by Ian W. Toll
In preparing operational plans for WATCHTOWER, Turner would have liked to begin with a blank page, but he did not reach New Zealand until mid-July, only a week before the fleet must ship out to meet King’s deadline. He was therefore obliged to work backward from the draft plan prepared by Vandegrift’s staff.
The task force sortied from Wellington on July 22, a long column of transports and cargo vessels under the protection of cruisers and destroyers. A passage of four days through calm seas brought them to the appointed rendezvous, 367 miles south of Fiji. Each ship lay wallowing on the swell, engines throttled back. As the afternoon wore on, new masts and superstructures peaked over the horizon in every direction. Veteran sailors pointed and identified ships by type or name: cruisers, destroyers, transports, cargo ships, minesweepers, fleet oilers, and (most encouraging to the marines) the big boxlike profiles of aircraft carriers. Grumman fighter planes patrolled the skies above. Near the carrier Enterprise was an even rarer sight—a battleship, the North Carolina. “There will never be a feeling like the feeling we had when we first made out a task force coming up over the horizon with an aircraft carrier and supporting cruisers and destroyers,” recalled Major Justice Chambers of the 1st Raider Battalion. For the first time since leaving the United States, the marines “realized that whatever we were going to do we were going to have a lot of friends with us.”39
For the good of secrecy and stealth, no one who was not directly involved in planning WATCHTOWER had been permitted to know what was afoot. Scuttlebutt had held that the 1st Division would relieve a garrison of New Zealanders at Fiji.40 But here was a vast and majestic display of seapower—a fleet of eighty-two ships, the largest yet assembled in the Pacific War. It could only mean that a major combat operation was at hand. “All over the sea and as far out as eye could reach the armada mottled the water,” an Enterprise pilot recalled. “Everybody aboard became excited at the prospect of being part of what looked like the first big American offensive of the war.”41
The fleet converged on the little island of Koro, where Turner had arranged for a dress rehearsal. The southern beaches of Koro were pounded by cruiser shells; Grumman F4F fighters roared overhead in a pantomime of engaging and shooting down Japanese Zeros; carrier dive-bombers hurtled down from high altitude and planted hundred-pound bombs on locations designated as enemy positions. Koro, they soon discovered, was unlike Guadalcanal in one critical respect. At low tide, shallow coral heads blocked the approach of the Higgins landing boats. The first wave of boats, filled with fully equipped marines, ran aground and the propellers jammed. Because he did not have boats to spare, Turner cancelled the landings.
On the afternoon of July 27, Admiral Fletcher summoned the task force commanders to a conference on his flagship, the carrier Saratoga. Rough seas made for difficult and even dangerous ship-to-ship transitions by boat or breeches buoy. Turner, on the destroyer Dewey, came alongside the looming shape of the big carrier. Vandegrift, accompanied by several 1st Division officers, came on the destroyer Hull. Admiral McCain, while hauling himself up a heaving ladder, was drenched by a flood of spoiled milk and garbage spewing from a waste chute. The brass convened in Fletcher’s wardroom. Notably, Ghormley did not attend the conference—the COMSOPAC was represented by his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan.
According to several participants, Admiral Fletcher was in a foul temper and opened the meeting with a distinctly unconstructive tone. He cleared the room of all officers below the rank of admiral or general. Vandegrift judged Fletcher to be “nervous and tired,” and ill informed about the details of WATCHTOWER. The admiral seemed to think the entire operation was a misadventure, and “quickly let us know he did not think it would succeed.”42 All could agree that the operation had been rushed, and lamented the lack of time for careful and thorough preparation. There were not even sufficient copies of Fletcher’s and Turner’s operational orders and annexes, and many fleet staff officers and ship captains would have to work from notes.
Discussion ranged over details of logistics, refueling, schedules of airstrikes on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, the occupation of the Santa Cruz island group, and the planned relief of the marines by army garrison troops. The discussions took an ugly turn when the subject changed to the controversial issue of air protection for the landing operations. Turner estimated that four or five days were needed to unload equipment, ammunition, and supplies onto the beachheads. Fletcher tersely replied that he intended to keep his aircraft carriers in the vicinity for only two. A tense debate brought from Fletcher a begrudging concession: the carriers would stay for three days. Beyond “Dog-Day plus two,” Turner’s amphibious force would have to manage without air cover. With that, Fletcher dismissed the conference, and the commanders parted on edgy terms. As the marines descended into the boat that would carry them back to their ship, a staff officer found Vandegrift “deeply disturbed and in no mood to talk.”43
THE PASSAGE TO THE SOLOMONS was pleasingly uneventful.44 The combined task forces, zigzagging to thwart enemy submarines, shaped a westerly course north of New Caledonia and into the Coral Sea, leaving Guadalcanal well to starboard. The seas were calm, the breezes mild, and a low cloud ceiling sheltered the fleet from Japanese reconnaissance planes. “It didn’t seem like war at all to me at first,” said Roland Smoot, captain of the destroyer Monssen. “We cruised those beautiful southern waters just as casually and unconcerned as though we were going to a Sunday school picnic.”45
On the transports, marines cleaned and oiled their rifles, machine guns, and cartridges; they belted ammunition, sighted along their rifles, sharpened their bayonets and knives. They scattered their gear over the decks, took inventory, and repacked. They secured their packs, with bed rolls folded carefully on top, and stood them in rows along the bulkheads. Their personal belongings went into sea bags to be entrusted to the crews of the ships. Each man was to carry six cans of C rations, enough to feed him for two days. One hundred rounds of ammunition in a cartridge belt, one hundred more in a bandoleer. Two grenades. A pickaxe or shovel (one or the other, as he chose). Two canteens, a gas mask, a first aid kit, a bed roll, a poncho, a mosquito net, a mess kit.46 To pass the time, they sang, smoked, played cards, or wrote home. At night, they slept in hot, dirty holds, in bunks four or five tiers high. To escape the heat, some of the men curled up on deck or bedded down in a lifeboat.
On August 5, with the three carrier groups leading the column, the fleet turned northward for the final leg of its approach. That afternoon, the weather cleared and the sun beat down for several hours. But their luck held: no Japanese snoopers appeared overhead, and in the mid-afternoon they entered another frontal area, and were blanketed by dense overcast and intermittent rainsqualls. On the following afternoon, Dog-Day minus one, Fletcher’s three carrier groups turned away to take up their position south of the weather coast of Guadalcanal. Turner’s amphibious force continued north toward Cheetah Shoals, off the mountainous island’s westernmost point.
At 11:05 p.m., the northbound fleet divided into two double columns, separated by 1,000 yards. The first (Transport Group XRAY) turned east to hug the north coast of Guadalcanal; the second (Transport Group YOKE) proceeded north of the stratovolcanic cone of Savo Island and then turned east toward Tulagi and the Nggela group. The night was dark, the sea calm. Not even a lit cigarette was permitted on deck. A crescent moon rose above the horizon in the east.47 Lieutenant Herbert L. Merillat recalled “tension in the air and complete silence save for the steady throbbing of engines, the gentle splash of ships’ prows cutting through the water, and the hushed movements of men on the open decks.”48 The cruisers and destroyers surged ahead at 27 knots, fast enough to throw salt spray over the rails. At that speed the warships would show “bone in teeth,” a long white bow wave that could be seen even on dark nights. Would Japanese lookouts detect them and raise the alarm? No shore guns opened fire; nothing stirred along the shore. “It was a most prosaic type of thing,” said Captain Smoot. “We had ac
hieved complete surprise.”49
From the rails of the transports, the marines studied the looming shape of Guadalcanal. It was a high black jagged mass, with contours barely distinguishable against the backdrop of a slightly lighter sky. They could see little in the predawn darkness, but their nostrils took in the rich, fetid odor of damp vegetation. With the first flush of dawn, they gradually discerned the rugged bluish-green mountains, the heavily forested ridgelines, the light patches of open plain, and the serpentine columns of trees and foliage that followed the rivers down to the coast. Binoculars swept over the native villages just beyond the beaches—little clusters of fiber roofs and garden plots. Every few miles along the shore, a river delta protruded to form a point. One of these marked the mouth of the Lunga River, just west of “Beach Red,” where the marines would put ashore. A few miles inland was their main objective, the nearly completed airfield.
The marines had been warned to expect a bloody fight on Beach Red. Those who survived the initial assault would have to fight their way inland, storming across drainage ditches that might double as trenches, fording rivers under fire, and advancing through fields of razor-sharp kunai grass. At every stage they would encounter thousands of well-armed and fanatical Japanese. A marine lieutenant told the journalist Richard Tregaskis that he expected one in four men to die in the first wave.50 Even so, spirits were high. Private William Rogal felt “a knot in my stomach, but it was no greater or more intense than the knot associated with stage fright.” More than death or injury, Rogal feared disgrace, or “showing the white feather.”51 William Manchester, the marine private who would earn literary fame as a memoirist and biographer, wrote that “vitality surged through you like a powerful drug, even though the idea of death held no attraction to you.”52 More than anything, he just wanted off the filthy, crowded transport that had been his universe for more than a month. A reserve captain who had been a grocery wholesaler in Boston said he felt “no more nervous than if I were being sent out to do a tough job in civilian life—you know, like trying to sell a big order, when there’s a lot of sales resistance.”53
At 6:13 a.m., as veins of gray light spread from east to west through the overcast, the heavy cruiser Quincy trained her main battery on Lunga Point and opened fire. The blast force of her 8-inch guns punched craters into the sea alongside the ship. Heavy concussions reverberated across Savo Sound and echoed back from the hills on the surrounding islands. To Colonel Twining it was “an unforgettable moment of history”—the first Allied counterinvasion of the war, the first step on the long bloody road to Tokyo.54 Four cruisers and six destroyers joined the Quincy, their greenish-yellow muzzle flashes lighting up the sea and the ships and the hills and ridgelines of the surrounding islands. Red tracer lines arced toward the shore, and powerful explosions backlit the palms along the beach. One shell found a fuel dump in the village of Kukum, just west of Lunga Point. The result was a tremendous detonation, a sheet of flame a hundred feet high, and a tower of oily black smoke. Lookouts on the light cruiser San Juan, in the northern fire support group, opened fire on Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo at a range of 2,000 yards. Within two minutes the waterfronts were reduced to smoking wreckage.
Five minutes after the first salvo, the ships’ guns fell abruptly silent. That was the cue for the Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, launched from the carriers before dawn, to begin their initial strafing runs over the unfinished airstrip. Red tracer lines reached down from the .50-caliber guns and ricocheted back into the sky, forming a shallow luminescent “V” pattern.55 Sixteen Grummans of the Wasp’s Fighting Squadron 71 (VF-71) flew low over the bay south of Nggela and riddled the seaplanes moored off Tulagi and Tanambogo with .50-caliber incendiary fire.56 Several of the enemy’s Kawanishi flying boats and floatplane fighters were transformed into floating infernos.57 Turning back for a second strafing run, VF-71 laid waste to landing craft, fuel barges, and machine-gun emplacements. SBD Dauntless dive-bombers planted 1,000-pound bombs on assigned targets along the Guadalcanal shoreline. As the bombers pulled out of their dives and turned west to return to the carriers, the cruisers and destroyers opened up again.
From the McCawley, General Vandegrift and Admiral Turner inspected the scene through binoculars. The landing beaches were marked by colored smoke pots that had been dropped by cruiser floatplanes. On Guadalcanal, plumes of smoke were uncoiling along a three-mile length of shoreline between the Lunga and Tenaru Rivers. The naval guns and carrier planes had done their work—Japanese buildings, barracks, radio stations, wharves, camps, warehouses, and antiaircraft batteries were burning brightly. There were no muzzle flashes ashore, or any enemy troops to be seen. Cruiser planes scouting the island from overhead reported no enemy activity. Even the natives seemed to have fled into the bush. Vandegrift and his staff officers noted the imposing mass of Mount Austen a few miles behind Lunga Point. Their maps had identified it as a “grassy knoll” of uncertain elevation. But it evidently stood more than 1,000 feet above the surrounding plains. They would have to pull in their lines and exclude it from their perimeter.2
“H-Hour,” the landing on Tulagi, had been set for 0800; “Zero-Hour,” the landing on Guadalcanal, was to be half an hour later. At 0630 Turner passed the word to begin lowering boats. Each craft was lowered away to the harsh clank of chains running through davits. The coxswains circled cautiously, engines muffled at low rpm, exhaust clouds wafting across the sea, and awaited the signal flag that would summon them to return and embark troops. A few minutes before seven, the marines began going down the cargo nets. They took care to grasp the vertical lines (not the horizontal ones, where fingers might be crushed under another man’s boot). Heavy gear was rigged with quick-release straps, a precaution against drowning should they fall into the sea. Each marine stepped into the flat bottom of a Higgins boat and took a seat. When a boat was full, the coxswain pulled away and began to circle. Conditions were near perfect—the sea was as calm as glass. Cargo nets were lowered on both sides of the transports, allowing for simultaneous port and starboard disembarkation. There were no overturned boats, no casualties, and no delays. After the comedy of errors of Koro, the smooth execution of the landing operations came as a welcome surprise—Major Donald Dickson called it “one of the slickest things I have ever seen.”58
At 7:41 a.m., the first wave of boats passed the line of departure (formed between two destroyers) and opened their throttles. The marines crouched down, heads below the gunwales. Spray flew over the sides and into their faces. The small American flag at the stern of each craft snapped briskly in the wind. A sailor watching from the Vincennes thought that “it looked like a Newport boat race with our flags flying from the sterns headed into the beach. It was thrilling to watch such an undertaking, and still there wasn’t any artillery fire or anything of that sort, and we were beginning to get a little apprehensive because we knew it was bound to come sooner or later.”59 The destroyers continued raking the shore with their 5-inch guns, then fell silent as the first boats scraped onto the sand. The marines clambered over the sides and trudged through the surf. They met no resistance at all. From Kukum to the mouth of the Tenaru, the beaches and adjacent coconut groves were apparently deserted. A white star shell shot up into the sky, signaling an unopposed landing.
When the third and fourth waves arrived later that morning, the beachhead was weirdly serene. An occasional rifle shot was heard in the distance, but no concentrated and sustained bursts that would suggest a firefight. On the incoming boats, marines lined up in leisurely fashion; one by one they leapt from the bow, over the surf, to avoid soaking their boots. Men were relaxing in the shade, smoking cigarettes, or trying to open coconuts with their knives or bayonets. A few had even stripped down to their underwear and plunged into the surf for a swim. Native huts with thatched roofs were being commandeered as shore-party command posts, and signs nailed to palm trees indicated where cargo handlers should stack and sort incoming equipment and provisions. A medical tent had been set up under a Red Cros
s banner, but at 10:30 a.m. the only casualty was a young man who had cut his hand while trying to open a coconut with a machete.60
It all seemed too easy, even a bit ominous. Did the Japanese hope to draw them into an ambush?
Chapter Two
AWAKENED BY THE NAVAL BARRAGE, THE JAPANESE ON TULAGI HAD been caught completely by surprise. Captain Shigetoshi Miyazaki, commander of the seaplane base, fired an initial radio warning to Rabaul. As the first landing boats scraped ashore on what the marines had designated Beach Blue, he and his small force of Special Naval Landing Force troops withdrew into the island’s hilly interior, but not before sending a final spirited broadcast: “We will defend to the last man. Pray for our success.”1
Rabaul, 650 miles to the northwest, was headquarters of the Eighth Fleet, commanded by the newly arrived Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa—and of the Twenty-Fifth Air Flotilla, a land-based aviation command with about ninety operational aircraft, including bombers, reconnaissance planes, and Zero fighters. With two working airfields and two more in reserve, Rabaul was the axis of Japanese airpower in the region, the backstop to smaller satellite airfields at Kavieng, Lae, Salamaua, Buin, and Buka. It offered a superb natural harbor, a flooded caldera more than a mile in diameter. But the Japanese conquerors had little affection for the place. It was a hot, dusty, primitive township, disturbed by frequent earthquakes and choked with pumice and gray-black ash from the volcano Tavurvur, whose imposing black cone dominated the view to the south. Admiral Mikawa’s headquarters was in a cramped, dilapidated colonial building. Enlisted men were quartered in crude barracks and fed mostly barley rice and miso soup, with open-pit cesspools for toilets. The best thing about Rabaul, according to an officer stationed there, was a bath house erected by the Japanese over the hot springs at the base of Tavurvur. Nothing boosted Japanese spirits like a hot bath.