The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  The feared attack came, but the Allied ships reacted slowly and suffered great losses against a lightning assault by five Japanese heavy cruisers and two light cruisers. The Australian Canberra and three American cruisers—Astoria, Vincennes, and Quincy—sank with considerable loss of life, while the Chicago took a torpedo in the bow and two destroyers also were damaged. It was “the severest defeat in battle ever suffered by the U.S. Navy.”13

  The only good news was that the Japanese cruisers had circled Savo Island and returned westward rather than pushing east and attacking the undefended transports off the beachheads. But the naval losses were so great—six ships and upwards of a thousand men—that King’s duty officer woke him in the middle of the night when the news finally reached Washington. King read the dispatch several times before asking that it be decoded again in hopes that there was an error. But the news was correct, and King called it “the blackest day of the war,” not to mention a clear setback for his policy of attack, attack, attack.14

  Characteristically, Nimitz’s first reaction was calmly to rally his subordinates. Radio communications with Ghormley were wretched and were equally so among Ghormley’s commands. Adding to Nimitz’s confusion was the fact that the Japanese had changed their naval code. He was getting little information from his forces, little insight from Japanese code intercepts, and a steady stream of queries from King as to what was happening. As late as August 19, with Turner’s amphibious ships back in New Caledonia and sixteen thousand marines temporarily isolated on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, Nimitz could send King little more information than “our losses were heavy and there is still no explanation of why. The enemy seems to have suffered little or no damage.”15

  Meanwhile, Japanese destroyers had landed nine hundred troops near the American beachhead on Guadalcanal. Turner desperately directed reinforcements of his own to the island, particularly marine fighters to the hurriedly completed airstrip at Henderson Field. Fletcher maneuvered his carriers out of range of Japanese land-based aircraft, but close enough to counter any assault by a major Japanese carrier force that was rumored to be forming at Truk, fifteen hundred miles to the north-northwest. The most nagging question was, when might an attack come?

  Through this uncertainty, Fletcher began to rotate his three carrier groups one at a time to the south to refuel as conditions permitted. When aerial reconnaissance and radio intercepts seemed to indicate no immediate Japanese threat from Truk, Fletcher dispatched the Wasp group south to refuel, only to learn that a major Japanese force with the repaired Coral Sea carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, the light carrier Ryujo, and substantial surface ships was bearing down on the eastern end of the Solomons.

  Enterprise and Saratoga steamed to engage, and their planes sank the Ryujo before a counterstrike from the main Japanese carriers severely damaged Enterprise. The “Big E” made for Pearl Harbor under its own steam, but a week later, a Japanese submarine torpedoed Fletcher’s flagship, Saratoga, and this carrier, too, was forced to limp to Pearl Harbor for repairs. That left Wasp and Hornet, the latter already en route south before the Enterprise was damaged, as the only two American carriers operational in the entire Pacific. Fletcher returned to Pearl Harbor with Saratoga, while Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes assumed Fletcher’s carrier command.

  Once again, the Japanese had been beaten back, though with tough American losses. Some, particularly in hindsight, seized on Fletcher’s untimely refueling of the Wasp task force as evidence of his incompetence. If three American carriers had been on station and the right intelligence had been received, Fletcher’s fleet would have outnumbered the Japanese and perhaps won another battle of the proportions of Midway.

  At the very least, King was again certain that Fletcher should have used his destroyers to make a surface attack against the Japanese, even as Fletcher withdrew his own carriers. Though a strong proponent of airpower, King was also always urging more aggressive surface actions. Barely had the Saratoga recovered its planes when Fletcher collapsed into a chair on its flag bridge and remarked to his staff, “Boys, I’m going to get two dispatches tonight, one from Admiral Nimitz telling me what a wonderful job we did, and one from King saying, ‘Why in hell didn’t you use your destroyers and make torpedo attacks?’ and by God, they’ll both be right.”16

  When Saratoga reached Pearl Harbor, Nimitz promptly gave Fletcher, who had been slightly hurt in the carrier’s torpedoing, a much-needed leave. Nimitz continued to feel that Fletcher had acquitted himself well and quite likely would have kept him in the heat of the Pacific action. King continued to feel quite differently. He had never forgiven Fletcher for the loss of Lexington at Coral Sea or Yorktown at Midway, and now there was the appearance—warranted or not—of Fletcher’s having abandoned the Guadalcanal beachhead and misjudged his carrier deployments at what came to be known as the Battle of the Eastern Solomons.

  Frank Jack Fletcher would subsequently be portrayed by a long list of military historians as somewhat bumbling and inept, preoccupied with refueling operations, and reluctant to risk his carriers for a knockout punch. Nimitz stood by Fletcher, particularly after Coral Sea, but King seems to have lacked confidence in him from the start. But whatever his perceived shortcomings and less-than-generous press, Fletcher was at the center of the three great naval battles that stopped the Japanese advance in 1942 and turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. Yes, he lost King’s beloved Lexington and the Yorktown, but in exchange he sent six Japanese carriers to the bottom. Fletcher, because of the gentleman sailor he was, would serve without complaint or any subsequent attempt at vindication.

  Fletcher was exiled to command the Thirteenth Naval District (Pacific Northwest) and the Northwest Sea Frontier, the coastal waters of Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. He would be eclipsed by the operations of Bill Halsey and Raymond Spruance, but they both owed much to his steady, tactical competence throughout the pivotal year of 1942, and, so too, did Nimitz and King.

  Nimitz later gave Fletcher a photo of himself autographed “11 Nov. 42, Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, A fine fighting admiral and a splendid shipmate, with much affection, C. W. Nimitz.” Their letters throughout the war and afterward were frequently addressed “Dear Chester” and “Dear Frank Jack.” Nimitz even once sent Fletcher “a fine safety razor with accompanying brushless cream,” for which Fletcher was “very grateful to be remembered by you.” King, for his part, made only passing reference in his memoirs to Fletcher being at Coral Sea, a circumstance repeated by King’s principal biographer.17

  In early September, King headed west to confer once again with Nimitz in San Francisco. But this time he brought a surprise with him. Bill Halsey was rested and well and itching only to get back into the fight. Just the week before, Halsey had told a packed auditorium of midshipmen at Annapolis, “Missing the Battle of Midway, has been the greatest disappointment of my life, but I am going back to the Pacific where I intend personally to have a crack at those yellow-bellied sons of bitches and their carriers.”18

  At their three-day conference, King and Nimitz spent considerable time dissecting the disastrous cruiser defeat at Savo Island, and, with Halsey’s return, it was only natural that they would start with Ghormley and review the entire command structure in the Pacific. Halsey was to have his old job back as commander of the Enterprise task force and assume Fletcher’s role as senior tactical commander whenever the dwindling carrier forces acted in concert. If King had been suspicious of Fletcher’s command abilities, he had quickly grown equally so of Ghormley’s, even though both he and Nimitz had initially agreed on Ghormley’s appointment as COMSOPAC.

  Nimitz promised to check out Ghormley in his usual low-key fashion and invited Halsey to accompany him on an inspection tour of the Enterprise after they both returned to Pearl Harbor. The “Big E” was in port being repaired after the damage it had suffered during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. Nimitz had medals to present, including the Medal of Honor to Chief Petty Officer John William Finn for his inspired machine-gun de
fense of PBYs at Kaneohe Bay on December 7, and an announcement to make.

  Halsey’s bulldog-like face was not yet well known, but his name was already well recognized throughout the navy as a fighting admiral, both for his early raid in the Marshall Islands and his daring delivery of the Doolittle Raiders. Looking lean and fit, he received little attention as he marched aboard the carrier behind Nimitz. But then Nimitz stepped to the microphone and motioned Halsey forward. “Boys,” Nimitz told the assembled sailors, “I’ve got a surprise for you. Bill Halsey’s back!” A roar went up along the flight deck. There was no hint of defeatism among this ship’s company. They were only too willing to embrace a fighter, and Halsey’s eyes brimmed with tears at the tribute.19

  But there was a strong sense of defeatism in the South Pacific, and Nimitz’s next task was to ferret it out. The day before Nimitz hailed Halsey on board Enterprise, the Wasp had been sunk by three torpedoes fired from the Japanese submarine I-19 while the carrier was escorting the Seventh Marine Regiment to Guadalcanal as reinforcements, and Hornet was now the only operational American carrier remaining in the Pacific.

  On September 24, Nimitz and his staff, including the faithful Hal Lamar, who was once again serving as his flag lieutenant, left Pearl Harbor in a PB2Y Coronado and flew south. After an unexpected overnight on the island of Canton because a bearing in one of the Coronado’s engines burned out, Nimitz arrived at Ghormley’s sweltering headquarters on the aging transport Argonne in the port of Nouméa, New Caledonia. Ghormley had not even managed to convince the French, who nominally controlled the island, to provide suitable headquarters space ashore. There was indeed defeatism in the air, but it certainly didn’t come from the marines dug in on Guadalcanal. In almost two months since its invasion, Ghormley had never visited Guadalcanal.

  Having flown almost four thousand miles from Pearl Harbor, Nimitz invited MacArthur to join him in Nouméa for a joint planning session. MacArthur, only a thousand miles away in Brisbane, Australia, declined. Nimitz was welcome in Brisbane, MacArthur said, but the general was simply too busy to make the trip to Nouméa. Instead, MacArthur dispatched his chief of staff, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, and Lieutenant General George Kenney, the chief of his air forces, to meet with Nimitz.

  CINCPAC had plenty of questions for all concerned. Why were Japanese reinforcements flowing through MacArthur’s territory to Guadalcanal with such impunity that the beleaguered marines there called the convoys “the Tokyo Express”? And if the situation on Guadalcanal was so desperate, why weren’t army troops arriving in New Caledonia being immediately sent to bolster them? Perhaps most disconcerting, twice during the conference at Ghormley’s headquarters a SOPAC staff officer delivered high-priority radio dispatches to Ghormley, only to have him mutter, “My God, what are we going to do about this?”20

  Nimitz decided to see for himself—a courageous decision given the situation there. After flying north in the Coronado to Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides, the admiral, joined by Commander Ralph Ofstie and Lieutenant Lamar, took off for Guadalcanal in a four-engine B-17 bomber because there was no suitable seaplane landing zone on the island. The pilot was young and a little green—as were so many men in those early days of the war—and he finally admitted to being lost, in part because there were no adequate charts of the Solomons. Lamar solved the problem by producing a National Geographic map of the South Pacific from his bag, and in the pouring rain, the big bomber touched down on the matted runway of Henderson Field.

  The marines’ Archie Vandegrift was on hand to greet the admiral and tell him “hell, yes,” they could hold, but since Henderson Field was the key to Guadalcanal and Guadalcanal the key to that end of the Solomons, the airfield had to be made a strongpoint at all costs. There could be no more talk—as had come from both MacArthur and Ghormley—about pulling out.

  And there was one more thing. Over a quiet, private drink later that night, Vandegrift bluntly told Nimitz that there were too many navy commanders in the theater acting timid and shying away from a fight because they were afraid of losing their ships. What was needed, Vandegrift said, were commanders who weren’t going to be taken to task by desk admirals just because they lost a ship by fighting it hard—a lesson that appeared to have been lacking around Savo Island.

  Nimitz nodded. He could relate. He remembered that day long ago in the Philippines when as a young ensign with a destroyer entrusted to his command, he had run it aground and might well have sunk his career save for understanding superiors who looked beyond that one incident to see his total worth.

  The next morning, Nimitz handed out medals and engaged in his usual folksy banter with the marines. Then it was time to go. In the laid-back, hard-pressed South Pacific, a barefoot Army Air Corps major with a black beard and grungy coveralls stepped forward to pilot the admiral’s return B-17. Two thousand feet of the Henderson runway was covered with metal matting; the other thousand feet, extended to accommodate B-17s, was dirt turned into mud by the rain. The departing bomber would need every foot to get airborne.

  Looking over plane and pilot, Nimitz asked how he intended to take off. “Admiral,” drawled the pilot, “I thought I’d start at this end, even though it’s downwind. I can get up to flying speed easy here on the metal matting. I’ll probably be up to flying speed before I reach the dirt section.”

  Several in Nimitz’s group eased into the background and made toward a second B-17, but Nimitz merely said, “All right,” and climbed right into the bombardier’s area in the Plexiglas nose of the plane. Those who were going with him got aboard as well, and the pilot gunned the B-17 down the matted runway. The jungle on either side rolled by, but when the plane hit the last thousand feet of dirt, the pilot decided that he couldn’t get airborne and aborted the takeoff. The bomber lugged into the mud, skidded toward the end of the runway, and finally ground-looped to a stop at the very end, with its tail at the edge of a steep ravine.

  The pilot nonetheless restarted his engines and taxied back through the quagmire to the rest of Nimitz’s party. The admiral, as usual, was nonplussed. Climbing down from his nose perch, he simply suggested they adjourn to Vandegrift’s quarters for lunch before trying again.

  By the second try, the rain had let up, and the wind freshened from the matted end of the runway. This time, Lamar saw to it that Nimitz was in a more secure seat in the fuselage. The pilot in his coveralls taxied the bomber down to the dirt end of the strip, turned into the wind, and roared down the meager runway. This time, the plane climbed into the sky, and Nimitz was on his way back to Espíritu Santo. There had been a couple of dicey moments, but Nimitz’s show of concern on Guadalcanal was a huge boost to marine morale, as well as indicative of his own style of leadership. When he returned to Pearl Harbor, he realized that he had to infuse more of the same in the South Pacific.21

  By then, Bill Halsey had been growing anxious waiting around Pearl Harbor while repairs to Enterprise were completed. Finally, Nimitz ordered him south on October 15 to review the situation before Enterprise arrived on station. After stopping at Canton Island as Nimitz had just done, Halsey’s PB2Y Coronado continued on to Nouméa and had barely landed and shut down its engines when a navy whaleboat came alongside, and Admiral Ghormley’s flag lieutenant passed Halsey a sealed envelope. Inside was another sealed envelope marked SECRET.

  With King’s hearty concurrence, Nimitz advised Halsey, “You will take command of the South Pacific Area and South Pacific forces immediately.” Halsey read the dispatch twice and then handed it to an aide, exclaiming, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson! This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!”22

  Nimitz had become convinced that Ghormley “was on the verge of a nervous breakdown” and that the “panicky and desperate tone” of his dispatches left no doubt that he needed to be replaced immediately. If the situation was as bad as Ghormley indicated, Nimitz “needed the very best man we had to hold down that critical area.”23

  In more diplomatic terms, Nimitz advis
ed Ghormley, “After carefully weighing all factors, have decided that talents and previous experience of Halsey can best be applied to the situation by having him take over duties of ComSoPac as soon as practicable after his arrival Noumea [October] 18th your date.”24 Nimitz went on to voice his appreciation for Ghormley’s “loyal and devoted efforts,” but in a private letter to Catherine, he expressed his “hours of anguished consideration.” It was a “sore mental struggle,” but “Ghormley was too immersed in detail and not sufficiently bold and aggressive at the right times.” With the decision made, he confessed to his wife, “I feel better now that it has been done.”25

  The South Pacific Area would soon feel better, too. It was certainly not all Admiral Ghormley’s fault, but the navy needed a leader who understood that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking the eggs.” Bill Halsey fit the bill. Time magazine described him as looking “saltier than sodium chloride” and “known throughout the Navy as a tough, aggressive, restless man.”26

  Those who knew Halsey at all or had heard of him were quick to embrace the change. “I’ll never forget it!” exclaimed one muddy and exhausted air combat intelligence officer on Guadalcanal. “One minute we were too limp with malaria to crawl out of our foxholes; the next we were running around whooping like kids.”27

  But in the beginning, Halsey would not have an easy time. In fact, his first month on the SOPAC job—late October to early November 1942—was one disaster after another. Halsey prepared to build a new airfield on Ndeni, in the Santa Cruz Islands, but Japanese pressure on Guadalcanal forced him to reconsider. General Vandegrift flew south to Nouméa to confer with Halsey and hear him ask the pointed question face-to-face: “Are we going to evacuate or hold?” Never one to equivocate, Vandegrift, whom Halsey later called “my other self,” growled back, “I can hold, but I’ve got to have more active support than I’ve been getting.” Promising Vandegrift everything he had, Halsey immediately canceled the Ndeni operation and poured all of his available resources into reinforcing the marines on Guadalcanal.28