Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  The carrier fleet’s surging esprit de corps, such a novelty for the battered warriors of Pearl Harbor, carried Chester Nimitz through the six months he had most dreaded. The Pacific Fleet’s flattops, under Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., ventured forth and struck targets from the Gilberts to all the way to Japan’s home islands. A task force with the carriers Enterprise and Hornet, the latter playing host to a flight of strangers, twin-engined Army bombers, launched an audacious raid against Tokyo. After Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s had done their work, the Combined Fleet’s commander in chief, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, won army backing for his plan to draw out and destroy the nuisance-making U.S. fleet once and for all by seizing Midway and the Aleutian Islands, then targeting Hawaii itself. He also continued the push from Rabaul south toward the stronghold of Port Moresby, New Guinea. He meant to isolate Australia, then continue southeast to threaten U.S. bases as far away as Samoa.

  In early May, a carrier task force under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher intercepted a Japanese invasion fleet bound for Port Moresby. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, the U.S. Navy sank the Japanese carrier Shoho, damaged a second, and turned back the invasion. Though the Lexington was lost and the Yorktown damaged, American pilots relished their victory and soon re-formed for another crack at the Combined Fleet. During the first week of June, after Nimitz’s codebreakers detected an enemy plan to invade Midway Island, a pair of carrier task forces under Fletcher and Spruance sprang an ambush. By the time fliers from the Enterprise, Hornet, and hastily repaired Yorktown called it a day on June 4, Japan’s thrust toward Hawaii was parried, with losses that included four frontline aircraft carriers and 110 pilots. The victory put the U.S. Navy in position, for the first time, to carry the fight to the enemy.

  The old plan for a Pacific offensive envisioned parallel drives toward Tokyo, one running from New Guinea toward the Philippines, the other through the Central Pacific to the Marianas. Which path received priority for supply, equipment, and reinforcement would depend on the outcome of an important battle yet to be fought—between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. General Douglas MacArthur advocated the New Guinea route; Nimitz and the Navy, the Central Pacific. Though the interservice rivalry was well established, the outbreak of war pitted them in competition for scarce weapons and matériel. As the first American offensive of the war took shape, the warriors in the Pacific would be constantly pleading their cause to those in Washington who rationed the resources. As it happened, King’s ambitions faced obstacles from those who outranked even MacArthur. FDR himself was said to favor European operations.

  As King saw it, the events of early June provided the longed-for opening for a Pacific offensive. While he knew his president would cherish sending his beloved fleet into action, King also knew what Roosevelt’s overriding aim was in the spring of 1941: helping the Russians. In a May 6 memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, FDR wrote, “It must be constantly reiterated that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis matériel than all the twenty-five united nations put together. To help Russia, therefore, is the primary consideration.” Despite her infamy, Japan was a negligible threat, Roosevelt thought. With Germany knocked out of the fight, Japan could not hold on, he believed. “The whole question of whether we win or lose the war depends on the Russians,” he wrote in June. “We can defeat the Japanese in six weeks.” King didn’t think the Navy’s victory at Midway had registered sufficiently with the Allied high command.

  As FDR saw it, diverting German forces from the critical Eastern Front and preventing a separate Russian truce with Hitler required a bold American move in Europe. The plan Roosevelt liked best, Operation Sledgehammer, would throw forty-eight divisions, more than seven hundred thousand men, across the English Channel and into France before the end of 1942. The Army’s ambitions were constrained by the pessimism of the British and the U.S. Navy’s inarguable need to at least hold on in the Pacific. Giving resources to that modest goal, even if it were simply a “maintenance of positions,” would compromise Eisenhower’s cross-channel plans. An alternative urged by the British, an invasion of North Africa, originally known as Operation Gymnast, then Operation Torch, was less risky from Churchill’s point of view, though it still competed for American time, resources, and attention.

  From his work with the British, King was aware that, officially, a “Germany first” strategy was operative. But his close involvement in negotiations and personal relationship with George Marshall enabled him to create the leeway to run the Pacific as he saw fit. In many cases he dealt exclusively with Marshall in designing strategy in the Pacific. As far as he was concerned, the strategy all along was “Pacific first.” The Navy was clearly most vested there. Four of its five heavy aircraft carriers were in the Pacific, and twenty-seven of its thirty-eight cruisers. “I sent an order to Admiral Nimitz,” King wrote after the war, “saying that despite all other orders, large or small, the basic orders are that the Pacific Fleet must, first, keep all means of communications with the West Coast and, second, but close to the first order, to keep all areas between Hawaii and Samoa clear of the Japanese and then as fast as it could expand that area toward Australia.” His mandate to Nimitz reflected the clarity of the Navy’s self-arranged destiny in the west. King considered “Germany first” little more than a political campaign slogan. Let the Joint Chiefs host their debating society with the British. King’s Navy had an ocean to conquer.

  For General Marshall, a powerful voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it would take a fully concentrated effort to beat the Axis decisively in either hemisphere. On July 13, he sent Eisenhower a secret telegram stating that an invasion of North Africa would be a fruitless dispersion of force. “We would nowhere be acting decisively against our enemies,” he wrote. With North Africa commanding most of its attention, the Army would have few aircraft, so critical to victory, available in the South Pacific. Winston Churchill pressed the case for North Africa, however. He candidly regarded an amphibious assault against France in 1942 and even in 1943 as suicide. Marshall was publicly noncommittal. Fearing a compromise that pleased no one, but wishing to strike effectively against the Axis somewhere, Marshall expressed a willingness to entertain the Pacific-first offensive strategy that Admiral King envisioned. The general saw the prospect of a Navy offensive in the Pacific as a lever to budge the intransigent British. If landings in France could not be made by early 1943, Marshall wrote to Eisenhower, “We should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan with full strength and ample reserves, assuming a defensive attitude against Germany except for air operations.”

  As King wrote after the war, his idea was to “stop the enemy as soon as we could get the ships, planes and troops to make a stand as far to the westward as possible.… I kept close watch on the area of Guadalcanal and finally decided, whether or not the J.C.S. would agree, I wanted to make some real move.… The Army still insisted that the time wasn’t ripe so I answered them, ‘When will the time be ripe since we have just defeated a major part of the enemy’s fleet [at Midway]?’ ”

  Knowing that he needed King’s support in the continuing arguments with the British, even as he feared unilateral Navy initiatives, Marshall agreed to back a Navy-directed plan in the South Pacific. If this was a bluff to cow the Brits, Eisenhower strengthened it by relaying Marshall’s suggestion to Roosevelt. Ike, too, thought that if a cross-channel invasion couldn’t be launched from England, then America should “turn our backs upon the Eastern Atlantic and go, full out, as quickly as possible, against Japan!”

  The president doubted the value of seizing “a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next.” Still, King knew FDR wanted action and believed he would not likely block a well-considered plan to turn the fleet loose against the Axis. As far back as March, King had urged Roosevelt to approve “an integrated, general plan of operations” based on the idea of holding six strongpoints that spanned the South Pacific from east to wes
t: Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, Tongatabu, Efate, and Funafuti. From those bases the Navy could protect the sea-lanes to Australia, then drive northwest into the Solomons and the Bismarcks. The opportunity to do that had finally come.

  Neither King nor Marshall seemed to grasp the degree to which politics would compel Roosevelt to veto an express Pacific-first strategy. For reasons of electoral calculation—to preserve his Democratic majorities in a congressional midterm election—Roosevelt wanted American troops fighting Germans before the end of the year. “We failed to see,” Marshall would write, “that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. The people demand action.”

  Public opinion was increasingly in favor of pursuing the fight in the Pacific. In January 1942, a Newsweek editorialist wrote, “Congressmen are receiving a growing stream of mail from constituents condemning the conduct of the war. The writers demand to know why Wake, Guam, and Midway garrisons were neither reinforced or rescued, why the Philippines were left with only a meager force of fighter planes while hundreds were sent to Europe, why the Navy has not laced into the Japanese fleet, etc.”

  The answer was the political clout of America’s Atlantic ally. “King’s war is against the Japanese,” one of Churchill’s advisers had warned him. If London did not commit to Eisenhower’s invasion of France, the adviser wrote, “everything points to a complete reversal of our present agreed strategy and the withdrawal of America to a war of her own in the Pacific.” On hearing this, Churchill reportedly remarked, “Just because the Americans can’t have a massacre in France this year, they want to sulk and bathe in the Pacific.” That was a dubious characterization of what his Atlantic cousins really wanted. Because the Japanese had struck them directly, and Hitler hadn’t, what many Americans—or the Navy at least—wanted was a massacre in the Pacific. The victory at Midway opened the course.

  The Navy would find its war on the boundless battlefield of the western ocean. When Martin Clemens turned on his teleradio in Aola and tapped out news of an airfield in the making, the pattern of the coming days began to take shape in the mind of Ernest King.

  2

  A Great Gray Fleet

  “ON CALM DAYS THE LIGHT BLUE HIGHWAY WITH ITS FROTHY CURBSTONES stretches along the great flat ocean to the horizon. This highway needs no signs; it tells friend and foe alike a ship has passed this way. If you follow along this road, your seaman-sharp eyes telling you where we zigged and where we zagged, you will come finally to the thrashing turbulence forced out by our screws; you will have arrived at our fantail, the after limits of a waterborne military community. And should you follow along the welded smooth side of our hull, past the splashing overboard discharges, you will soon come to the swishing white bow-wave, jumping constantly clear, and to the sharp stem cleaving the unmarked sea ahead, these extremities of our life.”

  The froth of bubbles that the USS Atlanta had left behind reached all the way to the northeastern seaboard. The young reservist who wrote these words, a New Yorker named Robert Graff, was new to the fleet but already in its thrall. In the rush of the past year, he had learned what his shipmates were capable of. The good ones on the good days became as brothers. Even some of the bad ones were just the kind of men you wanted on your side in a fight. A ship was a small world and one they came to love, even as its narrow steel enclosure restricted their immediate prospects and carried them, with few diversions, toward a deadly struggle.

  The salad days of her prewar launching in New York were a dimming memory. The ceremonial flourish that attended the launch of the ship had been spectacular. The country’s most popular purveyor of heavily freighted romance, Mrs. John R. Marsh, better known by her pen name, Margaret Mitchell, had been on hand in Kearny, New Jersey, on September 12, 1941, to celebrate the launching. With a quick two-handed swing, the author of Gone with the Wind smashed a bottle of champagne over an after turret housing and christened the lead ship of a new class of cruiser. Moored in the finishing basin at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, their decks fouled with electrical cabling and acetylene hoses and pneumatic hardware, unfinished fixtures and unfixed weaponry, two of the new type stood as sisters: the Atlanta and the Juneau.

  Like shipyards coast-to-coast, Kearny, New Jersey, was a festival of naval industry. Half a dozen destroyers and twice that many merchantmen crowded the docks up and down the river. But the Atlanta and Juneau stood out. What was most noticeable about them, before they were finished out with thousands of fittings, riggings, and shapely facets of superstructure, was the extent of their main battery. The arrangement of the twin-mounted five-inch turrets, three rising forward and three descending aft, with two more in hip positions amidships, helped give them their characteristic lines. The forest of barrels was suited to the mission of the Atlanta class: to provide antiaircraft defense for a task force. They had the largest single broadside of heavy antiaircraft weaponry of any vessel in any fleet, nearly half again that of the latest U.S. fast battleships that were five times their displacement. Though antiaircraft cruisers were fitted with the destroyer’s traditional armament of torpedoes and depth charges, the Atlanta was the embodiment of a navy built for a new kind of war. She was a welterweight ship with a middleweight jab. Her batteries were numerous enough to fend off multiple destroyers in a surface action, and put a dent in the most vigorous air attack as well.

  The Atlanta’s assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Lloyd M. Mustin, showed visitors this thick grove of firepower “with the same pride a mother would introduce her children,” said Edward Corboy, another Atlanta officer. A new ship was a complex system full of small flaws to fix. Mustin found that the Atlanta’s SC radar transmitter couldn’t send signals powerful enough to survive transmission through the foremast’s eighty-foot run of coaxial cable, bounce off a target, and return back through the receiver and the long cable to the radar room and produce a usable echo. He arranged for preamplifiers to boost the signal and, with adjustments to the receiver’s sensitivity, found that he could detect aircraft at fifty to sixty miles and surface ships at fifteen to twenty. He also saw to it that the Atlanta was outfitted with the new Mark 37 gun director. Coupled with the new high-frequency model FD fire-control radar, whose narrow beams returned a precise range on a target after it was located by the search radar, and a late-model power-drive gunsight that enabled him to slew rapidly to acquire targets, they were a powerful package. In impromptu training sessions, director crews zeroed their sights on subway trains carrying oblivious commuters across Manhattan’s East River bridges.

  Three months later, on the day before Christmas, the ship was finished and ready for commissioning into the fleet. Under overcast skies at the New York Navy Yard, Margaret Mitchell was on hand again. As soon as she finished her remarks, the sun broke through over Brooklyn, catching sharply on the swords of officers and flashing on the gray sides of all those gun turrets. “A rather dull tableau suddenly was a scene of splendor,” Edward Corboy said. For the plankowners on the first U.S. warship commissioned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was an auspicious sign.

  Under command of Captain Samuel P. Jenkins, the Atlanta shook down in the Chesapeake Bay, ran speed trials off the Maine coast, and was headed for the Pacific before many of her systems were complete. One didn’t have to be a veteran, or even a man, to admire her hard, monochromatic elegance. Elizabeth Shaw, the wife of one of her lieutenants, would write, “To my artist’s eye she was a thing of beauty and a true oceanic lady.” The wives had followed her on the journey from Atlantic to Pacific coast. At each place they were forbidden to board the ship, just as their husbands were forbidden from going ashore. Secrecy was the byword of the wartime Navy. Rumors were floated that arctic-weather clothing was due to arrive—“a glorious hoax,” Shaw wrote, “to keep the ship’s destination a secret even from the officers, for fear someone would tell a wife who would gossip.”

  When the Atlanta arrived at Pearl Harbor on May 6, with orders to join Task Force 16, the Enterprise carrier tas
k force, the Arizona’s commissioning pennant could still be seen flying above the wreck in mournful defiance. Death was persistent still. A thousand and a half bodies were believed to reside within the sunken battleships. The triumphs of Japanese airpower strongly suggested the need for task force defenses bolstered by ships like the Atlanta.

  After taking part in the defense of Midway, the Atlanta returned to Pearl Harbor and soon found herself with new orders. When Jenkins announced to his crew that their destination was Tongatabu, the Navy’s South Pacific fueling base south of Samoa, all hands wondered why. “I think the answer lies in the Solomons,” an officer speculated.

  * * *

  ON JUNE 22, 1942, thousands of well-equipped riflemen of the 1st Marine Division loaded into troop ships at San Francisco, passed Alcatraz, steamed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and set out into the Pacific’s first long swells. An uncertain future lay dead ahead. The weather decks were packed with men looking back.

  The convoy carrying forces from the 1st Marine Division, under Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, was three days under way when Ernest King informed George Marshall that these men would be the tip of the first spear he would throw at Japan’s Pacific imperium. On July 2, King sent Nimitz a “super secret” dispatch that outlined the Navy plan. Code-named Operation Watchtower, it was an invasion plan whose first stage, known as Task One, was the seizure of the Santa Cruz Islands, Tulagi, and “adjacent positions.”

  Given a “golden opportunity” by the victory at Midway, King directed Nimitz to begin preparations to go on the attack. No one expected an offensive to begin prior to the late fall of 1942. According to cynics, King believed the surest way to draw more resources to the Pacific was to send thousands of infantry where the prospect of their defeat would be intolerable. But it was clearly a genuine strategic threat that moved him most. According to Vandegrift, “What he jammed down the throats of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that just possibly the mighty Japanese had overextended. He saw that just possibly a strike by us could halt their eastward parade.”