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

by James D. Hornfischer

  The crew gave the visiting marines cigarettes and parted as brothers in arms. “They were just delighted at what we had done, and as far as they were concerned it didn’t matter whether we hit one single Jap in there or not,” Mustin said. “It had let the Japs know that there were other people to contend with than just the few marines on the island.”

  1 The notion would arise that the defeat at Savo was the reason for Ghormley’s removal. Ghormley had no hand in the tactical dispositions that night.

  21

  Enter Fighting

  WHEN ADMIRAL HALSEY BOARDED A BIG CORONADO FLYING BOAT on October 16 and took off from Pearl Harbor, bound for Nouméa, his orders were to take command of the task force that included his old ship, the Enterprise, now fully repaired and ready to rejoin the fight. With him in the four-engine aircraft was Nimitz’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, who was under orders to inspect conditions at headquarters and report to his boss on, among other things, the readiness for command of one William F. Halsey, Jr. The hero of the early-1942 carrier attacks on the Marshall and Gilbert islands as well as the Doolittle raid in April, Halsey had missed the chance to serve in the Battle of Midway because of a viral skin condition: herpes zoster, or shingles, a malady that was thought to have a psychosomatic component. Before he saddled him with a theater command, Nimitz wanted reassurance that Halsey could be depended on to reenter the war as his old effective self.

  Gauging Halsey’s mood and temperament on the flight, Spruance liked what he saw and reported it to Nimitz. And so the final piece of Nimitz’s command reorganization was set into place. When Halsey’s flying boat touched down in Nouméa’s glistening harbor on the afternoon of October 18, a whaleboat came alongside. Admiral Ghormley’s flag lieutenant stepped out, saluted, and handed Halsey a sealed envelope. Opening it, he found another sealed envelope. Inside was a memo from Nimitz.

  “You will take command of the South Pacific Area and the South Pacific Forces immediately,” it read.

  The first words the “utterly surprised” admiral spoke in response were, “This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!” When Halsey boarded the Argonne and finally located his old friend and Naval Academy football teammate in a cramped cluster of steel compartments, hot and oppressive, he understood right away the need for his relief. Ghormley, to Halsey’s eye, was “burdened beyond my own personal capacity,” swamped in reports and data and plans, assisted by a single staffer in the massive task of overseeing operations. “I have always insisted on comfortable offices and quarters for my staff,” Halsey would write. “Their day’s work is so long, their schedule so irregular, the strain so intense, that I am determined for them to work in whatever ease is available.” Why were the headquarters so meager? Ghormley told Halsey he had been unable to find space ashore. The French, it seemed, had been intransigent.

  The day before Halsey’s plane splashed down in Nouméa harbor, Ghormley received notice from Nimitz that Halsey was en route to relieve him. Ghormley acquainted Halsey with the facilities of his operations before taking his leave and boarding a plane for Pearl Harbor, then on to Washington.

  The word that a new boss was in town passed quickly through the loudspeakers of every ship in SOPAC, and from tent to Quonset hut to tent ashore. Halsey’s arrival was electric. Ed Hooper, an assistant gunnery officer in the battleship Washington, said, “We were absolutely elated when we heard the news. It was a shot of adrenaline for the whole command; things had been getting pretty wishy-washy down there.” Even the junior officers had been fidgeting under the absence of inspiring leadership. “During wartime it’s important how the leadership, starting with the Chief of Naval Operations, gets a message across to everybody in every ship, submarine, airplane and shore station. You need to hear it said that this is an extraordinary moment in your life and in the life of the country, and that you’re not going to let it down,” the Atlanta’s Robert Graff said. “Until that day, we had received no such message.”

  When Halsey had taken the Enterprise to sea in late 1941, he issued Battle Order Number One, which read: “The Enterprise is now operating under war conditions.… Pilots will sink anything they sight.” The declaration was unremarkable except for the fact that it was issued more than a week before the strike on Pearl Harbor. When Halsey was barely into his twenties, his Annapolis classmates referred to him as “A real old salt. Looks like a figurehead of Neptune.” His men liked his style. He had once said he was perfectly willing to divide the Pacific Ocean with Japan. “We would take the top; Japan would take the bottom.”

  From a seagoing family, Halsey had sailed with Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet as an ensign on the battleship Kansas. While that experience had taught him to appreciate the symbolism of naval power, he did not generally speak the language of the diplomat. “He was a fighting man, sans fancy trimmings,” the journalist Joe James Custer wrote. “He slipped in deftly, and he hit and he hurt. He was adept and clever, and he packed a terrific wallop: he was the Jack Dempsey of the Pacific raiders, he poled the Japs for a goal, and he swung from the floor.”

  Back in January, commanding the Enterprise during the raid on Japan’s Marshall Islands bases, he taunted the base commander over the radio: “From the American admiral in charge of the striking force, to the Japanese admiral on the Marshall Islands. It is a pleasure to thank you for having your patrol plane not sight my force.” Halsey’s public tauntings of the Japanese were so aggressive and frequent that a rumor spread that they had vowed to capture him and torture him to death. His colleagues Aubrey Fitch and William Calhoun reportedly embraced and gleefully spread this rumor. Sometimes when they saw Halsey they would mimic stirring a large cauldron, intoning, “Boiling oil … !” Halsey’s inevitable reply—“You go to hell!”

  Halsey was neither a genius nor even a working scholar in any academic or technical field, but he had a quality of brilliance that may have been even more important in a combat capacity. He was, it was said, “brilliant in common sense.” He knew that battles and wars were won not principally with well-drafted paperwork or subtle diplomacy or high materials and engineering ratings aboard ship, but by something quite simple and direct: placing ordnance on target. He knew, working backward from there, that the quality of the mind and spirit of the men distributing that ordnance was at least as important as the mechanical state of the weapons themselves. And he knew that small and simple acts, trivial in themselves but intangibly powerful, raised and perfected that quality; sometimes those things were as prosaic as showing up and listening to people.

  In the new South Pacific headquarters, a culture of informality reigned. Halsey rejected the new gray uniforms mandated by Washington. He favored working khakis. “The officers and chiefs of my command are wholly at liberty to wear the damn things—if, that is, they are so lacking in naval courtesy and have such limited intelligence as to prefer dressing differently from the commander of the force,” he wrote. Halsey’s approach to dress wasn’t dogmatic or dictatorial. A verse graced a plaque in the front hall of the headquarters: “COMPLETE WITH BLACK TIE / YOU DO LOOK TERRIFIC, / BUT TAKE IT OFF HERE: / THIS IS STILL SOUTH PACIFIC!”

  The casual ethos helped promote something else Halsey thought important: eliminating the distinctions among the services. His men were not marines or sailors or soldiers, but warriors of the South Pacific Fighting Forces. Halsey’s all-service esprit de guerre was relentlessly practical. Interservice tribalism was always costly, and all costs paid to the enemy’s cause. Halsey wasn’t shy about drawing from the Department of the Army’s budget. Under the principle of a united SOPAC team, he drew in Army welders, electricians, and mechanics to service the fleet—and asked that the cooperation be loudly touted. “I would like to see it widely advertised that the army is helping us here. I have never seen anything like the spirit there is in this neck of the woods. It is a real United States service.”

  Taking in the breadth of his duties, Halsey quickly sympathized with his predecessor. “As
I dug into my new job, I realized that the tremendous burden of responsibility that Bob Ghormley had been carrying was far beyond my own capacity.” No matter how brilliant or hardworking a man was, he couldn’t do it himself. Halsey would lean on his staff. “There’s a lot to be done,” he told them. “Look around, see what it is, and do it.” Halsey had once begged off from an assignment to command the Norfolk Navy Yard. His reasoning, as he told the Navy’s personnel chief at the time, Chester Nimitz, was that he didn’t feel suited to administering an industrial establishment. That, of course, was precisely what he had signed on for now.

  Halsey continued Ghormley’s effort to clear the cargo logjam at Nouméa. He expanded the plan to increase covered storage from 200,000 square feet to a million, then brought in hardware for a new 160-by-600-foot pier and tools to equip three new construction battalions. Since forceful leadership always seemed to be in short supply, he asked for a captain or commander from the Civil Engineer Corps to command the Seabees. “The maximum possible urgency must be assigned to the development of this base,” he wrote King’s office. When Halsey invoked urgency and immediacy, he did it not in complaint but in affirmation, on behalf of specific tasks and challenges. The long memorandum he sent to Nimitz demanding more of everything (above all “tankers and more tankers and more tankers”) was detailed and straightforward but did not suggest “or else disaster will follow,” as Ghormley’s sometimes did. “You are well aware of our needs and this is not offered in complaint or as an excuse but just to keep the pot boiling,” he wrote to Nimitz.

  His manner of securing a new headquarters from the French administration at Nouméa reflected his action-minded personal ethos. One day he sent his intelligence officer, Marine Colonel Julian P. Brown, to discuss his headquarters accommodations with the Free French governor. Wearing his best dress uniform, pinned with decorations dating to the First World War, Brown presented himself and began pressing the case for a new American facility ashore. When the governor asked, “What do we get in exchange?” Brown replied with the same ordnance-on-target forthrightness that Halsey was known for, if with some uncharacteristic sobriety: “We will continue to protect you as we have always done.” This somehow failed to impress the governor, who in grand diplomatic fashion took the matter under advisement. It required little more of such treatment before Halsey went volcanic. He rode ashore with a contingent of marines, marched to the headquarters of Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, the surly haut commissaire, posted the U.S. colors, and, finding the Frenchman absent, took over his office and set out his guard. For his personal quarters, Halsey seized the former Japanese consul’s residence, a brick house with a view of the harbor. As construction battalions broke ground for new recreational facilities—until then strictly forbidden by the Free French—it was clear whose well-being Halsey was committed to, and whose loyalty he was out to win.

  AS HALSEY WAS taking SOPAC’s reins in Nouméa, U.S. naval intelligence concluded that Admiral Yamamoto had assumed direct command of Japanese naval forces in the area. On October 19, radio snoopers noted something else that seemed ominous: High-precedence traffic had dropped to a level suggesting that the Combined Fleet was in “the final period of adjustment and preparation for action on a major scale.” The nightly runs of the Tokyo Express through the Slot had boosted the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal from six to twenty-two thousand men, nearly a match for the twenty-three thousand Americans there. Several hundred miles north of Guadalcanal, the main elements of the Japanese carrier and battleship fleet were marking time, preparing for a new assault on the island, coordinated with an attack by Japanese troops ashore.

  Under pressure from the Joint Chiefs to lend more support to the Guadalcanal operation, Douglas MacArthur foresaw a dark future if the Navy did not meet Yamamoto’s challenge. “If we are defeated in the Solomons, as we must be unless the Navy accepts successfully the challenge of the enemy surface fleet, the entire Southwest Pacific will be in gravest danger.” MacArthur continued, “I urge that the entire resources of the United States be diverted temporarily to meet the critical situation.” The fleet would be left to exert itself piecemeal. On October 20, the San Francisco and Helena, joined by the heavy cruiser Chester and six destroyers, entered Savo Sound to throw shells into the jungle near Cape Esperance. The mission came at a prohibitive price when a Japanese submarine put a torpedo into the Chester, forcing her removal for repair.

  As Imperial ground forces on Guadalcanal marshaled for a new assault near the Matanikau delta, Halsey decided to move his carrier task force into waters east of the embattled island. The Enterprise and the Hornet, escorted by the South Dakota, steamed northwest of Santa Cruz, casting search planes around the compass. At midday on October 25, a PBY Catalina spotted the vanguard of a large Japanese battle group. The return of two patched-up capital ships, the Enterprise and the South Dakota, and the arrival of a fiery new theater commander, put American forces in a position to be aggressive again. The rumblings of these events reached all the way to Pearl Harbor. “Today—our Saturday, 24 Oct—Halsey’s Sunday 25 Oct—will be a memorable day,” Nimitz wrote Catherine. “It is the start of the big long-expected push and we are as nearly ready as it is humanly possible to be.… Tonight and tomorrow will be critical in our history—and pray God they will be successful for us.”

  WHEN GHORMLEY ARRIVED at Pearl Harbor with Spruance, they were, as Nimitz wrote, “tired, hungry and much in need of baths, which they had missed for several days while in our island staging points.” They soon got a bath: in the bright light of publicity. They arrived at Nimitz’s headquarters almost simultaneously with the morning paper announcing the change of command. “The view expressed in informed quarters here,” read Charles Hurd’s page-one story in The New York Times, “was to the effect that the new Solomons commander would be expected to turn that venture from a currently defensive operation into an aggressive fight.… Very little informed analysis of the basic meaning of these changes was possible here … in view of the complete silence on the part of the men best qualified to explain them.”

  Sitting down with Nimitz, Ghormley asked, “What did I do that was wrong?” Nimitz produced a sheaf of the dispatches Ghormley had sent him. Nimitz said that if things were as dire as the dispatches indicated, “we needed the very best man we had to hold down that critical area. And then I asked him whether he was that very best man.” Ghormley told Nimitz he could make no such claim.

  Ghormley was a talented and decent man, but the war had outgrown his gifts. Writing Nimitz, Secretary Frank Knox was critical of the outgoing commander, referring to his “complete lack of offensive use of our surface craft until Norman Scott’s very successful raid north of Savo Island.” Knox thought the early days of the Pacific campaign resembled the start of the Civil War. “I presume most of us, if we had been required to choose at the beginning of the war between the brilliant, socially attractive McClellan and the rough, rather uncouth, unsocial Grant, would have chosen McClellan, just like Lincoln did.” As Ghormley’s staffer Charles W. Weaver would write, “When history is written, the good admiral will have his place in it, if the account faithfully records the true facts of the Admiral’s great burden in the early days of the Pacific War.”

  The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

  Operation Watchtower (As of October 18, 1942)

  ADM ERNEST J. KING

  Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH)

  and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)

  ADM CHESTER W. NIMITZ

  Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC)

  VADM WILLIAM F. HALSEY, JR.

  Commander, South Pacific Forces (COMSOPAC)

  RADM RICHMOND KELLY TURNER

  Commander, Expeditionary Force

  Task Force 62 (later 67)

  RADM AUBREY W. FITCH

  Commander, Air (land-based), SOPAC

  Task Force 63

  RADM THOMAS C. KINKAID

  TF 16 (Enterprise)

  MGEN ALEXANDER A. VANDEGRI
FT

  Commander, 1st Marine Division

  RADM GEORGE D. MURRAY

  TF 17 (Hornet)

  RADM WILLIS A. LEE

  Task Force 64 (Washington)

  RADM NORMAN SCOTT

  Task Group 64.4 Cruiser Striking Force (later 67.4) (San Francisco)

  As Ghormley returned to Pearl Harbor to take the post of commandant of the 14th Naval District in Hawaii, President Roosevelt was watching events in the South Pacific with something more than a commander in chief’s typical remove. After standing forcefully for the idea that aid to Russia was essential to defeating the Axis, and supporting a Europe-first strategy, his interest in the Solomons campaign was vigorous. His oldest son, James, was serving on Guadalcanal. Despite the potentially disqualifying handicap of being handed, at age twenty-eight, a reserve commission as a lieutenant colonel, which in time he rejected, Major James Roosevelt set himself to emulating the example of his father’s rough-riding fifth cousin. A capable and popular officer, he urged the creation of a new type of commando unit, Marine Raiders, which under the leadership of Evans Carlson and Merritt Edson would go on to distinguish themselves at Guadalcanal and elsewhere. James served as the executive officer of the 2nd Marine Raiders on Guadalcanal despite chronic physical ailments.

  On October 24, FDR wrote to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “My anxiety about the Southwest Pacific is to make sure that every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal, and that, having held in this crisis, that munitions and planes and crews are on the way to take advantage of our success. We will soon find ourselves engaged in two active fronts and we must have adequate air support in both places, even though it means delay in our commitments, particularly to England. Our long-range plans could be set back for months if we failed to throw our full strength in our immediate and impending conflicts.”