Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  “Then I saw his name and said, ‘Oh, Captain Turner. My God, yes. You were the captain when we went to Japan.’ ”

  The Savo disaster struck him personally. He grabbed Anthony by the hands, tears rolling down his cheeks, and said, “This should never have happened. If I had been aboard that ship it would never have happened.” And Anthony believed him.

  The Navy would do its best, for a time, to pretend it hadn’t. When transports carrying survivors of the Battle of Savo Island finally returned home, the men were sent to quarantine, removed from public circulation. They had stories to tell that Admiral King would be quite happy not to see in the newspapers. Some five hundred survivors of the Astoria, Vincennes, and Quincy were held under virtual house arrest in a barracks that had been constructed on Treasure Island for the 1939 World’s Fair. Marines were detailed to prevent the sailors from leaving. “Don’t you say one word about the battle,” they were told.

  When rumors reached the detainees that their officers had been allowed to go home, they rioted. After the sacrifice they had given, it was intolerable to be treated as security risks. And so the chairs flew. According to Astoria survivor John C. Powell, it took more than a hundred guards to settle them down. Stories about the August 9 defeat would not hit the papers until the middle of October. It could be said that the naval high command was still learning how to calculate its risks.

  THE UNITED STATES finally drew blood in the opening chapter of the Guadalcanal naval campaign when the submarine S-44 torpedoed the heavy cruiser Kako as she was returning to Kavieng.1 The loss of the ship did nothing to dim the mood at Truk. Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki, was filled with a sense of prideful vindication. He would write in his diary that “the conceited British and Americans who regard the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway as supreme victories cannot say anything now.… The enemy must be feeling the autumn in the fortunes of war.” Such verdicts were always debatable. By leaving the area, Mikawa would allow the U.S. Navy to say that the defeated American cruisers had, at the end of the day, kept the enemy from his objective.

  In early August, autumn had arrived for no one quite yet. The campaign for Guadalcanal had only begun. All the same, the first battle between major naval forces in the South Pacific left no doubt whose navy was master and whose was student. For Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and U.S. commanders all the way down the line, the residual sweet smell of the victories of spring had been borne away on a fell new breeze.

  1 Given Nimitz’s fear of submarines, and the S-44’s success here, it is mystifying why U.S. submarines were not more aggressively deployed in the Slot. As Admiral William S. Pye, the president of the Naval War College, noted, “It would seem that this would have been an ideal area for such operations. It was like a well-baited trap. We knew the Japanese were determined to reinforce their troops and try to recapture the island. They had to come to us, and they did come, again and again, from the very beginning of our occupation. They had to traverse narrow waters” (W. S. Pye, President, Naval War College, “Comments on the Battle of Guadalcanal, November 11–15, 1942,” June 5, 1943). Ghormley wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in 1950, “No submarines were under my command. After I was detached, it is possible that Halsey had some assigned to him, but I doubt it.… I asked CINCPAC for submarines once or twice, but none were made available” (Ghormley to Morison, November 15, 1950, Ghormley Papers).

  (Photo Credit: P.2)

  Dead sailors rose from out of the deep,

  Nor looked not left or right,

  But shoreward marched upon the sea,

  And the moon was a riband of white.

  A hundred ghosts stood on the shore

  At the turn of the midnight flood.

  They beckoned me with spectral hands,

  And the moon was a riband of blood.

  —from “Iron Bottom Bay” by Walter A. Mahler, chaplain, USS Astoria

  9

  A New Kind of Fight

  ON AUGUST 10, AT HIS HOUSE NEAR PEARL HARBOR, ADMIRAL NIMITZ hosted a dinner party with his staff in honor of a visiting dignitary, the commander of the New Zealand Air Force. He would not learn until much later that the inefficiencies of his guest’s own service branch contributed to the bloody fiasco in the Battle of Savo Island. Even if there were cause to blame him, the toast Nimitz lifted that evening to the common cause would probably have sounded the same. As the Pacific Fleet commander related it to his wife, Catherine, “We drank a cocktail toast to our Marines in the Solomons, who despite losses have done magnificently. I can sleep better tonight than I could for several nights past, although I am well aware we are not out of the woods yet.”

  After the debacle off Savo, Nimitz was showing his knack for understatement. What Admiral Turner would call “a fatal lethargy of mind” still gripped his fighting surface fleet. After eight months of war, in which his carrier fleet had enjoyed striking successes learning its trade under fire, the surface forces still were not battle-ready. Cruiser captains were not focused on the kinetic realities of wartime. So long as the carriers were deemed too precious to risk, the campaign would hinge on getting the surface forces of the Pacific Fleet ready to win battles. Paradoxically, the problem was their overconfidence. According to Admiral Turner, the surface forces at this time were “obsessed with a strong feeling of technical and mental superiority over the enemy. In spite of ample evidence as to enemy capabilities, most of our officers and men despised the enemy and felt themselves sure victors in all encounters under any circumstances.” Complacency and timidity were first cousins as contributors to defeat.

  And the problems were not just psychological. They were systemic as well. The radio links between units and commands were almost always unreliable. The fruits of the wide web of air searches, performed by PBY Catalinas and B-17s operating from bases on New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Santa Cruz, and Malaita, withered under pressure from bad weather, the shortcomings of human senses, poor coordination, and the vagaries of radio reception. Though the physical reach of the search planes was impressive—PBYs from Malaita could easily reach Rabaul, 650 miles away—aircraft from MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command could not communicate directly with South Pacific Area naval units.

  Coverage of the Slot on the afternoon of August 8 was a particularly egregious failure. Turner had asked the commander of land-based area air forces, Rear Admiral John S. McCain, to supplement MacArthur’s patrol coverage of the critical waterway. As it happened, McCain’s aviators were blocked by bad weather from flying the missions, but his message to that effect did not reach Turner until nearly midnight on the ninth. Had he known that his eyes in the sky could not fly, he might have alerted Crutchley, Bode, and Riefkohl to the possibility of a naval attack that night. He might also have requested that Fletcher use his carrier planes to fill the gaps in the search net.

  Too often, fighter pilots could not communicate with the ships vectoring them, nor sometimes with one another. Bomber pilots couldn’t contact the troops they were flying to support. Search aircraft could not communicate with ships. Squadron commodores could not reach the ship captains under their command. There was no network. In the narrow windows of time in which ignorance was costliest, all too often the components of SOPAC were fatally out of touch.

  As his screen was dying off Savo, Turner found he was unable to reach directly the only flag officer on screening duty that night, the capable Norman Scott. The TBS radio in Turner’s flagship, the McCawley, was partially shorted, and was effective only to about eight miles. Getting to Scott required him to go through Riefkohl on Vincennes. Turner couldn’t raise Ghormley, either. According to Ghormley, Turner’s radio frequency “could not be heard by the Commander of South Pacific Force. It is doubtful if all unit commanders of Task Force 61 could hear more than fragments of the blind transmissions on that frequency.” Ghormley could not hear Fletcher, either, and though the McCawley’s communications suite had been bolstered with the addition of sixteen field radios, Turner could not regularly
monitor Fletcher’s frequency.

  Plain bad luck joined wholesale system failure in plaguing the Americans. When the New Zealand Air Force search plane transmitted its sighting report at 10:25 a.m. on August 8, the radio station at Fall River was shut down, under air attack. After the pilot, Bill Stutt, landed the plane, he learned that his transmission had gone unreceived. He sped by jeep to the operations hut and delivered it in person. It sat there for nearly two hours before being sent to Southwest Pacific headquarters in Brisbane, and languished there for another three and a half hours before being routed to Canberra for area broadcast, and to Pearl Harbor for relay to the fleet. Turner did not learn of this important sighting of unidentified ships until the evening of the attack.

  Waiting for Ghormley to approve his request to withdraw, Fletcher was still standing by with the carrier task force, some 150 miles from Savo Island and well within striking range of Mikawa. When the approval came and the carriers finally did turn south at 4:30 a.m. on the ninth, Fletcher knew nothing of the opportunity. Long into the morning as his carriers withdrew, Admiral Fletcher “was completely uninformed regarding the surface actions in Ironbottom Sound during their progress,” according to his subordinate Kinkaid. “Had timely and accurate information of the surface actions been received,” Kinkaid wrote, “it is possible that the carrier air groups could have made the dawn air attack on the Japanese cruiser force which Mikawa so greatly feared.” The carriers hadn’t yet flown. They simply never learned that an enemy was near. Mikawa got away with his kills.

  Among Vandegrift’s men on Guadalcanal, adverse assessments of the Navy’s fighting spirit were not hard to find in the coming weeks. It wasn’t just marines who had doubts. Few were satisfied with the way the carriers were being employed. “The way these carriers operate seemed chicken-hearted as hell to me,” the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin, now a lieutenant commander, wrote on August 8. “Ended the day down off San Cristobal, pretty goddamn far from Tulagi for fighter support, if you ask me. I wonder when we will ever get the nerve to really go after these bastards, seek them out to destroy them.” A line lieutenant from the Wasp, Thomas R. Weschler, said that his captain, Forrest Sherman, “was always trying to get Admiral Noyes’s attention about the kinds of things Admiral Noyes ought to be thinking about”—including reversing Fletcher’s decision to withdraw from Savo Sound after the battle of August 9. As the tactical commander of the carrier force, Noyes held an almost superfluous position given that Fletcher flew his flag in a carrier, too. Noyes seemed hesitant to embrace a leadership role. According to Weschler, “Three times during the night, Captain Sherman said to Admiral Noyes, ‘I recommend you tell Admiral Fletcher that we should turn around and go back in there. They need our support.’ But Admiral Noyes never sent a single one of those messages forward.” Weschler, who would serve as an aide to Vice Admiral Arleigh Burke and ascend to three-star rank himself, was unimpressed with Fletcher’s deputy. “I always thought Admiral Noyes was sort of afraid of his own shadow.… He’d walk up and down the quarterdeck, in greens, wearing his aviation pigskin gloves, and that’s really the only time I ever saw him. I always had the impression of him as being sort of a mannequin, rather than really being a flesh-and-blood naval officer who was in the thick of decisions and ready to take over and set the course.”

  It was clear how far the fleet needed to go to beat the Japanese at a game the Americans thought they owned. The Navy entered the war with a xenophobic professional chauvinism prevailing at almost every level. They would have to overcome it in order to learn how to fight: to exploit new technologies; to change the way crews lived and worked aboard ship; to procure ordnance that actually exploded. More fundamentally, a spirit of “battle-mindedness” was needed in its commanders. Those who had been born with a fighter’s instinct would need little help. But for the majority of officers and men who had never experienced the sudden violence of ship-to-ship combat before, the Battle of Savo Island was a deeply unsettling lesson.

  The U.S. Marines had won the initial draw at Guadalcanal and strung a tight defensive perimeter around the airfield. A thousand miles to the west, the Japanese had beaten MacArthur to New Guinea. With the parallel Navy and Army campaigns now joined in earnest, the critical points of contact with the enemy were established along 9 degrees South latitude. The lines of battle in the South Seas had been drawn.

  FOR SOME OFFICERS, the hurdles to clear en route to getting their ships ready to fight were quite simple. One was no more complicated than getting the kids from Georgia off the battle telephones. The terse lingo of command had to run smoothly through a ship’s lines of communication. Regionally accented speech could block the instant recognition that a fighting crew needed in a scrap. Commander Joseph C. Wylie, the executive officer of the destroyer Fletcher, recalled that after the influx of patriotic volunteers to the fleet had taken place, only one in five of his men had ever been to sea before. Among them was a group of kids from the backwoods of the Peach State who had managed to sidestep boot camp altogether. They were fine and useful behind a squirrel gun, hunting in their native swamplands. In fights on larger waters, they were liable to foul things up. “We had to be very careful to have all or none of the Georgia boys on the telephone circuit, so that they could understand each other and we could understand them,” Wylie said. “There were a lot of special arrangements we had to make.”

  One of them involved the communication of relative bearings. Typically these are given in terms of an imaginary compass circumscribing the ship. Zero degrees is dead ahead, 180 degrees astern. “These kids had never heard of that and we didn’t have time to teach them. So we used clock bearings like the aviators had adopted.… If it was out on the starboard side, three o’clock, do you see?”

  One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a “fist-banging argument” between two of the ship’s up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marine named Lewis B. Puller, said, “I can take any dumb son of a bitch and teach him to shoot.” Mustin would go on to become one of the Navy’s pioneers in radar-controlled gunnery. Puller would ascend to general, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. Gesturing to Wylie standing in the doorway, Chesty Puller declared, “I can even teach him.”

  A ten-dollar bet ensued. The next time the Augusta’s marine detachment found time to do their annual qualifications at the rifle range, Wylie was Puller’s special guest. And by the end of the experiment, he was the proud owner of a Marine medal designating him an expert rifleman.

  The experience helped Wylie understand both native gifts and teachable skills and predisposed him to work with the rural kids under him. Now he could smile when the sighting of an aircraft approaching at a distant but undetermined range came through the Fletcher’s bridge phones as, “Hey, Cap’n, here’s another one of them thar aero-planes, but don’t you fret none. She’s a fur piece yet.” Wylie was a good enough leader to appreciate what the recruits from the countryside brought to the game. “They were highly motivated,” he said. “They just came to fight.”

  Back home, a great gathering was still under way. The stately pace of a global war allowed time for the majesty of a mass mobilization to build. Few of the untraveled young men who made their first venture west ever forgot its impressions. A Pullman car clicked and rolled through the slash pine and swamps of the South, and then into other terrain. “The moon rose, but still there were only the pines, a light here and there, a crossing bell, headlights of a car, then darkness again,” a new second lieutenant with the 1st Marine Division wrote. Bored but too anxious to sleep, recruits in dining cars played cards into the night. Others, foreheads leaning on windowpanes, watched the nighttime landscape roll unendingly past. From Augusta to Atlanta, then Birmingham, St. Louis, to the
high plains, across the Rockies, and toward the Pacific’s great frontier.

  Nimitz’s successor as chief of the Navy’s personnel office, Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, lamented that “The Nation has passed through an era of soft living and rampant individualism” that resulted in a “staggering” rate of rejection among new recruits for physical shortcomings. But the flood tide was rising. On December 7, the Navy had 325,095 personnel, plus more than 70,000 marines. Two years later the fleet’s muster rolls would carry more than 2,250,000 names, and the Marine Corps 391,000 more.

  Routed to training centers in San Diego or Michigan, finding their ships at Norfolk or Mare Island, shaking down and running speed trials off Maine or Puerto Rico, the new recruits made their homes in ships that would steam to victory, and carry kids and men and admirals alike to their death. A navy was still in the making, its day of triumph unknown, the men who were forming it yet unformed themselves, but motivated and carrying west. As Marine Corps aviator Samuel Hynes would observe, “They go to war because it’s impossible not to. Because a current is established in society, so swift, flowing toward war, that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.”

  Standing in its rolling surge, directing traffic, was Bob Hagen. A newly minted ensign himself, Hagen was assigned to duty as a service school selection officer at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He and his enlisted helpers sorted wheat from chaff, assigning recruits to advanced training based on their tested aptitudes. Giving six lectures a week to thousands of boots, he explained what water tenders did, and gunner’s mates, and yeomen. The tests would determine whether a kid saw colors well enough to be a signalman, or discerned tones sharply enough to be a radioman. Hagen and his staff collated the results and reviewed each applicant’s preferences. Those with the highest scores were routed to specialty training that filled the Navy’s most acute needs. Now and then a mandate would come down from on high. Once Hagen was told to find men to be pharmacist’s mates. Then the call came to fill out some newly forming construction battalions. Kids who had come of age on farms driving trucks found themselves in demand and quickly wore the chevrons of senior petty officers.