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

by James D. Hornfischer

  The dying Wasp drew in her escorts in a feverish rescue effort. It was the way of the South Seas that episodes like this were well attended by sharks. As the escorting vessels moved in with cargo nets thrown over the gunwales, the sailors were horrified. “Sharks were everywhere,” wrote Ford Richardson, a sailor from the destroyer Farenholt. “Dozens. Hundreds. A shark would catch a man by an arm or a foot and pull him under, cutting off his screams. The poor devil would pop up again, and again, like a cork on a fishing line. Each time his scream would be weaker than before. Finally, he would come up no more. Sometimes the shark would grab a poor man in the middle and shake him like a dog shaking a rat. Then the shark would back off, dragging the dying man’s entrails behind him. The water would turn milky with blood.” The rescuers worked until nightfall shrouded the scene of the horror. The ordeal was never more luridly horrifying than for a pair of brothers whom the deck force of the Farenholt tried to rescue. “Just at dark, a sailor came drifting by just out of range of a heaving line. He was holding up another sailor, but that man’s head was drooped over and his face was under water. He was dead. We shouted to the sailor, ‘Turn him loose and swim to us. He’s dead!’

  “ ‘He’s my brother,’ he replied.

  “ ‘He’s dead, Let him go and swim closer!’

  “ ‘He’s my brother! He’s my brother! He’s my brother … !’

  “Helplessly we watched as the current swept him by us, and on into the darkening gloom. The last we saw of him, he was still holding onto his dead brother. The last we heard faintly ‘He’s my brother.’ ”

  Although her escorts pulled aboard more than four hundred survivors, jamming them into all available spaces and passageways, the Wasp went down in the Coral Sea with 173 men. Though quick work by her damage-control crews kept her at full speed, the North Carolina would need six weeks at Pearl Harbor for repairs. The O’Brien was patched up, too, but she sank when her hull buckled en route to the West Coast.

  Next to the loss of the Wasp, the costliest casualty of the I-19’s attack was the Navy’s confidence in its commanders. Nimitz took a dim view of how Leigh Noyes had handled the carriers, operating at speeds that CINCPAC believed too slow to stay clear of prowling submarines. (Destroyer commanders preferred to operate below thirteen knots to enable best use of sonar.) Noyes was quietly removed and returned to the States to take a shore command, and placed before a board of inquiry that explored the culpability for the loss of the carrier. He was exonerated by a 1943 inquiry into the loss of the Wasp, but was never recognized for his combat service.

  The loss of the ship was kept a closely guarded secret. “They didn’t want anybody to know the Wasp was lost,” Thomas Weschler said, “just as they didn’t want anyone to know the Lexington had been lost at Coral Sea.… The Japanese would have had a heyday if they really knew how close to the end we were.” The Wasp’s survivors, like the survivors of the Battle of Savo Island, were hidden away—quarantined—in Nouméa. The news of the carrier’s sinking would not be released until December, by which time the survivors, sworn to secrecy about the reason for their leave, were finally allowed to tell family and friends the rest of the story. Stories of unmitigated disaster were never helpful to morale. While the South Dakota was under repair at Pearl Harbor, her skipper, Thomas Gatch, tried to use the story of the Battle of Savo Island as a teaching opportunity, inviting the captain of one of the sunken cruisers to visit his wardroom. Telling of the disastrous battle against Mikawa’s cruisers, his guest spoke in tones that fell from solemn to dire. “I guess he and Captain Gatch were old friends, and I am pretty sure Captain Gatch didn’t know in advance what this captain was going to say. His talk was very pessimistic,” recalled Paul H. Backus, a junior-grade lieutenant on the battleship. “At the end, Captain Gatch had to get up and say, in front of this officer, that nothing like that was going to happen to the South Dakota, that our best defense against this kind of nonsense was our nine sixteen-inch guns—cut and dried—and then he escorted the officer out of the wardroom. It was kind of sad, because this guy had lost his ship, and the way he lost it had left a very discouraging impression on him.” That mood would persist until the fleet got off its heels and did something to turn around morale. Admiral Wright, with Task Force 64, had under his command the tools to do the job. But the tools are not the craftsman, and they would be of little productive use until the right men showed up to do the job.

  13

  The Warriors

  IT TOOK CONSIDERABLE FORCE OF WILL TO OVERCOME THE PARALYSIS of the routine, the heavy inertia of predictability that almost every aspect of Navy life promoted, from the plan of the day to the formation plans drawn on the navigation board. It was easy not to notice how tiny elements of routine fused into a culture and made every day reassuringly like the last. The rhythm was made possible through a professionalization of the business of naval service that would never have existed but for previous great victories. In war, those comfortable rhythms needed to be violently overthrown if further victories were to be possible. Fast-thinking, quick-acting men would be needed to overthrow them.

  The awareness that one was in the presence of such an insurgent came at a pheromonal level. He didn’t have to be brash or intimidating. If he had the right qualities, they carried through the air around him despite his quietude. Some men were fiery and motivational, leading with a barely restrained recklessness and a demeanor of perpetually fresh anger. Others were intellectual warriors, brains in circuit with the matrix in space where vectors flew toward other vectors and the results of battle followed from the nature of their intersections. The fighter’s way was elemental. It was not possible to cultivate it reliably in an academic meritocracy, or to gauge it by class rank. The woodsmen with their squirrel guns who beat the British at New Orleans rallied to Andrew Jackson’s readiness to fury, a scent that inspired fear, his instinct to abandon prudence and seize a sudden opening to kill. Such a man knew that a warship was not a lady but a platform of systems that fire projectiles that kill. Having tasted defeat, the Navy was starting to come back to appreciating the unpolished strengths of the Georgia farm boys who found themselves under gentle persecution on board Commander Wylie’s Fletcher. A rebel yell and a blast of powder. That and a little planning and technical proficiency would carry the day.

  Rear Admiral Norman Scott was one of them. A 1911 graduate of the Naval Academy, he was known as “one of the best-liked men in the class,” in part no doubt because of his prowess in a hand-to-hand fight. An expert fencer, he had won “immortal fame,” as the irrepressible yearbook scribes wrote, by beating West Point en route to becoming an intercollegiate champion. He was a warrior; he always wanted his sword in the fight. According to Admiral Raymond Spruance, Scott’s tour of duty in the CNO’s office was an unhappy one. Sent there after commanding the heavy cruiser Pensacola, Scott “made things so miserable around him in Washington that he finally got what he wanted—sea duty.” Robert Graff of the Atlanta thought Scott was “kind of like a junior Halsey.” But fighters don’t always find their fight. It had been Norman Scott’s fate to sit idly by in the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan off Tulagi as the Japanese sliced through Captain Riefkohl’s cruiser screen on the night of August 9. Scott spent the next day, his fifty-third birthday, reflecting on what little he had seen of the Battle of Savo Island. He could claim some prescience for the screen’s unpreparedness for combat. He had warned Crutchley about the “grave inadequacies” of Condition Two, the state of partial battle readiness whose circuitous personnel shifts underlay the slow-footed response to Mikawa’s appearance.

  When he was named as Carleton Wright’s successor as commander of Task Force 64 in mid-September, one of his first acts was to return to tradition. In the late thirties, the U.S. Navy borrowed a training regimen from the Royal Navy, the so-called offset gunnery exercise. In these drills, ships squared off as they would in battle, fixing their gun directors on one another but setting off the alignment of the turrets by several degrees. As
the guns fired askance, a second director measured the precision of the offset. Any shot that landed a calculated distance behind the ship, projected in accordance with the range and the degree of the offset, was deemed a hit. Such drills were generally more orderly affairs if one ship did the firing and another served as target, rather than having both duel and maneuver simultaneously at full battle speeds. Precautions notwithstanding, the exercises were acts of faith: With fears of a catastrophic accident always present, they were conducted with a flinching caution that could keep officers up the rest of the night.

  Greater cause for insomnia lay in not knowing the proficiency of one’s crew. Admiral Ghormley had been hampered by this uncertainty. He didn’t know what his ships and commanders were capable of. He hadn’t spent time with them, or among them; hadn’t been physically present to assess critical variables, from their intangible esprit to the physical soundness of their machinery. He was candid about this. “I did not know, from actual contact, the ability of the officers, nor the material condition of the ships nor their readiness for battle, nor did I know their degree of training for warfare such as was soon to develop in this area. Improvement was acquired while carrying out combat missions,” he would write. This was a startling admission of a leadership failure. Norman Scott wasn’t about to emulate it, and certainly wasn’t satisfied to leave the education of his men to the enemy.

  After the damaging of the South Dakota, North Carolina, Enterprise, and Saratoga, the U.S. Navy had more capital ships on the sidelines than it had in the forward area. The loss of the Wasp left just one carrier, the Hornet, in the entire South Pacific. Battleships would find their moment, when fortune and necessity conspired. Until then, the “light forces”—cruisers and destroyers—would hold the line. The Slot would be their battlefield. “It was the way the Japs would come. We talked about it constantly,” wrote the Helena’s Chick Morris. “The talk was always of the impending clash with the enemy’s warships. Were we good enough? None of us knew. We had never been through the real thing.”

  In the last two weeks of September, during moments stolen from the drudgery of escort duty, Scott arranged for his cruisers to practice their craft. Determined to make his own force a match for the Japanese, he had studied the recent night surface actions carefully and instituted what a Marine gunner on the San Francisco, Clifford C. Spencer, called “Night Fighting Course 101.” No peacetime moonlight excursion this. “For the next two weeks we held daily gunnery practice and high speed night tactical maneuvers, every night, all night,” Spencer wrote. “We were at general quarters every night and had mock battles with opposing ships, all moving at flank speed. Some fun! The object of the practice was to have everyone sharpen their night vision and spot the enemy before he saw you. With training, helmsmen were able to maintain ship intervals with more expertise and direct more energy to finding the enemy ships, allowing you to get off those very important first salvos.” Floatplanes towing target sleeves. Flash cards with ship silhouettes. Competitions were instituted to determine the fastest gun crews. “In Texas the battle cry had been ‘Remember the Alamo!’ Here the rally cry was ‘Remember Savo Island!’ ” Spencer wrote. “Fatigue melted away when you thought of the slaughter of friends in the now infamous August 9th ‘Battle of the Sitting Ducks.’ ”

  The exercise Norman Scott led on September 22 was the first time some of his heavy cruisers had fired their big guns at all in five months, and the first offset practice they had done in more than a year. Trying to draw a bead on a highly maneuverable destroyer, the gunners of the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City learned the value of alert observation, and of close cooperation between the spotter and the rangekeeper or radar operator. Her officers called it “the best simulation of action it had thus far in target practices.” A few nights later the Salt Lake City was out again, on orders from Scott to duel the Helena. Parameters were loosened, the band of permissible speed widened to fifteen to twenty knots. The Salt Lake City pushed the limits, charging the Helena at twenty-four knots and landing a first-salvo offset straddle from 23,500 yards, more than thirteen miles away. Doctrine called for heavy cruisers to open fire in good weather from twenty thousand yards. Radar could bring even better results, allowing engagements to begin at ranges as great as thirty thousand yards.

  In June, after the Battle of Midway, radar was being touted as “the outstanding development of the war in fire control.” In a night exercise, a cruiser drawing ranges with the new high-frequency, magnetron-powered FD fire-control set landed eleven successive straddles on its target. Nimitz’s people looked at those results, studied the reports of battle coming back from the front, and drew the only conclusion: “We are still not getting all that we should out of this splendid instrument.” When his ships were firing on towed sleds, Scott ordered the sleds wrapped with metal and wire mesh, to provide a crisper radar return.

  Captain Small of the Salt Lake City knew that technology itself took you nowhere. Understanding and application were everything. Small had made it the “basic radar policy” of the ship that radar was the domain of the gunnery department. Data from the radars was transmitted not only to the bridge and Central Station, as on other ships, but straight to all gun director and control stations as well. This was no trivial modification to standing doctrine. According to the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin, there was “quite a lot of technique involved in transferring a radar target from detection by search radar to acquisition by the fire-control radar.” The search radar’s readings, so laboriously gotten, had to be manually plotted on the bridge before they could be conveyed by telephone to the gun directors. Small’s approach saved critical time by letting the gunnery team do its own plotting and get a direct picture of the situation.

  With enough practice, even liabilities could become strengths. Through the drills ordered by Scott, the Salt Lake City’s fire-control teams discovered that faulty circuitry was causing cross-talk between the circuits used by the main and secondary batteries. This defect would have confused an unpracticed crew, but Small’s men turned it into a strength. Overhearing the communications of their counterparts, the two teams came to recognize each other’s voices and in time enjoyed a productive cooperation.

  Good commanders helped their men get past their limitations, be they mechanical or psychological. The lessons Scott’s fighters learned were duly circulated fleetwide in bulletins. The problem of “buck fever”—the initial overeagerness of gun crews, firing before solutions were ready—had only one cure: the sobriety that came with experience. Special effort had to be made to keep fire controlmen informed of radar readings whenever a ship began the game of musical chairs that was going to battle stations. As key people changed stations, the flow of critical information could freeze. On some ships, including Scott’s flagship, the San Francisco, the first salvo from the main battery reliably knocked the delicate instrumentation of the FC radar out of operation. The shock of the main battery could jolt the foremast hard enough to throw the man aiming the director off his target, sometimes carrying the aim of the searchlight operator with him. In a light rain, those searchlights were ineffective beyond five thousand yards, like automotive high beams in a fogbank. Cold guns were full of surprises with their quirky ballistic properties. And as always, a ship-to-ship shootout after dark was a harrowing affair that confounded the senses, like riding a galloping bronco through a foggy night while aiming a rifle at a target that lies beyond a burning building. Simply put, there were no panaceas to defeat the sailor’s age-old foe, Murphy’s Law, and the universal problem of entropy.

  Their sheer terror was never greater in exercises than on the night of September 30. The San Francisco was shooting at a target towed by the minesweeper USS Breese when that small vessel sent word that the towline had parted. Targets drifting loose at night presented a danger to navigation. Sometimes the targets weren’t small sleds but derelict ships or large barges on which façades had been built to provide realistic silhouettes. To locate the wayward hardware, Scott’s ship
s began circling, searchlights reaching out into the darkness. No sooner did word come that the target had been found than gunners in one of the San Francisco’s starboard mounts were gripped by the sight of a ship bearing down on them fast, her bow to their starboard beam. When the crew alerted the bridge, the San Francisco went into a hard port turn and the Breese swung her rudder to the right. The minesweeper’s momentum carried her into the San Francisco starboard quarter, delivering a severe but glancing blow that collapsed the Breese’s bow and tore a thirty-foot gash in the cruiser’s side. As the ships turned, their sterns clapped together in a second collision. Physically, it was a mismatch. When the minesweeper’s stern struck the high wall of gray steel that was the San Francisco’s stern, it was forced underwater, subducted by the cruiser’s bulk. “With a sickening thump thump thump our outboard screw passed across Breese’s stern deck and quickly cleared her,” Clifford Spencer, the San Francisco marine, wrote. “Her stern popped up in the water like a cork. I never heard if the Breese had any fatalities, probably a few, but life was cheap in those days and soon it, the collision, was only a memory.”

  The vigilance required to avoid such mishaps took a toll. Spencer wrote: “In trying to give you an idea of the strain put on everyone from the Admiral on down to the lowest ranks during this period, I am at a loss, but try this: Imagine your living room is made of steel, the windows are your lookout posts and you have been there for two weeks. With very little rest and less sleep, you stare out day and night for an attack from the air, from across the street, or up from your basement, that you know will destroy your home and probably take your or your family’s life. This might give you a small idea of what the mental and physical conditions are like in sea warfare. This was maneuvers, but we knew that the real thing was just ahead. Grueling, yes, but Admiral Scott had to instill behavior into his ships and crews that the Japanese had perfected over many years. The Admiral had days, or at best a few weeks. We bitched and probably whined a lot, but by God, we learned!”