by Ian W. Toll
FROM HIS HIDEOUT IN THE JUNGLE HILLS of northern Bougainville Island, coastwatcher Jack Read watched over the Buka Passage, a narrow and strategically vital seaway between Bougainville and Buka Island. A dark, sinewy, thickly bearded lieutenant of the Australian Royal Navy, Read had served for more than a decade in South Pacific postings as a patrol officer. His observation post lay directly in the flight path between Rabaul and Guadalcanal, and that alone made him a critical node in the coastwatching network. Constant movement was a precaution against being caught by the Japanese, who were hunting him diligently. On August 8, Read was preparing to move to a new post at a remote native village named Porapora. After a regularly scheduled radio check-in with station VIG (Port Moresby), he dialed in to a 7-megacycles frequency in hopes of picking up stray aviation communications. Immediately his ears were filled with radio chatter of the American carrier pilots. It did not take Read long to put the pieces together: the Americans had descended in force on the southeastern Solomons.
As he was pondering the significance of this development, one of his native scouts heard the drone of aircraft engines overhead. Through a break in the jungle canopy, a large formation of torpedo-armed G4Ms came into direct view, only a few hundred feet above their heads. Read counted twenty-four. He immediately got back on the teleradio, raised VIG, and blurted out in plain English: “Bombers now going southeast.”21
For the second consecutive day, a coastwatcher had provided vital forewarning of an incoming airstrike. It was a pattern that would continue throughout the Solomons campaign. Every day, or nearly so, the Japanese sent airstrikes down from Rabaul—and every day, Jack Read or Paul Mason spotted the southbound formations overhead and relayed the warning. Read was especially well situated for this purpose, because his vantage point at Porapora commanded a panoramic view of all of Buka Island to the north, the eastern sea channels leading down the “Slot” (the body of water between the double file of islands that formed the Solomons archipelago), and the skies through which Japanese aircraft must pass. “The whole lay before you as a huge mosaic of detail and tropical splendor,” he wrote in a 1943 report to the Australian navy.22 Moreover, Read’s lookout camp at Porapora was difficult to approach overland, and he had won the stalwart loyalty of the native tribesmen, who gave him advance warning of any Japanese search parties. He was never caught.
READ’S TRANSMISSION WAS PICKED UP at Pearl Harbor and relayed to the American commanders, who received it twenty-five minutes after it was broadcast. That provided ample time for Turner’s transports and screening ships to get underway for evasive action, and for the carrier planes to gain altitude so as to be in proper attacking position when the enemy arrived.
The twin-engine bombers, painted green with the rising-sun disk on their fuselages, made a shrewd approach. The low-flying formation approached from the north, over Indispensable Strait, concealing themselves in the radar shadow of the Nggela island group, then turned back over Sealark Channel to attack from the east. The American fighters were at 27,000 feet above Savo Island, far out of position to repel the attack. At precisely noon, the intruders were spotted by gunners on the cruiser Australia. They were roaring in over the reefs, just 20 to 30 feet above the sea. Richard Tregaskis, watching from Guadalcanal, saw “flat sinister shapes, prowling low over the water, darting among the transports.”23 The fleet was wheeling and circling in anticipation of the attack. As the enemy planes came into close range, the heavy repeating concussions of the big antiaircraft guns were joined by the higher rattle of the shorter-range weapons.
All but five of the Japanese planes blew up, broke into pieces, cartwheeled, or dived into the sea. Only three managed to launch a torpedo, and only one of those struck home—the destroyer Jarvis was hit near the bow. (She limped away and was later sunk by a second air attack, resulting in the loss of her entire crew.) American Grummans, diving from high altitude, chased the survivors as they withdrew to the west. A stricken G4M crashed into the upper deck of one of the transports, the George F. Elliott. The ship’s marines had disembarked, so casualties were limited, but she burned fiercely from stem to stern, and trailed a plume of thick black smoke into the sky.
Two hours later, as the remnants of the flight passed over northern Bougainville, Jack Read counted only eight survivors.
VAST QUANTITIES OF MUNITIONS, EQUIPMENT, and supplies remained to be brought ashore. A thousand drums of aviation gasoline for Gavutu, 1,500 drums for Guadalcanal; small arms and machine-gun ammunition; aviation lubricating oil, engine spares, radio equipment, water distillation equipment, and water cans. Semaphore flags, Aldis lamps, smoke signaling devices, binoculars, typewriters, pencils, message blanks. Sixty days’ rations for all troops.24 Crates and drums had been landed haphazardly on Beach Red, and the shoreline was so congested with unsorted supplies that General Vandegrift had to ask Turner to suspend landing operations. With no advanced port facilities available, everything had to be transferred into small craft, manhandled up the beach, and sorted into supply dumps. Two days of air attacks had left barely a scratch on the fleet, but the recurring threats had required Turner’s ships to maneuver evasively for hours on end, during which time nothing could be unloaded.
The danger of beach congestion had been anticipated, but in the rush to plan and execute WATCHTOWER, the commanders had never faced it squarely. The landing craft were poor substitutes for proper cargo lighters. Navy beachmasters had neither the training nor the experience to do the job properly—but even if they had, there were not enough laborers. Turner’s operation plan specified that “Shore Party Commanders will call upon troop commanders in their immediate vicinity for assistance in handling supplies from landing beaches to dumps. Prisoners and stragglers will be used to assist in this task.”25 But no marine unit had been detailed to the task in advance, and the navy boat crews were not numerous enough to do the work. More hands were needed on the beaches.
The chaos prompted mutual recriminations. Citing doctrine and precedent, the marines insisted that the commander of troops ashore should be authorized to put a stop to unloading if the beachhead was not yet prepared to receive supplies. Turner blamed the marines for bringing a “vast amount of unnecessary impediments” and for failing to provide labor for the unloading. “The Marines have got to do this,” he wrote a colonel commanding the 7th Marines. “Ships’ crews can’t run boats and winches, operate the ship, man guns, furnish personnel to handle boat traffic, repairs and evacuation at the beach and at the same time furnish unloading details.”26 Navy landing boat crews offered some barbed comments to a number of marines on Beach Red who were neither fighting nor working.
Vandegrift was unwilling to pull combat troops back off the perimeter, but Turner (who planned to land forces on Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands) refused his request for a replacement battalion to provide beach labor. Not until the morning of August 9 was the problem addressed with the simple expedient of dropping supplies farther down the beach. Ammunition, crates, shells, and other materials were simply stacked among the palm trees, left for the marines to sort out in good time.
ADMIRAL MIKAWA, NEWLY APPOINTED COMMANDER of the Eighth Fleet, had arrived in Rabaul little more than a week before the invasion of Guadalcanal. Japanese command arrangements in the theater were fragmented and illogical. The navy’s Eighth Base Force had responsibility for garrison defense of New Britain and adjoining territories, while the Twenty-Fifth Air Flotilla controlled all air operations, but a cold rivalry divided them and rendered any effective cooperation unlikely. The Seventeenth Army staff, also headquartered at Rabaul, was heavily engaged in operations against Port Moresby on New Guinea.
No one seemed to welcome the arrival of Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet, as all of the suitable administrative buildings and barracks in Rabaul had already been occupied. Mikawa decided to station most of his cruisers at the rear base of Kavieng, on New Ireland, where they would be less vulnerable to Allied air attack. Mikawa, a cerebral and soft-spoken officer, had served as Chuichi Nag
umo’s second in command through the first six months of the war. He had commanded the battleships and cruisers of Kido Butai (the carrier striking force) and had witnessed firsthand the disaster at Midway, which would weigh heavily on his mind in the action to come. On July 30, he broke out his flag above a tumbledown house in Rabaul township. Lacking even a toilet, it was far beneath his station, but he had bigger problems.
On August 7, immediately after receiving word of the American invasion in the lower Solomons, Mikawa mustered his surface naval forces for a counterstrike. The Seventeenth Army was unwilling to provide reinforcements for Guadalcanal—the army staff took the view that the Americans could be ejected with ease, and in good time—so Mikawa pulled together a pitifully small force of 315 riflemen and “Japanese marines” to be embarked on a transport. (It was subsequently torpedoed by U.S. submarine S-38 off Cape St. George, New Ireland.) The Chokai put into Rabaul to embark the admiral and his staff, and then put to sea at 2:30 p.m., in company with the light cruisers Tenryu and Yubari and the destroyer Yunagi. They rendezvoused with Cruiser Division 6—Aoba, Kinugasa, Kako, and Furutaka—off Cape St. George shortly before nightfall.27
Mikawa intended a surprise nighttime raid into Savo Sound to destroy Turner’s vulnerable transports and cargo ships. Though the eight vessels in his column had not previously operated together, each ship and its crew were superbly outfitted, armed, and trained for night surface combat. Since the early 1920s, Japanese naval planners had envisioned a scenario for war with the United States that would require Zen-Gen Sakusen, “attrition operations.”28 Assuming that a naval war would be decided by a Mahanian clash of battleships in waters south of Japan, the planned “attrition operations”—submarine, air, and night torpedo attacks—were intended to sink American battleships as they advanced westward across the central Pacific. Night torpedo strikes by high-speed cruiser-destroyer forces (the Senken Butai, or “Advanced Force”) were held to be the most essential component of Zen-Gen Sakusen. The Japanese had devoted intense efforts to developing the weaponry, doctrine, and training of Senken Butai for these all-important night torpedo attacks.29 The fruits of their labors included first-rate night optical rangefinders and spotting sights, the skillful use of night illumination tactics (including star shells, searchlights, and flares dropped by cruiser floatplanes), and the exceptional aptitude of Japanese lookouts, chosen for their superior eyesight. In addition, the Type 93 “Long Lance” oxygen torpedo, which was 24 feet long and weighed more than a ton, carried a 1,100-pound high-explosive warhead and could travel at 50 knots to a range of 24,000 yards, or at lesser speed to a range of 48,000 yards. The Long Lances would inflict appalling punishment on the Allied fleet in the night to come, and in many more night actions in the ensuing campaign for Guadalcanal.
Reasoning that a simple formation would reduce the risk of collisions or confusion, Mikawa arrayed his seven cruisers and one destroyer into two columns. He placed his heavy cruisers (including his flagship, the Chokai) in the van and his destroyer in the rear.
Having witnessed the annihilation of four carriers by air attack at Midway two months earlier, Mikawa knew his planned dash into the Savo-Guadalcanal area might prove disastrous. Two or more American carriers were known to be in the vicinity, and if their air groups found him in daylight, they might destroy his ships at their leisure. Mikawa would manage the odds by traversing the last 200 miles of the run under cover of darkness, and then get away to the west before dawn. But he could not avoid being sighted farther up the Slot. Allied reconnaissance flights, including a B-17 and two Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Hudson bombers, passed overhead on the morning of August 8. Though Mikawa did not know it, his force had also been reconnoitered by an American submarine, S-38.
Passing the island of Choiseul at 4:00 p.m., Mikawa signaled his squadron to increase speed to 24 knots for the final leg of the approach. He planned to pass south of Savo Island, shell and torpedo the transports lying off Lunga Point, turn north and attack the ships lying off Tulagi, and retreat to the north of Savo Island.30 He hoped to be at least 120 miles up the Slot by first light.
AT DUSK, ADMIRAL CRUTCHLEY’S CRUISERS and destroyers maneuvered into their night deployment positions north and south of Savo Island. In conformity to Turner’s plan of operations, they divided into two groups, each built around three heavy cruisers, to guard one of two possible western entrances to the sound. Two destroyers, the Blue and the Ralph Talbot, were positioned as radar pickets farther west. The main eastern entrance to Savo Sound, Sealark Channel, was deemed a less likely route of attack. It was left in care of the light cruisers Hobart and San Juan.
At eight that evening, Turner summoned all senior commanders afloat and ashore to his flagship, the transport McCawley, for a late-night conference. Though Admiral Crutchley could have traveled to the McCawley by whaleboat, he elected to take his flagship Australia out of the southern line. In departing, he left Captain Howard D. Bode of the Chicago in command of the southern group. The northern group commanders were not informed of the admiral’s absence.
On the McCawley, Turner shared unwelcome news. He had copied a radio signal from Fletcher to Ghormley asking permission to withdraw the aircraft carriers to the east. Ghormley had assented. Having previously committed to stay for two days (less than half the time Turner thought necessary to unload), Fletcher was now pulling out eight hours early. Turner was dismayed, and so was the normally mild-mannered Vandegrift. Without air protection, Turner’s transports and cargo ships would be vulnerable to the inevitable Japanese airstrikes on August 9. He believed that he had no alternative but to move the rest of the fleet out at sunrise the next day. When Vandegrift insisted that he needed more supplies, Turner agreed to leave the cargo ships behind for another day of unloading. But the transports and warships must leave at dawn.
At no point in the conference did Turner refer to an approaching Japanese fleet. He had received spotty and contradictory sighting reports, and apparently did not fit the pieces together. The two RAAF Hudson bombers flying from Milne Bay, southeastern New Guinea, had seen Mikawa’s force that morning, but their reports had given different headings. One had identified two seaplane tenders in a column of ships on a course of 100 degrees. That misidentification—two seaplane tenders—led Turner astray. The admiral assumed they would anchor in Rekata Bay off Santa Isabel Island, about 200 miles northwest, and launch seaplane torpedo attacks the following day. Turner had also assumed (mistakenly) that Consolidated PBY Catalinas (flying boats) based in Espiritu Santo had searched up the Slot that afternoon. Poor weather had scrubbed those flights, but Admiral McCain had failed to inform Turner that the searches had not been completed. For that reason, perhaps, Turner had not ordered Crutchley’s cruiser planes to be dispatched to reconnoiter the same area.
The various communication failures and conflicting and erroneous reports seemed to have left Turner with a wholly unwarranted sense of invulnerability, at least until daylight brought the renewed threat of air attack.
It was a dark and moonless night, warm and humid, with mists hanging low across the sea. Passing rain showers repeatedly shrouded the area north of Savo Island, so the northern and southern screening groups could rarely see one another. Among the marines on Guadalcanal, rumors circulated that a major naval counterattack was impending. That impression multiplied at about 1:40 a.m., when the drone of a small aircraft engine was heard above the patchy cloud ceiling over Lunga Point. An air officer at the 1st Division command post correctly deduced that it was a cruiser floatplane, “and not ours.”31 Lieutenant Charles P. Clarke, officer of the deck on the Quincy, warned the executive officer that the strange planes must be enemy, as all Allied cruiser planes had been recovered earlier in the evening. But the executive disagreed and declined to awaken Captain Samuel N. Moore. Clarke later wrote that the brusque dismissal “was such that I was made to feel as if I were a jittery school boy.”32 (According to later reports by navy lookouts, one cruiser plane was sighted with running ligh
ts on, and therefore assumed friendly.) Only one ship broadcast a warning, but it apparently did not get through to Turner.
The scout dropped several parachute flares over Lunga Roads. They descended slowly through the overcast, emitting an intense greenish-yellow light that illuminated the entire transport fleet. A surge of false contact reports circulated through the marine lines. Some believed that the enemy was actually landing on the beach, and intermittent small-arms fire was directed at American patrol craft offshore. Then the engines faded as the planes headed west, and the flares came to rest on the sea.
The screening group crews had been at Readiness Condition One for forty-eight hours, and collective exhaustion was taking its toll. Rumors and bogus contact reports had continued to circulate without respite, and the contradictory and phantom sightings gradually eroded readiness. The cruisers ran in a monotonous oval pattern, crisscrossing the passages north and south of Savo Island. At nightfall on August 8, the alert level was downgraded to Condition Two, allowing half the watch to turn in and get some badly needed sleep in their bunks. The captain of one of the Allied cruisers wrote, “The enemy can reach this position at any time in the mid-watch,” then went to sleep.33 Physical and mental fatigue had exposed the fleet to precisely the sort of surprise attack that Mikawa was preparing to spring on them.