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

by James D. Hornfischer

  —Hanson W. Baldwin, “The Naval Defense of America,” Harper’s, April 1941

  19

  All Hell’s Eve

  WHEN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS RECEIVED NORMAN Scott’s dispatch about the battle that took place the night of October 11, Admiral Ghormley was hosting lunch in his flagship, the Argonne, with his chief of staff, Dan Callaghan, and an old friend from his days in London, Donald MacDonald. “Admiral Ghormley treated me like a son,” said MacDonald, then serving as the exec on the destroyer O’Bannon. “We had a nice lunch, and we talked about what was going on. Ghormley wasn’t exactly depressed, but he just thought he was trying to hold the line with very little strength. He said he wasn’t getting enough support, having to fight on a shoe string.” Among the problems the SOPAC commander articulated to his guests was one of combat leadership. “You know, Donald,” he said, “I don’t have any fighting admirals out here.” The statement seemed self-indicting. Until Scott took station off Cape Esperance, no U.S. admirals in Ghormley’s theater had been given an opportunity. Scott’s battle report provided an immediate rebuttal to Ghormley’s lament.

  It has been said that an army is as brave as its privates and as good as its generals. In a navy, the dynamics are different. On a ship bound for battle, admirals and seamen alike stand equally exposed to the hazards of combat. Admirals must have the same degree of physical courage. “The ship and crew members will go where he directs them—discipline and training will guarantee that—but his is the choice of the hazard that all will incur,” a naval strategist wrote.

  Historians like to tally victories for their own sake, like league standings or stock market prices. Combat commanders have a more pragmatic perspective on the consequences of battles. It is not the volume of the enemy’s hardware destroyed nor the number of his men killed that matters. What makes the difference is a battle’s impact on the will to fight, and on the ability to impose one’s will on an enemy in the future. Victory is in the mind, not the metal.

  While the Battle of Cape Esperance was a U.S. win in terms of ships sunk and immediate objectives realized, its actual impact on the larger fight for Guadalcanal had yet to be determined as the battered ships of Task Force 64 returned to Espiritu Santo.

  The future would belong to the side that most tenaciously maintained its will to fight. The Cactus Air Force at Henderson Field now boasted forty-five Wildcats, including the recent arrivals from the Saratoga; twelve Army Airacobra fighters of the 67th and 339th fighter squadrons; sixteen Dauntlesses organized into three bombing squadrons, two Navy and one Marine; and six Avengers of the Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron 8. Fighting within a comfortable radius of their home base, they held their own against the Japanese air forces opposing them from Rabaul, Buka, and Buin. The Japanese Navy’s 11th Air Fleet fielded a powerful armada of fighters and bombers: eighty-six Mitsubishi A6M Zeros and sixty-three Mitsubishi G4M Bettys, plus a handful of Aichi Val dive-bombers and Kate torpedo bombers. But the Cactus Air Force held the line.

  Defeated on the ground and stalemated in the air, Admiral Yamamoto was enacting an ambitious plan to hammer down on Guadalcanal from the sea. Goto’s defeat at the hands of Norman Scott was a small setback. The rest of the big push he was preparing against the island continued on schedule. As Scott was finishing his scrape with Goto’s cruisers, two Japanese battleships, the Kongo and Haruna, were pressing down through the Slot toward their objective: bombarding Henderson Field.

  NEAR MIDNIGHT ON October 13, the warning horn mounted in Henderson Field’s Japanese-built pagoda tower began sounding its forlorn, winding wail. A single-engine plane was heard overhead, and lightning was seen to flash. For half a second the grassy plain around the airfield’s perimeter was visible in bright relief. Then everything was black again. None of these events was remarkable. Nuisance artillery fire and petty air raids were nightly occurrences. An officer with the Marine intelligence section, Thayer Soule, lay in his bunk counting off the interval from flash to thunder. Hearing the drone of the Japanese aircraft overhead, he thought, Damn that plane, keeping us awake.

  Then an escalation, and the arrival of a waking nightmare:

  “Outside, a thousand rockets burst in the sky. The tent snapped taut. The blast blew me from my bunk. I groped for my shoes. This was a shoes-off night, the major had said. The light died out in a shower of sparks. Somebody shouted, ‘Star shell!’ Another crushing blast! A heavy salvo landed on the other side of the ridge. Trees snapped. Men up there cascaded off the cliff. Major Mather in pajamas. We hit the hole and sat, eleven of us, in a nine-foot-square hole.”

  The alert to Condition Red sounded. Henderson Field’s defenders poured from their mosquito-netted tents into a battlefield of biting malarial insects. On instinct and reflex, a thousand combat-seasoned men were racing for cover.

  A gunner’s mate assigned to the Naval Operating Base, Bill Kennedy, recalled the night of October 13 the way everyone would, as a terrifying holocaust. “The exploding gunfire from the ship was so loud and the concussion so great that we were literally blown out of our bunks. Shaving mirrors and what little glass we had around was broken. Running from tent to foxhole was like running a new kind of obstacle course; when a salvo was fired, the concussion threw you to the ground. Then when you got up, the concussion from the exploding salvo on the airstrip threw you down again.”

  The unseen ships that were hitting them were unnervingly close to shore. The trajectory of their gunfire was tellingly flat. The marines could feel on their skin the heat of the projectiles ripping by overhead, trimming the fronds from the tops of palm trees and blowing coconuts loose from their high groves. Fear paralyzed even the most proven veterans. “The air was filled with a bedlam of sound: the screaming of shells, the dull roar of cannonading off shore, the whine of shrapnel, the thud of palm trees as they were severed and hit the ground, and in the lulls from the big noises, the ceaseless sifting of dirt into the foxhole.”

  Soule scrambled into a shelter roofed with logs and steel plates and sandbags, smartly sited in the defilade of a ridge. “Our single light bulb swayed as salvos shook the ground.… Wham! Another salvo close by, then silence. There we sat—the colonel, the major, all of us—sitting on palm-log seats, staring at the too-low ceiling. Nobody spoke.… The plane was overhead now, and there was that flash again, red and fiery. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. Let’s see. Count to twenty-eight. We waited and counted. My knees wouldn’t stop shaking.… The earth heaved. Heavy pieces thudded on the roof. My stomach caved in. My head swam. The light went out. Or was I blind? I choked on the dust now thick in the air. We all coughed, gasped, coughed again, and sat there dazed.”

  Someone tried to light a lamp. The phone rang and someone moved to answer it. “Again the earth heaved. The roof bounced. The steel plates rang. One of the logs cracked but didn’t give. Dirt crashed into the entrance behind me. A tinkle of glass got through the blast. I smelled kerosene. Because we were in the center of the impact area, there was no whine, no shriek, no sound like a train, just the blast. It came all at once—the noise, the punch of wind, the dust. I guess we all blacked out.”

  The terrible march of the naval bombardment proceeded away from them now, having spared neither enlisted man nor general officer. No shelling they had ever taken came close to this. Japanese field artillerymen suffered from a serious shortage of ammunition that limited their output to less than a dozen rounds per day. Many of their guns were worn from prior service in China and Manchuria. Their Navy was another story. The battleships’ enormous guns were well maintained and well within their range. The Marine fighter ace Joe Foss found himself seized physically by the experience. “It seemed as if all the props had been kicked from under the sky and we were crushed underneath,” he said. One salvo came perilously close to decapitating the leadership of the 1st Marine Division, knocking Arch Vandegrift himself to the dirt in his shelter.

  Then, somewhere offshore, fire was checked. The great armored turrets were brought in
to the centerline, hoists stopped, and rudders turned so that the marauders could escape the coming of daylight. Morning revealed the results of the bombardment. In the foxholes and tents and covered pits around Henderson Field, forty-one men lay dead.

  Littering the torn earth were hundreds of small tubes. The length of a finger, an inch in diameter, they were innocuous enough when inspected up close. Packed in large projectiles and showered in from a few miles out to sea, designed to fall at a certain angle and burst at the height of a telephone pole, their incendiary and fragmentation payloads dismembered aircraft and men within a wide radius of the airfield and its dispersal areas. The storm over the airfield played havoc with the camp and its infrastructure.

  “Daylight disclosed what we had feared but dared not say,” Soule remembered. Tent camps shredded, gear ruined, and large holes scooped from the ground all across the encampment. “Atop our shelter were two big pieces of shrapnel, three inches thick, two feet long. Two men could barely lift them. A little jigsaw work showed that they were parts of one shell fourteen inches in diameter! Whole salvos had landed around us. The airfield had been clobbered.” Just one of the coastwatcher station’s three aerial masts remained standing, an Australian coastwatcher named MacKenzie wrote, “but luckily the teleradio transmitting aerial, in falling, had caught up in the head of a palm. We called 20J for a test report on our signal strength and readability. The answer came back at once: ‘Seems much improved. Have you been making adjustments?’ ”

  Still, the raking that the battleships Kongo and Haruna delivered that night was no laughing matter. Until then, young marines had learned to strut with disregard for the Japanese howitzers hidden in the hills. Their shells seldom reached the airfield. A journalist assigned to the area wrote, “The Marines at the airport treat its shells the way city-wise pedestrians treat taxicabs—with caution, but without nervousness.” But these same men were thunderstruck by the heavier throw-weight of fourteen-inch guns. It wasn’t the weight of steel that got under their skin. “It was the hopelessness, the feeling that nobody gave a curse whether we lived or died,” said Lieutenant Commander John E. Lawrence, one of the Cactus Air Force’s air combat information officers. “It soaked into you until you couldn’t trust your own mind. You’d brief a pilot, and no sooner had he taken off than you’d get frantic, wondering if you’d forgotten to tell him some trivial thing that might become the indispensable factor in saving his life.” The physical and emotional penetrations of the 973 large-caliber projectiles would be felt for a long time to come. Some would call this bombardment “All Hell’s Eve.” It was the heaviest and most concentrated artillery shelling a fighting man had to that time ever endured.

  The use of battleships in direct support of the Army was a rare departure from the typical Imperial Japanese Navy way. Guided by its old doctrine of seeing a decisive battle against the enemy fleet, it preferred to hoard its heavy combatants until they could be loosed for the lethal, war-ending blow. Rear Admiral Takeo Kurita had protested his orders to bring the two 762-foot-long monsters into Savo Sound so vehemently that Yamamoto had to threaten to lead the mission himself before he finally relented.

  Covered by fighters flying from Buin, an airfield south of Bougainville, the battleships arrived in an audacious gamble. And it paid off. Up in smoke went all of Henderson Field’s Avenger torpedo bombers, a dozen of its forty-two fighter aircraft, and all but seven of its thirty-nine dive-bombers, along with nearly all of its aviation fuel. The only defense offered by the U.S. Navy that night consisted of four PT boats sortieing from Tulagi and skirmishing fruitlessly with Kurita’s destroyer screen. The mighty Washington was not far away, having just escorted a convoy carrying Army reinforcements to a point just south of San Cristobál. In the company of the Atlanta and two destroyers, she parted ways with the convoy on the evening of October 12, and was en route south to Espiritu Santo when Kurita’s biggies came calling.

  The Japanese tide was so high, their appetite for bombarding U.S. shore targets so strong, that even Espiritu Santo was not safe. On the morning of October 14, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Segond Channel and opened up on the airfield with its deck gun. That day Yamamoto declared Henderson Field “suppressed.”

  In the days following Admiral Scott’s return to base after the Battle of Cape Esperance, U.S. naval forces were largely powerless to challenge what seemed an unceasing tide of Japanese ships. Pilots of American patrol planes were reporting more enemy vessels carving southerly wakes. On the morning of the fourteenth, two groups were spotted heading toward the island. One was especially foreboding: a force of six troop transports escorted by destroyers. The other was a pair of heavy cruisers and an escort of two destroyers.

  The only available U.S. carrier, the Hornet, was far from the theater of action, fueling northwest of New Caledonia. The Washington and the Atlanta were en route south, a day from reaching Espiritu Santo.

  On Guadalcanal, a lieutenant colonel from the headquarters of the Marine air commander on Guadalcanal, General Roy Geiger, paid a visit to one of his squadrons and described a dire and potentially disastrous situation. In the midst of intermittent Japanese artillery fire from the hills, he told them, “We don’t know whether we’ll be able to hold the field or not.” He said another task force of enemy warships and troop transports was headed their way. “We have enough gasoline for one mission against them. Load your airplanes with bombs and go out with the dive-bombers.” If on their return to base they landed in the midst of a pitched battle against newly landed Japanese troops, the pilots were told they would no longer have the luxury of fighting with wing-mounted machine guns, thousands of feet above their targets. “After the gas is gone we’ll have to let the ground troops take over,” he said. “Then your officers and men will attach themselves to some infantry outfit. Good luck and goodbye.”

  As instructed, the pilots flew off under the bright South Seas sun. As it turned out, speeches were speeches and their momentous mission was no Hollywood film. Planting a thousand-pound bomb with a delayed-action fuze into a speeding, veering destroyer was difficult even for a pilot who was not strung out after sleepless weeks of air attacks and artillery bombardment. Though even a near miss that fell seventy-five feet away could inflict damage, the Dauntless dive-bomber pilots, flying in pickup squads that sometimes numbered as few as two to four planes, were seldom effective. The two waves of air attacks the Cactus Air Force sent out on the fourteenth damaged only a single enemy destroyer. Meanwhile, the six heavily laden Japanese transports, with major elements of the Combined Fleet standing off far to the east, plunged toward Guadalcanal.

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF October 14, Ghormley informed Nimitz that the Japanese transports would land on the island that night, that enemy carriers and cruisers were on the move, and that he had no carriers to intercept. “THE SITUATION IS CRITICAL AND ENEMY REINFORCEMENTS MUST BE STOPPED IF OUR POSITION IN CACTUS IS TO BE HELD.”

  That night, the defenders of Henderson Field were given no peace for rest. Admiral Mikawa, in his flagship Chokai, with the heavy cruiser Kinugasa, accompanied a convoy to its unloading point off Tassafaronga, then detached the two cruisers to roam off Henderson Field. As the transports anchored offshore and began disgorging troops to the beach, the two cruisers lit up the sound for the second consecutive night, firing more than seven hundred eight-inch shells into the airfield without challenge.

  At dawn, the unloading of Japanese transports continued within plain sight of the besieged Marine detachment but outside the range of their artillery. The Cactus Air Force cobbled together an attack from available aircraft, fueled by dribbles of remnant aviation gasoline salvaged or brought in to the airdrome via emergency means, and damaged three of the transports badly enough that their captains chose to beach them. Protected by an umbrella of fighter planes from Nagumo’s carriers, the Japanese beachmasters still unloaded forty-five hundred men and two-thirds of their cargo and supplies from the grounded ships.

  The tenacity of the Japanese
reinforcement effort and the power of its air cover compelled Ghormley to turn back one of his own convoys, scheduled to arrive that morning. On the morning of October 16, he ordered three tugs towing barges loaded with urgently needed gasoline to reverse course and leave the area. The destroyer that accompanied them, the Meredith—she towed a barge as well—was sent forward to Guadalcanal, only to be set upon by planes from the Zuikaku and quickly sunk. Her survivors, adrift for three days, lost well over two hundred of their company to sharks.

  The success of the enemy landings underscored an undeniable truth. In the words of the coastwatcher MacKenzie, “It became immediately obvious that to hold Guadalcanal it was essential for the U.S. Navy to gain control of the sea.” Looking at his roster of ships after the Cape Esperance battle, Nimitz wrote to King, “SECURITY [OF] OUR POSITION CACTUS DEPENDS UPON ADDITIONAL FORCES NOT NOW IN SIGHT.” Vandegrift’s marines, he noted, had taken a heavy pounding from air and sea and “CANNOT REMAIN EFFECTIVE INDEFINITELY UNDER SUCH CONDITIONS.”

  Despite the victory, Yamamoto, too, was feeling the despair of attrition. “I have resigned myself to spending the whole of my remaining life in the next one hundred days,” he wrote to a friend.

  Nimitz wrote, “It now appears that we are unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.” As if to underscore his point, on the night of the fifteenth the heavy cruisers Maya and Myoko arrived off Lunga Point unopposed and turned loose on Henderson Field with more than a thousand shells. After this, the third consecutive night of naval bombardment, the Cactus Air Force found itself in possession of just nine Wildcats, eleven Dauntlesses, seven Airacobras, and no Avenger torpedo bombers—barely a third of its previous strength. Though the fuel needs of this diminished contingent weren’t what they once were, there was a desperate shortage of avgas as well. Rear Admiral Fitch, the new commander of SOPAC land-based air forces, delivered a grim assessment to Ghormley. The Marines, Fitch wrote, “CAN USE NO MORE AIRCRAFT UNTIL THE AVGAS SITUATION IMPROVES AND UNTIL DESTRUCTIVE ENEMY FIRE ON AIRFIELD FROM BOTH LAND AND SEA IS HALTED. SO LONG AS ENEMY SHIPS PATROL THE SEA AREA OFF LUNGA DAY AND NIGHT I CANNOT SEE HOW [DESTROYERS OR BARGES] CAN BE BROUGHT IN WITH REASONABLE CHANCE OF SUCCESS AND UNTIL THIS IS CHANGED, THE AVGAS SITUATION CANNOT BE IMPROVED TO ANY EXTENT. OFFENSIVE AIR OPERATIONS NOW LIMITED TO STRIKES FROM BUTTON [ESPIRITU SANTO].”