The deck force lowered a whaleboat over the side, and it motored in to the beach. When it returned, it was carrying the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines, his aide, and two other marines. Coming aboard, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, age forty-four, saluted Smoot. “I doggone near lost my life getting down to the beach. I’ve got a whole group of my men up there in the hills. I’ve got to get them out of trouble.”
Puller told a grim story. His marines, landing at Point Cruz and attempting to join up with Colonel Merritt A. Edson’s 1st Raider Battalion, were in the midst of a faltering effort to dislodge Japanese forces from the Matanikau village area. When Puller’s battalion got ambushed and pinned down by the well-entrenched units of General Kawaguchi’s 17th Army, they were effectively cut off. By day’s end, two dozen men would be dead and that same number wounded. They needed evacuation. Puller arranged for a couple dozen Higgins boats to do the job. The Monssen would lend fire support. “They are trapped up there,” he told Smoot. “Let me tell you where to shoot.”
Puller conferred with the destroyer’s gunnery officer, and in short order the ship’s four five-inch guns were trained inland again and set to barking. “We just ploughed it with bullets, straight up and down the middle,” Smoot said. “Then we spread the firepower up two sides.” Several Higgins boats, crewed by volunteers, motored in under fire to evacuate the trapped marines.
Wielding her main battery like a long-armed plow, Smoot’s gunners blew open a path through the jungle. “As the first marines appeared on the beach,” Chet Thomason wrote, “heavy enemy rifle and machine gun fire commenced from both sides. After a few minutes, the landing boats retreated back alongside the Monssen.” Getting the men to the beach was much easier than retrieving them from it. When Puller thought that the boat crews hadn’t committed themselves fully to the evacuation, he was furious. He stepped on Smoot’s toes by yelling at the coxswains, telling them to drive back to the beach and not come back until all the survivors had been retrieved.
“Four marines had managed to scramble into one of the boats earlier,” Thomason said. “They were lying down exhausted in the bottom of the boat. When they realized that the boat was being sent back into the beach, they scrambled up and jumped for the Monssen. Three managed to grab the lifelines and were pulled aboard. The fourth marine missed, and he disappeared beneath the water under the weight of his equipment. Two of the Monssen’s sailors quickly stripped off their clothes and dived into the ocean in an attempt to locate him, but they failed, and he was not seen again.”
A Navy Dauntless pilot who had been strafing Japanese positions, Lieutenant Maxwell Leslie, guided the boats to the landing area. As the Monssen’s brain trust peered out through the clearing smoke through their glasses, the boats closed the beach. The coming of darkness would soon give them cover. With the setting of the sun, bright red slashes of tracer bullets could be seen reaching out from the jungle, splashing all around the departing vessels. One of the coxswains of the landing party, a Coast Guard signalman named Douglas A. Munro, lingered during the evacuation to support his mates with his craft’s light machine gun. A Japanese machine gunner drew a bead on Munro’s boat and opened fire, killing him.
After Puller and the marines rescued from the island were dropped off in a waiting boat at Lunga Point, Smoot took the Monssen away from Guadalcanal. The destroyer joined the Alhena for the nighttime run out to sea, away from the threat of nighttime surface attack. The next day the two ships returned for a final day of unloading, and the Alhena evacuated many of the wounded rescued the previous day. With a lull in the fighting ashore and the skies free of air raids, the day was quiet and the ships retired again late that afternoon for Espiritu Santo.
Their traditional griping could not mask the fact that the marines needed their fleet for much more than just transportation. The Monssen’s display of fighting spirit restored some of their faith. And many had had enough of a taste of life at sea to know they wanted no part of it. After Smoot had given Puller his parting gift the day before—a steak dinner in the wardroom, a hot shower, a seabag full of clean clothes, and a stash of cookies and cigarettes—the infantryman took his leave from the ship. Smoot was glad to be of some help to the Marine Corps. “Everything we could do to help in their rugged life ashore, we did.” Puller thanked him, then said, “God, I wouldn’t have your job for anything in the world.”
At this, Smoot raised an eyebrow. “You mean to tell me you’d go back and go into that messy stuff over there and get yourself filthy and live on c-rations? You’ve come to see the kind of life I lead out here and you prefer yours?”
“I sure do. When you get hit, where are you? When I get hit, I know where I am.”
Like most of the other commanders in Operation Watchtower, Roland Smoot could not know where getting hit would leave him. For the time being, the storm of war had settled its eye on the fetid island. It had not yet come directly for him. When it did, as would almost always be the case, the little tin cans would take its brunt.
15
The Visit
SEPTEMBER WAS A MONTH OF PREPARATION, OF CONSOLIDATION, OF preliminary reckoning. “Today,” Admiral Matome Ugaki wrote in his diary on the thirtieth, “September is going to pass. Looking back, I find nothing has been accomplished this month.” That judgment may have been just deserts for being slow to grasp the significance of the American move into the Solomons. The Japanese were finding themselves outgunned at the point of contact and hamstrung by the geometry of the inter-island campaign. A shortage of fuel at Rabaul forced them to be sparing and selective in the use of their major warships.
The Americans had their own problems, some of them similar, but they were confronting them with active, troubleshooting minds. The fleet’s Service Squadron, the command that operated the tankers and transports and tenders and supply ships, had moved its headquarters north, from Auckland to Nouméa. The Navy was solving the algorithms that would determine how many tons of supplies, ammunition, fresh water, and food were needed per capita to keep an operation going. When the destroyer Laffey left the shipyard for war, she carried 103 pounds of beef liver, 280 pounds of cabbage, 400 pounds of carrots, 418 pounds of bacon and 499 pounds of pork loin, 36 pounds of chili powder, and nine gallons of ice cream—and that was just for her own men. Her inventory was typical, and delivering the calculated sum was a challenge to planners.
One of Nimitz’s staffers, visiting to investigate and report on the state of the supply chain, found Nouméa’s harbor a choked bottleneck of fully loaded cargomen waiting for dock space. The trouble ran all the way from San Francisco, where few seemed to know about the problems confronting SOPAC’s stevedores, to Wellington, New Zealand, where an untimely longshoreman’s strike was looming. Though Nouméa’s facilities could handle only twenty-four ships per month, often as many as eighty or more awaited unloading. The cranes in the harbor weren’t stout enough to haul away heavy loads such as PT boats. Serious thought was given to a crude remedy: sinking the merchantmen so that the Elco motor torpedo boats, seventy feet long and fifty tons each, could simply float free.
Admiral Nimitz had long been worrying about the chemistry of the SOPAC command. He decided to visit the theater personally to size up not only its materials but also its state of mind. On September 28, his seaplane set down in Nouméa harbor and he was promptly taken to the Argonne for an afternoon meeting of area commanders.
On his first arrival, Nimitz was disappointed to learn that the battleship Washington was still at the Navy’s fueling base at Tongatabu, eighteen hundred miles from Guadalcanal, “so far removed from the critical area,” he would scold Ghormley, “that she might as well have been in Pearl or San Francisco, insofar as taking advantage of favorable opportunities is concerned.” Nimitz also thought Ghormley was keeping Admiral Scott’s striking force on too short a leash, holding them too far south “to do much about visiting enemy ships.”
At 4:30 p.m. Nimitz sat down in the flagship’s w
ard room with a gathering of brass that included Ghormley, the SOPAC chief of staff, Dan Callaghan, Kelly Turner, Major General Richard K. Sutherland from MacArthur’s headquarters, and General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the Army Air Forces.
Arnold, a four-star, was Nimitz’s only equal in the room. Arnold was no friend of the Navy’s ambitions in the Pacific. Before leaving, he sought General Marshall’s advice on dealing with the rival service branch. Marshall’s advice was basic Dale Carnegie: Listen to the other fellow’s story. Don’t get mad. And let the other fellow tell his story first.
“We recognized the fact that the Navy was hard-pressed at Guadalcanal,” Arnold wrote. “They did need a ‘shot in the arm’—and needed it badly; but I was not sure that the way to give it to them was by sending airplanes that might better be used against the Germans from England.” He viewed the Navy’s demands for aircraft as a “separate intramural war” that was driven by “uninformed pressures” arising from public interest in the Pacific war. Arnold had been shocked by President Roosevelt’s posturing on the question of which theater should have priority. In private, FDR affirmed a Europe-first strategy. In public, he made statements that Guadalcanal had to be “held at all costs.” While Arnold didn’t argue with the idea that Guadalcanal should be held, he noted, “A natural word of encouragement from the President was at once seized upon as proof that he had changed his mind” about theater priorities. As Arnold would write, “It was obvious that the naval officers in this area were under a terrific strain. It was also obvious that they had chips on their shoulders.” Ghormley said that the pace of work had been such that he hadn’t left the Argonne’s flag quarters in about a month. When Arnold told him “that probably was the cause of some of his troubles, because no man—I don’t care who he is—can sit continuously in a small office, fighting a war, with all the complicated problems that come up, without suffering mentally, physically and nervously,” he received a quick comeuppance. “Admiral Ghormley lost no time in telling me that this was his theater and that no one could tell him how to command it. I assured him all I wanted was information; I was not trying to tell him in any way how to run his command. Things smoothed down after that, but it was clear that Ghormley and the other naval officers in that area—Admiral John S. McCain and Admiral Daniel Callaghan—were very worried about the situation there.… It looked to me as if everybody on that South Pacific front had a bad case of jitters.”
The logistical bottlenecks Arnold found at Nouméa appalled him. He found the practice of rerouting ships to New Zealand for unloading and reloading inexcusable given the shortages everywhere else. “At that moment the planners of Torch were going nearly crazy in their search for ships,” he wrote. In view of the accumulations of crated aircraft that he found at Nouméa, Arnold said that no more planes ought to go to SOPAC until the inventory had been unpacked and sent forward. The Navy’s principal problem, he told Admiral King, was a shortage not of planes, but of airfields.
Ghormley disagreed. “I presented the need for aircraft of all types, especially Army fighters.… I felt that our emergency needs should be met even if our commitments to allied nations, on lend-lease and our commitments to the African Campaign, which had not yet commenced, had to be slowed down somewhat.” Alas, the Army planners who allocated the service’s planes worldwide made decisions based on projected U.S. and Japanese air strength six months out, in April 1943. Since the planners estimated that the U.S. would have five thousand planes in the Pacific then, and the Japanese only four thousand, the more immediate needs of SOPAC were immaterial. The Cactus Air Force would have to make do in ’42.
Even though the U.S.–British Combined Chiefs of Staff had specifically agreed to divert fifteen Army air groups from Britain to the South Pacific, General Arnold successfully contrived to cancel it by arguing that any such reallocation, no matter how specific, was void because it jeopardized the “agreed strategic concept” of going on the offensive in North Africa.
As of September 1942, there was only one Allied offensive that stood in actual jeopardy, and it was far from the beaches of Casablanca. American forces on Cactus, Ghormley said, were “under constant pressure. Logistics supply is most difficult. We can send only one ship at a time and from the eastward there is only one channel.… The Japs are still getting in despite our air activity. Nobody knows exactly how many are on Cactus right now.” Ghormley made a worrying impression on his superiors. Nimitz took note of the discrepancy and the awkward second looks it caused around the room. Watching closely as Ghormley spoke, Nimitz found him worn, weary, and anxious. He couldn’t estimate enemy troop strength in part because he hadn’t visited the island himself to talk with the marines. Vandegrift’s intelligence section based their numbers on actual contact and behind-the-lines reconnaissance. When Ghormley mentioned that the island’s supply of aviation gas was down to just ten thousand gallons, Turner pointed out that the supply had actually been as low as half that volume.
After Arnold remarked on the pressing need for aircraft worldwide and observed that the South Pacific already had all the planes its airfields could effectively handle, Nimitz asked Ghormley a pointed question: Why hadn’t SOPAC’s naval forces been sent out at night to sink the Tokyo Express? The answer came when staffers interrupted the meeting twice to deliver priority radio dispatches to Ghormley. When he read them, his reaction both times was to say, “My God, what are we going to do about this?” In his voice were the echoes of the defeat at Savo, a generalized dread that manifested itself in defeatism. Ghormley saw the whole operation as standing on a precipice. As he later recalled, “If the Japanese desired to take a chance, with the major portion of their fleet supporting a large landing force, they could retake Guadalcanal and break through our lines of communication.”
As it happened, what Ghormley feared was exactly the plan then being devised by Yamamoto and his staff at Truk. On the Imperial Navy’s drawing boards was an ambitious schedule of sustained reinforcements, to be coordinated in October with another major naval push.
* * *
THE DAY AFTER the conference of high commanders on the Argonne, Chester Nimitz stepped into a B-17 Flying Fortress and flew to Henderson Field to tour the island battlefront. General Vandegrift was there to greet him. Nimitz promptly reaffirmed to him that his primary mission was to hold Henderson Field, as opposed to dislodging the Japanese garrison from the surrounding jungles and hills. Vandegrift had understood this well from the beginning, when he drew up his landing plan.
In the bamboo grove outside Vandegrift’s headquarters, Nimitz decorated several men. Colonel Merritt Edson, commander of the 1st Marine Raider Battalion and victor in the early clash south of Henderson Field, received the Navy Cross, as did the Marine Corps fighter ace Captain Marion Carl and Vandegrift himself. As Hal Lamar, Nimitz’s chief of staff, read the citations, Nimitz pinned them on each recipient. Among them was a tall sergeant who had captured a Japanese tank and blown up a couple of machine-gun nests. As Nimitz reached up to pin him with the Navy Cross, the sergeant fainted. “I never saw an admiral before,” he offered later.
When Nimitz returned to Nouméa, he met again with Ghormley and told him exactly what he wanted. He wanted all-weather airfields, more storage facilities for aviation gas, and Quonset huts, not tents, to shelter his pilots. He wanted better cargo-handling facilities, better roads, and more attentive aircraft repair services. “Planes are too expensive and too hard to get to let only minor damage render them permanently unserviceable,” he said. Nimitz wanted a salvage tug in the area, and improved radio procedures and better equipment. He wanted new doctrine for communications and more efficient distribution of mail.
In cataloging these things, Nimitz was showing Ghormley how he wanted leadership exercised. It would not prove helpful to Ghormley’s career that Nimitz visited Guadalcanal before Ghormley himself did. Gracious and subtle as ever, CINCPAC calmly told Ghormley something that might have been tinged with hellfire coming from a
different commander: “I want you to go up and see conditions for yourself.”
At their second meeting, Nimitz learned that Ghormley had not responded to a request from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a schedule of planned offensive operations up the Solomons toward Rabaul. Ghormley said he had not responded because “I feel that our present operations have not yet reached a point where such a plan and schedule would be worthwhile.”
Ghormley’s failure to propose the requested schedule of future operations was a command failure of a high order. Nimitz was suspicious of commanders who found reasons to stay out of harm’s way. Typically he kept his judgments of people to himself, but after two months of fighting and no victories to show, he was in a mood for accountability. He instructed Ghormley to include in his final report on the Battle of Savo Island his view as to the responsibility for the results that night. “Such a blow cannot be passed over, and we owe it to the country to do our best to fix the responsibility for that disaster, and to take the action necessary to prevent a recurrence,” Nimitz said.
Back at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz would give a New York Times reporter a sunny assessment of his trip. He professed himself “satisfied in every way with what I saw.” His other remarks, artfully innocuous, sent a warning shot over his South Pacific commander’s bow. Nimitz told Trumbull, “It was just the kind of trip you would expect a senior officer to take from time to time to see what’s going on.”
Late one evening on Guadalcanal, Nimitz had said to General Vandegrift over a drink, “When this war is over we are going to write a new set of Navy regulations. So just keep it in the back of your mind because I will want to know some of the things you think ought to be changed.”
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