Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

by James D. Hornfischer

  King deflected General Marshall’s attempt to give Operation Watchtower to Army control. On June 25, Marshall had written to King that Guadalcanal and Tulagi fell within the sphere of Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command (SOWESPAC), rather than the Navy’s South Pacific Area (SOPAC). Recognizing that the key to any such operation would be Marine Corps infantry who would necessarily operate with the fleet, King quashed the idea immediately, responding to Marshall that the operation “must be conducted under the direction of CINCPAC and cannot be conducted in any other way.” Marshall conceded to the Navy the responsibility for the first of the three tasks in the seizure of the southern Solomons. He handed the second and third tasks, the capture of the rest of the Solomon Islands and the neutralization and conquest of Rabaul, to MacArthur. Marshall moved the line dividing SOWESPAC from SOPAC, originally drawn to run straight through the southern Solomons, slightly westward to give the fleet exclusive domain over Task One. There were still too many cooks in the kitchen, but the hot appetizer would be the Navy’s dish to serve.

  Guadalcanal was thirty-six hundred miles from Pearl Harbor. Measuring distance from Pacific Fleet headquarters, an expedition to assault Yokohama would have been just as long. But King and Nimitz would beat Yamamoto to the punch. D-Day on Red Beach was set for August 1.

  WHEN GENERAL VANDEGRIFT was at last given the details of Operation Watchtower, several days under way for his staging area in Wellington, New Zealand, he was aghast at the speed required of him. The timetable allowed precious little time for preparation and training: They were to set foot on hostile shores on August 1. His superior, the commander of the South Pacific Forces, Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, joined General MacArthur in Melbourne, Australia, on July 8 to advise a postponement because of a lack of preparation and the inadequacy of friendly air cover over the invasion target. Though MacArthur had been written out of the invasion plan itself, he would still be relied upon to furnish air support to Navy forces with his long-range bombers, useful for both search and attack.

  The request, when it reached him, outraged King. He believed the offensive, on the drawing board for months, needed rapid execution. King told General Marshall, “Three weeks ago, MacArthur stated that if he could be furnished amphibious forces and two carriers, he could push right through to Rabaul. He now feels that he not only cannot undertake this operation but not even the Tulagi operation.” The admiral thought MacArthur, who was marshaling Army forces to dislodge the Japanese from eastern New Guinea, was pouting over the decision to remove Operation Watchtower from his domain. He was. King had outmuscled him and the first offensive of the war was going to be a Navy and Marine Corps show. The messianic commander of the Southwest Pacific didn’t like anything about that.

  * * *

  THE AMERICAN FLEET supporting the Marines was gathering piecemeal. Dispersed all around the eastern Pacific by the demands of combat operations to date, from the Coral Sea to Midway to the Aleutian Islands, three aircraft carrier task forces were assigned to the operation. The Wasp and Saratoga, which had missed the battles at Midway and Coral Sea, would join the Enterprise, a veteran of Midway and the Doolittle raid, in the Operation Watchtower combat task force. Meanwhile, Vandegrift’s amphibious element was scheduled to rendezvous with them in the Fiji Islands to rehearse the landings.

  During the last week of June, the Saratoga and sixteen other warships—four heavy cruisers, six destroyers, two oilers, and four transports—were under way south for Tongatabu, the fueling base in the Tonga Islands. On July 1, the Wasp departed San Diego with the transports President Adams, President Hayes, President Jackson, Crescent City, and a surface escort composed of the cruisers Vincennes, Quincy, San Juan, and seven destroyers. The Enterprise carrier force left Hawaii soon after the Saratoga did, conducting gunnery practice on the way. The rigidly programmed exercises, which involved firing on target sleds towed behind slow-moving fleet tugs, and then at sleeves towed by planes, did little to simulate what awaited them in the southern waters. For the gunners and fire controlmen in the cruisers San Francisco, Portland, and Atlanta, however, the chance to calibrate their radar and check the precision with which their directors aimed their remote-controlled guns was welcome. Everyone knew that a living enemy, long sought, would soon be near.

  The streams of combat vessels flowing toward the South Pacific consisted mainly of “light forces,” as cruisers and destroyers were known. The battleship fleet was essentially confined to station on the West Coast. Many sailors wondered why eight months after December 7 those battleships, fully repaired and modernized, would have no role in the battle for the South Pacific.

  On the eve of the war against Japan, the U.S. fleet had seventeen battleships in commission: fifteen prewar dreadnoughts and two of a fast new breed, the North Carolina and the Washington. Of the nine assigned to the Pacific, only the Colorado, refitting at Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, escaped December 7 unscarred. Two weeks after the attack, the three battleships whose damage was least, the Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, were under way on their own power for the West Coast. By early March, those three wagons were ready for war again, repaired, modernized, and joined with the Colorado. By mid-August 1942, Task Force 1, as the Pacific battleship squadron was known, had been bolstered by three transfers from the Atlantic, the Idaho, Mississippi, and New Mexico. By any measure this force of seven restored battleships was superior to the one that had been struck at anchor in Oahu.

  Their tenure in Hawaii was short-lived. Only four days after arriving, the Tennessee was ordered to Puget Sound for more refitting. The Pennsylvania followed within a month, and the Idaho for gunnery trials requested by Admiral King. They spent the early months of the war running exercises in unthreatened waters. None of the old battleships would reach the Solomons until after the fight for Guadalcanal was settled.

  The reason was their vast appetite for fuel. There were limits on the Navy’s ability to transport and store bunker oil in the Pacific. The success of Germany’s U-boat campaign required a massive redirection of the tanker fleet to the Atlantic to sustain the flow of oil to England. By the time the shuffle was complete, Nimitz had just seven tankers at his disposal. That was crippling to operations, given what fuel hogs the old battleships were. Task Force 1, including its escorts, burned three hundred thousand barrels of oil in a month—the total oil storage capacity of the entire Pacific in early 1942. A carrier task force was almost as thirsty. The Navy had enough fuel available to operate either its carriers or its battleships. As between the two, no combat commander alive doubted which choice to make. Admiral King urged “continuous study” of the problem, but Nimitz vetoed any proposal to operate the old battleships out of Pearl. The math simply didn’t work.

  The sight of great battleships lolling at anchor in the harbor at San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, deeply chagrined the cruisermen and destroyer sailors who would carry the fight against Japan. “We’re up against a navy that doesn’t keep its battleships home,” the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin complained to his diary in May. When men from the smaller ships went out on liberty, it was hard to resist raising provocative questions with any battleship sailors they might meet in the bars. The responses were usually fielded with fists. Now the energies of the oceanbound sailors of the Enterprise and the Atlanta were directed toward another fight.

  From Pearl, the route to Tongatabu traced the arc of 160 West longitude. Down this imaginary path went the Enterprise and, broad on her bows, the Atlanta and the Portland. Veterans of the Doolittle raid and victors at Midway, the ships of Task Force 16 were bolstered by the presence of a majestic newcomer churning the seas in the Enterprise’s wake. This was the North Carolina, the first of a powerful new type of battleship, fast, armed with nine sixteen-inch rifles and a steel forest of twin-mounted five-inch guns. She could keep up with the carriers at cruising speeds and burned 30 percent less fuel than did the older battleships.

  But logistics were as important as firepower. As General Dwight D.
Eisenhower huddled with his staff in London planning the North Africa landings, half a world away, in Auckland, General Vandegrift was figuring out how to get his ships loaded with men, arms, and two months of supplies, plan landings on a hostile and deeply unfamiliar beach, issue operational orders to his field commanders, and run dress rehearsals. The pressure on American planners to allocate scarce resources effectively was immense worldwide. What little cargo and tanker capacity could be thrown into the southern Solomons operation was a zero-sum deduction from the strength of the Atlantic convoys that kept Great Britain going. In both theaters, the Mediterranean and the South Pacific, America would proceed on a shoestring, and that name, Operation Shoestring, would emerge as Nimitz’s joking moniker for the Guadalcanal operation, even as the invasion fleet was being marshaled toward its faraway goal.

  WHEN ADMIRAL GHORMLEY received Nimitz’s directive to seize Guadalcanal, he summoned a staff officer and asked for charts of the region. “What in the world does this place look like, in the scheme of things?” Ghormley wanted to know. “The knowledge of the geography of the Pacific was hazy to American citizens generally,” Ghormley wrote, “and even to many of those in high places who were vitally concerned with the war effort.… We were pioneers, and accepted that fact.”

  The oldest of six children of a Presbyterian missionary from Portland, Oregon, Bob Ghormley had a knack for going where the action was. On August 15, 1940, he had arrived in London to serve as a “special naval observer” to his president just as Germany’s aerial bombing of Britain, the Blitz, began. In October he wrote Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, “Since my arrival here 2 months ago, I am impressed with the fact that this is a war laboratory which the British Government is more or less placing at our disposal. We are and must take every advantage possible of these facilities for gaining more knowledge and applying it practically to our own Navy.”

  President Roosevelt was eager for firsthand news on how the British people were holding up under the aerial siege. “Every day I was in London I felt more and more that England and, in fact, civilization was in great danger, and that the United States was the only country which could turn the tide,” he wrote. His was a diplomatically sensitive position, for Ghormley’s nebulous authority opened FDR to charges that the president was making “secret treaties” with Britain. In a presidential election year in which voices favoring isolationism were strong, the merest hint of an undeclared military alliance with England could have had complicated consequences.

  In his personal role as an agent of the White House, Ghormley enabled President Roosevelt to bypass Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and the State Department in communicating with 10 Downing Street. Meeting frequently with the British Admiralty and Air Ministry, Ghormley helped negotiate the ABC-1 agreement, articulating the Allied grand strategy for confronting the Axis worldwide. He exchanged candid correspondence with the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, on a wide range of subjects: convoy routes, Atlantic naval bases, the state of play on the Eastern Front, new war technologies from magnetic mines to radar, and the efficacy of RAF bombers and fleet units against German warships. Ghormley was also a fierce partisan for his own Navy in its intramural wars with other U.S. service branches. He reported to FDR on the malign machinations of Hitler—and to Stark on the schemes of the U.S. Army Air Corps to establish a “United Air Force,” which the fleet viewed as a threat to autonomous naval airpower.

  Influential though Ghormley was—some press reports lauded him as America’s premier naval strategist—his selection to command the South Pacific Forces came as a surprise to his peers. His last sea duty was in 1936, as captain of the battleship Nevada. He had never been to sea as a flag officer. Other admirals had much more experience afloat. Halsey and Fletcher had been successful carrier commanders. Nimitz’s first choice had been Admiral William S. Pye, the interim Pacific commander in chief after Husband Kimmel’s dismissal following the Pearl Harbor investigation, but King vetoed him. It is possible that Ghormley’s highest-ranking admirer, FDR himself, had a hand in giving him the job.

  Ghormley left London in April 1942, stopping over in Washington to build a staff from the remnants of the dissolved Asiatic Fleet. He had a hard time finding men with suitable experience. His coding and communications staffs in particular were either untrained or reservists with no experience with current fleet procedures and doctrines. He chose as his chief of staff an officer with political connections, Franklin Roosevelt’s former naval aide, Captain Daniel J. Callaghan.

  His appointment to command the South Pacific Forces carried him to the other side of the world with scarcely a week to sit still in one place. On his journey from Pearl through the necklace of South Pacific naval and Army bases—Palmyra, Canton, and Fiji, then to New Zealand and finally Nouméa—the yawning distances between points of strategic interest would unsettle him. East to west, it spanned the same distance as New York to Berlin. Its northern boundary was the equator; to the south, the South Pole. Ghormley hadn’t served in the Pacific in thirty years. It was unfamiliar terrain.

  From his time at Main Navy, Ghormley was familiar with plans to throw back a Japanese attack. He had no illusions about the nature of his enemy. He saw the Japanese as “dissatisfied, proud, grasping and aggressive. They would stop at nothing to gain their ends.” But the South Pacific Area would be a difficult place to fight them. Coming to the Pacific from the confines of London under siege, with scarcely a chance to acclimate, Ghormley would seem overwhelmed from the start by the unbounded expanses of sea. As one of his deputies would discover as a matter of first impression: “Robinson Crusoe should be required reading for anyone who is setting up an advanced base in the South Pacific islands.… There is no such thing as living off the country in the South Pacific, unless you live on coconuts alone.”

  The Pacific’s long swells carried the flotsam of frustrated Western colonial ambitions. The scattered failures of the English, French, Dutch, and Germans were announced by the mélange of place-names woven into the map, from New Britain, Hollandia, and Bougainville to San Cristobál, Choiseul, and the Bismarcks, and by the lack of civilization, or infrastructure. America’s legacy in the South Pacific was unwritten, but those who would begin to write it, for better or worse, were well on their way.

  (Photo Credit: 2.1)

  3

  The First D-Day

  ON JULY 22, MAJOR ELEMENTS OF THE OPERATION WATCHTOWER expeditionary force sortied from New Zealand. Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, whom King had promoted from his own staff, commanded the Watchtower amphibious force from his flagship, the transport McCawley. Out of Wellington’s Port Nicholson hove the invasion armada in a long single column, twenty-two transports and their destroyer screen, joined by an escort of cruisers, headed north toward the fleet rendezvous in the Fiji Islands. The combined task force’s Marine Corps accompaniment under Vandegrift was the largest modern amphibious force yet assembled.

  Slugging along at eleven knots, the invasion force needed most of a day to steam beyond reach of the umbrella of friendly aircraft operating from New Zealand. An order went around to all personnel to destroy their diaries. Small things like that tended to work on a man’s mind. The frightful possibilities of the experience ahead were beyond what most unblooded marines and sailors could imagine.

  From over the horizon came more muscle: two carrier task forces, bringing the Saratoga and Wasp into the game. The heavy cruisers Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes, and Chicago joined their Australian counterparts Canberra and Australia. The Enterprise task force was a day late for the rendezvous because Rear Admiral Kinkaid’s charts did not accurately show the International Date Line. It was not an inconsequential error. Things like that could keep an admiral from receiving additional stars. “We kept very quiet about it,” Kinkaid wrote, “and I doubt if Nimitz or Fletcher know it to this day.” To make up time and keep pace with the other task forces, Kinkaid’s Task Force 16 had one less day in port than it would have had, forcing the North Carolina t
o continue without refueling.

  The merger of the far-flung task force in the Coral Sea swelled the order of battle for Operation Watchtower to fifty major ships. It would in the end number more than eighty. By comparison, the carrier groups that had raided Japanese positions on Wake and Marcus islands early in the war each had just ten ships. The Doolittle raid in April sailed with two dozen, as did the Midway flotilla. From horizon to horizon now the Watchtower armada stretched, silhouettes long, gray, cold, and sleek. “We were conscious of the fact that this was one of the largest and strongest groups of war vessels ever gathered, certainly the largest and strongest of this war to date,” Richard Tregaskis, a war correspondent, wrote. “The thought that we were going into our adventure with weight and power behind us was cheering. And our adventure-to-come seemed nearer than ever, as the new group of ships and ours merged and we became one huge force.”

  Experience in wartime Britain made Ghormley wary about the threat of espionage. No doubt mindful of the role that spies played in the surprise attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Ghormley wrote his staff, “Loose talk is a stupid habit.… Some would risk the lives of their friends by a silly effort to impress others in public places.” There was good reason to fear leaks about ship movements, especially in places like Auckland, where peacetime protocols controlled the movements of merchant vessels into and out of port. The setup was so haphazard that it seemed a miracle operational secrecy was maintained at all. The act of gathering intelligence always came with a risk to the security of planning. Navy intelligence teams were seeking out planters and others who had been evacuated from Guadalcanal to interview for information about the island. Some of those former residents would travel with the invasion force to help identify landmarks.