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

by James D. Hornfischer

  In a March 26 memo to King titled “Strategic Deployment in the Pacific Against Japan,” Turner had written that any offensive would have to be directed by a local commander “who is closely acquainted with local conditions, and in a position to make decisions on the spot,” and supported by enough airpower “to ensure continuous local naval and air superiority” (emphasis in original). Fletcher’s withdrawal violated Turner’s notion of maintaining proper strength—and leadership—at the point of contact.

  After the conference, Turner reportedly confronted Fletcher over the withdrawal of the carriers, hissing: “You son of a bitch, if you do that you are yellow.” The acrimony would only grow worse. Ghormley wrote Nimitz on July 29 with an update: “I sent Dan Callaghan and LeHardy up to confer with Fletcher. I am enclosing a copy of Callaghan’s notes which show some of our problems. The big one right now is fuel. We are working on that as hard as we can.… Some tankers are arriving behind schedule so it is going to be difficult. I fear any chance of advancing dog day is not possible.”

  At the Saratoga conference, Fletcher called aside Captain Callaghan at one point and expressed his thanks that Ghormley had placed him in tactical command of the operation. Fletcher said he had thought Ghormley would exercise that function himself. What Ghormley expected of Fletcher’s carriers was unclear. An indication of SOPAC’s view of the plan to withdraw might have been a note Callaghan wrote in the margin next to his record of Fletcher’s announcement about his plan to leave after three days: a single exclamation point. As Ghormley’s representative, he did nothing to challenge this timetable at the meeting.

  It was time for the fleet to move again. On July 27, south of Fiji, Turner’s amphibians rendezvoused at sea with the battle fleet for the run to Guadalcanal. “At first there was a mast astern of us—then another—and then several,” an officer on the destroyer Sterett wrote. “Soon superstructures came into view, and we became aware that we were joining a whole fleet of ships: transports, destroyers, tankers, minesweepers, cruisers, a new battleship, and two big carriers.”

  The scale of the operation was now obvious to all. As various types of major combat ships hove into view with their escorts, captains gathered their crews and informed them of their destination. When skies cleared, the fleet’s aircraft resumed flying. Planes from the carriers and cruiser scout planes alike scoured the horizons. When the pilots returned to their ships, they were agog at the extent of the naval power that had been mustered.

  * * *

  VICE ADMIRAL GHORMLEY arrived in Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, on August 1. The French island colony had never been envisioned as a springboard for major military operations. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, France’s last monarch, wanted it as a penal colony. Even U.S. naval planners didn’t foresee its importance until Japan’s rise as a power encouraged the development of a secondary path to Asia, across the South Pacific, as an alternative to the newly threatened primary Pacific route passing through Guam.

  Named Port-de-France on its annexation by France in 1854, Nouméa featured a spacious inner harbor in Dumbea Bay. It was slow to develop. Nearly a century later, it had but a single large pier, and the marine railway serving it could handle only small vessels. Its yard could not repair damage such as Japanese battleships were likely to inflict. Arriving ships sometimes found no harbor pilots to guide them in, which was unfortunate seeing as the channels into Great Roads, the outer harbor, passed through a treacherous barrier reef ten miles to seaward and old French mines were known to be about. The progress of the world seemed to leave Nouméa behind. The energies of even the most vigorous empires seemed to fade in the fronded South Pacific.

  American logisticians came to see that their cargoes would have reached Guadalcanal faster if they were routed through the more capacious facilities in Auckland, more than a thousand miles farther south. Nouméa’s principal value lay in its potential. Its location would be the foundation of everything that would follow. If it was located too far south to serve as a staging and support area for operations in the Central Pacific, but not far enough to the rear to be an arsenal secure against all enemy threats, American military surveyors found it was the best place in Oceania from which to manage Operations Pestilence and Watchtower. Reasonably close to both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, it was a natural way station for flights originating in the eastern Pacific. The island was large enough for several armies to garrison there. Great Roads, well sheltered by reefs, could accommodate almost every U.S. warship in the Pacific.

  On arrival, Ghormley found himself in the midst of a near insurrection. The unrest in the French colony was the product of a power struggle between a popular local governor and the man Charles de Gaulle had appointed as his high commissioner in the Pacific. The commander of the U.S. Army garrison nearly had to declare martial law to end their quarrel over imperial administration. The political tension in Nouméa reflected the brittle state of organization in a region that America badly needed to be stable. Without stability, it would be hard to grow a network of self-supporting advance bases from which to generate an offensive. But things could have been far worse than they were: Had the French administration in New Caledonia cast its lot with the Axis, as their counterparts in French Indochina had, America’s sea-lanes to Australia would have been closed with or without a Japanese airfield on Guadalcanal.

  The Americans made their military headquarters in the optimistically named Grand Hotel, a two-story wooden structure on the waterfront, unpainted and weather-beaten. Next to the fleet landing was the small Hotel du Pacifique, which was soon to become one of the most bustling officers’ clubs south of Pearl Harbor. Behind its double wrought-iron gate was a tree-shaded courtyard with a bar said to be the longest in the Pacific. The appeal of the place—beer for fifteen cents, shots for a quarter—would be evident from the condition of the courtyard in time: “pounded flat into baked mud by the dusty shoes of thousands of officers,” as a late-coming destroyer officer put it.

  When U.S. servicemen first arrived on Nouméa in March, it became clear that the affection of Frenchmen for Americans was inversely proportional to the proximity of an Axis power. In negotiating for use of the island, Ghormley found the colonial administration fearful for its sovereignty. Well seasoned in the sensitivities of European diplomacy, Ghormley assured De Gaulle’s man that the United States had no permanent imperial ambitions in New Caledonia. America’s intention, Ghormley said, was solely to defeat Japan. When pressed, he pointed to the likely treatment the French would receive after a Japanese conquest. He found the people of the islands considerably more appreciative than their government, if for reasons that hardly seemed helpful in the middle of a total war against world fascism. According to the Navy’s official history of the South Pacific Area, “Almost every French civilian hopes America will stay in the area to curb the British; and the British civilians hope we will stay to discipline the French.”

  For Ghormley and American officers straight down the line, curbing the Japanese with an unprecedented amphibious offensive was the more urgent challenge. It would require innovation across the board. “The war in our area must be considered a warfare under a new name—‘Island Warfare,’ ” Ghormley wrote Slew McCain. “Young U.S. officers and men have many ideas as to warfare.… Encourage new ideas and use the good ones.” Ghormley’s communications up the chain of command, however, reflected a less hopeful tone. In a secret letter to Nimitz, he wrote, “I think our actual deficiencies are greater than are realized in Washington.… I am worried about our deficiencies in port organization at the Bases. These organizations are provided for on paper, but the actual shortage of officers and men to carry out war time port necessities, with nothing to fall back on in the Island bases, is tremendous.”

  The leading navies of the world were situated in a challenging period between the age of fighting sail and the age of nuclear propulsion when fuel was consumable and therefore a critical limit on their reach. Once the term steaming replaced saili
ng in the naval lexicon, the concept of an operating radius took root. “If an enemy lay beyond that radius, the fleet might as well be chained to a post,” a maritime historian wrote.

  BY DUSK ON AUGUST 5, with a heavy haze saddling the sea and some unlikely escorts, flying fish arcing and splashing amid rainbows in the bow spray, the ships of the Watchtower task force shaped a northward course. By skirting the radius of enemy air reconnaissance, Fletcher aimed to keep the fleet hidden from Japanese snoopers on the final run in.

  Shortly after midnight on Friday, August 7, Fletcher’s expeditionary force approached Guadalcanal from the west. “God was with us during the approach,” the captain of the destroyer Monssen said, “because we had a complete overcast of clouds just about five hundred feet above us, complete dense white overcast of clouds, a perfectly calm night, not a ripple on the ocean.” To the hundreds of lookouts standing watch, the island revealed itself as a dark-against-dark silhouette, “vague, black and shapeless off our starboard bow,” Joe Custer wrote; “like a purple lump in a pool of oil,” according to George Kittredge, a turret officer in the Chicago. The moon was just rising, a waning crescent only five days to new, but its faint light was enough to make visible the plantation island’s interior mountains, and the round mound in the sound, Savo Island, ahead and just to port. The Chicago’s bow wave, curling back in a surge of salt spray every time it pressed into a swell, produced a great phosophorescent arrow that receded for miles off either quarter. Kittredge feared it would reveal them to the enemy. But the operation was going like clockwork. After everything—the sonar soundings of fish, the endless refueling, the tense waiting, the failed rehearsals, the massive ocean rendezvous six thousand miles from home—Fletcher’s task forces were just fifteen minutes behind the schedule that had been set weeks before.

  Two powerful forces indigenous to the island competed to make the first impression on the newcomers: the scent of tropical flora and the stench of a rotted harvest. The abandoned Lever Brothers plantation’s fermenting fruits and the tropical vegetation everywhere else made a vivid blend, almost visual in its impact on the senses. En route to this place, the Navy had done well to avoid surprises. The diverse mélange of aromas was the first of many, small and large, that would find them at Guadalcanal.

  Because submarine attack was among the worst surprises of all, fighting captains understood the importance of the blackout restriction: lights out, no smoking, exterior bulkhead doors and hatches tightly shut, no exceptions. The Astoria’s searchlights were turned in to keep their lenses from reflecting the moon. Turner’s transports were exhibiting less discipline. Lazing along off the Astoria’s port quarter, they were seen blinking signal lamps at one another. “What the hell do they think this is, Broadway?” someone asked. All nerves were atwitch. A Japanese naval patrol was widely expected to greet their arrival. As the amphibious force approached within three miles of Lunga Point, a strongpoint said by the coastwatchers to house antiaircraft gun emplacements, the commander of the landing force’s cruiser screen, Rear Admiral Victor A. C. Crutchley, Royal Navy, ordered his ships to draw a bead while the transports drew past. Shortly after 3 a.m., on all vessels, came the call to general quarters. Bugles blared through intercoms. Synthetic alarm bells summoned the heavy clambering of soles on steel decks and ladders. Then: “All hands man your battle stations! Set Condition One!”

  As dawn broke, it was almost possible, from the high perspective of a cruiser’s foremast, to comprehend the work of the entire amphibious and bombardment force as one concerted effort, projected by a once-divided nation resolved to fight. In the Astoria, Joe James Custer, the war correspondent, lit a match, touched it to his cigarette, and looked down from the director platform at the showers of sparks shooting from the cowling of a scout plane throttling up on an amidships catapult. With a muffled blast the canvas-winged biplane was shot wobbling into the sky. It turned and headed for the island to serve as eyes for the guns. No sooner had the journalist stuffed a wad of cotton into each ear and slackened his jaw against the thunder he expected than he was lifted by a great concussion and thrown against a splinter shield that was draped with charts and posters showing Japanese aircraft silhouettes. A cruiser’s broadside did things like that. His helmet knocked askew, Custer was swallowed by a cloud of gray-white smoke from the Astoria’s nine main guns. Ahead, the Vincennes, Quincy, and Chicago were salvoing, too, tongues of yellow-green flame lashing out sudden and staccato from their eight-inch batteries. Seen from a distance, their projectiles lofted slowly, like lazy red flares, through the lightening predawn sky. When the red lines descended into the dark island, they split into shallow V’s, ricocheting through the hillsides and jungles, tearing up tree trunks, and repulverizing sand.

  Distance was a cleansing agent for everything. “The pervasive mud, and jungle gloom and tropical sun, when they are not all around you smothering you, can have a haunting beauty at a far remove,” wrote an infantryman who would arrive at Guadalcanal later, James Jones. “When you are not straining and gasping to save your life, the act of doing so can seem adventurous and exciting from a distance. The greater the distance, the greater the adventure. But, God help me, it was beautiful.”

  No one found the sunrise of August 7 more beautiful than the stranded British-colonial-agent-turned-spy, Martin Clemens, hiding out in Guadalcanal’s eastern hills. He was napping, having spent the previous night reporting to Townsville on the locations of Japanese troops and facilities, and making plans for his own escape. The deep concussion of the naval bombardment awakened him. Looking out to sea, he made out the dark forms of American cruisers low on the water. Overhead, gray-blue aircraft streaked by.

  As Clemens’s heart surged, he tuned his teleradio to a frequency that was full of urgent chatter: aviator lingo, cast in a distinctive American twang. When one of his operatives, a Melanesian sergeant major named Jacob Vouza, found him, Clemens was in rapt bliss listening to the pilots’ voices. Off the beach near Lunga Point flowered a sight he had dreamed of: a friendly fleet drawing near, and landing craft churning toward his liberation. An “amazing panorama laid out as far as the eye can see, from Savo to Rua Sura, from Lunga to Tulagi—ships everywhere.” He made out fourteen troopships and half a dozen cruisers. He found the scene so surreal that he was moved to invoke the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock. “Calloo, callay, oh what a day!!!” he wrote. Flash. Salvo. Thrump. The guns of a friendly squadron were trained in anger on his miserable island.

  As the American cruisers moved in closer, from ten thousand yards to four, and the destroyers closer still, the pilots Clemens had heard on the radio droned into view. The carrier planes split into elements and dove on their targets. Bob Ghormley did seem to appreciate the critical role the planes would play in the first days of the landings. On August 2, having debriefed Dan Callaghan after the Saratoga conference and learning of the argument between Fletcher and the others over the withdrawal of the carriers, Ghormley sent Fletcher a dispatch that read: “UNDER INFORMATION YOU PLAN TO WITHDRAW CARRIER SUPPORT FROM TULAGI AREA PRIOR TO DOG PLUS 3 DAYS. NECESSITY EXISTS OF PROVIDING CONTINUOUS FIGHTER COVERAGE FOR AREA.” General Vandegrift, for one, might have wondered why Dan Callaghan hadn’t emphasized this on Ghormley’s behalf at the conference.

  If Ghormley’s message itself was unemphatic and less than specific, he offered some alternatives for accomplishing that goal, including ferrying squadrons of planes from the departing carriers to Guadalcanal, or stocking rear-area bases with external fuel tanks so that their fighters could grow longer legs and fulfill the mission. Fletcher was still weighing his options as the landing boats reached the line of departure off Guadalcanal, bound for the beach whose boundaries were marked off by colored smoke pots.

  Across Savo Sound, the four transports assigned to Landing Group “Yoke” were already disgorging their marines for the assaults on Tulagi and Gavutu. Resistance there would be sharp. The delicate crack and stutter of small-arms fire was soon audible in the sound. The
Chicago, joined by the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan and the destroyers Monssen and Buchanan, roamed offshore, main batteries flashing. Eight Japanese flying boats, caught at anchor in a bay south of Tulagi, went up like matchsticks under concentrated naval fire and air attack. Ashore, the last dispatch that the Japanese headquarters managed to send to Rabaul—“Enemy strength is overwhelming”—barely preceded the salvo from the San Juan that wrecked the station. So completely did these ships, under Rear Admiral Norman Scott, toss up the Gavutu waterfront that an element of the first wave had to be diverted from its original landing site, a seaplane ramp that was shattered by the fury of five-inch thirty-eights. A Lever Brothers’ dock nearby, somehow still intact, was used in its stead.

  It was 9:10 a.m. when the marines of Landing Group “X-Ray”—assigned to seize Guadalcanal—prepared to embark in their landing boats. As the morning wind rose there came from the transports the slow grind of chains on davits as the landing craft settled into the sea. Streaming over the gunwales and crabbing down the nets draped overboard went the marines. The novel sights and sounds of amphibious war would become common: the throaty hum of aircraft streaking through the morning sky; diesel motors gurgling and swelling as the boats readied to make the run to shore; munitions depots and assorted flammable stores on shore blossoming bright within churning plumes of smoke; and then that smoke, dissolving and dispersing, becoming a gray haze that covered the area like dirty gauze.

  Despite the ill omens of the rehearsals in Fiji, the actual landings on Guadalcanal were an anticlimax. When the marines hit Red Beach, five miles east of Lunga Point, they found an almost complete lack of opposition. Near the airfield, they gathered the spoils that the enemy workers left behind: meals still on the table, personal gear tossed in all directions, valuable equipment intact. They found ammunition, guns and artillery, fuel, radio equipment, trucks, road graders, refrigerators, and electrical generators. To keep watch over the area, they erected bamboo platforms on either side of the Lunga River, with views commanding Savo Sound as far west as Cape Esperance, and out to Koli Point in the east. Phone wires were unspooled from the platforms to General Vandegrift’s command post, and another line went to an Australian intelligence officer who monitored the network of coastwatchers in the Solomons chain.