed rooted in the emperor’s divinity, would sustain the energy and determination of every warrior. So it was said and believed. As combat attrition reduced the numbers of veteran aviators, they were replaced with green men recently graduated from truncated flight-training programs. The newcomers did not press home their attacks in the face of antiaircraft fire and were more easily shot down. Their formations tended to come unglued during the long southbound flights, and they were more likely to get lost when visibility was poor. The long return to Rabaul was a deadly disadvantage.
Belatedly, the Japanese began to build or expand airfields between Rabaul and Guadalcanal—Kahili on southern Bougainville, Ballale Island (in the Shortland group), Buka Island (north of Bougainville), Lae on New Guinea—but none of these achieved the status of a major forward airbase, and they were most often employed as emergency strips for aircraft staggering back toward Rabaul. Japanese construction battalions were underequipped and manned by largely unskilled draftees from Korea, Okinawa, or Taiwan. Lieutenant Commander Iyozo Fujita, a Zero pilot based at Rabaul, recalled that in the last extremity pilots were told to ditch their planes near islands occupied by the Japanese army. “Unfortunately, there was no guarante
e that you could get back to your home base from there.”35
The Bougainville-based coastwatchers continued to send their priceless forewarnings of southbound enemy air formations. Jack Read, whose beard had descended almost to the neck of his shirt, enjoyed the afternoon ritual of watching the surviving remnants of Japanese flights as they flew overhead in groups of two or three.36 The Japanese knew perfectly well that two Allied coastwatchers were hiding in the bush at the northern and southern ends of Bougainville, and were determined to get rid of them. Paul Mason learned from native spies that a hundred Japanese troops and a number of tracker dogs had gathered at Buin and would soon come after him. He called in an airstrike that killed the dogs in their cages. Both men had remarkable success in holding a tenuous grasp on the loyalty of native villages. Though their presence was known by hundreds of people in dozens of villages, none betrayed them to the Japanese.
IN WASHINGTON, HAP ARNOLD TOLD HIS COLLEAGUES on the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the South Pacific was oversupplied with airpower. He had returned from his inspection trip through the region armed with statistics purporting to show that Halsey’s and MacArthur’s theaters held a commanding margin (by number of aircraft) over the enemy. His accounting was close to the mark, but the rapid attrition on both sides required constant reinforcement. Guadalcanal was becoming the “sinkhole” for Japanese airpower that Admiral John S. McCain had advertised, but the scale and ferocity of the South Pacific air war could be sustained only by drawing down commitments to Europe, especially to Britain. As Washington’s most tenacious custodian of the “Germany-first” principle, Arnold was impatient to expand the bombing campaign against the Reich. He had opposed the North African invasion (TORCH) on the same grounds.
