Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  “I know one right now,” the marine said. “Leave out all reference that he who runs his ship aground will face a fate worse than death. Out here too many commanders have been far too leery about risking their ships.”

  Nimitz said nothing but smiled, perhaps recalling his tenure in command of the Decatur and of the court-martial charges that he had so audaciously defeated. Somehow that spirit had to be made to prevail here and now. There was little doubt that he meant to send his friend Bob Ghormley a message: Know your theater, know your command, then find those aggressive captains, the fighters, who would win the day.

  Off Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance, night after night, Imperial Navy cruisers and destroyers landed troops and supplies with scant interference. Between the end of September and the first week of October, Admiral Mikawa made eight runs after dark with fast destroyer-transports, delivering virtually without incident ten thousand troops of the Imperial Army 2nd Division, a veteran unit that had won infamy for its work during the murderous occupation of Nanking.

  To Norman Scott and his cruiser captains—Gilbert Hoover in the Helena, Mike Moran in the Boise, Charles H. McMorris in the San Francisco, Ernest G. Small in the Salt Lake City, and soon enough many others—a terrible burden was about to be passed. They would confront the Japanese at night and try to reverse their momentum after dark.

  Probably encouraged by Nimitz, Ghormley ordered Scott on October 5 to “HAVE STRIKING FORCE OPERATE IN POSITION OF READINESS TO ATTACK ENEMY VESSELS LANDING REINFORCEMENTS AT CACTUS.” Scott was the author of a new night battle plan that attempted to apply the lessons of the previous months. Flying his flag in the San Francisco, he accompanied the escort carrier Copahee within range of Guadalcanal and stood by on the sixth as air reinforcements flew off to Henderson Field. Then he joined the Salt Lake City, the Helena, the Boise, and five destroyers east of Rennell Island and prepared to seize his opportunity.

  16

  Night of a New Moon

  WITH GHORMLEY’S BATTLE ORDER IN HAND, NORMAN SCOTT WASTED no time departing Espiritu Santo. Task Force 64 arrived south of Rennell Island on October 9. There he ran them through a series of intramural scrimmages, pitting his cruisers against one another in offset gunnery exercises. That same day, two transports, the Zeilin and McCawley, departed Nouméa carrying a regiment from the U.S. Army’s New Caledonia–based “Americal” Division—the 164th Infantry with 2,837 men under Colonel Bryant E. Moore—as well as 210 ground crewmen from the 1st Marine Air Wing, eighty-one jeeps and trucks, heavy guns, and forty-two hundred tons of supplies and cargo. Scott’s cruiser force joined them at sea for the journey to Guadalcanal.

  Scott had chosen as his flagship the heavy cruiser San Francisco, commanded by Captain Charles H. McMorris. As one of two such ships in Task Force 64, she was a traditional if not an ideal choice from which to command this particular battle force. Even among the heavy cruisers, she was a black sheep. After she performed poorly in gunnery exercises off Hawaii early in the year, the San Francisco found herself assigned to escort convoys rather than sailing with a combat task force. To equip her for an escort role, the shipfitters at Pearl had fastened to her fantail a depth charge rack. This hardware, customarily found on a destroyer, was of dubious value in a heavy cruiser, insofar as those ships had no sonar equipment with which to locate submarines. Cruisers were meant to fight surface actions, in which depth charges were decidedly unhelpful things to have aboard. The unusual fitting was a shameful “scarlet letter” that brought derision from other cruiser sailors.

  Though the twelve-thousand-ton heavy cruisers San Francisco and Salt Lake City were the largest and most heavily armed ships in Scott’s force, as well as the two highest-rated cruisers in the fleet in terms of the efficiency of their overall engineering performance, they were not necessarily the most technologically capable or most powerful in combat. That honor belonged to his light cruisers, the Helena and the Boise, which were equipped with fast-firing six-inch main batteries and the new microwave-frequency SG surface-search radar, far superior to the SC sets carried by most heavy cruisers. But radar was a newfangled complexity. Almost all admirals of the World War II era were more comfortable with mechanical-optical fire control, based on direct observation and visual adjustment. This and other factors, including considerations of onboard living space for an admiral’s staff, recommended the heavy cruisers as flagships.

  As October settled in, quickening radio traffic continued to suggest a surge in enemy naval activity in the northern Solomons. Admiral Ghormley queried MacArthur and Rear Admiral Aubrey W. Fitch, who on September 21 had replaced Rear Admiral John S. McCain as commander of SOPAC’s land-based air forces,1 whether their search pilots had seen any of the “new-type heavy units” that he believed the Japanese were operating in the area. He mentioned sightings of an “extra large cruiser, Mutsu type,” as well as some kind of a “mystery ship.” Perhaps scorning his South Pacific commander’s foggy notions of the Japanese Navy’s generally familiar ship classes, Nimitz replied dismissively: “No mystery ship known here.” But as ever in war, the faster information flowed, the more the questions proliferated.

  On the morning of October 11, the sense of pending action was well apparent to anyone with access to a radio. In the Helena, encoded blocks of text dashed through the foremast antenna into Chick Morris’s radio room, “a steady, chattering stream that kept the typewriters hopping,” he wrote. There were reports of sightings, requests for information and clarification, questions from pilots on patrol. The latest was that a pair of Japanese cruisers and six destroyers were southbound from Rabaul. This report was rather innocuous on its face, and not entirely accurate. The Japanese force that was sighted, commanded by Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto, consisted of two separate groups. The cruiser force, which Goto personally commanded from his flagship, the Aoba, actually included three heavy cruisers, the Aoba, Furutaka, and Kinugasa, and two destroyers. The Reinforcement Group, steaming separately, contained the fast seaplane tenders Nisshin and Chitose and five troop-carrying destroyers.

  Goto’s cruisers were dispatched to bombard Henderson Field on the night of October 11–12. The two tenders, meanwhile, were scheduled to anchor off Tassafaronga and send ashore heavy artillery, ammunition, and equipment as well as a battalion of troops. Powerful as Goto’s combined group was, it was but the vanguard of a much larger force that Admiral Yamamoto was gathering at Truk, soon to flatten Henderson Field and destroy the U.S. Navy forces protecting them once and for all. Under the overall command of Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, this force included all five of Yamamoto’s carriers. A force that included the carriers Junyo and Hiyo, with the battleships Kongo and Haruna and four heavy cruisers and the ten ships of Raizo Tanaka’s Destroyer Squadron 2, sailed under Kondo’s direct command. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s fast carrier striking force, with the Shokaku, Zuikaku, and Zuiho, steamed separately. Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe would command the rest of the combined task force’s heavy surface forces: the battleships Hiei and Kirishima and three heavy cruisers, escorted by fifteen destroyers. Sixteen submarines advanced in a skirmish line ahead of the surface task forces.

  This tremendous gathering of naval power would unleash itself on Guadalcanal and its neighboring seas in coordination with an assault on Henderson Field by the 17th Army, tentatively set to step off on October 22. Yamamoto would await the Army’s signal. Meanwhile, Goto’s force would serve as the spearhead of the counteroffensive.

  SCOTT PREPARED TO enter battle on the basis of partially correct and incomplete information. American search planes found the Reinforcement Group but mistook the tenders for cruisers—a near-perfect reversal of the error made by the New Zealand scout pilot back in August, who reported tenders or gunboats, thereby masking the identity of cruisers. Now Goto’s cruisers approached undetected, and behind the Reinforcement Group. The manner of approach suggested the Japanese had no fear of an American surface fleet. On October 11 and 12, attacks by the planes of the 11th Air Fleet would suppress
Henderson Field and enable the tenders to reach Tassafaronga, while the cruisers struck the airfield.

  In the San Francisco’s flag quarters, Scott studied the charts with his staff and did the math, figuring the approaches his enemy was most likely to use and planning his own countermoves backward from the point of optimum contact. His designation as “Commander, Night Screening and Attack Force,” suggested the approach he would use in defending Savo Sound. There was nothing attack-oriented about Admiral Crutchley’s approach back in August. Scott intended to choose the circumstances of first contact. He seemed to appreciate something a surviving officer of the Quincy wrote regarding the disaster of August 9—that “Battles can only be won by ships engaged in offensive actions. … In spite of the fact that we had numerically superior forces in the area, a bold attack by the enemy was partially successful. Doubtless a similar attack by our own forces on a Japanese stronghold would have been equally successful.” In an evaluation released by Admiral King’s headquarters, it was urged, “Surface ships should be employed as striking forces. So far the war in the Pacific has been featured by long-range carrier air duels. We have, however, suffered equal if not greater losses from submarine and surface ship attacks. We must use our surface ships more boldly as opportunity warrants.” Scott saw the night patrol as a hunt. He would remain hidden, and set out to intercept when the moment was right, seeking the enemy. At a conference at Espiritu Santo, he discussed the new mission with his commanders and formulated the doctrine that would give them a chance to beat the Japanese at their own game.

  Doctrine, simply put, is an agreed plan of action that clarifies who will do what, how, and when. Existing tactical instructions for combat commanders emphasized major actions between capital ships fought at long range. According to General Tactical Instructions, formulated in 1940, any firing that took place below seventeen thousand yards was considered “close range.” The light forces that engaged at those close ranges had no standardized doctrine at the fleet level; squadron and division commanders had the responsibility to devise their own doctrine and battle plans. Norman Scott’s plan for Task Force 64 on the eve of battle would go like this: On the night he planned a sortie, Scott would keep his nine ships south of Guadalcanal near Rennell Island, outside the range of enemy bombers, until about noon. He would begin his run after the open window to air attack had closed. Moving north during the midafternoon, with his cruisers’ aviation divisions stripped to a single floatplane, he would accelerate to battle speed—twenty-five knots—when he was about 130 miles south of Savo Sound. As his task force made its five-hour sprint toward the battle zone north of Guadalcanal, friendly search planes would confirm the enemy’s position by last light. Once the battle area was reached, he would form into a single column with the destroyers Farenholt, Duncan, and Laffey in the van, followed by the flagship San Francisco, Boise, Salt Lake City, and Helena, with the destroyers Buchanan and McCalla bringing up the rear. He would then launch his floatplane for tactical spotting leading up to the engagement. Radio silence on the talk-between-ships frequency would be broken only to report actual contacts.

  If the timing worked out, Scott would intercept the Tokyo Express west of Savo in accordance with its faithfully kept delivery schedule. His destroyers would illuminate the enemy ships immediately upon radar contact and attempt a torpedo attack. His commanders would be free to open fire on first contact, without requesting his permission. Fire first and ask questions later would be the order of the day. His leading cruisers would close rapidly and fire at short range in continuous-fire rather than salvo mode. The two rear cruisers, the Salt Lake City and the Helena, and the rear destroyers would keep watch on the formation’s disengaged side. A particular challenge for the leading destroyers would be to stay alert for course changes blinkered from the San Francisco behind them. Improvised maneuvers were likely to be frequent once the action started.

  Unlike the Navy brain trust in the campaign’s inaugural days, Scott based his doctrine not on sunny assumptions, but on grave possibilities. Whereas Kelly Turner and his commanders had once assumed the Japanese could not reach Savo Sound before morning on August 9, Scott set himself to face the worst. His plan was no stroke of brilliance, nor was it even American in origin—he was more than willing to learn from the success of his enemies. His approach resembled nothing quite so much as a defensively oriented version of the one that Admiral Mikawa had prevailed with two months earlier.

  One thing Scott’s tactical instructions didn’t adequately clarify was how his destroyer captains would bring their torpedoes to bear. Torpedoes were the killing weapons of naval war, and much easier to aim than guns were. The art of gunnery, of firing projectiles at a moving target, entailed difficult calculations, including the problem of physically stabilizing guns on a rolling sea and the vagaries of three dimensions. Torpedo solutions were expressed in just two dimensions. If you knew your own torpedo’s speed, it was a simple matter to trace the enemy’s crossing angle and estimate the intersection point. “Any qualified watch officer accustomed to maneuvering a destroyer in formation can estimate the lead angle accurately enough to produce a collision course [for a torpedo],” an experienced destroyerman wrote. “At the short ranges of engagement being reported, a destroyer’s hull length would cover almost any error in estimate.” Aside from that oversight—Scott intended to rely on his guns—he had ably applied common sense, and the standard tactics for surface battle that every professional graduate of the Naval War College should have known well.

  IN THE HELENA, as in all the ships of the SOPAC force, runners hustled decoded message traffic to Captain Hoover and his department heads. Three or four times an hour, Ensign Morris ran to Hoover’s cabin behind the bridge with messages and battle plan dispatches from Scott. There was no doubting the pace of activity within the skipper’s mind. His bulkheads were papered with charts of the southern Solomons area, marked in red where enemy submarines and ships had been reported. Whenever Hoover received a new dispatch, he studied it quietly then turned to his chart, tracing his finger over the track marking the progress of the Japanese ships. “The two lines on the chart were twin fuses, smoldering toward each other,” Morris wrote. “When they met there would be an explosion.”

  Despite that, Hoover “was without question the calmest man on the Helena,” Morris continued. “It was, in fact, something more than simple calmness. On entering that cabin from the feverish bustle of the ship, you sensed a kind of loneliness. You felt the pressure of the responsibility upon the man who sat there hour after hour, thoughtfully planning the attack of his ship—our ship.… Her officers and men were already waging that battle within themselves, measuring their mettle, wondering how they would shape up in action.” Hoover told Morris that he expected action that night and asked him to show the reports to all the Helena’s department heads.

  Commander Rodman Smith, Hoover’s gunnery officer, was tall and husky and not given to pleasantries: “as grim as his guns.” When Morris found him he was poring over gunnery charts, ordnance data, and hundreds of other technical matters that determine a ship’s ability to land salvos on target. When the ensign handed him the dispatch board, Smith initialed it without comment and gave it to his assistant, Warren Boles.

  “Captain seem to be worried?” Lieutenant Boles asked.

  “Not a bit,” Morris said.

  “Are we going in?”

  “He says it looks like it.”

  “I hope so. The men need something to shoot at.”

  The prospect of a small steel-enclosed world crashing in around a man has a useful way of concentrating the mind. Men whose stations were in belowdecks compartments, situated below the waterline and sealed in at battle stations by watertight doors, were keenly aware that they already lay in their tombs should a torpedo hit. On untested ships especially, people tended to fidget. The Helena had a fire controlman named Samuel Maslo who reliably predicted the worst. Whenever talk of intercepting the Tokyo Express came up, which was always,
he would say things like, “We’ll catch it sure. They got twenty ships to our one. They’ll murder us.” They called him “Sobbin’ Sam the Fire Control Man.” Fretting like that was easy to laugh off, but the echoes tended to linger. Still, one learned through the strenuous pace of shipboard life not to dwell on remote possibilities. Nimitz had found that confidence grew and pessimism waned the closer one got to the combat front.

  To sailors and officers whose knowledge of war had come in school, as opposed to the crucible of the actual thing, there was comfort in numbers—and in the open air. On the Helena, Chick Morris and his fellow ensigns and j.g.’s (junior grades) made a habit of gathering on the forecastle. They called themselves the Junior Board of Strategy. Until sunset left them sitting in darkness, they studied the flag hoists by which Admiral Scott sent messages to the squadron, then discussed and analyzed the implications. On the moonlit nights, beautiful to a layman’s eye but fraught with danger for sailors in a war zone, the creamy light was bright enough to play cards by. But it was another kind of contest that held their imaginations captive.

  What would it feel like when it finally came? “The Japs would strike—they had to strike—but when?” Chick Morris wondered. “The ship’s officers talked of nothing else.” The young could be forgiven their nerves. Experienced officers would be given less latitude to indulge themselves.

  Morris never forgot the otherworldly serenity of the tropical evening of October 11 as the Junior Board of Strategy stood in session, watching the San Francisco’s flag hoists raise the orders for the night. “We were moving west, straight into the sun,” he wrote, “the air so clear and still that the whole visible world seemed splashed with sunset colors. It was good to stand there and watch the ships of our formation steaming through that placid sea. And I was not alone. Other men were thinking the same thoughts. Some were sitting around anchor windlasses. Others were parked on the bitts, quietly ‘batting the breeze.’ One man was asleep on the steel deck, and another, nearby, was deep in a magazine of Western stories.”