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

by James D. Hornfischer

  A fog lay low over fleet operations for the first two months of the South Pacific campaign. Chester Nimitz was a master of showing grace and easy hospitality to reporters who visited him without revealing actual newsworthy information. The Navy insisted that everything was progressing well toward a major U.S. offensive that would push the Japanese back north. When news of the Battle of Savo Island finally broke in mid-October, and word followed a few weeks later that the carrier Wasp was lost, the Navy’s credibility suffered. “So mismanaged was the Navy’s handling of news releases, both as to timing and candor, that according to one informed source the American public grew to believe that the Japanese version of the Pearl Harbor story was more accurate than our own, making Tokyo’s subsequent claims of success all the more plausible,” wrote the historian Lloyd J. Graybar.

  Baldwin’s October reporting got him invited to a November meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Strategic Survey Committee, a “solemn conclave” held in the U.S. Public Health Service Building, across from the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue. Baldwin was asked to take a seat at a long table with twenty-five or thirty officers of all services in dress uniforms and testify secretly to what he had seen on Guadalcanal. The hitch was that he could not tell his bosses at the Times about it. He agreed and entered the large meeting room as a witness to events at the front.

  “I spoke more frankly, of course, than I was able to do in the pieces I’d written,” Baldwin said. He described how the North Carolina had been torpedoed and how, with but one battleship and one carrier in the theater at the time, “we were just hanging on by our teeth. When I said this about the ship damage and about the cruisers that had been lost at Savo, and I gave them the names of the cruisers in this secret meeting. A Navy captain stood up, violently angry, and said, ‘I object to that, I object to that. This is top-secret information! Admiral King has given the strictest orders that no one is to know about this!’

  “Well, of course,” Baldwin told his antagonist, “I understand it’s top-secret information. I haven’t published the names of these ships or the exact losses or details and I don’t expect to. I was asked to come down here in top secrecy and not even tell my paper about it, and I’ve done so.” As the captain kept pressing his case, Baldwin gathered the impression that many of the officers who were there that day, sitting on a committee charged with advising the president on military matters, had no idea what had actually happened in the waters off Guadalcanal back in August. “That,” Baldwin would say, “is a hell of a way to run a war.”

  Change was already in the air. When Admiral Spruance first laid eyes on a copy of the Boise’s after-action report from the Battle of Cape Esperance, air-couriered to Pearl Harbor from Nouméa, he gave it to Nimitz, who gave it to King, and all understood what a publicity bonanza it was. So began the process of legend building that would make some ships famous for things they never did, and leave others unknown despite their great deeds. A statement in the report that “the Boise fired on six targets” was conflated in the press to the Boise sinking six ships. A Navy publicist referred to the Boise as a “one-ship task force.” As a result of this hype, few would ever hear of Captain Hoover and the Helena, whose barrels flaked as much paint as the Boise’s had that night off Guadalcanal. When the Boise reached the Philadelphia Navy Yard for repairs in late November, the public saw a living, breathing man-of-war baring her scars—and the accuracy of history was quickly a casualty.

  News of the Boise’s performance at Cape Esperance was released simultaneously with, and perhaps as an antidote to, the darker tale of the Battle of Savo Island. As reporters began to challenge the Navy Department’s manipulations, King, in spite of himself, took a page from Nimitz’s book. He began hosting meetings with newsmen at the Virginia home of his attorney and friend, Cornelius Bull. At the first such gathering, on November 6, King circulated among eight reporters, addressing rumors that operations at Guadalcanal were foundering and rebutting the accusation that the Navy was stonewalling press inquiries. He defended his silence during the early phase of the operation on grounds of operational security. “There was every reason to believe that the Japanese did not know the extent of their success,” he said. Breaking a personal oath, he drank alcohol with reporters. The four-hour soirée won them over. “They were for him 100 percent by the time they said good-bye,” one participant said. These “Sunday vesper services,” as the scribes began calling them, would continue at Bull’s home until 1944.

  Elmer Davis, the head of the Office of War Information, felt it was essential to publicize the pathbreaking effort in the Solomons, but lamented, “There was no one in Washington who was seeing that the Navy got any credit for what it did, or telling the story in any way, shape or form.” Soon, however, the pubic appetite for tales from the combat zone would be too strong to ignore. If the press had to learn to stay out of the Navy’s way and let it win a war, in time the Navy would learn to stay out of its own way and let its story be told.

  25

  Turner’s Choice

  LEAVING THEIR DAYS AS A CARRIER TASK FORCE ESCORT IN THEIR wake, relieved to be out of the submarine-haunted waters of Torpedo Junction, the men of the antiaircraft cruiser Atlanta entered Sealark Channel, approached Lunga Point, and laid eyes on a new battlefield ashore. “In the half dawn,” Edward Corboy wrote, “we could see our planes landing and taking off with their lights on. Flashing shell bursts lighted the scene at intervals as the Marines and the Japs traded early morning punches.”

  A Marine major came aboard by motor launch to aid in gunfire spotting. When the Atlanta cruised within range of enemy territory, she opened fire, aided by an Airacobra pilot, who circled overhead, diving to point out targets and radioing corrections to the ship. Norman Scott’s squadron worked over the coastline from the Matanikau delta up to Tassafaronga Point. By the time they were finished, the gray paint was peeled back from the Atlanta’s rifle bores, her fantail littered with five-inch shell cases and spent powder cans, and the known artillery emplacements and supply and ammunition dumps considerably less useful to the Japanese. As the deck force broke out the fire hoses to cool down the barrels, the major boarded a launch to return to shore. Tears welled in his eyes. “He couldn’t thank us enough,” Corboy said. “The raking we gave that coast made history in the Solomons.”

  Promised help by Halsey and expecting further reinforcements, General Vandegrift had issued an operation order on October 30 calling for an offensive push west of Henderson Field. Rising out of their defensive crouch and venturing into the west, his men would try to drive the Japanese beyond artillery range of the airfield and encircle any units dug in on the Matanikau River delta. On November 1, two battalions of the 5th Marines, well supported by artillery, crossed the Matanikau and tore into enemy positions. Thoroughly exhausted and beset by malaria, the Japanese melted against the onslaught. Vandegrift lacked the men both to hold his airfield perimeter and sustain a serious offensive, and that spared the remnants of the 2nd (Sendai) Division from a far worse fate.

  The fleet, for its part, had multiple roles, each challenging in its own right: to cover and protect the supply lines to Guadalcanal, to throw gunfire in support of Marine positions ashore, and to counter the expected thrust by enemy combat ships, submarines, or aircraft. Halsey gave Turner overall command of naval forces in the Guadalcanal area, and Callaghan and Scott command of the cruiser task forces that were haphazardly assembled from them. Kinkaid was replenishing in Nouméa with the wounded Enterprise, while the battleships of Lee’s Task Force 64 lurked south of Guadalcanal, out of range of Japanese air attacks.

  Still recovering from the carrier battle and pressured by the need to assign combat vessels to escort duty, Halsey did not concentrate his major surface warships in a striking force. He made do with what he had, peeling off the cruisers and destroyers escorting convoys as they came north and sending them out hunting. On November 4, as Vandegrift was pushing west along the coast, Turner ordered the San Francisco, the Helena
, and the destroyer Sterett to lash at Japanese positions. In four passes along the shore, the Helena put out more than twelve hundred rounds of six-inch fire, and four hundred rounds of five-inch. It was little more than a live-fire exercise, but it sufficed to get Dan Callaghan, in his flagship, the San Francisco, acquainted with his tools.

  The Japanese seemed unnerved by this aggressive use of U.S. naval might. The Tokyo Express, stretched as it was, did not have the stomach to confront American cruisers without heavier support from the Combined Fleet. According to Turner, captured documents and diaries suggested that the presence of U.S. warships at this time deterred the IJN from bringing in thousands more reinforcements for an attack on Henderson Field.

  Its desperate position on Guadalcanal led the 17th Army to beseech the IJN for emergency reinforcements and support from the 11th Air Fleet. At first light on November 5, Admiral Tsukuhara’s aviators swarmed aloft. The twenty-seven Bettys and two dozen Zeros were foiled from attacking by heavy cloud cover over the airfield. Naval forces had better luck. That night the light cruiser Tenryu led fifteen destroyers to their unloading points off Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance, where they dropped a regiment of troops, which promptly rallied to confront Vandegrift’s advance. These men were just the first wave of a far more ambitious effort. U.S. snoopers monitoring radio transmissions from Truk and Rabaul had hints of a scheme that entailed forces much larger than the Tokyo Express runs did. Yamamoto was marshaling resources to deliver an entire division to the embattled island.

  The next day a coastwatcher in southern Bougainville reported thirty-three Japanese vessels off Shortland Island. Two days later, on November 8, another coastwatcher warned of a dozen transports steaming southeast through Buka Passage, on the northern tip of Bougainville.

  On November 8, Halsey landed on Henderson Field for a tour of ground zero in the ongoing campaign. He knew that an all-out enemy attempt to retake the island was near. As he considered his own next move, it was time for him to confront the consequences of his gamble off Santa Cruz a few weeks earlier. The decision to throw his only two carrier groups at a superior Japanese force had cost him the Hornet and made the damaged Enterprise too valuable to lose. The inestimable value of that lone remaining carrier would keep Willis Lee’s battleships, the Washington and the South Dakota, the most powerful available surface unit in the entire Pacific Fleet, tethered to the Enterprise for protection. Once again, the marines ashore would be left exposed for lack of robust carrier support. And once again, it would be the Navy’s light forces that mustered to their defense.

  Receiving Halsey for dinner, Vandegrift instructed his mess attendant to serve his superior the best meal possible. “I know we haven’t got much, but make it good for the Admiral,” he told them. On a disease-ridden mud pit of a battlefield, a can of Spam is four-star cuisine. Vandegrift’s cook took some beans and dehydrated potatoes and added chunks of the canned meat to make a salty gray stew. He followed that coarse course with slices of cooked Spam with boiled beans. A peach cobbler made from soggy canned fruit was dessert.

  As the plates were cleared, Halsey said, “I’d like to compliment the cook on our dinner.” So Vandegrift summoned a big, red-faced sergeant who appeared to have been pulled from the front lines for this special duty. Halsey said to him, “Son, I want to compliment you. That’s as fine a dinner as I could have got in the Waldorf-Astoria. That soup was out of this world. I’ve never had Spam or meat cooked like that. And those beans were just right on the spot. That pie you had, that cobbler, why even my mother couldn’t have made that.” The sergeant grew redder and redder in the face as Halsey spoke, and finally all he could say was, “Aw, Admiral, horse … stuff.”

  That night a Japanese destroyer approached Guadalcanal’s shoreline and gave the South Pacific boss a sterner rebuke. Without any protection from his own fleet, Halsey found himself first embarrassed, then gripped by rank fear as Henderson Field absorbed the barrage. “It wasn’t the noise that kept me awake; it was fright,” he would write. “I called myself yellow—and worse—and told myself, ‘Go to sleep, you damned coward!’ but it didn’t do any good; I couldn’t obey orders.”

  Three U.S. convoys were en route to Guadalcanal. Having returned to Espiritu Santo, where they hauled aboard new stocks of five-inch ammunition to replenish their depleted magazines, the men of the Atlanta found themselves ordered back to sea. At 8:30 a.m. on November 9, with Norman Scott aboard as task force commander, the Atlanta led four destroyers, the Aaron Ward, Fletcher, Lardner, and McCalla, out of Espiritu Santo escorting three cargo ships. Before dawn on the tenth, another group left Espiritu Santo—the San Francisco, embarking Rear Admiral Callaghan and commanded by Captain Cassin Young, who had relieved Captain Charles H. McMorris with the heavy cruiser Pensacola, the Helena, and the destroyers Cushing, Laffey, Sterett, Shaw, Gwin, Preston, and Buchanan. Admiral Turner himself was under way from Nouméa leading a group labeled Task Force 67. His flagship, the transport McCawley, led the transports President Jackson, President Adams, and Crescent City, escorted by the cruisers Portland and Juneau and the destroyers O’Bannon, Barton, and Monssen. After the transports had safely reached anchorage, Turner decided to assemble the cruisers and destroyers into a single striking force.

  On the morning of the eleventh, Scott’s Atlanta task force reached Guadalcanal, and its three transports started unloading troops near Lunga Point. After dark, Scott’s warship escort joined Callaghan’s. Turner’s amphibs landed six thousand men, bringing the U.S. garrison on Guadalcanal to twenty-nine thousand. Halsey ordered the Pensacola and two destroyers, the Preston and Gwin, to return and fortify the Enterprise task force. That night the combined cruiser force swept Savo Sound but found nothing. At dawn on the twelfth, another group of transports arrived and anchored off Kukum. As these vessels came under fire from a Japanese shore battery after sunrise, the Helena, Shaw, and Barton silenced it.

  The quiet of early morning was a surreal time, the sea glassy calm, the clear sky warmed by a bright sun. Inbound Japanese planes were still hundreds of miles away. On the Helena, blasting unseen targets ashore, “The gunners fired as though at rehearsal—as though Guadalcanal were a target being towed past for their convenience,” Chick Morris wrote. “For more than an hour our bombardment mowed down the island’s coconut trees and drilled tunnels in the jungle. Seabee bulldozers might have done the job as well, but hardly with such fantastic speed. As the shells burst upon impact, spraying shrapnel for yards around, we watched enemy troops scrambling in panic up the hillsides. We watched them die.” The destroyers Buchanan and Cushing razed the shoreline westward, destroying several dozen small barges lying along the beach and enemy ammunition and supply dumps farther inland.

  Valuable though this work was for the infantry, the Navy’s greatest challenge lay at sea. And in Norman Scott, the fleet had the right man available to meet it. In the Battle of Cape Esperance, he had stared into the void of night, squinted at the flash of enemy powder, studied the silhouettes of unknown ships, and carried his force through to a victory. Though it wasn’t a resounding victory, it had put vital seasoning into a man who was by nature already a fighter. Afterward, Scott had the sole claim to status as a victorious surface-force commander. He had absorbed the lessons of his experience and acted on them with a focused seriousness.

  One lesson arrived swiftly: that war is the craft of putting ordnance on target decisively, and it is really nothing else. This lesson was being learned the world over in more than a dozen languages. The rigmarole of military life, after all, was designed in part to shape the character of men to respond effectively in that half second where a vital decision must rise instantly from habit. A ship full of pilothouse philosophers, sailors’ lieutenants, and colorful China hands who inspire great fiction will lose a fight in an eye’s blink to a quick, tight, fast-firing crew who snaps their weapons on target and delivers direct fire by the express route. The victors in every battle from Pearl Harbor to El Alamein to Stalingrad had learned this
important truth, and now Admiral Scott was among them. On the other side of the world, the Wehrmacht was locked in a death grip with the Russians at Stalingrad. In North Africa, British forces were winning a decisive victory over the Afrika Korps at El Alamein. Such a turning point was soon to be at hand in the South Pacific.

  Seasoned under fire and wise to how he might have won previous fights still more convincingly, Scott knew what tools worked best. Like Turner, he had had time to think through the lessons of experience against the Tokyo Express. “FOR OPERATIONS AGAINST JAP LIGHT FORCES,” Scott wrote Halsey on the eighth, “SUBMIT NECESSITY FOR GUNS LARGER THAN FIVE-INCH. JAP STRENGTH IN TORPEDOES NECESSITATES EARLY EFFECTIVE HITS WHICH CAN ONLY BE MADE BY LARGER GUNS. EFFECTIVENESS OF FIVE-INCH AA FOR SINKING DD IS DOUBTFUL. ATLANTA CARRIES ONLY ABOUT 10 PERCENT COMMON MARK 32. IN ORDER MAKE BEST USE OF OUR DOUBTFUL TORPEDOES DDS WITH TWO OR MORE MOUNTS SHOULD BE ASSIGNED STRIKING GROUPS.”

  Good men had died for Scott to gain these insights. Given his emphasis on larger guns, he must have lamented the order that detached Pensacola from the area. Having won at Cape Esperance largely on the blowtorching output of the Helena’s and Boise’s six-inch batteries, he preferred heavy-gunned ships to antiaircraft cruisers. But the Pensacola had her problems. The first of the new eight-inch-gunned cruisers built to treaty restrictions, she had a tendency to roll even in moderate seas, which compromised the accuracy of her guns. Her seams tended to pop whenever a full salvo was fired. So while the Juneau or the Atlanta might have seemed better suited to protecting SOPAC’s last aircraft carrier, the Pensacola got that job and the antiaircraft cruisers were thrown into the line despite Scott’s wishes.