by Ian W. Toll
Command responsibility would fall to Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, the newly appointed Commander of South Pacific Forces (COMSOPAC). But Ghormley had arrived in the theater only five weeks earlier, and his was an entirely new command. He was camped for the moment in Auckland, New Zealand, but he had not yet pulled together a staff or established a permanent headquarters. Immersed in the complexities of logistics, the COMSOPAC was not yet even receiving timely communications because of “inexperienced radio and coding personnel.”22
Uppermost in Ghormley’s mind was the problem of fuel. Chartered tankers had been dispatched from North America with half a million barrels of oil, and he would have three fleet oilers assigned for underway replenishment. He had small dry docks at Auckland and Wellington on New Zealand’s North Island, but any major damage to larger ships would have to be handled in Pearl Harbor or North America. He had no facilities for bulk fuel storage north of New Zealand. Ammunition of every category and caliber was in dangerously short supply. The South Pacific air commander, Rear Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain (COMAIRSOPAC), was engaged in the Sisyphean tribulations of building airstrips on remote tropical islands offering nothing in the way of raw materials but coconuts and native timber. The troops that would actually land in the Solomons—the 1st Marine Division, under Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift—had left their training base at New River, North Carolina, less than a month earlier. Two-thirds of those forces were still at sea, en route to New Zealand. They had been promised an additional six months’ training before being deployed in active operations, and had not yet set in motion the colossal logistical preparations an amphibious landing would require.23
Operation PESTILENCE, the code name assigned to this first attempt to wrest territory from the Japanese, would quickly fall to pieces unless supported by well-appointed sea and air bases in the island groups immediately east of the Solomons. With King’s deadline just five weeks away, those bases did not yet exist. Noumea, capital of the Free French colony of New Caledonia, offered a serviceable airfield and a capacious harbor with rudimentary port facilities. But it was 986 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, far too distant to provide direct air support. Farther north, in the southern New Hebrides, the island of Efate had been occupied by a marine battalion, and construction was underway on a fighter airstrip. But Efate was 800 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, still too far to serve the purpose. A sea base and airstrip were needed in the remote northern reaches of the New Hebrides, within a 650-mile flight radius of Guadalcanal. Scouting the area from the air, Admiral McCain peered down at the island of Espiritu Santo, the largest in the group, and spotted a heavily forested plain nestled amid hilly jungle terrain. It was just inland of Segond Channel, a fine natural harbor. It would have to do.
Captain M. B. Gardner, McCain’s chief of staff, later told a panel of officers in Washington, “Robinson Crusoe should be required reading for anyone who is setting up an advanced base in the South Pacific islands. There is nothing to start with, except the jungle.”24 The frenetic month-long race to hack a 6,000-foot bomber strip out of the jungle at BUTTON (the code name for Espiritu Santo) exposed the scale of the challenges encountered by the construction battalions (“Seabees”) in the South Pacific. All necessary equipment and supplies were brought into Segond Channel by ship, but there were no wharves, warehouses, or cranes in the harbor, and all heavy equipment had to be hauled onto the beach from pontoon lighters. Fuel drums were pushed off the decks and “swum” into the beaches, then lifted manually onto trucks to be dispersed to more than two dozen concealed fuel dumps. Marston mats, the pierced steel planking used to surface runways, came in monstrous two-and-a-half-ton bundles that had to be run up the beaches in tank lighters. When the destroyer USS Dale arrived at Santo on July 28, her crew had expected a proper naval base, but for several hours they could not even find the anchorage: “We couldn’t figure out where to go, so we just cruised slowly around the island. Finally the lookout spotted some mastheads sticking up above some palm trees and we rounded a point to find an entrance to a little bay.”25
The primeval conditions required manpower, and plenty of it—but manpower, in turn, created its own logistical problems. All provisions, clothing, and medical supplies had to be brought in directly from the United States, and the prevalence of malaria called for Quonset huts or at least screened tent cabins.
For a month, thirty-five Seabee equipment operators and a company of African American labor troops did battle with the jungle. They worked around the clock, under floodlights at night. The Seabees ran the tractors, bulldozers, and rollers, and the infantrymen wielded axes and shovels. Trucks and earthmoving equipment were often idled for lack of a single minor part, and a seaplane had to be dispatched to Efate or Noumea to obtain it. With a desperate spasm of effort the work was completed on July 28, the deadline McCain had ordered. The first squadron of B-17s flew in the next day, but they had to be fueled manually, and each of the big four-engine bombers drank 50 drums of fuel. (Almost a year would pass before the base could be equipped with bulk aviation gasoline storage tanks and a pipeline to the harbor.) Seaplanes could operate out of Segond Channel, but there was no seaplane tender available until the end of July. The harbor was unprotected by either mines or torpedo nets. The construction teams had worked themselves to exhaustion; they were “full of malaria and need rest.”26
THE WAKEFIELD, A ONCE-SUMPTUOUS LUXURY LINER now doing service as a squalid and overcrowded troop transport, passed through the heads of Wellington Harbour, New Zealand, on June 14. She carried General Vandegrift, most of his staff, and the first echelon of the 1st Marine Division. The voyage had been grueling. The Wakefield was under-provisioned, requiring the men to manage on short rations. Many had lost fifteen to twenty pounds at sea.
Vandegrift had counted on a period of rest and recuperation, followed by an additional six months’ training in New Zealand. But on June 26, at a conference with Admiral Ghormley in Auckland, the admiral wordlessly handed him King’s June 24 dispatch to Nimitz warning of pending orders for an amphibious attack in the Solomons, with D-Day set for August 1. Vandegrift was dumbfounded. “I could not believe it,” he recalled. “I read the typewritten words again. There was no mistaking their content.”27
Most of the marines of the 1st Division had enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor. They had received little or nothing in the way of amphibious training. Two-thirds of the division was in Samoa or still at sea. Operation WATCHTOWER (code name for the first stage of PESTILENCE—the capture of Tulagi and Guadalcanal) would throw those new marines into an assault on enemy-held islands in just five weeks’ time. Insofar as Vandegrift knew, the beaches would be fortified and defended by the same battle-tested veterans who had routed the British in Malaya and the Dutch in the East Indies. His equipment, weaponry, and supplies were crated in the holds of seven transports. All had to be unloaded, reclassified, and combat-loaded onto smaller assault transports, a colossal logistics problem that alone might require a month or more to solve.28 Vandegrift did not believe the operation was feasible, certainly not by August 1. Ghormley was even more pessimistic: “I don’t see how we can land at all, and I am going to take it up with MacArthur.”29
King’s dispatch had not come in the form of an affirmative order. Rather, the COMINCH had written that “the following arrangements are contemplated” and Nimitz should “prepare” accordingly.30 King was maneuvering to force the operation through the Joint Chiefs over the objections of MacArthur, who wanted to command it himself. After several rounds of heated argument, followed by some hard bargaining, Marshall agreed to a three-phase offensive through the Solomons and New Guinea, concluding with the capture of Rabaul. The orders were distributed on July 2. Task One, the “seizure and occupation of Santa Cruz Islands, Tulagi and adjacent positions,” would remain under the command authority of Nimitz and his sub-theater commander, Admiral Ghormley.31 (King subsequently altered “adjacent positions” to specify the island of Guadalcanal.) Tasks Two and Three
, involving the capture of Japanese airfields on the northeast coast of New Guinea, followed by the seizure and occupation of Rabaul, would be General MacArthur’s show. In order to keep Task One entirely within Ghormley’s domain, the line of demarcation dividing the SOPAC (South Pacific) and SOUWESTPAC (Southwest Pacific) areas was moved one degree westward, to latitude 159° east, skirting the western end of Guadalcanal.
Ghormley’s instinct was to scuttle PESTILENCE, or at least to have it postponed. In this view he found a provisional ally in MacArthur. One month earlier, the imperious general had proposed to mount a direct assault on Rabaul itself, asking that two carrier task forces be transferred from the Pacific Fleet into his command. (King had shot that proposal down.) Now, a month later, Ghormley found the general willing to join in opposition to the more indirect line of attack envisioned in PESTILENCE.
Following a hasty conference in Melbourne, MacArthur and Ghormley sent a long joint dispatch to Washington, proposing that the operation be “deferred.” They cited a lack of trained amphibious troops, a shortage of adequate shipping, and a dearth of sufficient land-based bomber or fighter strength. Japanese air reconnaissance flights would likely discover the incoming invasion forces, and therefore “surprise is now improbable.” The fleet and supporting carrier groups would be obligated to linger in the area for one to four days, during which time they would be “exposed to continued hostile air, surface, and submarine attack,” posing a “danger of destruction by overwhelming force.” It was their joint recommendation that PESTILENCE be postponed pending a buildup of sea, air, and ground forces in the region.32
King was disappointed with Ghormley and incensed with MacArthur. “I take note,” he complained to Marshall, “that about three weeks ago MacArthur stated that . . . he could push right through to Rabaul. Confronted with the concrete aspects of the task, he now feels that he not only cannot undertake this extended operation but not even the Tulagi operation.”33
King refused to entertain any deferral of PESTILENCE, but he offered a fig leaf in the form of additional naval and logistical forces to support the operation, including carrier task forces built around the carriers Enterprise, Wasp, and Saratoga, and logistical vessels including tankers and troop transports. “With these and other considerations in mind, [the Joint Chiefs] do not desire to countermand operations already underway for the execution of Task One.”34
GENERAL VANDEGRIFT AND HIS STAFF moved into the Hotel Cecil in downtown Wellington—a once-elegant, now-shabby institution that had been reserved for their exclusive use—and faced the daunting task of writing a plan. More than any other military organization in the world, the Marine Corps had studied and planned for amphibious warfare, and they were keenly aware of its risks. To land on a hostile shore was the most perilous of all major military operations. To be confident of victory, the attacker must possess overwhelming advantages—control of the surrounding sea and of the air above; and heavy bombardment of enemy positions to precede the landing, followed by rapid delivery of ground forces and heavy weaponry to the beaches. If he could achieve surprise, that would greatly mitigate the initial risks. But even if the first attack was successful, he would have to receive constant resupply by sea and reliable air protection overhead. Ghormley and MacArthur doubted those conditions could be guaranteed, and had placed their doubts on the record. King, half a world removed from the scene of action, had locked the operation into a seemingly impossible schedule.
The grave problems confronting the marines could easily give way to dark pessimism. Vandegrift, aware that morale was brittle, would tolerate no negative chatter. He was a native Virginian of medium height, with thinning hair and gathering jowls—a genial and gentle man, known for his steady and unflappable demeanor, even when under great stress. That trait had earned him a nickname among his Marine Corps colleagues: “Sunny Jim.” Once it was clear that WATCHTOWER was inevitable, a staff officer recalled, Vandegrift “refused to engage in any chitchat concerning its merits. Those who questioned it were immediately rebuffed. . . . Vandegrift rejected all doubts and cavils about what we were ordered to do and regarded those who offered them with condign and unforgiving contempt.”35
Next to nothing was known about the Solomons. Aerial photos of the area, forwarded from MacArthur’s headquarters in Melbourne, were misdirected and lost in a file at Ghormley’s headquarters. What few maps and charts they obtained were spread out on a table, but these were too old or drafted on too large a scale to be useful. One identified Guadalcanal incorrectly as “Guadalcanar.”36 Rivers were misidentified or inaccurately located. The sea charts forwarded by the navy were decades old and provided little detail about coral heads.
The marines put out word that they would like to interview anyone who had personal knowledge of the islands, and the New Zealanders managed to collect some of the refugees who had lived and worked in the Solomons before the Japanese invasion. Charles Widdy, a former Lever Brothers plantation director, made a crude hand-drawn sketch identifying from memory the position of ditches, swamps, hills, barbwire fences, grass plains, coconut palms, and rivers. But Widdy, like most Europeans, had stuck mainly to the coasts and knew little of the island’s interior. Even when his memory was reliable, the distances and scales were not much more than guesswork.
An aerial reconnaissance mission was plainly needed, and Colonel Merrill B. Twining arranged to fly over Savo Sound in an army B-17. Looking down from 3,000 feet, Twining noted and photographed an extensive network of coral reefs in the azure waters south of Tulagi. When the aircraft banked south to reconnoiter the north coast of Guadalcanal, Twining was relieved to see that the situation there was much better—deep blue water reached almost to the shoreline, and no Japanese defensive fortifications were visible along the beach. Dogged by three floatplane Zeros, the sturdy bomber escaped by dodging into a cloud bank, and returned safely to Port Moresby on New Guinea.
King’s stringent deadline required around-the-clock logistical preparations. The 1st Division’s supplies, ammunition, and heavy equipment had been embarked haphazardly in ships that had sailed from Norfolk, New Orleans, San Francisco, and San Diego. All had to be unloaded onto the Wellington quays, then sorted, repackaged, and reloaded for combat into smaller attack transports. The scale of the work was unprecedented.
Wellington, a graceful English city enclosed by green hills, offered the best port facilities in the SOPAC command area. Aotea Quay, the largest in the harbor, could accommodate five large vessels, and the waterfront was spacious enough to allow crates to be stacked and concealed under tarps. An early New Zealand winter brought cold rains and high winds. Cardboard boxes disintegrated under the driving rainstorms, reducing dry foodstuffs to an unsalvageable mush. Much of the division’s fresh eggs, meat, and dairy products had spoiled for lack of refrigeration.
Wellington stevedores were organized into a semi-militant union and ruled by a port director who barely disguised his hostility to the Americans. The wharf workers (“wharfies”) were always on the verge of striking and often refused to work for reasons that seemed obscure. Turning a deaf ear to suggestions that they work at a wartime pace, they spurned any references to the danger posed by Japan. They broke for morning tea, afternoon tea, and cigarettes, and laughed at the idea of working past the customary quitting time. They walked off whenever it began to rain, sometimes explaining that they had not brought their “Macintoshes.” The stoppages were usually of short duration, often less than an hour, but they were maddeningly frequent. In one twenty-four-hour period the wharfies walked off the job fourteen times. Most of the stevedoring was done by the marines themselves, who worked around the clock, under floodlights at night, and kept at it through driving rainstorms. One marine approvingly noted graffiti left on a Wellington wall: “All wharfies is bastards.”37
FROM THE START, PLANNING FOR the forthcoming expedition was encumbered by an awkward and unwieldy chain of command. Admiral Ghormley, to whom King had assigned principal responsibility for WATCHTOWER, wo
uld remain shorebound at his embryonic headquarters in Noumea. Ghormley gave seagoing command of the entire expeditionary force to Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, the carrier task force commander who had come south with the carriers Enterprise and Saratoga. (The third carrier, the Wasp, was en route from the United States, but required several days’ repairs in Tongatabu.)38 Fletcher’s carrier groups (Task Force 61) would soften up the beaches with a heavy schedule of aerial bombing and strafing attacks, and provide fighter cover to intercept any incoming Japanese aircraft. The cruisers and destroyers of Task Group 62.6, commanded by Rear Admiral Victor A. C. Crutchley of the Royal Australian Navy, would bombard the beaches prior to the landings. MacArthur’s air forces, operating from Port Moresby, would attack the Japanese airfield at Rabaul and the other satellite airfields in the region to suppress the inevitable enemy airstrikes on the invasion forces. Before the fleet set sail for the Solomons, it would rendezvous in the Fiji group and conduct a rehearsal landing on the island of Koro, in the southern Fijis. “Dog-Day” was set for August 7, approximately one week later than the original deadline established by King.
To command Operation WATCHTOWER’s amphibious forces (Task Force 62), King tapped a member of his own staff—Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, who had headed the navy’s War Plans Division since 1940. Turner was, like King, a brilliant but touchy character. A short, balding man with steel-rimmed glasses and heavy black eyebrows, Turner was habitually irritable and quick to raise his voice. “Balls!” was a favorite exclamation. Relentlessly driven, he expected colleagues and subordinates to match his pace. He had a keen analytical mind—even his critics acknowledged that much—but he did not take kindly to criticism even when it was offered in good faith. Rarely did Turner give fulsome praise for a job well done, and he was not slow to lay blame on others, especially when the culpability was arguably his own. He often lapsed into a hectoring, didactic style more suitable to a courtroom lawyer than an admiral. These qualities had earned him the nickname “Terrible Turner.”