The New York Times said the victory handed the Navy and the nation “badly needed proof that in slugging contests at sea our leaders, men and ships can out-think and outfight the Japanese,” and that the victory was further evidence of the startling transformation of civilians such as Robert Whisler and Willy Rhyne into able sailors and soldiers.52
Making their triumph all the more remarkable was that as this battle raged in the Solomons, on the other side of the world another American armada had the week before launched its first major operation against Hitler’s armies in North Africa. Japanese leaders noted, with fear and respect, that the United States was able to wage war on two fronts simultaneously. If the country could conduct such campaigns now, what might their military be able to do once America’s factories and shipyards began turning out ships and weapons in abundance?
The eloquent Vandegrift had the final word with the message he sent to Halsey on behalf of all the Marines on the island. He wrote, “Our greatest homage goes to Scott, Callaghan and their men who with magnificent courage against seemingly hopeless odds drove back the first hostile stroke and made success possible. To them the men of Cactus lift their battered helmets in deepest admiration.”53
In the battle’s aftermath, Roosevelt nominated Halsey for promotion to full admiral. When Halsey received the four stars denoting his new rank, he removed the three-star clusters from his uniform and asked that one cluster be sent to Mrs. Callaghan and the other to Mrs. Scott. “Tell them it was their husbands’ bravery that got me my new ones.”54
Halsey’s aggressive spirit had spread to O’Bannon and the other ships that participated in that night encounter. While the next months would concentrate largely on what Admiral Nimitz called a battle of supply, as both sides reinforced and prepared for future offensives, Halsey would continue to push his forces to keep their foot on the pedal. Except for one surface action involving Fletcher, the crews of O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas now faced an indeterminate period of exhausting patrols and escort missions.
PART II
DESRON 21 HOLDS THE LINE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC
CHAPTER 4
BLUNTING THE TOKYO EXPRESS
Although the crew of O’Bannon exceeded MacDonald’s expectations in the recent engagement, he worried about their reaction to the event. While they had emerged from their first major action without casualties, some of the crew doubted that their good fortune would continue. The ship was certain to be involved in many battles before Japan was defeated, with each action diminishing their odds of surviving. “The boys were interested in living,” MacDonald said, “and some of them got a little worried.”1
They might have been more concerned if they had known about Halsey’s correspondence with Admiral Nimitz over the alarming shortage of destroyers. Halsey needed to strengthen his grip in the southern Solomons and establish a base from which to mount offensive strikes northward, but he could not do that without aid. O’Bannon, Fletcher, Nicholas, and the other units required reinforcements.
“This is a most acute shortage,” he wrote Nimitz in early December.2 Halsey explained that in order to escort transports to Guadalcanal, he had to pull his destroyers from antisubmarine screen duty around his aircraft carriers, which consequently limited the carriers’ utility. Nimitz sympathized with his admiral but told him he would have to wait until US shipyard production increased or more were released from actions in the Aleutians and in the European theater.
Despite the deficiencies, Halsey exuded confidence that he would wrest control of the Solomons from the Japanese. “Everyone here is working like a beaver,” he wrote to Nimitz. “We shall lick hell out of the yellow bastards every time an opportunity presents. That is a promise.” He explained that a lull following the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal had handed them “the first breathing spell we have had,” and that he was using it to build up the Marine defenses. He wrote that “we have been piling things into Cactus, as fast as possible,” including a shipment of turkeys for Thanksgiving.3
The lull to which Halsey referred did not extend to the crews of those transports and their escorting destroyers that rushed supplies and reinforcements to the island. Halsey admitted that he had no choice but to keep throwing his destroyer crews into harm’s way, even though “these splendid men are pretty well shot” after the November surface engagement.4 If Vandegrift was to succeed, those transports and destroyers had to keep the aquatic pipeline going.
Nonstop escorting action became the norm for the crews of O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas. “We had hardly returned to base when we were ordered out again—up to Guadalcanal,” MacDonald wrote of the days immediately following the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. “My God, they [the crew] said, wasn’t it over yet? No. It hadn’t begun. We went up again and again.”5 Sleep was a rare commodity. Seaman 1/c Whisler learned to catch a few hours’ nap in between the duties and watches that kept him active around the clock.
In a grueling pattern that lasted into the middle of 1943, the destroyers escorted transports to and from Guadalcanal, searched the seas for enemy submarines and the skies for Japanese aircraft, and bombarded enemy land positions. The weeks taxed the destroyer crews, who longed for a breather in Australia or Noumea. “At that point of time, the US did not have the equipment, ships or supplies that they needed,” Seaman 2/c Chesnutt wrote in his diary a few days after the major November surface engagement. “We actually just limped along getting by with whatever was available.”6
Not yet assigned to the permanent squadron that would soon garner praise throughout the Pacific—such organization would come only when more ships reached the Pacific—the three destroyers often worked together, but at other times left Espiritu Santo or Guadalcanal alone or with other units. Operating in waters around Guadalcanal and south to Espiritu Santo that Lieutenant Pfeifer noted “virtually belonged to Hirohito,” the destroyers helped bolster Halsey’s land units both at Guadalcanal and for what looked to be a long, difficult drive up the Solomons.7
They steamed through channels made treacherous by uncharted submerged reefs and underwater rock formations, often relying on out-of-date charts that cautioned, “Mariners are warned to navigate this area with great caution.”8 Cole and Wilkinson relied on their ship-handling skills, sharp-eyed lookouts, and luck to maneuver through the islands. Crews, faced with the dual threats posed by the Japanese and the tricky waters, could never let their guard down.
The destroyers’ war diaries read like long litanies of actions. In early December, for instance, Wilkinson daily called O’Bannon’s crew to general quarters because of contacts picked up by his radarmen and sonarmen. The ship barely avoided a torpedo that passed ahead of the destroyer, patrolled off Guadalcanal while transports unloaded their supplies, shepherded the transports into Tulagi Harbor for the night, formed a nightly screen to protect those vessels from submarines and surface raiders, patrolled the entrance to nearby Gavutu Harbor, provided gunfire support for Marines near Togama Point, and conducted five depth charge attacks on possible enemy submarines spotted off Guadalcanal. Only then did O’Bannon leave the Guadalcanal area, not for a respite but to escort a transport across Torpedo Junction to Espiritu Santo.
After completing the dangerous trip to the New Hebrides, O’Bannon waited three days for another transport convoy to assemble. During the interim, O’Bannon patrolled the waters off Espiritu Santo’s entrance and conducted military exercises and drills. After taking on supplies and fuel on December 11, O’Bannon again escorted more transports across Torpedo Junction to Guadalcanal, where she repeated the fatiguing schedule of patrolling and screening. Combat in the lower Solomons became an unrelenting series of missions that, while lacking the drama and headline-grabbing actions of major surface engagements, nonetheless carried the same deadly risks to crews and ships.
The tired men needed no excuse to vent their anger. One day Wylie and other sailors on Fletcher followed a dogfight between American and Japanese pilots. During the action, an American pilot p
arachuted out of his damaged fighter and was floating down to the water when “four Nips came by and shot him while he was in the air.” Angry crew yelled obscenities at the Japanese pilot, and Wylie’s “hatred for the Japanese increased.”
Wylie and others wanted payback. When Cole took the ship near two enemy pilots who also had parachuted into the water, the Japanese swam away. Still upset at watching the American pilot being gunned down, Wylie ordered the deck gunners to open fire “because I didn’t want them to get back to shore and fly again. They were within swimming distance of the beach.” The savagery that marked the Marine combat on Guadalcanal extended to the water, and Wylie and his crew had no reservations about shooting the Japanese after their enemy had declined help from the Americans. “The bitterness was incredible,” said Wylie.9
On the other side, the Japanese had lost so many destroyers and transports trying to push food, supplies, and reinforcements to their comrades on Guadalcanal that on November 16, two days after Wilkinson and Cole had helped repel Abe’s surface units, authorities in Tokyo turned to submarines for help. Each day at Buin on Bougainville, the northernmost Solomon Island standing 470 miles north of Guadalcanal, the Japanese loaded rations and other supplies onto destroyers and submarines, which rushed them down the Slot to Makino Point at the west end of Guadalcanal.
When Hara asked Commander Yasumi Toyama, chief of staff on Rear Admiral Razio Tanaka’s Destroyer Squadron 2 at Rabaul, his opinion of the squadron’s work, Toyama protested, “We are more a freighter convoy than a fighting squadron these days.” His squadron ships carried cargo to “that cursed island, and our orders are to flee rather than fight. What a stupid thing!” Toyama groaned that the destroyers’ decks were stacked so high with supplies for Guadalcanal that they could carry only half of their usual ammunition, thereby reducing their ability to fight. Hara agreed that “we must always be ready for battle. I think it is wrong ever to consider fighting as merely secondary,” and he added that “excessive caution is crippling.”10
Hara, Toyama, and other officers stifled their complaints in light of what was at stake for their countrymen on Guadalcanal. “More than one hundred men are dying from hunger daily,” explained Vice Admiral Teruhisa Komatsu, commander of the submarine force. “Many of the rest are eating grass. Very few men are fit for fighting. What are we to do, let our countrymen starve to death in the jungle? We must help them, no matter what sacrifices must be made in doing so!”11
Much as O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas escorted transports to and from the island, Japanese destroyers carried the bulk of the load on their side. In the operation nicknamed “Tokyo Express” by their American counterparts and commanded by Rear Admiral Tanaka, already noted for his surface exploits around Guadalcanal, each destroyer on the Express delivered one hundred drums of supplies per run. The destroyer skippers brought their ships within two to three hundred yards from shore, where they dropped the drums over the side to float them toward the island. The emergency delivery system proved haphazard at best, as some drums sank or drifted away before reaching the infantry, but it was the most they could do under the circumstances.
Operating in what he labeled “the savage waters of the Solomons,” Hara asserted that “the destroyers of the celebrated ‘Tokyo Express’ were the real workhorses of the South Pacific.”12 Often heading out unaccompanied by the more powerful cruisers or battleships, as did O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas, Hara’s Amatsukaze sailors and other destroyer crews grudgingly deemphasized their offensive capabilities to focus on resupplying their harried comrades on Guadalcanal.
Success in November and December around Guadalcanal rested on the overburdened American destroyer crews who repeatedly transited Torpedo Junction to bring in more men and equipment than did the Japanese. Combat in the lower Solomons pitted destroyer against destroyer, Hara versus MacDonald, in a single-minded contest to keep open those vital lifelines to Guadalcanal.
The Japanese assessment of the situation was gloomy: for every submarine or destroyer that delivered supplies to their forces on Guadalcanal, the Americans sent two. “The enemy foothold is thus being strengthened day by day,” Ugaki posted in his diary on November 26. “If things go on at this rate, we’ll soon be unable to do anything about the situation.” Eleven days later he commented of the supply runs made by O’Bannon and the other US destroyers: “So frequent are they that it is rather too much trouble to make note of them.” He said the Japanese struggled to ship even the most basic of supplies to Guadalcanal, even by submarine, and wrote on December 10, “The only ways left for us now are either to fire materials packed in waterproof bags from torpedo tubes while submerged or to chute them from planes.” Ugaki concluded that evacuation of the island, once scoffed as incredulous, was now being considered and is “the most urgent matter.”13
Japanese resupply efforts continued until December 11, when Tanaka sent the final naval supply run to Guadalcanal. Evacuation increasingly seemed the only option, with Japan pulling her forces off Guadalcanal, digging in on islands to the north, and renewing attacks from those locations. Even without Guadalcanal, the Japanese would still hold the rest of the Solomons. Hundreds of inlets and harbors dotted the island chain across hundreds of miles, providing bases from which Japanese ships or aircraft could emerge to strike the Americans. Should they abandon Guadalcanal, the Japanese intended to make Halsey sweep them from each location, a monumental task that would further challenge the destroyer crews who daily plied the dangerous waters.
“We Are Out to Win a War”
With major surface engagements certain to occur in forcing the Japanese out of the Solomons, however, and disappointed with the tactics utilized in the mid-November naval battle, Halsey asked Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, a veteran of naval encounters since Pearl Harbor, to examine the previous engagements off Guadalcanal. As Wilkinson, Cole, and other destroyer officers had urged, Kinkaid’s study recommended placing destroyers with the latest radar, such as O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas, in a van group to provide a better chance of spotting the enemy before the Japanese detected them. He also urged that destroyers act as independent units rather than being shackled to a cruiser column, and that cruisers hold their fire, which divulged a ship’s position, until after the destroyers had launched their torpedoes. Kinkaid believed his suggestions increased the odds for American forces to deliver a surprise attack with both torpedo and cruiser fire before the Japanese had a chance to respond.
The plan might have worked at Tassafaronga, the next engagement, had the battle-tested Kinkaid been there to implement it, but immediately before the action he was shifted to the Aleutian campaign. His successor, Rear Admiral Carleton Wright, lacked Kinkaid’s experience, but with Kinkaid’s blueprint, he stood an excellent chance of winning.
On November 29 American intelligence intercepted a Japanese message indicating that another of Admiral Tanaka’s Tokyo Express would arrive near Guadalcanal the next day. Admiral Wright steamed out in his flagship, Minneapolis, to meet the eight Japanese destroyers, but instead of positioning his ships into two groups, one comprising his six destroyers and the other containing his five cruisers, as Kinkaid suggested, Wright placed them in the familiar column formation. Leading the way were Cole and Wylie in Fletcher, followed by three destroyers, a quintet of cruisers, and two rear destroyers.
Cole and Wylie tried to alert Wright of their radar capabilities, but again their entreaties fell on deaf ears. When dusk settled in and Wright instructed them to hold fire until they received his permission, Wylie was furious. His ship and the other destroyers needed to strike upon first sighting, not wait for an admiral four ships back to give his approval. Wright’s move struck Wylie as “the most stupid thing that I have ever heard of.”14
In the late hours of November 30, just as Wright’s force arrived southeast of Savo Island, seven of Tanaka’s destroyers formed a single column in preparation for delivery of the drums, with the eighth, Takanami, prowling as scout 3,300 yards in the
van. Since oil drums cluttered the decks of each destroyer, Tanaka lacked his usual complement of ammunition and torpedoes, but he hoped to sneak in close along Guadalcanal’s coast, deliver his cargo, and beat a hasty retreat northward before the Americans could pounce on him.
With Cole again working on the bridge and Wylie feeding him information, Fletcher’s radar picked up Tanaka’s ships at 7,000 yards. Cole relayed the enemy’s course, bearing, and speed to Wright, and requested permission from Wright to mount a torpedo attack. The admiral, who did not want to release his destroyers until he knew the enemy’s precise location, refused.
Not until five minutes after Fletcher’s radar detected Tanaka’s destroyers did Wright give the command to open fire. By that time, ships on both sides had so changed their relative locations that Wright missed an opportunity to launch a torpedo attack at optimal position and handed Tanaka the time he needed to fire his deadlier, more accurate torpedoes.
Without waiting for orders, as Cole was forced to do, Takanami launched her eight torpedoes and opened fire at the American force. A few moments later, Cole received permission to launch his ten torpedoes, at which point, according to Seaman Chesnutt, “hell broke loose.”15 American cruiser fire sank the lead Japanese destroyer, but the other seven Japanese destroyers turned parallel to Wright’s ships and launched their torpedoes, which crashed into four of the five American cruisers, leaving only Honolulu unscratched. Two torpedoes shattered Minneapolis’s bow and a third torpedo rammed into New Orleans and ignited two of her ammunition magazines, while a fourth struck Pensacola and set her fuel tanks afire. Finally, two torpedoes punctured Northampton’s port side, sparking a tremendous explosion that engulfed the cruiser in flames.
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