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

by James D. Hornfischer

  This was the consequence of Kinkaid misunderstanding the orders from Halsey that directed him where to operate. When he was instructed to keep his task force near a particular line of latitude, Kinkaid understood the line as a limit on his northern movement and stayed well south of it. Having paid a high cost for Halsey’s bold, some would say reckless, employment of the precious carriers at Santa Cruz—a cost that included not only the Hornet, but also his own reputation among aviation admirals, who felt he needlessly delayed launching a strike after the enemy was spotted—Kinkaid was probably in a mood for caution now.

  The direction of the wind was another problem. With a southerly prevailing wind, Kinakid had to reverse course 180 degrees and head south, into the wind, in order to generate a headwind strong enough to launch or recover aircraft. This was one of the reasons Task Force 16 was farther south than many thought it should have been.

  When a SOPAC staff officer, Charles Weaver, informed Halsey and Miles Browning that Lee could not reach the battle area on the night of November 13–14, he was met with a furious response. “You can well imagine the blast I got from my seniors who were sure that Lee was in a good position to intercept.” Having pledged to Vandegrift that he would support the marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal with everything he had at his disposal, Halsey was chagrined to be forced to notify the general that neither his battleships nor any American naval units would be on hand that night to defend Guadalcanal from naval attack.

  At the survivor camp on Guadalcanal that night, Bill McKinney, the Atlanta electrician, was resting underneath a tent he had been given by the marines. He was too exhausted to celebrate with the victorious pilots, too exhausted even to set up his tent. So he used it as a blanket. He was awakened once when the heavy rains leaked underneath the canvas, turning the ground to mud. Around 2 a.m. he was awakened again, this time by a rain of fire. Two heavy cruisers, the Suzuya and Maya, arrived offshore that night to shoot up the airfield.

  Men were shouting, running everywhere, as heavy explosions rolled in from the sound. Those who had endured the shelling by battleships a month earlier would say this one paled in comparison, but a bombardment from the sea was always terrifying. A sailor who had survived the sinkings of the Wasp and the Barton came sprinting into a bunker during the bombardment, mute with terror. McKinney took the assault by the two Japanese cruisers personally. “I had the feeling that they knew where we were and planned to finish us off,” he said. He could see the “little winking pinpoints of blue light as their salvos thundered toward us. It was a fearful experience.”

  The closest large U.S. warship at hand in Savo Sound that night was Captain DuBose’s Portland, tied up and concealed near Tulagi’s shore across the sound as her crew worked on repairs. DuBose spotted the two enemy ships as their searchlights explored the anchorage off Lunga. Every faithful hand in the Portland prayed the lights would not find them. DuBose knew there was no way he could tackle two fully primed opponents with his ship barely navigable. So he watched the searchlights and instructed Commander Shanklin to fire only if they fixed in his direction. In due course Calvert’s PT boats threw their weight at the Japanese cruisers, making several torpedo runs to no effect.

  Firing five hundred shells apiece in an unmolested half hour, the Maya and Suzuya destroyed eighteen planes and damaged thirty-two more on Henderson Field. Frightful though it was, this bombardment paled with what the Hiei and Kirishima might have wreaked, and underscored the significance of Callaghan’s sacrifice.

  WHEN THE MORNING ROSE on Savo Sound on November 14, it was still Friday the thirteenth in Washington. The first dispatches of the events off Guadalcanal the previous night traveled quickly by radio from Nouméa to Pearl Harbor to the Navy Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The tension I felt at that time was matched only by the tension that pervaded Washington the night before the landing in Normandy,” James Forrestal would write. Later, when a Japanese invasion force was reported in the Slot, President Roosevelt began to think the island was lost. But from Washington the president did not have contemporaneous knowledge of what the Cactus Air Force was doing. Japan’s most important effort to send troops to the island was under way and now, thanks to the success of Callaghan and the failure of Abe, was exposed to daylight air attack. The most important day in the illustrious history of the Cactus Air Force was at hand.

  At first light on Henderson Field, the ground crews of the 1st Marine Air Wing began a long day of work fueling and arming planes to strike at enemy targets in the Slot. The pace was so desperate that all hands from the mess tents were pressed into service. There would be time aplenty to eat after more pressing appetites had been sated. Soon the pilots were scouring the waters within two hundred miles of the island. The Enterprise, steaming two hundred miles south-southwest of Guadalcanal, was delayed in launching her dawn search, thanks to squalls. But most of the Enterprise’s sixty-two planes, including twenty-three Dauntlesses and nine Avengers, got in on the attack.

  Winging north and west with varied responsibilities for search and strike, they found the ships that had hit them the previous night southwest of Rendova Island, New Georgia. The Suzuya and Maya, which had rendezvoused with the heavy cruisers Chokai and Kinugasa, were set upon violently. A flight of Dauntlesses led by Marine major Joseph Sailer fell on the Kinugasa, which was trailing oil from torpedoes hits landed by Marine Avenger pilots shortly after first light. The Enterprise Dauntlesses hit her hard, damaging her grievously with a heavy bomb. Two Enterprise pilots, Ensign Richard M. Buchanan and Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert D. Gibson, delivered the coup de grâce, leaving the Kinugasa to capsize and sink later that morning, taking down fifty-one men. Ensign Paul M. Halloran of the Enterprise’s Bombing Squadron 10 dove on the Maya but missed with his bomb. As he pulled out, the wing of his Dauntless struck the cruiser’s mainmast, spilling gasoline into the superstructure. The resulting fires killed thirty-seven sailors. Halloran was never seen again.

  But the pilots’ principal objective was Tanaka’s lightly defended transport force. Slugging south on Saturday morning, passing between New Georgia and Santa Isabel, the troop carriers were set upon by Cactus Air Force and Enterprise planes around the same time the Japanese cruisers were coming under attack. Tanaka’s transports scattered, turning in slow circles to avoid the fall of bombs and torpedoes. By midafternoon, seven of the eleven transports had been sunk, along with all of their cargoes and a great many of their men.

  Amid the catastrophe of these terrible losses to their amphibious capability, Admiral Tanaka salvaged what he could. In a remarkable feat of improvisational seamanship, he brought his destroyers alongside the foundering transports and transferred thousands of soldiers on the fly.

  As they did so, Rear Admiral Kondo, riding in the light cruiser Nagara, took command of a makeshift but powerful bombardment force—the Kirishima, joined by the heavy cruisers Atago and Takeo, the light cruisers Nagara and Sendai, and nine destroyers. They moved south again to lay their guns on Henderson Field, quickly overtaking Tanaka’s four surviving transports and taking station ahead of them. Owing to the intensity of the air attacks directed at the Japanese cruisers and transports that day, the Kirishima and her consorts avoided detection from the air.

  THE SURVIVING SHIPS OF Task Force 67 arrived at Espiritu Santo on the afternoon of November 14. Entering the channel, the San Francisco followed the Helena closely. A monument to the danger of haphazard navigation stood for all to see: the wreck of the luxury-liner-turned-troop-transport President Coolidge, which several weeks earlier had blundered out of the safety of the channel into the harbor’s defensive minefield.

  As the San Francisco came into the harbor, she passed, port-side-to-port-side, four other cruisers anchored in a line, the Minneapolis, New Orleans, Pensacola, and Northampton. “It was pretty awe-inspiring,” Jack Bennett said. The crews of the anchored ships manned the rail and offered three rousing cheers to the battle-scarred counterpart. “Hip, hip hooray—three times, that was something
emotional,” Bennett said. “The greatest accolade you can get is from your comrades in arms.”

  In the harbor, the Helena went alongside a tanker to refuel. A sailor on the oiler surveyed the shrapnel-pocked light cruiser and hollered over the rail, “What happened?” A wag on the Helena replied, “Termites.” Schonland refused an instruction to go alongside a tanker to refuel and requested an anchorage instead. With the flag lowered to half-mast, the San Francisco was assigned a berth, and as she eased in, the ships nearby gave her a hero’s welcome. Ship whistles blew loud and long. Schonland arranged with Hoover for the Helena’s band to come aboard, and for her chaplain to conduct a funeral service on the San Francisco.

  The mobile base hospital at Espiritu Santo was crowded. Ship’s doctors, seeing the facilities available ashore, lamented the butchery they had been forced to perpetrate in the battle area: amputations, crushing tourniquets, dressings soaked through and dried into open wounds. In combat, you did your best with what you had. With his legs shot through with more than 130 shrapnel wounds, the San Francisco’s Cliff Spencer was taken to a wardroom full of wounded sailors and marines. “I wasn’t near anyone I knew and at that moment I had never felt so sad and alone,” he wrote. “Next to me on the opposite tier bunk lay a muscular young sailor. He was crying. I tried to strike up a conversation with him and asked, ‘What ship are you off of?’ He said the Atlanta.… As we talked the corpsman came to dress his wounds. He threw back the blankets and lifted about an eight-inch stub of his right leg. It had been amputated above the knee and had not been surgically closed, just a raw cut covered with a large bandage. He shocked me by almost screaming, ‘The sons of bitches on the San Francisco did this! How can I ever work the farm with this bloody stump?’

  “Needless to say I didn’t volunteer the name of my ship.”

  The tribalisms of a naval force were still producing raw feelings. “There were some real hard feelings between the Helena and San Francisco when they got into port,” a sailor recalled. It seems there were Helena sailors who thought the flagship had turned and run at the height of the engagement, and that “the Helena had to stay there and do the job—or whatever.”

  As the San Francisco underwent temporary repairs, Schonland was relieved as acting commander by Captain Albert F. France, from Halsey’s staff. The personal effects taken from the dead were turned over with an inventory to the supply officer for shipment home to the relatives whose photos had adorned stateroom bulkheads, sat framed on small metal desks, and become shattered and scattered by the many impacts of the fight. The good order of the flagship was returning.

  Turner sent a message to the ships of Task Force 67 that amply reflected his feelings toward the battered ships of his command.

  Task Force 67 is hereby dissolved. In dissolving this temporary force I express the will that the number 67 be in the future reserved for groups of ships as ready for high patriotic endeavor as you have been. I thank you for your magnificent support of the project of reinforcing our brave troops in Guadalcanal and for your eagerness to be the keen edge of the sword that is cutting the throat of the enemy.

  I was well aware of the odds which might be against you in your night attack on November 12 but felt that this was the time when fine ships and brave men should be called upon for their utmost. You have more than justified my expectations in taking from the enemy a toll of strength far greater than the strength you have expended.

  With you I grieve for long cherished comrades who will be with us no more, and for our lost ships whose names will be enshrined in history. No medals however high can possibly give you the reward you deserve. With all my heart I say God bless the courageous men, dead and alive, of Task Force 67.

  The Cactus Air Force’s devastating attacks against the transports on the morning of the fourteenth would never have happened without their sacrifice. The deaths of Callaghan and his staff were the final blow to Ghormley’s original SOPAC command. With their passing, and that of Norman Scott, the Navy simultaneously cashiered the folly of the old and some of the promise of the new. The winding course between victory and defeat off Guadalcanal offered a series of object lessons that future leaders would study and profit by. The tuition in that brutal school was steep.

  But one more collision of giants remained to decide who would control Savo Sound. The next costly lesson would follow the very next night with another collision of the exhausted fleets.

  At Pearl Harbor, monitoring the reports of more major Japanese naval units approaching Guadalcanal, Admiral Nimitz sent a broadcast to all task force commanders, bracingly stating the obvious: “LOOKS LIKE ALL OUT ATTEMPT NOW UNDERWAY TO RECAPTURE GUADALCANAL REGARDLESS LOSSES.”

  (Photo Credit: P.4)

  “The turret whips around but it is the guns themselves that seem to live. They balance and quiver almost as though they were sniffing the air.… Suddenly they set and instantly there is a belch of sound and the shells float away. The tracers seem to float interminably before they hit. And before the shells have struck the guns are trembling and reaching again. They are like rattlesnakes poising to strike, and they really do seem to be alive. It is a frightening thing to see.”

  —John Steinbeck, “A Destroyer,” November 24, 1943

  36

  The Giants Ride

  THE BATTLESHIPS WASHINGTON AND SOUTH DAKOTA PUSHED THROUGH the sea with an implacable ease. Halsey well understood the risks of sending Willis Lee’s two big ships to set an ambush in Savo Sound. “The plan flouted one of the firmest doctrines of the Naval War College,” Halsey would write. “The narrow treacherous waters north of Guadalcanal are utterly unsuited to the maneuvering of capital ships, especially in darkness.” But the big ships were all he had left.

  The Washington (the second and last ship of the North Carolina class), and the South Dakota (the first of a newer breed) were not sisters but close cousins, part of the surge in new major ship construction that followed the expiration of the 1930 London Naval Treaty’s five-year-long “building holiday.” The construction of the big new ships was politically risky for President Roosevelt during the pinchpenny, isolationist-minded years after the Great Depression. He waited until after the 1936 elections to authorize the Washington’s construction.

  The Navy’s General Board never seemed sure what it was willing to sacrifice in order to meet the limits imposed by treaty limitations on battleship displacement. Its preferred designs changed as frequently as its membership did. In the end, Lee’s two battleships were the product of a decision to emphasize superior firepower. The two ships each carried a sixteen-inch main battery that fired a twenty-seven-hundred-pound projectile. More than ten times the weight of the eight-inch round fired by a heavy cruiser, these heavier weapons changed the calculus of warship architecture and, in turn, tactical doctrine as well. Though it was customary to design battleships to withstand hits from their own projectiles, the Washington did not have armor stout enough to defeat the heavy new sixteen-inch ordnance. The South Dakota’s side armor could take such a hit from beyond twenty thousand yards (or 11.4 miles), but only because her designers had compromised her ability to survive torpedoes. Rushed to the South Pacific soon after their commissionings, neither ship was put through the usual round of sea trials prior to deployment. But there was widespread confidence in them nonetheless, and the ships were more than a match for Japanese battleship such as the Kirishima, with a fourteen-inch main battery.

  Aside from the short time they had operated together with the Enterprise task force, the Washington and the South Dakota had never been in each other’s company. While Admiral Lee repeatedly drilled his gunnery and director crews in aiming their guns and finding targets, neither ship had much experience actually firing her big weapons. The Washington had only fired her main battery twice at night, both times in January 1942. Nighttime gunnery experience was scanter still on the South Dakota. She had fired her main battery three times, but never at night. Though the ships were state of the art, the state of their live-f
ire experience was far less than that of the old battleships sidelined on the West Coast: The Colorado conducted ten main-battery live-fire exercises between July and November. Lee’s four destroyers had never operated together either.

  The first time the South Dakota’s main battery was tested with a full nine-gun broadside, the wave of blast pressure pushed through the passageway where Captain Thomas Gatch was standing, tearing his pants right off him. The vast power of the sixteen-inch guns required a perfect physical apparatus to ensure not only their working order but also the safety of the ship. The bomb that exploded atop turret one during the air attacks of October 25 had gouged two barrels of turret two, which jutted out over the bomb’s impact point. A lieutenant junior grade who served in the turret, Paul H. Backus, said, “As you can imagine, we made all kinds of measurements and sent messages back to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, describing these gouges, their depth, their length, and asked the question, ‘Can we shoot these barrels?’ We never did get an answer that we could live with.” Finally word came back that turret two’s center and left guns were not to be fired.

  This powerful but patchwork group, Task Force 64, was Lee’s first seagoing flag command. What he may have lacked in combat experience, he had made up for through the rigorous study of the practical problems of combat in the radar age. Having served as director of fleet training just before the war, he was one of the first naval officers to build a career on the wonkery of modern wave physics. The lingo of transmitters, receivers, double-lobe systems, and ring oscillators was like speaking in tongues to most officers. Imperturbable and capable of solving multiple lines of variables as they shifted, Lee was reputed to know the intricacies of radar systems better than their own operators did.