Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  While O’Bannon and Fletcher hunted German U-boats in the Atlantic during their shakedown, over in the Pacific, Operation Watchtower, as the military designated the August 1942 Guadalcanal landings, suffered a series of setbacks. Meant to halt the Japanese thrust toward Australia and New Zealand and to establish a base from which the United States could eventually launch its own offensive, US naval and Marine forces instead scraped for their lives.

  In the Battle of Savo Island, in early August, the United States Navy suffered the worst defeat in its history when it lost four cruisers and more than 1,000 dead to a surprise Japanese night surface engagement, leaving Vice Admiral Ghormley only one capital ship and one carrier, Hornet, remaining in the South Pacific. Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift’s Marines maintained a slim hold on Guadalcanal, centered on the vital fighter strip at Henderson Field, but the battle’s outcome would depend upon which side could rush in enough reinforcements and supplies to withstand the other.

  Some Marines on Guadalcanal compared the situation to that of their Marine compatriots who had had to surrender at Wake Island and Guam. Hanson Baldwin wrote, “We are, indeed, fighting a major war on a shoestring,” and he noted that the fighting to date indicated “that the Japanese will never quit until they are killed or utterly crushed.” He concluded that action off Guadalcanal “has developed into a battle for the Southern Pacific. The battle is a sprawling, intermittent sea, air and land action in which the stakes are high—perhaps eventual victory itself.”29

  Optimism infested the other side. By early May leading Japanese militarists concluded that the United States, badly reeling from its losses at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, could not mount a major counteroffensive until at least the second half of 1943. The Japanese thrust southward toward the Solomons seemed to be progressing as they had hoped, and it appeared that before long, the Japanese would solidify their position in the region and threaten US supply lines to Australia.

  A headline in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun in August 1942 proclaimed, “Japan Leads the World,” and an official boasted, “Soon we will be calling the sea between New Guinea and Japan the Sea of Great East Asia—the Mediterranean of the Far East.”30 Captain Hideo Hiraide, the Japanese navy’s spokesman and also a popular radio personality, went so far as to announce in one broadcast that Japan was planning a naval review off New York Harbor.

  Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki of the Navy’s general staff tempered his enthusiasm after the blows inflicted by US surface and air forces at the May Battle of the Coral Sea and the June calamity at Midway, where US aircraft sent four Japanese carriers to the ocean’s bottom. “Unless we destroy them promptly,” he wrote on August 7, the day American Marines landed at Guadalcanal, “they will attempt to recapture Rabaul, not to speak of frustrating our Moresby operation. Our operations in that area will become extremely unfavorable. We should, therefore, make every effort to drive the enemy down first, even by putting off the Indian Ocean operation.”31

  The focused attention to Guadalcanal handed the advantage to the Japanese and created a desperate situation for the crews of O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas. “Danger lurked at every turn,” MacDonald said of their arrival in the South Pacific.32

  CHAPTER 2

  INITIATION AT GUADALCANAL

  The officers and crews knew enough about the Pacific war to realize the Navy rushed them to waters dominated by their foe. The Japanese had already sunk three aircraft carriers, four cruisers, and an alarming number of destroyers. Risks had to be taken if they were to reverse the situation and prevent the Japanese from dominating in the South Pacific, and risks meant death and injury.

  O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas were tossed into the action as soon as they arrived in the South Pacific. For much of October the new arrivals escorted transports and other vessels along the main supply route, six hundred miles from Espiritu Santo to Guadalcanal and the nearby island of Tulagi. The task, which called for shepherding supply ships across waters heavily infested with Japanese submarines, was so dangerous that American sailors christened the area “Torpedo Junction.”

  “Dawn quarters is a lot more serious in this area—no laggards at all,” Watertender Wing, aboard Nicholas, entered in his diary for October 1, about escorting the transport Formalhaut across prime hunting grounds for enemy submarines that lay in wait for the shipping they knew would be ferrying men and supplies to the United States Marines on Guadalcanal.1 The next day, three days before O’Bannon and Fletcher entered Noumea, New Caledonia, one thousand miles to the south, Lieutenant Commander William D. Brown, skipper of Nicholas, guided his destroyer and Formalhaut into Lengo Channel, the southern entrance to Savo Sound, which separated Guadalcanal from Tulagi. While the crew had safely traversed Torpedo Junction, they now operated off Guadalcanal, within range of Japanese aircraft and surface ships.

  In those early weeks on Guadalcanal, both sides engaged in a frantic race to build up their forces. A pattern became maddeningly familiar to every destroyer crew operating in those dangerous waters. The skippers maintained Condition Two, with half the guns manned and half the crew at battle stations, while escorting transports to the Solomons, and upped the vigilance to Condition One, with all stations and guns manned, when nearing Guadalcanal and while guarding the transports as they unloaded their cargoes. If enemy aircraft appeared, the destroyers moved the transports to sea while US fighters from Henderson Field engaged the Japanese, and returned to Guadalcanal to resume unloading when the aerial battles terminated.

  Three times in the next two days Nicholas and Formalhaut had to retreat from the area due to enemy air attacks, but Formalhaut delivered her entire complement. Once finished, the two ships turned south, where they again entered the dangerous waters of Torpedo Junction for the jaunt to Noumea, New Caledonia. Both ships safely arrived at their destination, but instead of relaxing, of necessity Brown and his crew shifted their attention to the next of many transports waiting to be escorted to Guadalcanal.

  The unrelenting state of readiness taxed officers and crew. Day and night, cooks made available coffee, sandwiches, and soup, and even delivered the items to crew manning their posts. The crews often felt as if they worked on gigantic yo-yos as their destroyers ricocheted from harbor to harbor to keep supplies and reinforcements flowing to the island. The destroyers zigzagged north to Guadalcanal, south to Espiritu Santo, east to Samoa, southwest to Noumea, back to the Solomons, again to Noumea, and so on. Destroyermen prefer offensive action, but their ability to shepherd convoys across Torpedo Junction, to sweep the harbor entrances at Espiritu Santo and Noumea, and to search for enemy submarines took precedence over what MacDonald and most officers considered the primary role of a destroyer—launching torpedoes against enemy ships in a surface action. Their desire to operate in an all-destroyer group and so engage the Japanese had to wait.

  Complicating matters was that at the same time, the Japanese engaged in their own rush of men and matériel to Guadalcanal. The aptly labeled Tokyo Express operated most nights in late summer and fall. Normally consisting of one or two cruisers escorted by a handful of destroyers, the convoys departed the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul, seven hundred miles to the northwest, in the afternoon and entered Savo Sound, to Guadalcanal’s northwest, two nights later, where they bombarded Henderson Field and Marine lines before dropping off supplies for their own forces ashore. After completing their delivery, the ships scurried northwest before daylight to be out of range of US aircraft operating during the day.

  With the Japanese gone, the United States Navy took over by day. Wilkinson and Cole timed their arrivals to enter Lengo Channel east of the Marine perimeter around 5:00 a.m. to reach Lunga Point by daylight. While the destroyers searched the waters for enemy submarines and the skies for Japanese aircraft, the transports unloaded ammunition, rations, construction materials, and other items to Vandegrift’s forces ashore. At dusk they retired south near San Cristobal Island, not far from Guadalcanal, and waited until the early morning, at wh
ich time they returned to Guadalcanal for another day of unloading.

  Most crews hated pulling away from the island at night, which exposed the Marines on Guadalcanal to terrifying bombardments, but the Navy had to protect its sparse resources. Vandegrift complained about the torturous nighttime bombings, but Ghormley did not yet feel strong enough to challenge the enemy at night.

  “I’ll never forget the humiliation of slinking down Lengo Channel each evening in October and letting the Japs come in at night and bombard the shit out of the Marines,” said Lieutenant John Everett of the Nicholas. “Americans are not accustomed to having the shit kicked out of them; it was very hard to take.”2

  It was difficult to swallow back home, too. In the New York Times, Charles Hurd described the actions off Guadalcanal as “the game of hide-and-seek being played by the opposing air and naval forces around Guadalcanal.” Hanson Baldwin cautioned his readers only three days after O’Bannon and Fletcher had escorted Copahee to Guadalcanal that “the news from the Solomons of the last few days again showed that this campaign is likely to be bitter, unrelenting and protracted and will probably continue to involve a considerable portion of the naval strength of both sides.”3

  “I Daily Hoped for Relief”

  Confident of victory, the Japanese poured in fresh commanders, troops, and supplies for a mid-October push. On October 9, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, a brilliant tactician with experience in the jungles of New Guinea, arrived to direct the offensive. Within a week four thousand Japanese reinforcements joined the forces already on Guadalcanal. The Japanese expected to attack on October 22, by which time almost seventy ships from the Combined Fleet, including four aircraft carriers, would have arrived to keep Nimitz’s fleet at a distance. Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, commander of the crack Sendai Division, admonished his troops that they were to either defeat the Americans or die.

  The Marine commander, General Vandegrift, pleaded for additional men and supplies to alleviate the dire conditions. While he possessed a significant force of Marines, he explained that because of the ceaseless combat and inadequate rations, more than half were physically unable to mount protracted operations against such a skilled enemy. On frequent visits to the front lines, Vandegrift saw repeated examples of his men’s ability, but also detected signs that they teetered on the brink of collapse. Malaria-infected men remained at their posts in the unfamiliar jungle terrain, where they fought in temperatures reaching 103 degrees. They suffered from a lack of food and sleep and watched in mounting frustration as enemy ships steamed at leisure in the strait off Guadalcanal, untouched by an absent United States Navy. “I daily hoped for relief by the Army,” wrote Vandegrift of the difficult September and October weeks.4

  While Japanese submarines intensified their efforts in Torpedo Junction, on October 13 Japanese battleships lambasted Henderson Field with their mammoth twelve-inch and fourteen-inch guns, which hurled toward the Marines on Guadalcanal shells that Vandegrift later described as “monsters.” The Navy’s inability to prevent the bombardment infuriated the Marine commander, whose men suffered nightly while the enemy boldly steamed offshore, free to wreak havoc on Guadalcanal. “I could do nothing to disrupt the raid,” Vandegrift wrote. “We owned no night fighters; our artillery could not reach the ships. Like everyone else in the perimeter I sat out the bombardment, hoping against a direct hit on my dugout.”5

  Vandegrift sent a priority dispatch to Nimitz and Ghormley. He argued that the situation called for “two urgent and immediate steps: take and maintain control of the sea areas adjacent to Cactus [code name for Guadalcanal] to prevent further enemy landings and enemy bombardments such as this force has taken for the last three nights; reinforcement of ground forces by at least one division in order that extensive operations may be initiated to destroy hostile forces now on Cactus.”6

  Two days later, again in full view of incensed Marines, the Japanese unloaded more troops and supplies off Tassafaronga. Admiral Ugaki confided to his diary on October 13, “I think a chance of turning the tables has been grasped at last. It has been a long struggle and effort, indeed.”7

  The apparent Japanese advantage rested upon a cracked foundation, however. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief, Combined Fleet, who had visited the United States earlier in his career and witnessed that country’s astounding productivity, doubted that the Americans would relinquish their slim hold on the island. They had already sacrificed the lives of many Marines and sailors, and they would continue to fight until a massive infusion of men, ships, and matériel from the United States reached Guadalcanal. He feared that optimism among the Japanese high command overlooked American determination and industrial capabilities. Yamamoto argued that the Japanese army had foolishly sent small numbers of reinforcements to Guadalcanal—fifteen hundred in August and another three thousand in September—and contended that such a piecemeal approach would allow the United States to close the military gap in the South Pacific.

  Yamamoto’s qualms mirrored the anxiety felt in Washington, D.C. On October 16 reporters asked Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox if Vandegrift could hold the island. The secretary declined to offer a prediction but replied, in words that were less than reassuring, that he hoped Vandegrift could resist until additional help arrived.

  Both sides prepared for the decisive phase around Guadalcanal. By night the Japanese continued to rush men and supplies to the island while bombarding Vandegrift’s forces, while during the day the American ships shuttled in reinforcements to those Marines and Army infantry who would have to battle Hyakutake’s units.

  “We have been racking our brains these days to think of some plan to destroy the enemy fleet,” Ugaki wrote in his diary on October 18. Both Knox and Ugaki understood that the stakes were high, and that whichever side grabbed the upper hand at Guadalcanal would take a huge step toward controlling the South Pacific. As a captured Japanese document stated, “It must be said that the success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal Island, and the vital naval battle related to it, is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or for us.”8

  Fortunately, a dramatic turn of events ushered in a new commander for the South Pacific, an aggressive leader who, with sheer audacity and by the nature of his powerful personality, uplifted the Marines on Guadalcanal and invigorated the crews of his ships. A destroyerman by background, he would again turn to those vessels, including O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas, to help turn the tide.

  “The Fightingest Admiral in the Navy”

  Military visitors to Admiral Ghormley’s headquarters in Noumea sensed it within minutes. Instead of originality and optimism, crucial to bolstering the Marines fighting on land and the sailors at sea, desperation prevailed in the South Pacific’s central command post. The admiral and his staff rarely left the sweltering confines of their offices aboard the tender Argonne, a depressingly small ship that Ghormley’s staff had nicknamed the “Agony Maru.” Mounds of paperwork shoved sleep to the side. Frantic calls for planes, ships, and men replaced measured communiqués. Ghormley, the man who should have been a source of reassurance, was far from assured himself.

  Reporters saw it, too. At Pearl Harbor Admiral Nimitz asked Hanson Baldwin, fresh from a trip to the Solomons, how he assessed the South Pacific commander. “He was really completely defeatist,” the correspondent recalled of Ghormley. “He was almost despairing.” Baldwin added that Ghormley was overworked, and that the admiral wondered how he could mount a successful operation when he lacked the required resources. “We’re just hanging on by our teeth,” Ghormley had remarked to Baldwin.

  Baldwin left the Argonne convinced that Nimitz needed to find a replacement for a man he saw as a timid commander. Instead of hesitation, the crisis called for aggression, “because here was a time when you needed tough, hard, almost ruthless men. He was a miscast, in my opinion. He should never have been in that job.”9

  MacDonald noticed it when he first visited his London comrade upon arriving
in the South Pacific and Ghormley complained that he lacked aggressive commanders. MacDonald was too polite to point out the obvious—that if an officer failed, it fell to Ghormley, the commander in the South Pacific, to replace him with someone who could succeed.

  Nimitz flew to Noumea on September 28, where his concerns deepened when neither Ghormley nor his staff could adequately answer Nimitz’s queries about the lack of progress at Guadalcanal. As Nimitz talked, Ghormley’s chief of staff at the time, Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, walked in with a dispatch. Rather than delivering a measured reply, Ghormley exclaimed, “My God, what are we going to do about this?”10

  During a trip to Guadalcanal the next day, Nimitz found a refreshing contrast in Vandegrift’s optimism. The Marine general said he could defeat the Japanese units converging on Henderson Field, especially if he received additional men and supplies and if the Navy became more aggressive around Guadalcanal. Vandegrift needed fighting sea commanders not only to help stall the Japanese momentum but also, and more important, to provide evidence for his Marines on the island that the Navy was willing to risk everything on their behalf.

  Nimitz had no alternative but to replace Ghormley. He did not have to search for the right man, for he was then in the Pacific, a commander whose actions had already made him one of the nation’s first naval heroes. The men aboard O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas were about to be tossed into action by a man the press loved to call the “Bull.”