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

by James D. Hornfischer

  American planes were ranging well up the Slot now, hammering targets from the air base at Munda to Rabaul itself. Japanese aircraft, meanwhile, were newly recommitted en masse to their months-old drill: to make the long flight down to Guadalcanal, suppress the Cactus Air Force, block the sea approaches to the island, and cover the evacuation. In this final spasm of violence in the southern Solomons, a group of U.S. warships was set upon by Japanese torpedo bombers.

  They came in at twilight on the evening of January 30, a flight of thirty-one torpedo-armed Betty bombers, bearing down from the starboard hand of Task Force 18 as it slugged a northwesterly course at twenty-four knots. Under the command of a rookie to the Pacific theater, Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen, steamed the heavy cruisers Wichita, Chicago, and Louisville, the light cruisers Montpelier, Cleveland, and Columbia, and six destroyers. The escort carriers Chenango and Suwannee slugged along to provide air cover.

  Giffen had orders to rendezvous with four destroyers southwest of Guadalcanal and then patrol Savo Sound. To keep the rendezvous, and to escape a significant threat from submarines, he chose in favor of better speed and ordered the slow carriers to lag behind. At twilight on January 30, this force was fifty miles north of Rennell Island when air-search radars lit up with bogeys. Submarines had indeed been hunting him, not with their torpedoes, but with their snooping periscopes and radios. Though he had been sighted, Giffen, like Gilbert Hoover, was loath to break radio silence. He thus declined to transmit interception coordinates to the combat air patrol provided by the Chenango and Suwannee, standing off to the south.

  Except for the fact that they arrived after sunset, it was a reprise of the November 12 air attack on Turner and Callaghan, with a twist. From the sky at dim twilight fell a kaleidoscope of burning colors, flares, expertly dropped to show the direction of the American force and color-coded to indicate its composition. The Japanese air forces were as much students of night warfare as their Navy, and the Americans were no less bewildered by this innovation than by the others the Japanese had employed. Still, shipboard antiaircraft gunnery was, as ever, very effective, aided by a technological wrinkle kept strictly secret: the use of “proximity fuzes” that used a radar transmitter in the shell to tell it when to explode. One of the burning Bettys fell through the night sky and passed ahead of the Chicago, crashing into the sea off her port bow.

  The last group to bear the designation Task Force 18 had been the star-crossed unit containing the Wasp, Vincennes, and Quincy, all of them now lost. The Chicago was a blooded veteran of these waters, too, having served, on the night it all began, as the interim flagship of Rear Admiral Crutchley’s southwestern cruiser screen. Her captain at the time, Howard D. Bode, had assumed temporary command when his British superior left station on August 9 to confer with Turner and Vandegrift about the sightings of Japanese ships and the imminent withdrawal of Fletcher’s carriers. Making contact with a mysterious squadron, then taken under fire and torpedoed in the bow, Bode’s ship had steamed away from the action, searching for phantoms as Gunichi Mikawa made his lethal run.

  Now, under a new captain, the Chicago stood in harm’s way again. The flames on the water from the fuel of the crashed Betty cast her as a lucrative silhouette for other pilots. They lined up on her and dropped. Two of their torpedoes struck the cruiser on the starboard side, collapsing compartments and stilling three of her four screws. The ship’s crew labored to flood port side tanks to bring her back from a starboard list. The Louisville took her in tow.

  The following morning, Task Force 18 huddled around the Chicago as relays of Wildcats from the two escort carriers, and the Enterprise, too, tried to shield her from follow-up attacks. But there was no denying the Japanese this prize. After an early-afternoon chess match between search planes from Rabaul and the American combat air patrol, Japanese strike aircraft found the Chicago again around 4 p.m. It was unfortunate that most of the other ships of the group had been ordered to withdraw to Efate. The Chicago needed help against the planes. The Japanese bombers put four more torpedoes into the stricken cruiser. She rolled over and sank within twenty minutes, taking sixty-two officers and men to their graves.

  THE REMOVAL OF GIFFEN’S cruiser group from the order of battle on February 1 was a boon to Operation KE. That day a force of twenty destroyers under Rear Admiral Hashimoto, who had succeeded Raizo Tanaka as commander of the Reinforcement Unit and who had fought Willis Lee the night of November 14, departed from Shortland Island for the first run at evacuating Guadalcanal’s garrison. Labeled by long habit, the Reinforcement Unit had a mission now that was quite the opposite of what its name suggested.

  As Hashimoto plunged south, aircraft from Henderson Field spied him north of Vella Lavella in the early afternoon. Soon swarms of Cactus Air Force planes were slashing at his ships, ninety-two planes in two waves. A near miss smote the destroyer Makinami, forcing the detachment of two more destroyers to stand by her. A second destroyer was hit and forced to turn back as well. After nightfall, Tulagi’s PT boats piled in. The remaining Japanese destroyers contended with eleven of them attacking in pairs and trios. Lieutenant John Clagett’s PT-111 was taken under fire by the destroyer Kawakaze. One shell struck home, and the boat exploded into flames that claimed two men. The PT-37, hit three times and set afire, went down with her entire crew save one. The PT-123 was attacked by a Pete reconnaissance floatplane, which deftly planted a bomb on her fantail, sinking her in flames.

  Despite the opposition, Hashimoto got six destroyers through to Cape Esperance, and six more to Kamimbo Bay. Small boats from the destroyers motored to shore to begin gathering the men of the 17th Army. This first evacuation run would recover 4,935 men, most of them emaciated and disease-ridden. On February 4, a second run extracted 3,921 more, including the three-star generals Harukichi Hyakutake and Masao Maruyama, the commanders of the 17th Army and the 2nd (Sendai) Division, respectively.

  General Patch was thoroughly fooled by the deception. On the seventh, he announced that the two recent runs of the Tokyo Express had landed more troops—an additional regiment with supplies, he said. That same day Hashimoto got under way on a third evacuation run, this time with eighteen destroyers. The persistence of the Japanese destroyermen in withdrawal and retreat was as gallant as anything they had done in battle. This last effort yielded a diminishing but significant return, 1,796 men. The rescue of 10,652 souls from Starvation Island was a boost to morale and a gift of grace that no member of that ferociously Spartan Army had any reason to expect. Hitler gave his 6th Army no such reprieve, insisting they hold their position on the Volga River until, drained of fuel, food, and fighting will, they had no choice but to surrender, which they did on January 31.

  Operation KE cost the IJN one destroyer sunk and three more badly damaged, as well as fifty-six aircraft. Weighing this with the American losses of the Chicago, the destroyer DeHaven, three PT boats, and fifty-three planes, the equivalent of two divisions of Japanese troops, it could be said, departed Guadalcanal with their dignity intact.

  The Americans on Guadalcanal had long known their enemy was withering away. Now he seemed to vanish before their weary eyes. General Patch was deprived of the pleasure of a final rout of his foe. But on February 9, 1943, he had the satisfaction of sending a dispatch to the headquarters of the commander, South Pacific Forces, and Admiral Halsey had the equivalent satisfaction of reading it.

  TOTAL AND COMPLETE DEFEAT OF JAPANESE FORCES ON GUADALCANAL EFFECTED 1625 TODAY.… AM HAPPY TO REPORT THIS KIND OF COMPLIANCE WITH YOUR ORDERS.… ‘TOKYO EXPRESS’ NO LONGER HAS TERMINUS ON GUADALCANAL.

  1 The Helena would be sunk in the Solomons, a victim of torpedoes, in the Battle of Kula Gulf, on July 6, 1943. That event seems to live more powerfully in the memories of her veterans than the Guadalcanal battles do.

  42

  Report and Echo

  THE MEN CAME HOME, AS THE LUCKY ONES DO. THE WAR RAGED ON.

  On New Year’s Day, the President Monroe arrived in San Francisco with he
r complement of Atlanta survivors. It was just as well they missed the hoo-hah over the San Francisco’s arrival three weeks before. An Atlanta veteran, Robert Chute, was “full of the usual horror stories and equally full of scathing remarks for the San Francisco,” Bettsy Perkins, the wife of one of the ship’s officers, wrote. “Mind you, Mrs. Perkins,” he said, “I ain’t talking about this ship to no one but you, but a guy’s gotta blow off some steam to someone and all this Hero Ship stuff is bunk.”

  Perkins was tearfully reunited with her husband, Van Perkins, but the reunion was short-lived. When his leave was up, the war still beckoned. He was reassigned to the light cruiser Birmingham. In the Philippines in 1944, Perkins was serving as the cruiser’s damage-control officer when she went to the assistance of a damaged ship, the light aircraft carrier Princeton, struck by a bomb. Commander Perkins was supervising the Birmingham’s firefighters as they played their streams into the burning carrier. His ship was so close alongside, and the sea so heavy, that her superstructure took a beating from the overhang of the carrier’s flight deck. When the Princeton’s magazines detonated, Perkins was killed instantly. He was buried at sea quickly and summarily, and not a shipmate from the Atlanta was there for him. They had gone to fight their own wars.

  After the war, Bettsy married one of the few men on earth who would understand her loss, another officer from the Atlanta, Jim Shaw, himself a widower. In her memoirs, published decades later, her outlook on the romance of naval service would acquire a bittersweet complexity, torn between romantic reverie and cold-eyed pragmatism.

  I now see that I had a love for the Atlanta like that you afford a human being and that ships are after all just floating offices and as warm as a dead fish. I will never forget the Atlanta. She taught me a lesson. I won’t ever try to love another ship. I’ll just take them for what they are worth which is nothing. The Atlanta is dead and buried. She got buried in my heart which was perhaps the wrong place for her, but she got there, and now I realized that she was unique and that I must not try to hold up other ships to her standards which means that I must become more tolerant towards other ships because I cannot judge all by the exceptional.

  With the Atlanta left to be honored in memory only—and by a new homesake, the CL-104, serving with the fleet in 1945—the public never deeply registered the name. As Guadalcanal’s naval veterans found other ships to fight the war in, they would find that few other vessels or crews would withstand any comparison with the past.

  No sooner had Robert Graff returned fully to the world at Oak Knoll than he was surrounded by inquisitors. “As soon as I could talk, people would gather around my bed. What they wanted to know was, what was it like to fight? What are the particulars that make battle different from civilian life? How do we prepare? The people back in Washington, what did they know?

  “The first thing I told them was to try to do their part in making the ship’s company a fighting team. If you can do that, you’ve got half the battle won. That means that everybody feels a responsibility for everybody else. Everybody has a job to do and his task is to do his job correctly and well. Talk to the shipmates in your division as much as you can, not only to learn your job but to build up a sense of confidence, little by little, that if you get hurt, another guy’s going to know how to help you. If you do those two things, you’re a long way along.”

  Lloyd Mustin was appalled that it should take exposure to actual combat for the Navy to develop rudimentary tactical competence. “The requirement to be ready to execute simple tactics in the dark while engaging the enemy, I suppose, is one of the things that you’d expect naval officers would be taught from the time they become midshipmen.

  “You could adduce a lot of crocodile tears and a lot of clichés that all these poor guys didn’t have any time to train together, and so forth, and it’s essential that they be working as a team and so on. Well, that’s just so much balderdash.… They should be able to work together as a team on no advance notice whatsoever by virtue of working to a single uniform common U.S. Navy doctrine, a single common signal book which, of course, we’ve had for years and years.”

  Graff didn’t believe books could ever teach a man to respond effectively to the sensation of a bulkhead shattering or a keel buckling underfoot. “Think creatively, imaginatively, about what combat is really like,” he told his inquisitors, “and what would you do if you lost control over your survival. You have to talk like that with your shipmates.

  “There are no secrets here, but what you find is that some people are constitutionally unable to perform that way. So then the game is to make sure that they’re put in positions where they can use the talents they have when circumstances are horrific.” Unless everybody does his job, and learns to do it under duress, “there can be no fighting ship.”

  After Graff had healed well enough to be reassigned, he reported to Philadelphia, where a new aircraft carrier, the Monterey, was preparing to get under way for the Pacific. When her captain, a naval aviator, heard that an Atlanta survivor was joining his wardroom, he appreciated what he had and was smart enough to ask him to a private lunch. “He wanted to know everything,” Graff said. “He really just probed me and probed me.” Combat veterans tended to be resilient and adaptable. One way or another, Graff adapted to being in high demand.

  The way America handled its “first team” differed markedly from Japan’s. The Americans brought them home after their inaugural experience under sustained fire and employed them to train the next wave. The Japanese left them on the front to fight until the inevitable happened, and saw their human assets waste away. It was a gilded luxury that the Marine Corps could send home its first fighter ace, the commander of one of the most decorated squadrons in the Solomons, Captain John L. Smith, give him his Medal of Honor, and refuse his requests to return to combat, “not until you have trained 150 John L. Smiths.” A less dramatic case, but more typical of the system, was Edgar Harrison, a fire controlman from the San Francisco. He took his battle experience to the Navy’s technical schools, becoming the first instructor on the new Mark 56 fire-control system, developed to repel attacks by kamikaze aircraft.

  As Graff went to sea in the Monterey, the Aaron Ward’s radar officer, Bob Hagen, reported to Seattle-Tacoma to become the gunnery officer of a new destroyer, the Johnston, whose captain, Commander Ernest E. Evans, was a combat veteran who had been similarly recycled from a previous assignment. Jesse Coward and Roland Smoot, commanders of the Sterett and Monssen, respectively, would take command of destroyer squadrons and play important tactical roles in later campaigns, too. Tested and seasoned by adversity, all would acquire varying degrees of naval legend in the Leyte Gulf campaign in the Philippines in 1944.

  The epic of the Pacific war found new chapters for everyone. The endless game of personnel-rotation musical chairs saw the continuous replacement of the experienced by the inexperienced, until, by the end, only the experienced remained.

  JOE JAMES CUSTER, the war correspondent, had served in the South Pacific campaign’s earliest days and witnessed the destruction firsthand. On board the Astoria, and later, recovering from eye surgery at Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, he had become close with men who had served in the inferno. He had looked into their eyes and seen right through into their minds and souls, and found reflections of pain in a blackness that he called “something new the psychiatrists were working on.” Experience was important. It delivered benefits, and took a price, too. “They were ill, physically, mentally, spiritually; they had undergone agonies of body and mind that were impossible to contemplate except by those who had actually been there.” The scale of violence was impossible to reckon with.

  Custer’s articles detailing the loss of the Astoria, published near the end of October in The Seattle Times and elsewhere, awakened in the families of many servicemen an urgency to understand what their loved ones had been through. Letters soon began arriving in Room 232 at Queen’s Hospital. Until his eyes healed and he could read them himself, the nu
rses on duty had to do the honors for him.

  One correspondent’s brother, a lieutenant, had gone missing. “We have received news from Wash. of his reported death. I guess it’s natural that I should wish to repudiate this, but I just don’t feel Tom is gone. You say a cruiser was lost—was anybody on board saved? If I could come to you personally to talk it over with you I’m sure I could readily make you see how much the truth means to me, to all of us. My mother hasn’t even been told as yet what we’ve heard. We’re afraid what the shock might do to her.… In the name of Christian charity, and as a fellow countryman, can you see fit to write and answer me?”

  “You may not care to bother with this letter but please do as it will probly relieve the heartaches of seven people who morn the loss of a dear Boy just 20 years old, who was on the ship Astoria in battle. this is his grandfather writeing you for more information. He was dearly loved by me and his grandmother who passed away on the night of August 9th 42.” (All typos in quotations are sic.)

  Another correspondent had a son on the Quincy, now missing in action. Could he have swum to land or been taken prisoner? “If he is in a hospital would they let him write home and tell me where he is? My son’s wife is to have a baby some time this month.… We grasp at any opportunity to contact someone who may have known our boy.… We shall never tire of listening to anything connected with the last days of the life of the Astoria.”