Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  Seasoned under fire and wise to how he might have won previous fights still more convincingly, Scott knew what tools worked best. Like Turner, he had had time to think through the lessons of experience against the Tokyo Express. “FOR OPERATIONS AGAINST JAP LIGHT FORCES,” Scott wrote Halsey on the eighth, “SUBMIT NECESSITY FOR GUNS LARGER THAN FIVE-INCH. JAP STRENGTH IN TORPEDOES NECESSITATES EARLY EFFECTIVE HITS WHICH CAN ONLY BE MADE BY LARGER GUNS. EFFECTIVENESS OF FIVE-INCH AA FOR SINKING DD IS DOUBTFUL. ATLANTA CARRIES ONLY ABOUT 10 PERCENT COMMON MARK 32. IN ORDER MAKE BEST USE OF OUR DOUBTFUL TORPEDOES DDS WITH TWO OR MORE MOUNTS SHOULD BE ASSIGNED STRIKING GROUPS.”

  Good men had died for Scott to gain these insights. Given his emphasis on larger guns, he must have lamented the order that detached Pensacola from the area. Having won at Cape Esperance largely on the blowtorching output of the Helena’s and Boise’s six-inch batteries, he preferred heavy-gunned ships to antiaircraft cruisers. But the Pensacola had her problems. The first of the new eight-inch-gunned cruisers built to treaty restrictions, she had a tendency to roll even in moderate seas, which compromised the accuracy of her guns. Her seams tended to pop whenever a full salvo was fired. So while the Juneau or the Atlanta might have seemed better suited to protecting SOPAC’s last aircraft carrier, the Pensacola got that job and the antiaircraft cruisers were thrown into the line despite Scott’s wishes.

  The Atlanta didn’t have the additional space that other flagships had for an admiral and his staff, but Scott didn’t mind. “He spent a great deal of time on the bridge just as a unit commander does in a destroyer flagship,” Lloyd Mustin, the Atlanta’s assistant gunnery officer, said. “The captain’s chair was in the traditional starboard corner of the pilot house. There was a similar chair on the port side. Admiral Scott inhabited that through many long hours, day and night. The officers of the deck spent hours with him in the pilothouse. Sitting inside the door to the bridge wing, feet up on a chair, he was accessible, friendly, and conversational. He discussed anything and everything.” Typically an admiral kept his own staff apart from the captain’s wardroom. But Scott didn’t mind mingling with the leadership on his host flagship. “We were the eyes and ears of the captain of the ship. We were also Admiral Scott’s eyes and ears when he was not on the bridge,” Mustin said.

  Then a dispatch came down from Kelly Turner’s headquarters. It was a shocker. It said, in effect, that when Callaghan’s and Scott’s forces merged into a single force, to be designated Task Group 67.4, Scott would take second seat to Callaghan. Halsey was personally close to Scott. But because Callaghan had held the rank of rear admiral for fifteen days longer than Scott, tradition forced an absurd result: Callaghan, the chief of staff to a theater commander who had been removed for his lack of battle-mindedness, was relieving Scott, the only proven brawler in the American surface fleet admiralty, as officer in tactical command of the striking force.

  When Callaghan served in the heavy cruiser New Orleans, he befriended a medical officer named Ross McIntire. When McIntire became President Franklin Roosevelt’s personal physician, he recommended Callaghan as the president’s naval aide. Receiving the assignment to shore duty at a point when his advancement depended on gaining command of a major warship distressed Callaghan deeply, but he tried to make the best of it. In the spring of 1941, he pleaded for sea duty, and the president released him to command the San Francisco. A year later, he was ordered to serve as Ghormley’s chief of staff. In October, the cycle seemed to repeat itself when Callaghan was cast loose after Halsey’s arrival, and the best billet available to him—the nearest hull in the storm—was, once again, his old ship.

  The news of his return to sea was met with joy in the San Francisco, where he had earned the nickname “Uncle Dan” for his collegial way. The men of Task Force 67’s other heavy cruiser, the Portland, were pleased, too, for Callaghan had once been their exec, a role in which he had achieved the nearly impossible: becoming popular in the always-difficult position of the captain’s stern right hand. Oakland-born and San Francisco–educated, Callaghan had turned prematurely gray, it was said, after a court-martial in 1915 (fully acquitted) for allegedly mismanaging some engine room equipment while serving as the engineering officer in the destroyer Truxtun.

  The news of his elevation now hit the Atlanta hard. The crew, overjoyed when Scott came aboard with his flag, was deflated by his relief. The prestige of serving as flagship to a victorious admiral had been considerable. Now, though he would remain aboard, Scott would have nothing of substance to do but advise and consult (if ever asked) and follow Callaghan’s orders. It would strike more than a few fighting sailors as a shame that the Navy was taking Scott’s expensively earned curriculum of experience effectively out of circulation.

  What didn’t change as a result of Scott’s replacement was the Atlanta’s assignment to roam with the street fighters. Ironically enough, Scott himself probably wouldn’t have kept her in the task force had he been in charge of its composition. In this stout company, an antiaircraft cruiser was as out of place as a fox in a pack of wolves.

  AS THE AMERICANS were gathering, U.S. radio intelligence learned of large enemy naval forces gathering in the north. Back at Nouméa after his visit to Henderson Field, Halsey studied the briefings of CINCPAC radio cryptanalysts. Nearly foiled because of changes the enemy had made in their code groups and call signs, they still made a fair appraisal of the naval forces Yamamoto had ordered into action at virtually the same time Halsey was dining with Vandegrift on November 8. In the coming days, the enemy’s order of battle would be appraised in the aggregate as having two carriers, four battleships, five heavy cruisers, and about thirty destroyers. This assessment was mostly accurate, though it overestimated the carrier power available to the Japanese and did not reveal the complicated deployment plan that Admiral Yamamoto had settled on.

  Issued to his fleet on November 8, the Japanese operation order was designed to bring the eleven troop transports under Admiral Tanaka to unloading points off Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance. Carrying seven thousand troops, twenty days of supplies for thirty thousand men, and loads of artillery ordnance, they were escorted by a dozen destroyers. Much farther to the east, standing sentinel for the transports, was a powerful element of the Combined Fleet known as the Advance Force, under Admiral Kondo. It contained the battleships Hiei, Kirishima, Kongo, and Haruna, three heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and twenty-one destroyers. Separately, Admiral Mikawa commanded a striking force with four heavy cruisers, the Chokai, Kinugasa, Kumano, and Maya. Owing to battle damage and severe attrition to air groups, only one aircraft carrier, the Junyo, was available to lend air cover to this major operation. The report also indicated a massing of air strength at Buin, which would launch concentrated attacks three days before the landings. Though their troops were starving and their pilot ranks thinning, the Japanese had by no means given up on Guadalcanal. The heavy striking power of the Japanese battleship force was still to meet its match.

  In the second week of November, the Guadalcanal campaign entered a kinetic new phase. In a letter to Callaghan concerning the future operations of Task Force 67, Turner had forecast the nature of the coming Japanese assault like a meteorologist: air attacks beginning on the tenth and continuing daily with increasing strength; the departure of a troop convoy from Buin with escorts; a separate sortie by battleships and cruisers to bombard Henderson Field; a strike by enemy carrier planes; and then the crowning blow, an amphibious landing near Cape Esperance or Koli Point, supported by another naval bombardment. The Japanese were a day or so behind the initial reports of this cycle, but they were coming, like a violent storm front that would not be turned aside.

  How to array his available forces against the oncoming heavy surface group, arguably the most dangerous threat, was the most pressing decision Turner faced. Since no enemy transports had yet been sighted with it, he saw two possible purposes as to the Japanese mission: to attack his transports during the night, or to bombard Henderson F
ield and Vandegrift’s infantry positions. Turner’s options, then, were to keep his combatant ships close to the anchorage in order to guard his transports, or send them out to do battle in the open sea and keep the IJN’s guns away from Henderson Field.

  Seeing that control of the nighttime sea was vital, Turner made the latter choice. Rather than see to his own immediate safety, he detached Task Force 67’s entire supporting cruiser force, stripping the transport anchorage of the major ships of its screen, and gave it all to Callaghan. This was a significant gamble, for Turner could well have kept the warships close to the landing area, protecting his anchorage. Clearly he had had time to consider the errors of the campaign’s early days, when divided cruiser forces, deployed piecemeal in Savo Sound, had been dispatched with ease by a concentrated enemy flotilla. Improvision was always the order of the day. But the convergence of three separate convoys into the area all at once now offered an opportunity to concentrate. Turner wrote Callaghan, “It looks this time like the enemy is finally about to make an all-out effort against Cactus.… If you can really strike the enemy hard, it will be more important for you to do that than to protect my transports. Good luck to you, Dan. God bless all of you and give you strength.”

  Halsey was painfully aware that his only carrier, the Enterprise, would be without the use of her forward elevator until near the end of the month. Nonetheless, he knew that whatever airpower she could throw into the coming fight would be indispensable. Accordingly, on the morning of November 11, Halsey ordered the Enterprise task force to get north from Nouméa with instructions to take positions two hundred miles south of San Cristobál and strike Japanese shipping near Guadalcanal. Given the poor state of repair of her forward elevator, it was risky to commit the Enterprise into battle again, and this may be why Halsey’s decision to send her north was too late to allow the carrier to be in position to strike enemy forces then en route south. He had briefly considered detaching her air group to Espiritu Santo. But could not afford to throw the dice as aggressively as he had at Santa Cruz, and he knew it. He held Admiral Lee’s battleship group in the south with the Enterprise for the time being, too. They were a powerful reserve.

  Turner’s election to commit his entire combatant force for an open-sea encounter was the only practical possibility under the circumstances. As Hanson Baldwin informed the readers of The New York Times as the lead-up to the Santa Cruz carrier battle, “We must establish local naval superiority around Guadalcanal.… This can be done only by the continuous use of surface craft; air power is also absolutely essential to this end, but, as we have seen, alone it is not enough, alone it cannot prevent the Japanese from constant nightly infiltration by sea into Guadalcanal.” There was no other way to deflect an enemy surface force at night than to go all-in with the surface forces, whose “smashing offensive spirit,” Baldwin wrote, was key to everything. If they prevailed, and if the destruction of the airfield was thereby prevented, the Cactus Air Force would be free to strike the stragglers at will during that morning sanctuary when even the earliest-rising Japanese planes would still be hours away.

  U.S. Navy Combat Task Forces in the South Pacific

  (as of November 12, 1942)

  TASK GROUP 67.4

  (Cruiser Support Group)

  Rear Adm. Daniel J. Callaghan

  San Francisco (CA)

  Portland (CA)

  Helena (CL)

  Atlanta (CLAA)

  Juneau (CLAA)

  Cushing (DD)

  Laffey (DD)

  Sterett (DD)

  O’Bannon (DD)

  Aaron Ward (DD)

  Barton (DD)

  Monssen (DD)

  Fletcher (DD)

  TASK FORCE 16

  (Carrier Task Force)

  Vice Adm. Thomas E. Kinkaid

  Enterprise (CV) (damaged)

  Northampton (CA)

  Pensacola (CA)

  San Diego (CLAA)

  Morris (DD)

  Hughes (DD)

  Russell (DD)

  Clark (DD)

  Anderson (DD)

  TASK FORCE 64

  (Battleship Support Group)

  Rear Adm. Willis A. Lee

  Washington (BB)

  South Dakota (BB) (damaged)

  Preston (DD)

  Gwin (DD)

  Benham (DD)

  Walke (DD)

  Now it would be Kelly Turner’s turn to be a riverboat gambler. On Dan Callaghan’s untested shoulders he would gamble his entire command.

  26

  Suicide

  ON THE SAN FRANCISCO, IT WAS LIKE OLD TIMES AGAIN. DAN callaghan, the ship’s former skipper, was aboard wearing the two stars of a rear admiral. Just as in old times, a San Francisco sailor named Eugene Tarrant found that he occupied the ideal place from which to observe Callaghan at work and in repose: right in his shadow.

  No men on a ship were wiser to the way things worked than the sailors who stood invisibly in the wardroom’s midst. The white-jacketed mess attendants and cooks—a lowly caste within S Division, which saw to the supply and sustenance of the crew—mostly were black enlistees. Like all enlisted men, they cultivated what scraps of control and power were left to them. The ladder of ranks and ratings had its peculiarities, with voids on middle rungs and true power residing at the bottom and the top.

  Battleships and carriers had separate dining facilities for junior and senior officers. On cruisers, all the officers dined together except for the captain, who had his own cabin. When he was in command of the San Francisco, Callaghan made a practice of eating with his men. He used the wardroom to break down barriers and accelerate the growth of his young officers. The mess attendants and cooks had as good a view of the goings-on as anyone.

  On duty in the officers’ galley, Tarrant found that he could raise the pantry door, which was designed like a dumbwaiter, and hear Callaghan talking with his staff in the next compartment. With access to high-level scuttlebutt, he sometimes found himself as well informed as the intelligence analysts at headquarters. “I heard about all the plans,” Tarrant said. “They’d talk about what forces they were going up against, when they expected contact with the enemy, how they planned to deploy the fleet.”

  In the after-midnight morning of November 12, Admiral Turner informed Callaghan that patrol planes had reported two battleships or heavy cruisers, one cruiser, and six destroyers southbound at twenty-five knots, and within a day’s run of Savo Sound. Tarrant was on duty when Callaghan received Turner’s order to gather the disparate cruisers and destroyers from three task forces and take them into action against this threat.

  At the news that a fight with battleships was brewing, Callaghan began pacing his flag bridge. He was heard mumbling that it was a fool’s errand to take on ships three times the San Francisco’s size, and that it was a shame there was no time to confer again with Admiral Halsey. When the moment presented itself, Eugene Tarrant exercised the cook’s prerogative and asked Callaghan if he really thought the mission was hopeless. As Tarrant recalled, the task force commander was candid. “He said to me, ‘Yes it may be that. But we are going in.’ ”

  The officer-of-the-deck for the first dog watch, Lieutenant Jack Bennett, listened to the admiral conversing with Captain Cassin Young as they stood on the starboard bridge wing. “The wind carried their voices to me as I paced the deck and I was able to clearly observe the demeanor of each,” Bennett said. “They were discussing the unannounced fact that there were battleships in the Tokyo Express.… Captain Young … was in an understandably agitated state, sometimes waving his arms, as he remarked ‘This is suicide.’ Admiral Dan Callaghan replied, ‘Yes I know, but we have to do it.’ ” As Bennett saw it, Callaghan was “calm, unemotional, resolute and perhaps resigned to his fate.”

  Rumors had a way of sweeping a ship like wildfire. Word spread through the San Francisco that Callaghan deemed his orders a death sentence. “We were all prepared to die. There was just no doubt about it,” said Joseph Whitt, a seaman firs
t class whose battle station was in turret one. “We could not survive against those battleships.”

  Callaghan was fifteen years old when, three days after Easter in 1906, the great earthquake struck San Francisco. In the chaos and wreckage, he had done what a teenager could to help the injured. His prep school, St. Ignatius, was destroyed. As the fires consumed the school and its church, one student thought that “all hell seemed dancing with joy.” For the rest of the term Callaghan was left to study Virgil and Dante in a makeshift classroom amid the city’s ruins while the Jesuits rebuilt their school. For the men of the San Francisco and the rest of Task Force 67, it would begin that afternoon. Inbound now at twenty thousand feet, moving swifly toward the island, came a wave of twin-engine Betty bombers and thirty Zeros, fuel burning fast on half-empty tanks.

  BELIEVING THAT U.S. CARRIER STRENGTH had been eliminated entirely in the Battle of Santa Cruz, Yamamoto planned to neutralize the last bastion of U.S. airpower in the theater, stubborn Henderson Field, with a one–two punch of air attack and naval bombardment. The Bettys were first spied by a coastwatcher near Tonolei, on Buin, around 1 p.m. The air-search radar on Guadalcanal registered the bogeys when they were still more than a hundred miles out. That was enough time for Kelly Turner to get his transports under way in Savo Sound, where they could maneuver and make themselves much harder targets, and for Callaghan to herd his cruiser task force into a protective antiaircraft ring around them.

  Hiding above the cloud bottoms, the torpedo-armed bombers revealed themselves at the last minute, dropping down and buzzing Florida Island, throttles firewalled, descending steadily until they were right down on the water. U.S. fighter pilots were close in pursuit. Captain Joe Foss, leading a flight of eight Marine Wildcats and eight Army Airacobras, pushed over on them from twenty-nine thousand feet. The speed of his dive ripped loose the cockpit hood of Foss’s Wildcat. The Bettys divided into two groups and came in from the starboard beam of Turner’s northerly oriented formation. Unmindful of the heavy five-inch airbursts and twenty-millimeter tracer fire thrown up by the ships, which turned to present their sterns to the attackers, Foss and his boys chased the Japanese bombers right down to the deck, fifty feet above the water.