It became a war of attrition. In a succession of tremendous naval struggles, the tide swung back and forth, with both sides suffering alarming losses, including, for the United States, the Hornet, the carrier that had ferried Jimmy Doolittle’s planes to the waters off Japan. The Americans won some victories. But until October, when aggressive, hard-drinking Bull Halsey took over command in the South Pacific from the super-cautious Vice Admiral Robert Lee Ghormley and began pressing his commanders to challenge the enemy in night fighting, the Japanese controlled the waters around Guadalcanal. The turning point was what became known to history as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
On the night of November 13, two Japanese battlewagons, with a screen of destroyers, came barreling through the Slot, headed for Guadalcanal. Yamamoto had sent them to bomb Henderson Field into submission and provide cover for a landing force of 10,000 fresh troops arriving on fast transports and destroyers. American intelligence had once again broken the Japanese code, giving Halsey time to prepare. First to meet the Japanese fleet was a badly outnumbered destroyer-cruiser force under Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, a close personal friend of President Roosevelt’s. Defying the odds, Callaghan attacked, fighting at dangerously close range, in what was the seagoing equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.
It was a moonlit night and the American correspondent Ira Wolfert was on shore with the Marines to witness what Admiral Ernest King called “one of the most furious sea battles ever fought.”13
THE LAND FORCES HAD GIRDED THEMSELVES for a … [heavy] bombardment. Men huddled in foxholes, and asked each other silently with their embittered faces, “Where’s our Navy?” and wondered what would be left to stop the Jap transports.
Those seven hours of darkness, with each moment as silent as held breath, were the blackest our troops have faced since Bataan, but at the end of them our Navy was there, incredibly, like a Tom Mix of old, like the hero of some antique melodrama. It turned the tide of the whole battle by throwing its steel and flesh into the breach against what may be the heaviest Jap force yet engaged by surface ships in this war….
The beach had a front-row seat for the devastating action. Admiral Callaghan’s force steaming in line drove headlong into a vastly more powerful Jap fleet which was swinging around tiny Savo Island with guns set for point-blank blasting of Guadalcanal…. Matching cruisers and destroyers against battleships is like putting a good bantamweight against a good heavyweight, but the Japs unquestionably were caught with their kimonos down around their ankles. They could have stayed out of range and knocked out our ships with impunity, and then finished us on the ground at their leisure.
We opened fire first. The Jap ships, steaming full speed, were on us, over us, and all around us in the first minute…. The range was so close that the Japs could not depress their guns enough to fire at the waterline, which is why so many hits landed on the bridge and two of our admirals were killed.
The action was illuminated in brief, blinding flashes by Jap searchlights which were shot out as soon as they were turned on, by muzzle flashes from big guns, by fantastic streams of tracers, and by huge orange-colored explosions as two Jap destroyers and one of our destroyers blew up within seconds of one another…. The sands of the beach were shuddering so much from gunfire that they made the men standing there quiver and tingle from head to foot.
From the beach it resembled a door to hell opening and closing, opening and closing.14
It was over in twenty-four minutes, “a barroom brawl after the lights had been shot out,” an American officer described it.15 Watching the naval gunfire from a distant foxhole, the tall, twenty-six-year-old combat correspondent Richard Tregaskis, author of the now classic Guadalcanal Diary, realized that the fate of the Marines hung on these tremendous naval collisions in the waters of the Solomon Islands. “One had the feeling of being at the mercy of great accumulated forces far more powerful than anything human. We were only pawns in a battle of the gods, then, and we knew it.”16
The Japanese lost a battleship and were prevented from bombing Henderson Field and landing troops. But the American flotilla had ceased to exist as an effective fighting force. Callaghan and another admiral, Norman Scott, were killed on the bridges of their ships and a cruiser and four destroyers were lost.
The next day, the light cruiser Juneau, with a crew of nearly 700 men, was blown to pieces by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine. On board were the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa. They had enlisted together after Pearl Harbor, convincing the Navy to break its policy of splitting families in wartime. The Navy claimed that all five Sullivans went down with the ship and it launched a publicity campaign, featuring their parents, to boost war production. But one of the brothers, George Sullivan, along with 140 other men on Juneau, had actually survived the spectacular blast that took the ship under, only to die later in a shark attack—a fact not revealed for forty years. The men had lived hour to hour, without food or water, under an unforgiving sun, and were assaulted by sharks as they clung to rafts and life nets. The last of the survivors—only ten men—were not found for over a week because of a botched search-and-rescue mission by the Navy.
The damaged but still lethal Japanese fleet steamed on toward Guadalcanal. Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee, with a force of four destroyers and two battleships—Washington and South Dakota—met the enemy head-on in Savo Sound. It was another night fight and one of the only full-scale battleship engagements of the entire war. Almost the instant the two fleets collided, the Japanese sank two destroyers and damaged the other two. At this critical moment, South Dakota, nicknamed the Big Bastard by its crew, experienced a power failure that put out its radar. Without its “night eyes,” it became an easy target for Japanese night fighters. They put forty-two hits into it, smashing the ship’s superstructure, knocking out its communications, and killing and mangling crewmen.
Robert L. Schwartz, a reporter for Yank, the GI paper, interviewed men on the South Dakota and pieced together what went on inside the ship after it was hit. His story is one of the most powerful accounts of naval combat in print.
HODGEN OTHELLO PATRICK … TALKER ON THE Big Bastard’s sky patrol, highest lookout post where the ship took its first hit during the Battle of Savo Island, came as reasonably close to being killed as can be expected of any man.
Patrick remembers squaring for battle and from his high perch seeing the Jap ships come up. He saw the first salvo leave the flagship up ahead. His next recollection is of being thrown against a bulkhead and finding somebody’s arm, without a body, across his face. A dead weight lay across his chest, pinning him.
“I’m dead,” he thought, and the remembrance of it is still clear in his mind. “Here I am dead. This is what it’s like to be dead.” But the earthly touch of shrapnel in his knee and his hip convinced him that he was still alive. He looked around. The two officers lay dead. Seven enlisted men were still. Four wounded looked at Patrick, not knowing what to do next.
Patrick pressed the button on his headset. “Sick bay,” he called, “send help.” … But no help came.
Patrick ordered two wounded to go below and then put tourniquets on the other two, using their own belts. He applied the same treatment to his own leg above the bleeding knee…. He hunted a long time for morphine before he found it and divided it with the others. As he was about to take his share of the sedative he noticed that several of the men he had thought dead were stirring. Without a moment’s hesitation he divided his share among them….
Despite his injuries, Patrick found that he could get to his feet. He saw that he could report better while standing and remained that way until the end of the battle. Afterward, he fell again to the deck but never stopped his regular reports until he was relieved the next morning.
Patrick was the only enlisted man of the crew who was recommended for the Navy Cross.
When general quarters sounded on the Big Bastard, Rufus Mathewson … took his post as a talker in the conning tower.
“It’
ll be a push-over,” he heard someone say. “Just a bunch of armed transports. We’ll knock ’em off like sitting ducks.”
Mathewson said to himself, “I wish I was home.” …
Hours ticked by. Shortly after midnight the loudspeaker carried a cold steady voice from the plot room. “Target 20,000 yards, bearing 240° … target 19,800 yards, bearing 241° …” Slowly the target drew closer.
There was a terrific explosion up ahead. Mathewson dashed to one of the slits and felt his stomach drop as he saw a battleship ahead silhouetted by flame. “Lord, let me out and I’ll change my ways,” he said aloud. A direct hit had dissolved one of the [American] destroyers….
Over the lookout’s phone came a voice, “Destroyer sinking on our starboard bow.” The captain ordered left rudder, and the helmsman swung the wheel. They skirted the destroyer, then came back on their course. From over the phone came the Admiral’s voice: “Fire when ready.” …
Thirty seconds later shells screamed out. The captain and the navigator were jarred away from their positions at the ’scopes, but voices came in over the phone.
“Right on!”
“The damned thing has dissolved!”
“Looked like a cruiser.”
“That was a battleship!”
In rapid succession Mathewson heard a loud crash, a rolling explosion, and then the searing rattle of metal fragments as they crashed into cables, guns, and superstructure. The ship shrugged, leaned back into a volley of 6-and 8-inch shells that raked through the sky control tower, topmost position on the ship.
Quickly Mathewson called sky control on the battle phone. “Patrick, you there?”
“Here, but our officers are dead, and all of us are wounded.”
Mathewson asked for permission to go relieve Patrick but his request was denied. Mathewson and Patrick were close friends, and now the thought of Patrick lying wounded on sky control beyond the help of anyone because of fires burning below him almost brought tears to his eyes.
Methodically Big B went on firing….
Six-and 8-inch shell fire peppered the bridge with steel fragments. It was almost impossible for shrapnel to penetrate the armor of the bridge but the men inside heard one shell smack through the gun director just aft of the bridge and then explode against the chart house. Directions for course and bearing stopped coming in.
Over the amplifier from the chart house came a voice. “My God, this man’s bleeding to death. Send help. Hurry. Please hurry.”
Melvin McSpadden, the engine control talker, was first to answer. “Sick bay is on this circuit and they’ll send a doctor. Give us some bearings.”
“This poor guy’s bleeding to death. Have you got any bandages? I can’t leave him like this.”
McSpadden tore down a blackout curtain hanging over one of the slots, stuffed it through the aperture and shouted to a seaman on the catwalk outside. “Take this to the chart house quick.” …
Batt II, which is the auxiliary control room situated inside the superstructure below the sky control tower, was the hardest hit portion of the ship. One of the talkers in Batt II was Tom Page….
Page remembers it was a beautiful night. There was a big moon and it was very warm and quiet. The smell of gardenias was strong from off Florida Island. The association of the gardenias with the action that followed caused Page to lose all desire to smell a gardenia again.
Over the amplifier came a voice, “Guadalcanal on our starboard hand.” Big vivid flashes lit the sky—some of it gunfire in the distance, some of it lightning….
Page sat in a corner on an overturned bucket, feeling comfortable now that the big guns were booming. He noticed that the commander, usually a very nervous man, was very calm. Then he was knocked off his bucket by a shell hit. The molten metal from the shell ran across the floor like lava and he stepped out of the way. Steam pipes were broken, electrical fires sputtered. Noise and heat from the steam were unbearable. He screamed over the phone to engine control to shut off the auxiliary steam line….
During the entire action one of the lookouts standing by a slot kept repeating in a low voice: “Lord, I’m scared. Nobody has any idea how scared I am. How could anyone be this scared? My God, I’m scared.” He said that over and over for about 10 minutes. Nobody thought it was strange.
Men began crawling to their feet…. Only the noise of the steam escaping could be heard above the gunfire below. Then the gunfire ceased and within a minute the steam went off. A new noise could be heard now—the moans of the injured and the dying. Pharmacist’s mates went among them, injecting shots of morphine….
[At that moment] John P. Buck [the ship’s] after-battery lookout…. could see the big 16-inch barrels poked out over the starboard rail. He was lazily watching them when they suddenly fired a salvo with a deafening roar. Buck was picked up bodily and thrown [several feet through the air]. He heard his helmet fly off and strike a bulkhead 30 feet away, then roll around the floor. The explosion blinded him for about 15 minutes, during which time he groped on the floor and found his helmet….
Over five miles away a 14-inch shell came screaming out of the muzzle of a gun on a Jap battleship. Buck first saw it when it was about two miles away from him, looming larger and larger as a red dot in the sky. He knew it was going to hit and knelt down….
The shell came through at exactly deck level…. There was a blinding flash and roar, and shrapnel rained down like cinders. Buck mentally marked turret No. 3 off his list. But when he went out to look he found that the turret was still there but beside it was a yawning hole in the deck.
Looking over the starboard rail he saw a Jap ship racing up. He reported it but worriedly wondered how they were ever going to hit it with the after turret almost certainly out of action. Then he heard the secondaries open fire with a staccato bang-bang-bang, finally reaching the ear-splitting regularity of machine-gun firing….
The after turret, meanwhile, turned slowly toward the approaching ship, now so close that the elevation on the barrels was almost nil.
Nobody was more amazed than Buck when the after turret fired. He had no idea it was still in action. Then he saw that the Jap ship had been hit almost point-blank by all three shells. There was a big flash where the ship had been and then smoking, bubbling water….
The firing stopped and Buck left to help in the care of the wounded. At sick bay he found men stretched out on every available table with doctors and pharmacist’s mates working over them while standing in 4 inches of blood and water on the deck.
He was sent with a doctor to the top of the superstructure to help the wounded men who had been cut off there. Only Patrick was still there. The doctor stayed with Patrick, giving Buck Syrettes of morphine to administer inside the superstructure on the way down.
Descending on the inside of the tower, Buck found a man lying on one of the upper levels with one leg shot off. He took out his knife and walked over to a dangling electrical wire, cut it loose and wrapped it around the injured man’s leg. He wrenched loose the shattered rung of a ladder and used it to twist through the wire, making a tourniquet.
On the next level down he felt his feet get tangled in something in the water on the deck. An officer came along with a flashlight and they discovered that his legs were entwined by someone’s insides floating on the water.
He kicked himself loose and went down to the main deck where he saw a man sitting wearily against a bulkhead.
“Hey, Mac, are you okay?” asked Buck.
No answer came so Buck asked him again. When he got no answer this time, Buck reached down to feel his pulse. The man was already cold. Buck left and went back to his post.
Up above the deck the wounded Patrick was giving out morphine. Page was trying hard to keep breathing above the escaping steam, and Buck was trying to recover his sight after being dazed by shell fire. Below decks, in the engine control room, was Chief Yeoman Cheek reading an old issue of the Reader’s Digest.
The huge panel of gauges in front of h
im was functioning perfectly. The engine was at top speed, the boilers were maintaining a magnificent head of steam, and the blowers were keeping the room quite cool and comfortable. When a command came through, Cheek carried it out, then returned to his reading.
There was nothing else to do.
The noise of the battle was distant and removed…. So Cheek kept on reading the Reader’s Digest….
It was morning when Cheek walked up onto the deck and saw the destruction. Then he realized, for the first time, how many shells had ripped into the ship during the night.
After he saw the damage, he couldn’t sleep for three days.17
The Japanese couldn’t put the Big Bastard out of action and its powerful batteries helped the Washington sink the battleship Kirishima. When that happened the superior Japanese force withdrew. On the morning of November 15, American planes, ships, and artillery pounced un the abandoned troop carriers. In this bloodbath, the Japanese were able to land only about 2,000 men. Running in transports under Japanese guns, the Navy, meanwhile, had built up the fighting force on Guadalcanal to over 35,000 men, and many of the steadily outnumbered Japanese were beginning to starve and run short of medicine and ammunition.
After the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Victory in the Solomons was no longer in doubt. There was plenty of hard fighting ahead—not until February were the last Japanese cleared out of Guadalcanal, and the fight for New Georgia, Choiseul, and Bougainville in the northern Solomons continued through most of 1945. But the naval losses the enemy suffered in this prolonged campaign constituted a disaster second only to that of Midway: two battleships, twenty three other warships, 600 aircraft, and almost 2,300 irreplaceable aviators. The United States lost two carriers and about as many other combat ships as the Japanese, many of them in the waters between Guadalcanal and Savo Island, called Ironbottom Sound for the number of ships sunk there. What went unreported to the American public was the loss of almost 5,000 sailors in some of the most savage naval fighting in history. With the war beginning to go well for the Allies, not only in the South Pacific but also in French North Africa, where American troops landed in November 1942, and at Stalingrad on the Volga River, where the Red Army was beginning to win one of the most ferociously fought battles of history, the Navy thought it prudent to suppress these grim figures. While mourning the death of his friend Daniel Callaghan, Roosevelt announced that the “turning-point in this war has at last been reached.”18
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 8