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

by James D. Hornfischer

  “Appears enemy is building up striking force by continuous small landings during darkness,” Vandegrift wrote. “Due to difficult terrain areas are beyond range of land operations except at expense of weakened defenses of airfield. We do not have a balanced force and it is imperative that following measures be taken: A. Base planes here capable of searching beyond steaming range during darkness. B. Provide surface craft DD’s or motor torpedo boats for night patrolling. C. Provide striking force for active defense by transferring 7th Marines to Cactus. If not prevented by surface craft enemy can continue night landings beyond our range of action and build up large force.” In other words, the Marines needed the Navy.

  On September 3, Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, Fletcher’s replacement as carrier commander, proposed that the cruisers and destroyers of the disbanded Saratoga group be used much as Vandegrift had suggested—to add muscle to the surface Navy in direct support of the Marines. A few days later, Ghormley revamped the task force assignments to provide for a separate “surface screening and attack force” of cruisers and destroyers, known as Task Force 64. It was a humble flotilla, far less powerful than the North Carolina–led force envisioned earlier. To be based at Espiritu Santo and placed under temporary command of Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, the new surface attack force was made up of the heavy cruiser Minneapolis, the light cruisers Boise and Leander, and four destroyers. Still, the unit’s designation as Task Force 64 was an organizational signal that these ships had a vital mission and deserved stature on par with the carrier task forces (Task Force 61), Turner’s amphibs (Task Force 62), and McCain’s land-based air command (Task Force 63).

  No longer under a foreigner’s flag, as Crutchley’s cruiser screen had been, or linked by a decimal to the amphibious fleet, as Riefkohl’s martyred Task Group 62.6 had been, Task Force 64 were their own warriors. Given nominally to the operational control of Kelly Turner, they had an essential mission that “leaves much to the initiative of Task Force Commanders,” Ghormley wrote. “Keep in mind that there is no quicker means to ultimate victory than the sinking of enemy ships.”

  Only the ships of the surface fleet could hold safe the nighttime supply lanes and finally ensure American control of the island. Only surface ships, the mobile heavy armor of the seaways, could stop the Tokyo Express after dark and hold control of the seas. All that remained was for the Navy to find the will and the opportunity to send them into action again against the reigning masters of the old way of naval war.

  Thus far in 1942, six of the seven Allied heavy cruisers that had ventured forth and fought Japanese surface ships muzzle-to-muzzle lay at rest beneath a blood-warm sea. The Vincennes, the Quincy, the Astoria, the HMAS Canberra, and, four months earlier and far from the Solomons, the Houston and the HMS Exeter, had all been overmatched and destroyed by their counterparts. All seven might have been lost had Howard Bode’s Chicago entered battle on the night of August 9. This record was doubtlessly on the minds of all the skippers of the fast, multi-role ships that the Navy had long assumed would prevail in any direct action with Japanese surface ships. In the cold trade of naval warfare, such preconceptions held no value. There was but a single axiom that counted (now confirmed and amended by Gunichi Mikawa): Victory flew with the first effective salvo, and a second and a third didn’t hurt the cause either.

  Training courses in evolving disciplines such as fire control were under furious revision. Certain courses, for radarmen for instance, were being designed from scratch. All these changes, the growth of manpower and the evolution of doctrine, were aimed at one thing: knocking Japan to the mat in what was shaping up to be an epic oceanic brawl. In the sweltering South Pacific, the hardware needed to do that was plowing relentlessly south, fresh from the proving grounds.

  On the morning of September 6, the men of the light cruiser Atlanta, en route to Hawaii with the damaged Saratoga, arrived at Tongatabu and beheld a heartening sight. Two powerful new ships were in the harbor, the battleship South Dakota and the antiaircraft cruiser Juneau. News came that the mighty North Carolina’s sister ship, the Washington, was seven days out of the Panama Canal, due in the theater the following week.

  The coming of the powerful (and more fuel-efficient) fast battleships raised hopes at a time when naval planners were intensely aware that Japan’s great 69,000-ton Yamato and several of the heralded 36,600-ton Kongo-class battleships were at Truk. No U.S. ship in the area could match them. “I cling to the fond hope that some one of our admirals, some day, will force the fight—will go after these bastards at a time of our choosing, and with forces arrayed to our satisfaction, and will blow the bloody bastards clean to hell. And the North Carolina and Washington are some of what it takes to do that job,” Lloyd Mustin wrote.

  Lieutenant Commander Edwin B. Hooper, the alumnus of MIT’s fire-control course and an assistant gunnery officer in the Washington, proclaimed the fast battleships “a tremendous step forward in technology, orders of magnitude over the old battleships, even with their modernization.” The most dramatic improvement they offered over the older battleships was their high-frequency SG radar, the existence of which was still secret. The North Carolina had had her new apparatus installed at sea instead of within view of prying eyes in the shipyard. The ship’s Marine detachment stood armed guard over the newly equipped fire-control and plotting rooms. The Atlanta’s sailors had hardly gotten the dope on the South Dakota or greeted their counterparts on their sister ship, the Juneau, when the two newcomers were under way again. Then, oddly, just a few hours later they were returning to port. Misfortunate had struck the South Dakota. She had run aground on an uncharted coral head.

  Reputations form fast in the cloistered passageways of the fleet. The South Dakota was already known as a hard-luck ship. Some ascribed it to the state of South Dakota’s failure to follow the tradition whereby states presented their namesake dreadnoughts with a handmade silver service. The governor didn’t deliver, and the consequences were inevitable. During a shakedown run in the Chesapeake Bay, she went aground and lost electrical power. In speed trials off Casco Bay, Maine, the South Dakota collided dead center with a whale. Unable to slow down during the stringently prescribed test of the power plant, the ship ground the hapless mammal in half. Some of the chief petty officers said this heralded, somehow, good fortune. If good fortune was to be had, it belonged to Captain Thomas Gatch, for he might have been relieved of command on the spot had any of this made the papers. Now he had done it again, and his reward for putting an eighteen-inch-wide gash the full length of her underside was to be ordered back to Pearl for two weeks of repairs. It was a serious setback for the reconstitution of SOPAC’s surface striking force.

  ON SEPTEMBER 7, Admiral Nimitz flew to San Francisco to meet with Admiral King and Secretary Forrestal at the St. Francis Hotel. On the agenda was a review of the state of the South Pacific command, partly occasioned by the defeat in the Battle of Savo Island. It would be more than a month yet before such matters became fodder for headline writers.

  On that same day, on board his flagship Argonne at Nouméa, Admiral Ghormley composed a letter to Nimitz that he knew he had no business writing. He was in the grip of an exhaustion that seemed to color everything. It might have been cabin fever; he hadn’t left his flagship since his arrival on the first of August. He couldn’t stop himself from unburdening himself. “I have to spill this to somebody,” he wrote, “so I am afraid you will have to be the goat, but I hope you will burn this after it is read.”

  By the time this reaches you, Mr. Forrestal will have seen you. I think for the time he was here, he got an eyeful and an earful. Whether he can do anything about it, I don’t know. Somebody said the last day or two, on the British first visit to Washington they burned it, on the second visit they occupied it. It looks so to me that we are doing their job all over the world and the Government is not backing us up down here with what we need, why, I don’t know. I feel sure that you have the picture completely, but I am very surprised from one or two
of King’s dispatches, that I do not believe he appreciates it.

  As between King and Ghormley, the doubts were mutual. King was growing skeptical about his SOPAC commander’s fitness for command. King asked Nimitz whether Ghormley could stand up physically to the strain of South Pacific duty. Nimitz had no way to know. He knew his friend was a seadog, a strategist, a diplomat, and a gentleman. But he would soon wonder if he had the one thing that was needed most in the South Pacific in 1942: a fighter’s heart.

  “Our carrier situation at present is precarious,” continued Ghormley’s letter to Nimitz of September 7. “Some people are probably saying why don’t I send surface forces in strength to Guadalcanal at night. The simple reason is, it is too dangerous to suffer possible loss under the present conditions where they have submarines, motor torpedo boats, surface forces and shore based aircraft to aid them in restricted waters.”

  The last sentence revealed that Ghormley didn’t really understand what confronted his men in the combat theater. If Japan’s change in radio codes left Navy intelligence snoopers poorly apprised of movements, it should have been clear by the second week of September that Japanese motor torpedo boats were not a major threat in the Slot, nor did they fly land-based attack aircraft at night. As for the restricted waters, they were, of course, no less restricted for the Japanese than they were for the Americans, who enjoyed the significant advantage of defending those waters instead of attacking them. While the Navy’s conservatism with its carriers was well justified, the same could not be said of the light forces. If the gunslingers of the fleet were too valuable to risk now, when would they be risked?

  Ghormley was of mixed mind regarding the appropriate range of his command authority. He wrote Nimitz in that same letter, “A recent dispatch from Washington told me of several ships that had P-38’s on board, but they have never given me authority to divert a ship. I do not want that authority, for in diverting a ship in order to get an airplane, I might divert the very ship that had the critical ammunition in the hold to tide over a tough situation in Australia.” The pressures of command were clearly weighing on him. He had insufficient authority, but he was no longer sure he wanted more of it.

  At the St. Francis, Nimitz acknowledged to King and Forrestal that the problems in the South Pacific were grave. While he was glad to have three battleships in his theater—the Washington, North Carolina, and South Dakota—they were poor replacements for the heavy cruisers lost at Savo because their ravenous appetite for fuel limited their deployability. Nimitz didn’t yet have enough tankers to keep them operating. Forrestal promised he would do what he could.

  But the question of Ghormley’s fitness for command was a far more perplexing problem. Nimitz knew then, faced with Ernest King’s inquiry, that he had no other choice: He would hop on a Coronado patrol plane and fly to Nouméa to see his old friend personally. He would order Ghormley to undergo a physical examination. Then he would let King know what he found.

  Ghormley had long complained that Washington had little interest in or sympathy for his problems. What he didn’t know was that Forrestal, based in part on impressions formed during his own recent trip to Nouméa, was going powerfully to bat for him. Forrestal had visited hospitals where badly burned sailors from the Battle of Savo Island were still fighting for their lives. “What could I say in the face of such heroism and such suffering except to bow my head,” Forrestal said. The Navy secretary would find tankers for Nimitz and urge Roosevelt to speed up reinforcements. He was so vocal in his entreaties on Ghormley’s behalf that Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, by now occupied with planning the invasion of North Africa, thought Forrestal had been unduly influenced by his personal impressions. “Jim,” Stimson said, “you’ve got a bad case of localitis.” Forrestal replied without a lost beat: “Mr. Secretary, if the Marines on Guadalcanal were wiped out, the reaction of the country will give you a bad case of localitis in the seat of your pants.”

  Before adjourning at the St. Francis Hotel, the three leaders settled on a personnel move that would send electricity through the carrier fleet and beyond. It was agreed that Vice Admiral Halsey would return to Pearl Harbor with Nimitz and eventually take over his old billet as commander of the Enterprise task force as soon as repairs to the battle-damaged carrier were complete in mid-October.

  Shortly after they returned to Pearl, Nimitz took Halsey to visit the Enterprise. On board the weathered and battle-worn ship, competing with the pneumatic and hydraulic clangor, Nimitz awarded decorations to the crew. Then he announced, “Boys, I’ve got a surprise for you. Bill Halsey’s back!” There were cheers. Then he told them, “I know that you have been promised a rest and God knows that you deserve it, but you also know that we have lately suffered severe losses in ships and men. I have no recourse but to send you back into battle.” That statement received a courteous silence, and they would have five more weeks to think about it.

  IN HINDSIGHT IT was unclear which of the opposing fleets was less prepared for the fight that lay ahead. As the American brain trust was conferring in San Francisco, Yamamoto held a series of conferences in the flag quarters of the Yamato at Truk. According to Tameichi Hara, a destroyer captain who participated in the meetings, his commander in chief’s agenda was trivial next to other pressing issues. When would the world-beating Combined Fleet summon the will to gather, coordinate, and smash the upstart Americans? Where was the fuel going to come from that would enable the great Imperial battleship force to churn south? A culture of deference kept tough questions from being addressed. “Criticism of basic concepts in the Imperial Navy would have impugned the top-level admirals, and brought instant dismissal of the critic,” Hara wrote.

  The problems Yamamoto faced were those that plagued every commander in the machine age, when ships were more powerful than they had ever been before, but were effectively tethered to bases by their insatiable need for fuel. Situated much like the Americans were, waging war six thousand miles from home, the Japanese struggled all the more because of the large investment of pride they had made in the ships that were least amenable to operating at high tempo. That pride manifested itself in doctrine that vested supremacy in battleships: The Japanese fleet had been created under the idea that it would win a decisive battle over the Americans, at a time and place of its choosing. The pieces were in place. The battleships Yamato, Mutsu, Hiei, and Kirishima were all in the theater at Truk, backstopping Nagumo’s roaming carriers. If the idea of sidelining their heaviest naval armor was dismaying to the Americans, it was downright intolerable to the Japanese, who counted on them to win the “decisive battle.”

  The Japanese Army’s hubris and ambition were part of the problem. Famed for its iron discipline, it failed to discipline its ends to its means. The 17th Army stubbornly refused to abandon its failing bid to cross New Guinea’s central range and seize Port Moresby. This strained both resources and attention. The Imperial Japanese Navy saw the limitations more clearly. “Unless Guadalcanal is settled,” Ugaki wrote, “we cannot hope for any further development in this area.” A continuous realignment of means with shifting ends took place as both sides wrestled with complexities of the battlefield that were seldom apparent at the game table.

  On September 11, Turner and McCain met with General Vandegrift to plan their resistance to an expected Japanese attack that the U.S. fleet would be in no position to stop. Early that morning, Ghormley wrote Nimitz again to recount the deficits and laxities of the various components of SOPAC, “SITUATION AS I VIEW IT TODAY IS EXTREMELY CRITICAL.” Not wanting the carriers to seek battle unnecessarily, Ghormley ordered Noyes to keep them south of 12 degrees South latitude, about 150 miles south of Henderson Field. With land-based air strength on Guadalcanal down to eleven Wildcats and twenty-two Dauntlesses, once again the marines were left to their devices to endure air attacks, bombardment by naval gunfire, and seaborne landings of enemy reinforcements. On the night of September 13, the defenders of Henderson Field faced their most serious test yet.

/>   That night—just as, on the other side of the world, the earth shook from the German assault on Stalingrad—Vandegrift’s marines faced some seventeen hundred Japanese troops charging their positions about a mile south of the airfield. Skillfully dug in on a high ridge soon to be named in his honor, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson mounted a determined defense, coordinating artillery and mortars with the close-in work of his riflemen. The tenacity of the Japanese was unnerving, their nearness to victory harrowing. They briefly overran a second airstrip under construction east of Henderson Field, named Fighter One. A patrol of infiltrators was killed within fifty feet of General Vandegrift’s tent. Though the casualties of this battle were poorly recorded—the Japanese lost around eight hundred men, as against a hundred or so for the Americans—the Battle of Edson’s Ridge was another resounding victory for the marines. Nevertheless, the savagery and determination of the Japanese attack suggested grim things to come if the nighttime reinforcements were allowed to flow. American reinforcements were on the way. A regiment of the 1st Marine Division, the 7th Marines, was at last under way from Nouméa to join Vandegrift.

  The Wasp and the newly arrived Hornet were assigned to provide air cover to the transport force. En route north to their operating area on the afternoon of September 15, the carrier task force got its hardest shock yet. Admiral Noyes was turning the Wasp out of the wind as flight operations ended for the day. She was making sixteen knots, about 150 miles southeast of San Cristobál, when a periscope broke the water and crosshairs settled on the carrier. The Japanese submarine I-19 maneuvered, lined up on the carrier, and loosed six torpedoes.

  It would go down as the single most devastating torpedo spread of the war; the I-19’s torpedoes struck three ships. The Wasp absorbed two of them, producing a series of blasts fed by aviation fuel and stored bombs. In minutes the carrier was a pyre, her pall visible for miles. The torpedoes that missed boiled onward, toward the Hornet task force six miles away. The destroyer O’Brien was struck, too, and lost part of her bow. The battleship North Carolina was the third victim, taking a torpedo forward on the port side that opened a thirty-two-foot-wide hole in her hull, buckled two decks, and disabled her number one turret, killing six.