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

by James D. Hornfischer

  “With our air cover gone, the Japs had it pretty much their own way,” gunner’s mate Alvin Grahn recalled. “Dive-bombers and torpedo planes, like I say all mixed up. There were destroyers and cruisers zig-zagging all over the place and firing their guns like mad, and the Jap torpedo bombers had trouble trying to line up on the Hornet with so many other vessels in the way. The torpedo planes finally were able to find an opening along our starboard side and that’s when we really caught hell. One of them dropped a torpedo and then swooped up and over the flight deck. Somebody hit him good and he caught fire. Just a mass of flames, with the landing gear falling off and all. The pilot layed his plane right over and made a tight circle and came back and smashed into the port side.… The plane’s engine and fuselage penetrated four or five staterooms and kept right on going and ended up in the forward elevator pit. All this punishment left us without power or water pressure, dead in the water and fighting fires with bucket brigades.”

  The Enterprise task force came under a final attack, too. For all the withering resistance their brothers had met over the American carrier task forces, the pilots who flew on Kondo’s final strike of the day, launched by the late-arriving Junyo, braved the gauntlet once again. They put a five-hundred-pound bomb into the San Juan that penetrated her thin decks and exploded beneath her, wrecking her rudder. Another bomb hit the forward turret of the South Dakota. Exploding atop the heavily armored roof, this blast had nowhere to go but up and out.

  Every officer on the battleship’s bridge except one hit the deck. That officer was Thomas Gatch. The ship’s captain was standing on a catwalk forward of the conning tower, watching the Enterprise ahead of him through the evening mist. The popular commander, who prized a certain kind of honor from studying Napoleon’s wars, the literature of Shakespeare, and the history of the War Between the States, would say later that “it was beneath the dignity of a captain of a U.S. man-of-war to duck for a Japanese bomb.” The reward for his bravado was a spray of shrapnel that nicked his jugular vein. As the chief quartermaster hastened to pressure the wound, the ship’s doctor made his way to the bridge. Rumors flew that Gatch was near death. For him, readiness to do battle put everything else belowdecks. Spit and polish—out. Regimentation for its own sake—out. Discipline as a means of encouraging anything other than fighting efficiency—out. His medical condition was the chief topic among the crew for days.

  As the Hornet foundered and listed, her fires out of control, carrying 111 dead, two American destroyers were detailed to ease her into death. The Mustin and the Anderson trained out their torpedo batteries on the carrier and fired, but each failed to put her under. The destroyers then turned to their guns, popping five-inch rounds into the Hornet’s waterline. After several hundred rounds, her fires were all the hungrier, but still she refused to go. It was after the Americans had left her to the night—around 1:30 a.m., with fires raging so badly that she would be of little use even if the Japanese seized her as a war prize—that Kondo’s men-of-war closed with the hulk. It was Japanese destroyers that finally put the Hornet under with their torpedoes.

  The foregoing, evidently, was enough drama for one day. Disliking his chances with one damaged flattop against two unscarred enemy carriers—the Zuikaku and Junyo were at large and dangerous, and he knew nothing of the shredded state of their air groups—Kinkaid continued retiring. He would face stern second-guessing for his decision to abandon the Hornet.

  Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, the commander of the Vanguard Force, would be censured for caution, too. He elected not to pursue Kinkaid’s withdrawing Enterprise task force as night fell on October 26. The decision couldn’t have been for lack of motivation. He had been present at the Battle of Cape Esperance, where his lifelong friend Aritomo Goto had fallen. He had heard tell of Goto’s dying profanities—“Bakayaro!” (idiots!)”—as the cruiser Aoba was smashed by forces he had believed were friendly.

  AS THEIR SHIP SLUGGED SOUTH in the company of the battered Enterprise, the crew of the South Dakota turned to the ceremonies by which they honored their dead. After dark, Captain Thomas Gatch ordered the engines slowed and came to a stop so that a proper burial at sea could be conducted for her first two dead. The night was black, and a feeling of gloom pressed down like a weight. The chaplain, Commander James V. Claypool, kept a strong grip on the belt of the nearest pallbearer, lest he stumble and fall overboard as he intoned the words. “Forasmuch as the spirit of the departed has returned to God who gave it, we therefore commit his body to the depths of the sea.… ” Captain Gatch was belowdecks and for all the celebrants knew he might well be next off the slab. Untold hundreds of men lay dead on other ships or were already within the sea’s embrace. As the South Dakota’s attending crew performed the committal, raising one end of the burial slab so that the bodies could slide into the sea, Claypool read the benediction. “May the Lord bless thee and keep thee.… ” As he spoke, the moon shone through a break in the clouds, illuminating the decks of the great ship. Claypool thought it was a signal of immortality awaiting all who believed.

  The South Dakota had taken aboard the survivors of the Porter, the destroyer lost that day to the crashing Avenger’s wayward torpedo. The survivors were given clothes, smokes, bedding, and anything else they needed. Several of that ship’s engine room crew, badly burned in the fire from the torpedo, died in the battleship’s sickbay. The captain of the Porter asked Claypool to do the rites as the destroyer’s crew gathered aft. “In their borrowed clothes they stood in a horseshoe on the fantail of our ship, listening to the words of hope and love spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ. They wiped away tears with the sleeves of their dungarees, but they left the burial service with shoulders straightened and heads high. Watching them, I thought I heard a bugle sounding the thrilling Navy call, ‘Carry on!’ ” Claypool wrote.

  When the ship returned to Nouméa after the October 26 battle, the wounded men sent away to hospital ships begged to be allowed to return, but only if Gatch remained in command. Was he alive? they wanted to know. All too well, the SOPAC medical corps would tell them. He was said to be a difficult patient. Chaplain Claypool kept him on the straight and narrow. Gatch followed a British tradition that required the captain to read the Scripture lesson at Mass. The captain’s faith no doubt empowered his chaplain, who thought that organized religion was a natural thing for a Navy to promote. “Men have to have something in their heads,” he would write. “If they don’t have religion, superstition rushes to fill the vacuum.… They don’t stand up under fire. In the Navy, we take along religion as we take along ammunition.” The South Dakota had loaded that particular magazine to capacity while en route to the theater. Crossing the International Date Line, Claypool was pleased to find himself with back-to-back Sundays, thanks to the change in time zones.

  THE JAPANESE WASTED no time making the most optimistic claims about the performance of their fliers that day. “I wish we had as many carriers as they claim to have sunk,” Nimitz wrote to Catherine the following day. But no tall tales were needed to claim a material victory. “Numerically or tactically, it was a Japanese victory,” Tameichi Hara, an IJN destroyer captain, would write, echoing American opinion at least with respect to ship losses. “The enemy [the Americans] had entered the fray with a tactical and psychological advantage, but complacence had cost them a high price. The enemy was able to strike at times and places of his choosing. To his surprise, the head and tail of the Japanese opponent were versatile and flexible—contrary to Midway—and they struck back effectively with what force they had.”

  Though the losses of aircraft were about equal—ninety-seven Japanese planes were lost against eighty-one U.S.—it was in personnel casualties that America gained its most striking if seldom-appreciated victory. In Japan’s first concentrated exposure to state-of-the-art antiaircraft fire, 148 pilots and aircrew died—a third more than at Midway (110). Fully half of Nagumo’s dive-bomber flight crews were lost. American squadrons suffered twenty dead on the day, plus four more re
scued by the enemy and taken prisoner. The leadership in the IJN’s squadron ready rooms took a severe blow; twenty-three squadron and section leaders were lost. By sundown that day, more than half of the pilots who had hit Pearl Harbor on December 7 had been killed in action. The carriers Zuikaku and Junyo, though not seriously damaged, were forced home to Japan for want of men to fly their planes. With the evisceration of its naval aircrews, the Japanese suffered a critical deficit that they would never make up. Captain Hara’s assessment was a profound understatement: “Considering the great superiority of our enemy’s industrial capacity, we must win every battle overwhelmingly. This last one, unfortunately, was not an overwhelming victory.”

  The battle took a heavy toll from the Japanese carrier force, and also from its longtime commander, Chuichi Nagumo. Haggard and old, appearing to friends to have aged twenty years in less than a year of action, Nagumo was relieved in command of the carrier striking force by Jisaburo Ozawa, a destroyerman whose abilities as a task force commander were unknown to his peers.

  After the Battle of Santa Cruz, the United States would have not a single operable carrier task force in the South Pacific until the Enterprise could be repaired at Nouméa and placed back into service. Task Force 17 was dissolved with the sinking of the Hornet. And with the Enterprise going to the yard for repairs, the South Dakota was sent to join the Washington in Task Force 64.

  Having exhausted their carrier forces in the seas east of Guadalcanal on October 26, the opposing fleets returned to their bases to regroup. With Halsey’s and Yamamoto’s carriers sidelined for now, the question to be answered in the parry and thrust of the coming weeks was: Which side’s surface combat fleet would step up and control the seas by night? No matter how gallantly men might fight on land, they would not hold on long if their Navy finally failed them. In a few short weeks, the greatest challenge yet to the American position on Guadalcanal would loom in the dark waters of Savo Sound.

  24

  Secret History

  THE LULL IN THE LAST DAYS OF OCTOBER WAS A TIME FOR LICKING wounds. Following the collision of carrier forces off Santa Cruz, the tempo of action slowed to a pace that suited the languid tropical breeze. The flattops withdrew to their bases to tend to their many lacerations. Ashore, the infantry had fought to a standstill as Vandegrift’s men repulsed Hyakutake’s haphazardly executed assaults. Still, the persistence of the Japanese pressure on the airdrome from air, land, and sea exacted a toll from body and mind.

  By the end of the month, every one of the nineteen Dauntless pilots from the Saratoga’s Scouting Squadron 3—which had relocated to the island after their carrier was torpedoed on the last day of August—was a casualty, removed from the flying rotation because of illness, fatigue, health-threatening weight loss, or “nervous condition.” For these same reasons squadron mechanics had lost the handle on record keeping and couldn’t perform basic preventive maintenance on planes. They applied themselves only to actual malfunctions, but little could be done for their own breakdowns. The island made short work of all who were sent there, man and machine alike. General Geiger, the commander of Guadalcanal’s air units, gave way to the strain, too. His chief of staff, Brigadier General Louis Woods, would replace him in a changing of the guard that saw the arrival of several new Marine air squadrons as well.

  On October 27, Halsey ordered the San Francisco and the Helena, escorted by several destroyers, to leave Task Force 64 and set course for Espiritu Santo, where they would escort three transports carrying reinforcements to Guadalcanal. Kelly Turner, having promised Vandegrift that the Marine commander’s requests for support “have received most earnest attention,” dispatched the fast transports Fuller and Alchiba from Nouméa to ferry a load of heavy artillery, ammunition, and stores. The 155-millimeter guns, set to arrive on November 2, would boost the infantry’s ability to counter the Japanese artillery that threatened Henderson Field from the surrounding hills. Another convoy carrying reinforcements from the 8th Marine Regiment would bolster Vandegrift’s order of battle and enable him to take the offensive ashore.

  The detachment of these ships coincided with the dissolution of Admiral Ghormley’s staff. Halsey’s arrival at Nouméa meant the replacement not just of Ghormley, but also of everyone else in his headquarters. Given the idiosyncrasies of Halsey’s style, it was important for him to work with a handpicked team. It had been said only partly in jest that it took a certain type of sailor to serve well with Halsey: He didn’t want anyone who didn’t smoke, drink, or run around with women. Even if that were just playful rhetoric, it must have given a smile to Admiral King, whose wandering hands and eyes were well known to his peers. It certainly suited the first man from Ghormley’s headquarters, Dan Callaghan, his gregarious chief of staff, to find a seagoing combat command under Halsey. Promoted from captain to rear admiral just days before Operation Watchtower began, Callaghan was a seadog at heart. Halsey sent him back to sea in the San Francisco, which Norman Scott had until a few days before made his working home.

  Writing the commanders of his surface units on October 30, Halsey observed that “enemy offensives since September 15 have followed the same general pattern”—the carriers operating within a rectangle of sea northeast of Malaita and their reinforcement convoys tracking in through the Slot, descending from the north-northwest. He pointed out that two or three days’ warning of an enemy naval force’s approach was usually available, thanks to the combined efforts of coastwatchers, submarines, and long-range air search. He emphasized the importance of coordinating search efforts with follow-up air and naval attacks. “Submit comment and proposals by earliest air mail,” he wrote.

  Halsey had no way to know the full extent of the Japanese quandary. Increasingly, they were operating in a straitjacket zipped tight by the limitations on their supply and oil lifeline. The destroyers of the Tokyo Express made an average of six runs a month to ferry men, arms, and critical consumables to Guadalcanal’s northern coast, the typical run consisting of six destroyer-transports and two destroyers as combat escorts. Their capacity was entirely inadequate. The 17th Army required far more than thirty-six destroyer loads a month. General Hyakutake’s staff calculated its needs as 5 loads of supplies per night, or 150 every month. If the reinforcements of heavy weapons and supporting equipment were added to this, the necessary portage increased to eight hundred runs per month, plus twenty more from fuel-hungry seaplane tenders. As the historian Jonathan Parshall has calculated, that level of effort would have taken half of the Imperial Navy’s monthly allotment of fuel. Measured in terms of tonnage delivered per unit of oil burned, cargo ships were thirty times as efficient as destroyer-transports. But use of the slow ships was fruitless as long as U.S. pilots controlled the skies of the Slot. It was a difficult problem: Without the heavier capacity of those larger vessels, Imperial ground forces would be unlikely to take the airfield.

  The only feasible way the Japanese had to deprive their enemy of air superiority was to destroy Henderson Field’s air group with bombardment from the sea. And by that same reasoning, the only way the Americans could prevent a repeat of the devastating nighttime ordeal of mid-October was by pressing their surface forces into the fight and seizing control of the night. The wartime “food chain” circled right back to the ancient art of ships grappling with one another on the sea.

  Halsey continued to reshuffle his decks as October wound to a close. On the thirtieth, he ordered Norman Scott to take his small task force—the Atlanta and four destroyers—and shell Japanese positions near Point Cruz in support of Marine units that were crossing the Matanikau River to secure Henderson Field’s western flank. The fleet had to get its guns into the fight one way or another.

  IN A NOVEMBER 1 ARTICLE headlined, “Navies Manoeuvre for Big Stakes in Solomons,” New York Times reporter Charles Hurd wrote, “In the end, one side or the other of the Guadalcanal contestants will be cut off from supplies.… They now look toward the sea for the next great phase in the contest. That sea and air battl
e may be fought at any hour or it may not occur for weeks. In any event, we probably will not know about it until the issue has been decided.”

  Certainly they wouldn’t if Admiral King had his way. He was no friend of the fourth estate. Hanson Baldwin, covering fleet maneuvers in Panama before the war, was chagrined to find the censors butchering one of his New York Times dispatches because it reported a commander’s golf score. Now that a war was on, restrictions were far more severe. It had been said that King’s preferred approach to press relations would be to remain silent until it was over, then announce, “We won.” “So far as I’m concerned,” King told a correspondent for Collier’s magazine, “information given the public is information which will almost certainly reach the enemy.… I have no intention of giving the enemy anything from which he can derive a shadow of aid and comfort. That’s the way I am, that’s the way I have always been, and that’s the way I always will be.” The secrecy was so tight that The New York Times made it front-page news in mid-October when the Navy officially acknowledged having bases in the New Hebrides and the Fiji Islands.

  A Chicago Tribune reporter named Stanley Johnson learned one of the war’s most closely guarded secrets: the breaking of the Japanese code and the Navy’s ability to follow Japanese fleet movements. In an account of Midway appearing in his paper, he revealed the names of participating enemy ships—information that only Tokyo would have. Certain that this would betray the secret of its code-breaking success, the Navy brought charges against the paper, but didn’t seem to have considered the consequences. When the Tribune began editorializing about its persecution by the government—a complaint made plausible by the fact that Secretary Knox had been the publisher of its rival daily before the war—the Navy was unable to reply, since the grounds of its suit were sensitive state secrets. The possibility of a courtroom circus vanished when a grand jury refused to indict.