Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  Time was of the essence, but speed faced many obstacles. Many of the small craft used to bring in supplies were loaded so deeply by the head that they couldn’t make it all the way up the beach. When their ramps were lowered, they filled with water and their straining engines drowned. Compounding the trouble was the way the big transports offshore had been loaded in Wellington: for commerce, efficiently and in volume, not for combat, enabling quick access to food and ammunition. In the Chesapeake Bay area and on the West Coast, the Navy was still establishing specialty schools to teach these skills to their beachmasters. At Guadalcanal, on-the-job training would have to suffice.

  Early in the evening of August 8, in his flagship McCawley, Turner was wrestling with these frustrations, minding the possibility of further attacks, when Frank Jack Fletcher did what Turner had been dreading for two weeks. In a message to Admiral Ghormley, Fletcher was requesting permission to withdraw his three aircraft carriers, now serving as Task Force 62’s umbrella and shield, from their supporting positions near Guadalcanal.

  The reasons Fletcher cited were various—that his F4F Wildcat fighter force had, after two days of action against Japanese bombers, been whittled from ninety-nine planes to seventy-eight; that his ships’ fuel reserves were dwindling; and that the presence of torpedo-armed enemy aircraft posed a threat to his carriers. Fletcher’s reasoning was never clear or consistent. When he asked Admiral Noyes, the tactical commander of the carrier force, for his opinion about a withdrawal, a shortage of fuel was not among his expressed concerns. But when Ghormley notified Nimitz of the decision, fuel was the only concern he mentioned.

  Turner never forgot the contentious planning conference on the Saratoga, where he and General Vandegrift pushed for the carriers to remain on station through August 9. Fletcher’s defenders say he only ever promised two days of air support—through August 8. Either way, the argument continued. Passions about the use of the carriers ran so high that they even got to the gentlemanly Marine commander. Vandegrift would be moved, in his memoirs, to accuse Fletcher of rank cowardice: “This was the Koro [Saratoga] conference relived, except that Fletcher was running away twelve hours earlier than he had already threatened during our unpleasant meeting. We all knew his fuel could not have been running low since he refueled in the Fijis.”

  Though Ghormley approved his request solely on the basis of a fuel shortage, Fletcher’s carriers had enough fuel for several additional days at cruising speed. His destroyers were at about half capacity, with enough fuel for about thirty-six hours of high-speed operation. The larger ships on hand could have topped them off. Since he had yet to receive Fletcher’s final operations plan, Ghormley had no independent knowledge of the actual risks to the carriers and felt bound to take Fletcher at his word. “All knew that the enemy could arrive in force and catch our Task Forces short of fuel,” Ghormley wrote. “This had to be considered very seriously. When Fletcher, the man on the spot, informed me he had to withdraw for fuel, I approved. He knew his situation in detail; I did not.”

  Weeks earlier, in joining MacArthur’s call to delay the invasion, Ghormley had expressed the need for a continuous presence by carrier aircraft. As MacArthur put it to King, “It is the opinion of the two commanders, arrived at independently and confirmed after discussion, that the initiation of this operation at this time without a reasonable assurance of adequate air coverage during each phase would be attended with the gravest risk as has been thoroughly demonstrated by the Japanese reverses in the Coral Sea and at Midway.” The Navy’s successes were also cautionary tales. If “assurance of adequate air coverage” was indeed essential, one might wonder why Ghormley did not more closely monitor the carriers’ actual fuel needs or simply insist they stay on hand, within range of shore.

  Fletcher was the most battle-seasoned senior officer in Operation Watchtower. The experience of combat had taught him its costs. At both Coral Sea and Midway he had had a great carrier, the Lexington and then the Yorktown, sunk from under him. At a time when the Pacific carrier fleet numbered just four, three of which were assigned to Watchtower, he was fearful of further losses. During the day, the Enterprise, Wasp, and Saratoga operated from a position about twenty-five miles south of the eastern end of Guadalcanal. From there, naval aircraft on patrol were but a quick few minutes from the beaches. Though Japanese planes from Rabaul six hundred miles away would have little capacity to strike them even if they could find them, the danger posed by the Japanese carriers and submarines was considerable. The paramount question was whether the carriers were foremost in Fletcher’s mind, or the overall operation.

  In his original July 2 operational order to Nimitz, King had specified the conditions under which the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) could order the carriers withdrawn. “The withdrawal of the naval attached units of the U.S. fleet may be ordered by the U.S. chiefs of staff upon completion of any particular phase of the operation in the event that (1) conditions develop which unduly jeopardize the aircraft carriers (2) an emergency arises in other Pacific areas which dictates such withdrawal” (emphasis added). In King’s view, completion of a particular phase of the operation—for instance, the landings—was a necessary precondition to a high-level decision to remove the carriers. Not even a serious threat to the carriers themselves excused their departure prior to the completion of a phase. Though it is unclear exactly what constituted a “phase,” and while the criteria for a withdrawal ordered by the JCS were not the same as for one ordered by the tactical commander, it does seem unlikely that Admiral King ever envisioned a withdrawal before the initial unloading of supplies was done. The second precondition allowing the carriers’ withdrawal—undue jeopardy to them—required that Fletcher view his losses of fighter planes and consumption of fuel, both rather predictable outcomes of operations, as excessive.

  Fletcher was said to be the only U.S. flag officer who understood that Watchtower would provoke the Japanese to a major naval counterattack. “His major job,” wrote author Richard B. Frank, “was to win the carrier fleet action that would decide the fate of the Marines.” If that was the case, it would have been reckless to risk his carriers before that threat actually appeared. He knew he would have to win that battle without ready reinforcement to make up his losses. No new carriers were due from the shipyards until late 1943.

  A well-situated referee to the controversy over Fletcher’s decision making was Marine colonel Melvin J. Maas. If his position on Fletcher’s staff makes his sympathy for his boss unsurprising, his status as a leatherneck inclined him to balanced perspective. He believed the only way the Japanese could retake Guadalcanal was through a major amphibious counteroffensive. “Marines cannot be dislodged by bombers,” Maas wrote. Because he saw the carriers as the key to preventing an enemy landing, he favored a withdrawal of the carriers, even at the expense of his brothers.

  “To be able to intercept and defeat [Japanese troop landings], our carrier task forces must be fueled and away so as not to be trapped here.… By withdrawing to Nouméa or Tongatabu, we can be in a position to intercept and pull a second Midway on their carriers. If, however, we stay on here and then, getting very low on fuel, withdraw to meet our tankers, and if they should be torpedoed, our whole fleet would be caught helpless and would be cold meat for the Japs, with a resultant loss of our fleet, 2/3 of our carriers, and we would lose Tulagi as well, with all the Marines there and perhaps all the transports.

  “It is true, Marines will take a pounding until their own air gets established (about ten days or so), but they can dig in, hole up, and wait. Extra losses are a localized operation. This is balanced against a potential National tragedy. Loss of our fleet or one or more of these carriers is a real, worldwide tragedy.” There is little doubt Fletcher’s view of the situation off Guadalcanal took a serious accounting of the strategic significance of this scarcity of carrier power.

  So would go the debate. The amphibious commanders met on the evening of August 8 to discuss what to do, Kelly Turner summoning Vandegrift an
d Crutchley to his flagship, the McCawley. Vandegrift arrived by launch from the beach. Shortly after 9 p.m., Crutchley, the cruiser force commander, pulled his flagship, the heavy cruiser Australia, out of formation in the southwestern covering force and set course for Lunga Point. This left the other two cruisers in that force, the Chicago and the Canberra, to guard that entrance to the sound. Crutchley left the commander of the Chicago, Captain Howard D. Bode, in interim command of his group.

  The Australia anchored off Lunga Point, and Crutchley took a whaleboat to the McCawley. During the meeting, Vandegrift was struck by both Turner’s and Crutchley’s absolute physical weariness. There had been no break in the pressure they faced. Two days of air attacks and continuous difficulties with logistics ashore had worn them down to the threshold of exhaustion. Turner announced a tentative decision that he had been reluctant to make: In view of Fletcher’s withdrawal, he would remove the transports and all of the cargo ships from the area, too. They would leave at sunrise on the ninth. Turner asked Vandegrift if enough stores had been unloaded to last his forces for a while. He asked Crutchley whether the cruiser screen could hold for a day or two without the protection of carrier-based fighter planes. Turner heard their grumbling affirmations and let’s-hope-sos and adjourned the meeting at eleven forty-five.

  As the commanders took leave of Turner’s flagship, the enemy’s torpedoes were already in the water.

  6

  A Captain in the Fog

  IF COMMAND IS A LONELY MOUNTAIN, THERE WERE FEW PEAKS MORE desolate than Howard D. Bode, the captain of the Chicago. Largely, it seemed, he liked it that way. It was common practice for a skipper to take all his meals alone in his cabin. This suited the ship’s officers, because Bode’s manner was insulting and intimidating when he was not entirely aloof. He visited the wardroom only for meetings, and his presence always chilled the company.

  Bode could wield the chilling power by proxy. “His officers were scared to death of him,” said his Marine orderly, Raymond Zarker. “The minute I would walk in there they would freeze, like a bunch of frightened rabbits.” According to an officer who knew him on another ship, “he was short and stocky and to a young ensign the most staggering thing about him was that he let his hair grow long enough so that it hung down over the collar of his service dress whites. He used to stick one of his hands in his blouse in front and he postured a little like Napoleon postured and looked a little like I thought Napoleon was supposed to look.”

  On the Chicago, officers who stood by their captain on watch and tried to be helpful did so at their peril. To give advice to a tyrant was to suggest his fallibility and offer oneself as a scapegoat should things go wrong. There were a few senior officers whom Bode outwardly respected, but he treated most of them in line with his whispered nicknames, “Captain Bligh” and “King Bode.” Of the Pacific Fleet’s eleven heavy cruisers, the Chicago ranked lowest for engineering performance, a fact that may have arisen in part from the unwillingness of his engineers to fudge fuel records—a technique sometimes used to mask actual consumption but which might well have invited a stickler’s wrath. He was bound for flag rank, had shaped his career toward that goal ever since he had survived some unpleasantness as a senior midshipman at the Naval Academy: a disciplinary proceeding for hazing, all of it duly reported on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. It was mortifying, but it didn’t hold him back. He was a star, bound to command task groups and wear gold stars.

  The scuttlebutt on the Chicago had it that Bode was from money. The son of a Cincinnati judge, he had married into the Dupont family and thus would have known the glamour of overseas capitals even had his prewar service as a naval attaché not taken him around the world. In that capacity, and later as a section chief in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he had become an expert in foreign intelligence. When Bode urged the disclosure to Pearl Harbor’s commander of certain evidence that the berthing locations of vessels within the base were under scrutiny by Japanese agents, he reportedly clashed with Admiral Turner—a gambit for only the stoutest of heart. Turner, it was said, shut him down. His next assignment was to command the battleship Oklahoma. On December 7, it was only through chance that he was ashore when Mitsubishi crosshairs found his ship. The Oklahoma was heavily hit and capsized, killing almost half of her 864-man peacetime complement. Bode’s absence spared his life. He and ten other men from the battleship transferred to the Chicago.

  On the night of August 8, when Admiral Crutchley took the Australia out of the southwestern screening force to confer with Turner, he signaled the Chicago by light, “TAKE CHARGE OF PATROL. I AM CLOSING CTF 62 AND MAY OR MAY NOT REJOIN YOU LATER.” With mere hours between the end of the conference and the rise of dawn, when the Australia and the other cruisers were supposed to go south to protect the transports, Crutchley saw no point in returning to his nighttime patrol station. And so Bode was alone again, in temporary command of a two-cruiser squadron guarding one of two routes into Savo Sound. The elevation to commodore-for-a-night was, he no doubt thought, a foretaste of duty to come.

  Bode had reckoned with the possibility of a ship-to-ship fight against the Japanese on the night of August 8. According to a sighting report from an Australian plane out of Milne Bay, New Guinea, the Japanese fleet was on the move. Recorded at ten twenty-five that morning but delivered near dusk, the report read: “AIRCRAFT REPORTS 3 CRUISERS 3 DESTROYERS 2 SEAPLANE TENDERS OR GUNBOATS 0549 S 15607 E COURSE 120 TRUE SPEED 15 KNOTS.”

  It was a curious report, vague as to ship type. When the Chicago’s navigator plotted the coordinates of the enemy naval squadron, Bode’s executive officer, Commander Cecil Adell, determined that it was too far away to reach the Chicago’s patrol area before midmorning on the following day.

  So it will be a quiet evening after all, Bode thought.

  Because the narrow waters between Guadalcanal and Savo Island were poorly charted, Bode had elected not to take the lead as befitted his command. Bringing his six-hundred-foot-long heavy cruiser to the head of the truncated column would have required him to conduct a minuet of giants in perilously confined waters after dark.

  The Chicago’s crew was on the brink of exhaustion after several days at battle stations. As soon as one attack ended, a warning of the next one usually followed. There would be a warning this night as well, or a hint of a warning, but it would be cried only faintly, and no one would seem to hear it, or fathom it, until it was too late.

  ADMIRAL MIKAWA WAS AWARE he had been spotted. One of his lookouts saw the plane that had betrayed him. Its appearance in the cloud gaps overhead persuaded him to reverse course in order to deceive the pilot that he was en route to Rabaul or Truk. But there was no need to fool an aviator who was already fooled.

  The pilot of the plane, a New Zealander named William Stutt, reported to his base at Milne Bay that the ships scribing white lines in the waters of New Georgia Sound might include two seaplane tenders, or gunboats. These references to disparate ship types bewildered those receiving the report. Gunboats were not a recognized class of modern warship, though the term might suggest a small combatant such as a PT boat. Seaplane tenders were rarely mistaken for surface combatants of any kind. The ambiguity served to mask the actual lethal nature of Mikawa’s striking force. Knowing nothing of Operation Watchtower in any event, Stutt was not predisposed to alarm. His report languished for hours at his base, and then for hours more at Brisbane, and finally reached Turner and Crutchley between 6 and 7 p.m. With its reference to seaplane tenders, it failed to arouse the suspicions it ought to have. Turner surmised that the enemy’s mission was to establish a seaplane base near Rekata Bay, off the northern tip of Santa Isabel Island.

  Continuing to vary his course to mask his purpose, Mikawa ordered his cruisers to launch search planes to survey the waters ahead. Within a few hours their reports would come back. Off Guadalcanal: fifteen transports, a battleship, four cruisers, seven destroyers, and an “auxiliary carrier”; off Tulagi: two heavy cruisers, twelve destroye
rs, and three transports. At a quarter to five, Mikawa signaled the battle plan to each of the ships: “WE WILL PENETRATE SOUTH OF SAVO ISLAND AND TORPEDO THE ENEMY MAIN FORCE OFF GUADALCANAL. THEN WE WILL MOVE TOWARD THE FORWARD AREA AT TULAGI AND STRIKE WITH TORPEDOES AND GUNFIRE, AFTER WHICH WE WILL WITHDRAW TO THE NORTH OF SAVO ISLAND.”

  Mikawa knew nothing of Fletcher’s plan to withdraw. His only sure evidence of the threat posed by U.S. carriers was the chatter of American pilots that his radiomen were intercepting. To avoid that threat, he would have to strike under cover of darkness. He calculated that as long as the fight began before 1:30 a.m., his force, on withdrawal, would be outside the range of U.S. carrier planes come daylight.

  On came Mikawa’s column at twenty-four knots, the flagship Chokai in the lead, followed at thirteen-hundred-yard intervals by the heavy cruisers Kako, Kinugasa, Aoba, Furutaka, then the smaller Tenryu, Yubari, and Yunagi. Preparing his lunge into the American anchorage, Mikawa ordered his commanders to jettison all flammables. From the signal yards of each ship rose long white battle streamers that whipped the air. Back at Truk, Admiral Ugaki spent the day relishing the thought of what was coming: “The Eighth Fleet is going to surprise the enemy in Guadalcanal tonight. Come on boys! Do your stuff!”

  THE HMAS CANBERRA led the Chicago in column with the destroyers Bagley and Patterson along a northwest-to-southeast patrol line, reversing course by a column turn every forty-five minutes. To give the weary crews some relief, the ships were in what was known as Condition Two, a state of partial battle readiness that kept one of the cruisers’ two forward turrets fully manned, and the after turret half manned. Bode was reassured to know that both Crutchley and Turner had received the same contact report he had. In Turner’s judgment, the reference to seaplane tenders suggested the ships were bound for a quiet anchorage north of Guadalcanal where the Japanese had a seaplane base. As for the threat of enemy surface ships, Turner was unconcerned. He had told Crutchley that he was comfortable with the disposition of the cruisers to protect the anchorage. “I was satisfied with arrangements, and hoped that the enemy would attack,” Turner later wrote. “I believed they would get a warm reception.” While Turner was with Crutchley and Vandegrift, a Japanese aircraft—a floatplane from one of Mikawa’s cruisers—revealed itself to spotters on the Ralph Talbot, running low, flying east over Savo Island. The destroyer announced, “WARNING—WARNING—PLANE OVER SAVO ISLAND HEADED EAST.” The message was repeated on several radio frequencies. It shouldn’t have been news. Word had arrived hours before from the San Juan, leading three destroyers on patrol off Tulagi, that an unidentified plane had been sighted over Savo Island. The picket destroyer Blue saw it, too. That ship’s gunnery officer asked his captain for permission to open fire, but since the plane was displaying running lights, it was deemed a friendly. The Blue’s skipper feared that if he reported the plane by radio, he would only risk the Japanese detecting his ship’s location by radio direction finder. Fear of using sensors and communications was widespread in the screening force. When Captain Bode retired to his cabin behind the pilothouse for a nap, confident no attack could come that night, he ordered his radar officer to turn off the Chicago’s search radar for fear that Japanese ships might detect and trace the beams.