Vice Admiral William F. Halsey was two days into a tour of the South Pacific when Nimitz ordered him to cancel plans and report to South Pacific headquarters at Noumea. When his aircraft set down in the harbor’s waters at Noumea, a member of Admiral Ghormley’s staff handed him a missive. Halsey ripped open the envelope, marked “Secret,” and read its contents, which named him Ghormley’s replacement as commander of the South Pacific. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!” he bellowed to his staff intelligence officer, Marine Colonel Julian P. Brown. “This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!”11
The combative Halsey was accustomed to handling hot potatoes, though, as his long tenure in the Navy had proven. He had spent the early portion of his career perfecting destroyer tactics that he, along with a handful of similarly minded officers, boasted were the best in the Navy. Halsey employed a dynamic approach in which his destroyers barreled at flank speed through tricky maneuvers, ignoring heavy seas and biting winds alike. If ever a ship reflected her skipper’s attributes, for Halsey it was a destroyer, a vessel that darted and raced about in search of an opponent to fight.
He added to his daring reputation from the war’s opening moment. On a day that saw American battleships settling to Pearl Harbor’s mud and aircraft smoldering on pockmarked runways, Halsey was aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise scouring the seas around Hawaii in search of the enemy. Although he failed to locate the Japanese carriers, before day’s end he had muttered, to everyone’s delight, that before the war ended, “the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.” Even though Halsey now commanded from aircraft carriers, according to a reporter familiar with the man, “he never lost the sense of speed and dash that the ‘tin cans’ develop in an officer.”12
For his deeds at Pearl Harbor, as well as for raids against Japanese-held islands in early 1942, Halsey quickly became the darling of the home front. Newspaper headlines shouted his triumphs and called his actions salve for an ailing nation. He had restored an optimism badly shattered on the Pacific war’s first day, and then shown to the military and the public alike that the Navy, though hit hard at Pearl Harbor, retained plenty of sting.
Sailors aboard ships about Guadalcanal and Marines on land welcomed Halsey’s appointment, for they knew that a fighter now stood at the helm. Marines slapped each other on the back, and some claimed that having Halsey in charge was like adding three aircraft carriers to the fleet. Military correspondents, accustomed to filing disheartening reports of the fighting, shared in the jubilation. “The effect on the men of the fleet and those ashore at Guadalcanal was electric,” wrote Gilbert Cant. “Halsey had the reputation of being the fightingest admiral in the Navy.”13
Contemporary newspapers and magazines conveyed the impact on the home front of Halsey’s appointment. “New South Pacific Chief Aggressive Commander,” proclaimed a Los Angeles Times headline. The New York Times joined in with “Shift to Offensive Is Seen in Washington Selection of ‘Fighting’ Admiral Halsey as Commander in the South Pacific.”14
Time magazine placed Halsey on its November 2 cover. A lengthy article examined the importance of the South Pacific, where O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas had only recently arrived. “It has become the vortex of a naval whirlpool which may easily engulf either adversary,” the magazine concluded of Guadalcanal. The profile added, “If the U.S. loses Guadalcanal, the Japanese can press on with relative ease, take the whole chain of islands down through the New Hebrides to New Caledonia, and then have only the narrow moat of the Coral Sea between them and Australia. But if the U.S. holds Guadalcanal, and can force its way up the chain as far as Rabaul, then the Allies will have a series of bases from which to build a major offensive against the Japs.” The article explained that the results Halsey achieved with his bag of tricks, which prominently featured those destroyers he loved, “can mean the difference between vigorous offense and weary defense in the Pacific, perhaps between beating the Japs in two years and in ten.”15
Halsey, a man accustomed to quick action, faced three crucial tasks—to reinforce the Marines on Guadalcanal, to prevent the enemy from reinforcing their own troops on the island, and to destroy a Japanese navy that dominated the waters around Guadalcanal. Unfortunately, he had few resources with which to execute his missions. A handful of surface ships, including O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas, either plied the waters or would soon be there, but he needed more of everything if he was to reverse the situation at Guadalcanal. Unfortunately for him, the United States’ first land assault against Hitler, the November invasion of North Africa, took priority, and Halsey would have to make do with what he had to contain the Japanese until additional help arrived.
Five days after being named commander, Halsey met with Vandegrift in Noumea. The Marine officer described the deplorable conditions under which his Marines fought, and emphasized that while he was confident his units could hold, he needed more air and ground reinforcements than he had been receiving. Halsey promised to immediately send whatever resources he had.
True to his word, Halsey located and tossed men into action and diverted ships to the Solomons. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” he said. “You can’t fight a war safely or without losing ships.” When one Army division arrived in the South Pacific, its commanding officer told Halsey that he needed three weeks to combat-load his transports and prepare his men. Halsey laughed and remarked, “Your division is leaving for Guadalcanal tomorrow.”16
Halsey may have been short of crucial items, but until he possessed the tools, he would substitute attitude and grit to invigorate his forces. Halsey’s Third Fleet War Diary bemoaned the paucity of South Pacific resources “in men, material, ships, planes,” but boasted that the sailors under his command lacked “everything but guts.”17 This sense of urgency spread throughout the forces operating in the South Pacific in the coming months, dictating much of what MacDonald, Wylie, and the other officers and enlisted aboard the trio of destroyers would do to strike back at the Japanese and begin the long road to victory.
“Even more than the hit-&-run disaster at Pearl Harbor,” intoned Time magazine three weeks after Halsey assumed command, “even more than the defeat in the Philippines, the prolonged Battle of the Solomons had brought the U.S. people face to face with a great and bitter truth of war. To most nations in all wars have come days filled with a succession of campaigns that were costly and not going well. Now, more than at any time since 1863, America knew such days.” The magazine concluded, “In their concern, the people hoped for the best, prepared for the worst, gloomed at the sinkings and took courage from their heroes.”18
Among those heroes were the first three crews of what would eventually become Desron 21.
“I Was Just a Country Boy”
MacDonald sensed a change right away. Destroyers, historically built to launch torpedo attacks, engaged in everything but that. Lacking items in every crucial area, including warships, in the early weeks and months Halsey utilized his destroyers as his jack-of-all-trades.
Halsey sent O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas straight to the Solomons, where the officers and enlisted enjoyed no breather in escorting ships north from Espiritu Santo to Guadalcanal, back to Espiritu Santo, down to Noumea, and northward again to Espiritu Santo and Guadalcanal. “The Guadalcanal Shuttle was in full operation,” wrote one destroyer officer of those desperate weeks in the Solomons. “Every trip to the objective area brought about a quick turnaround. It was never-ending, escorting cargo ships one time and assault transports with reinforcements the next.”19
Crews had to remain at their stations for long stretches because of the constant threat from enemy submarines and aircraft. “We had to be on alert pretty much all the time,” said Seaman 1/c Robert Whisler of O’Bannon, “because the air cover was not complete until Guadalcanal was secure.”20
At the same time, the Japanese upped the pressure. In late October, Emperor Hirohito issued a rescript to his military stating, “We believe the war situ
ation is critical. Officers and men, exert yourselves to even greater efforts.” Hirohito then said to an adviser, “Guadalcanal is the focal point of the war and an important base for the navy. So don’t rest on small achievements. Move quickly and recapture it.”21 The outcome in the South Pacific, and with it possibly the future of the war itself, boiled down to what unfolded off Guadalcanal.
Every voyage across Torpedo Junction, the stretch of the Coral Sea connecting Guadalcanal to Espiritu Santo and Noumea, was rife with peril. Radarmen scrutinized the water’s surface and the skies for enemy ships and aircraft, while their compatriots in sonar kept watch on the ocean’s depths for Japanese submarines that silently prowled below.
No one could relax. Aboard O’Bannon, when he was not at his battle station as a trainer on one of the ship’s five-inch guns, Seaman Whisler scrubbed decks or tended to his other duties. Whisler had only recently joined the ship in Espiritu Santo from the USS McCalla (DD-488) and now operated in a hotly contested battle zone, all while being, at age seventeen, the youngest member of the crew.
“I was just a country boy,” said Whisler years later. He was born October 1, 1924, in Hobbs, Indiana, and his family moved to Michigan five years later. “I quit my senior year in high school to join the Navy in March 1942,” he recalled. His grandmother gave him a silver dollar as a parting gift, saying it was for good luck. He placed the coin in his pocket, mostly as a way of maintaining an attachment to someone with whom he was close, but he figured it could not hurt in the luck department. He needed good fortune as the O’Bannon threaded her way across Torpedo Junction in late October and early November. “They kept us busy all the time with missions, training, drills, and regular watches,” explained Whisler.22
The Tokyo Express mirrored their movements by rushing in from the north their own reinforcements and supplies. Nearly every night a cluster of Japanese destroyers escorted transports to Guadalcanal, “almost in accordance with a time table,” according to MacDonald. “These nights were very hectic as we were constantly on the alert and we were maneuvering in waters which were then somewhat unfamiliar.”23
Officers and enlisted learned that around Guadalcanal and in Torpedo Junction, each day brought its challenges. Late October for Nicholas was typical of what the three destroyers faced. Early in the morning of October 22 the ship anchored off Guadalcanal, where Brown called general quarters to provide protection while the transport, Kopara, unloaded its cargo. In midmorning three Marine officers boarded to direct fire for a bombardment of enemy positions near Marine lines on the island. From a range of 11,500 yards, Brown navigated Nicholas on four alternating east-west runs off Guadalcanal, each time moving the destroyer closer to shore until the gap had been cut in half. The five-inch gun crews fired more than a thousand rounds during the two-hour bombardment, creating a thrilling spectacle with the fiery explosions ashore.
Shortly after, three enemy bombers attacked. Brown’s five-inch guns fired for six minutes to repel the bombers, but two minutes later three more planes charged Nicholas. While Brown maneuvered the destroyer to avoid the bombs, the 40mm and 20mm crews joined in, pumping almost a thousand shells skyward. Over the next twenty minutes streams of gunfire coughed from Nicholas’s guns to divert the enemy pilots. The Japanese fled after dropping two bombs that splashed harmlessly fifty yards to port.
When the all clear sounded at 1:45 p.m., sailors were surprised at their fatigue. The air attack had lasted only half an hour, yet they felt as if they had been fighting all day. As calm settled in, the men understood how excruciating even a brief attack could be. Given that, what must a major surface engagement be like?
Thirty-five minutes after the air attack, a Japanese shore battery opened fire at Kopara. The five-inch crews again jumped into action, tossing almost two hundred shells against the position; the American barrage silenced the offending guns.
As dusk set in, Brown escorted Kopara out to sea for the night, as he did on the following two evenings. “At sea, steaming as before in company with Kopara on course 176° True, speed 11.5 knots,” Virgil Wing wrote in his diary on October 24. “0450 Dawn alert, but I was already on watch.” With a final destination of Noumea, Brown had his men tidy up the ship. “We don’t get any cleaning done in the disputed area due to full time on watches of one kind or another,” added Wing.24
The next afternoon Brown received orders to leave Kopara, which would continue to Noumea, and join Task Force 64 to meet a reported Japanese surface force west of Savo Island. The battleship Washington led an imposing array of three cruisers—Atlanta, Helena, and San Francisco—and nine destroyers, including Fletcher. With Nicholas joining as a tenth, the unit formed a powerful countermeasure to the reported enemy force.
Tension mounted with each mile. When in late afternoon the task force neared the western side of Savo Island, where the Japanese were reported to be, Brown called the crew to stations. The ships formed into a long column, with six destroyers leading the unit, followed by the three cruisers, the flagship, and four more destroyers in the rear. Brown mentally questioned the formation, which split the destroyers into two groups. He, like most destroyer skippers, would have preferred collecting the ten into a unit so they could launch a massed torpedo attack. Information suggested that the enemy was expected to arrive around midnight, but when nothing was found anywhere near Savo Island, the ships retired north and west of Guadalcanal.
The previous four days had taken a toll. As Virgil Wing walked aft, a machinist’s mate stopped him. During fitting out in Bath, the man had boasted about his eagerness to fight, but he was now a changed sailor. After the tension of the previous days, the machinist’s mate stared at Wing and mumbled, “How much more do they think we can take?”
“This night seemed to have the elements that separated fortitude from bluster,” wrote Wing on October 25. “The sailors gathered in small groups or alone.” One man withdrew and refused to speak; “he looked at the eastern horizon and his face seemed to thin and sag as I watched.” Nearby a sailor conveyed his intent to leave with the words “I’ll get off this ship, just watch me!”25 The man received his wish when, after refusing to eat for more than a week, the ship’s doctor transferred both him and the reclusive sailor off the ship.
Fletcher and O’Bannon experienced the same, but a new wrinkle appeared on November 8. While Nicholas escorted a transport to New Zealand, O’Bannon and Fletcher departed Noumea for Guadalcanal as part of Task Force 67, consisting of four transports, the cruisers Juneau and Portland, and three destroyers. Instead of guarding transports and keeping a close eye on the waters, however, the two crews were soon to be tossed into one of the largest surface naval engagements of the war.
The Japanese were on their way.
“You Are the Son of Samurai”
Admiral Ugaki knew that the emperor was already calling Guadalcanal “the place of bitter struggles” and that some action to regain the initiative was imperative. His cohort Admiral Yamamoto believed that if the Japanese did not follow up their Pearl Harbor triumph with another convincing victory over the United States, they would face an uphill battle for the remainder of the war. Ugaki wrote a friend in early October, “Things here are proving hard going. I felt from the start that America was not likely to relinquish lightly positions established at the cost of such sacrifices, and I pressed the view that a high degree of preparation and willingness to make sacrifices would be necessary on our side, but everybody here always persists in facile optimism until the very worst actually happens.”26
Yamamoto would not allow his nation’s 1942 Pacific conquests, speedy military operations that had impressed military observers around the globe, to be wasted by defeat in the Solomons. He planned an intricate November operation to hit Halsey before the American had a chance to expand his forces. While the Japanese army rushed another sixty thousand troops to Guadalcanal and the Imperial Navy continued to bombard Henderson Field, Yamamoto’s senior naval commanders would lure the United States Fleet into a nig
ht battle, where Japanese wartime experience and their superb torpedoes could crush the inexperienced Americans. Two light carriers, four battleships, eleven cruisers, and almost forty destroyers gathered at Truk for the operation, while in the Solomons, beginning on November 2 and for the following eight days the Tokyo Express maintained a constant flow of reinforcements and supplies from Rabaul to Guadalcanal.
Halsey figured that November would likely bring a surface engagement with the Japanese and countered with his own measures. A cruiser-destroyer force rushed in artillery ammunition to the Marines on October 30, and he began gathering a force that included O’Bannon and Fletcher with which to meet the enemy.
“I hope they will become prey to our attack tomorrow,” wrote Ugaki on November 10. When scout aircraft located Task Force 67 under Admiral Richmond K. Turner, which included MacDonald and the O’Bannon, two hundred miles from Guadalcanal, Ugaki asked himself, “How shall we destroy this enemy?”27
Tameichi Hara, then in the South Pacific, where he began compiling a record for the Imperial Japanese Navy that was the envy of his contemporaries, wondered the same. Born October 16, 1900, in a suburb of Takamatsu City, on the northern coast of Shikoku Island facing the Inland Sea, Hara seemed predestined to a life at sea. The Japanese navy traced its origins to the city, the first major naval battle in Japanese history was fought off Takamatsu in 1185, and the Inland Sea teemed with aquatic life that formed a mainstay of the Japanese economy.
The future destroyer captain was mostly influenced by his grandfather Moichiro Hara, who had been a revered samurai in his youth. Although changes in the Japanese societal structure enacted in 1871 eliminated the influence of the samurai class, his grandfather never tired of regaling Hara with tales of the feats of famous samurai warriors. Moichiro longed to return to those years and earmarked his grandson as the person to restore military glory to the family.
Tin Can Titans Page 5
