Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  The new commanding officer of American ground forces on Guadalcanal, General Patch, let the whole thing slide. He reportedly allowed fantastic quantities of surplus to pile up for off-the-books requisition. Just one in six cases of beer ferried ashore reached the quartermaster dump. Much as the Army supply clerks might have protested, no complaints ever came from Patch, who seemed to regard the theft as a generous toast to his brothers in arms who had served so well since August.

  Under Patch, Guadalcanal would begin its transformation to a rear-area base, a place dense with storage depots, hospitals, baseball games, fire trucks, and ration dumps with beer stacked higher than two men could stand. There would be automotive maintenance shops, chapels, water carnivals and regattas with clowns on surfboards, forestry companies, performances by Bob Hope and Jerry Colonna, gardens tended by Japanese POWs, kennel shows, and visits by Eleanor Roosevelt. An armed forces radio affiliate known as The Mosquito Network would flourish there. Its program supervisor, hired out of Hollywood, would create a musical segment called the “Atabrine Cocktail Hour,” promoting faithful use of the anti-malaria medication. Troops coming ashore would do so now as rehearsals for landings farther north and westward.

  The Imperial Japanese Navy had lost the ability to impose its will on the waters of Savo Sound. Ashore, the position of the 17th Army, desperately drawn in to hold small parts of the island’s tangled and mountainous twenty-five hundred square miles, was about as precarious as the initial U.S. position. “The whole color of the war ashore on Guadalcanal was changing, and we could see it,” said Lloyd Mustin.

  41

  Future Rising

  IN THIS SEA OF DESTINY, A SPANISH PRIEST HAD ONCE SEEN BOTH THE scale and the pattern of the coming days. Men now living, the survivors of the inferno of 1942, could begin to see the shape of the future, too. It was a wide, islanded oceanic vista cut through now with markers for a trail that would become a path that would become a road. Extended and improved by other ships and other crews, it would lead all the way to Tokyo.

  Some would say the victory at Guadalcanal led nowhere. After all, instead of setting sights on conquering Rabaul, the Navy and the Marines would bypass it, jumping north to Tarawa and pouring through the Central Pacific. MacArthur would carry the fight on a line to the west, following a parallel route along New Guinea’s northern coast toward the Philippines. But the rights of way for all these roads were laid by the ships and men of the South Pacific Forces. If they had faltered, Australia and New Zealand would have stood alone and America’s confidence to undertake a serious offensive anywhere at all might have been broken entirely. For the American veterans of the struggle in the South Pacific, another road lay before them, a road home for a brief respite, and then a return to the war that gave no permanent reprieves except to the dead.

  For several days after the Atlanta went down, Robert Graff drifted in and out of consciousness in a Lunga Point foxhole. Effectively checked out of the campaign, he was unaware of the final dramas that raged in Savo Sound. The pillars of the earth shook beneath him, but he remained in his own world, bruised body and mind rallying to their own defense.

  One night Graff was placed in a small boat and sent to a waiting cargo ship, and along with many other stretcher cases was taken to Espiritu Santo. There, in a series of operations in a medical hut, doctors removed chunks of shrapnel that had riddled him that night. That’s where he first heard the whole story of the loss of his ship, and of the deaths of Admiral Scott and the others on the Atlanta’s bridge under heavy fire from friend and foe. It felt like a story told by a stranger from another world. He walled himself off from the experience, even as he couldn’t quite shake his wonderment that he had survived it. He would reflect on the arbitrary randomness of his luck for the rest of his life. “People were killed all around me. It put me in a very, very deep emotional funk for years.”

  Graff was taken to Efate to recover. Most of the other medical evacuees were taken to Nouméa, where they were transferred to the “receiving ship,” which was not a vessel but a transfer facility consisting of a large tent city on a scenic hillside, well populated with survivors of the Hornet, the Atlanta, the Northampton, and various sunken destroyers. In time they were gathered and transferred to the holds of a transport, the President Monroe, which ferried them to Auckland. Graff ended up in Auckland, too.

  On arrival in the harbor, Graff heard strains of a military band playing its bouncing repertoire. Recent history started to catch up with him then. “I just cried my heart out,” he said. “I could not get ahold of myself, whatever there was to hold onto.” A nurse came into his hospital room once or twice and lulled, “Shhh, there’s nothing to cry about, old man.” But she couldn’t know and he didn’t tell her. “I just continued to cry.” In time, and with struggle, he was able to rise and lift himself out of bed.

  The Atlanta survivors got four days of “free gangway” in New Zealand’s largest city. “This was a privilege seldom afford in the USN. It means ‘beat it and don’t come back until we sail,’ ” Bill McKinney wrote. Strolling the city streets by evening, the sailors were, he recalled, “literally engulfed by girls. It would have taken a leper to have wound up with less than a girl on each arm. They were quite frank and got to the point quickly. Many of them seemed to live alone and we were invited to move in during our stay in Auckland. They were so blunt that many a usually self-assured sailor was left open-mouthed.”

  The Helena, now under a new captain, Charles P. Cecil, was ordered from Nouméa to Sydney for some R&R. Entering the harbor, the light cruiser was saluted by the deep groans of tugboat whistles and cheering well-wishers waving from sailboats and pleasure craft. The city’s iconic Harbour Bridge, silhouetted in a rosy red at twilight, was the backdrop for a celebration that spilled ashore into the oyster bars and Red Cross–sponsored dances and cocktail parties.

  Such pleasures were a superficial salve. Graff’s shipmate Jim Shaw wrote to his wife, Jane, of the new perspective on life the experience of battle had given them. “We hate the petty bickering of politics.… We hate the disunity between labor and capital. We look with a sort of contemptuous tolerance on such organizations as the USO. We eye askance and critically the opinions aired by the press. As for the ‘military commentators’ who learn their strategy out of books, we writhe in disgust at their positive statements as to how the actual combat should be carried on.… After the war is over the fighting man is going to demand a kind of peace and a kind of government that will be some slight remuneration for the blood and toil and anguish of the war.”

  For Leonard A. Joslin, a survivor of the Quincy, nighttime was forevermore a haunted place. “Years later I’d have nightmares, and dreams at night, and I would see the ship coming into port. I’d see men waving. I could see the signal bridge. I knew that I was supposed to be up there. But the ship would fade away. And I’d try to catch it at another port, and the same thing. I could see the men waving, the signal bridge; I knew I was supposed to be up there. But the ship would leave me, and the dream would fade. Many times, years later even, I would dream of this ship, and the men. And they’re waving at me.”

  On the eleventh of December, Joslin’s vision unfolded in real time for the survivors of Dan Callaghan’s old flagship arriving in her namesake city. As the crew manned the rail, thousands of Bay Area residents greeted them, jamming the hillsides and promenades to have a look at the battered San Francisco entering the harbor. Eugene Tarrant remembers the cool weather that welcomed their homecoming, and the fog that held the Golden Gate Bridge like a midnight pall off Savo. It was a publicist’s dream: the veterans of a hero ship, returning to the city where she had been built (Vallejo), right next door to the hometown (Oakland) of the admiral who had died in battle on her bridge.

  When the ambulatory survivors were flushed out of the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital and bused downtown for a ticker-tape parade six days later, “They gave this city a strange feeling of humility and sadness, and at the same time its greatest
thrill in many a year,” a San Francisco Chronicle reporter wrote. The procession of survivors stretched out for more than a mile, attended by a crowd of seventy-five thousand lining the street. However, the mood of the celebration was peculiar. “It was the quietest parade this city has ever seen. There was some cheering and applauding, but it didn’t stick. For the most part, the thousands on the streets stared as they would at a sacred procession.” Some of the marchers proceeded with canes and crutches, wearing hospital robes. None of them stayed thirsty for long on Market Street that week.

  Admirals Nimitz and King were on hand to give medals. They decorated Bruce McCandless with the Medal of Honor in front of an audience that included his parents and his wife. The father of Dan Callaghan drove over from Oakland, but the late admiral’s mother and widow stayed home. “They didn’t think they could face it. They didn’t think they could stand it,” Dan Callaghan, Sr., told a reporter. In Washington, President Roosevelt himself had just given the same award to family representatives of Callaghan and Norman Scott. Herbert Schonland and the San Francisco’s heroic firefighter, Reinhardt J. Keppler, received the Medal of Honor as well.

  For the rest of the San Francisco’s crew, there was acclaim to go around, though many of them understood it was excessive. “In the press we were lauded beyond all reason,” Clifford Spencer wrote. Almost everyone knew that other ships, including the Sterett, Monssen, Barton, Juneau, and Atlanta, had suffered far heavier proportions of casualties but weren’t able to return for ticker tape and free beer. Whenever he heard the San Francisco referred to as the Navy’s “fightin’est ship,” McCandless would insist that “polishing off a battleship is a community job.”

  The homecoming of damaged warships was a rare thing for the public. The lack of a fair perspective on their accomplishments was inevitable. The way Mike Moran’s Boise was feted in Philadelphia would forever irk many Helena sailors, who had thrown at least as much ordnance the enemy’s way and were now rewarded with obscurity for having taken less in return.1 The New York Times reported as fact that the Boise “sank six Japanese warships in twenty-seven minutes.” To the lasting chagrin of the Washington’s men, the South Dakota was immortalized in the press as “Battleship X,” used out of concern for security. When the mask was finally lifted, the ship’s name was cast in lights that her dubious battle performance did not seem to merit. Nevertheless, Captain Gatch announced that his ship “sank three Jap cruisers and demonstrated there’s no match for a battleship, except equally good battleships.” When the San Francisco entered harbor, she was in the company of a fellow veteran of Ironbottom Sound, the Sterett. As the cruiser prepared for a public reception at Pier 16, the humble tin can went, unheralded as those expendable ships often are, to the yard at Mare Island.

  None of these small injustices matched what Eugene Tarrant and his fellow steward’s mates and cooks suffered when they went ashore. Cameramen from the Fox Movietone News Agency dwelled on the San Francisco’s crew until Tarrant’s turn came. When he and his S Division shipmates began filing past, the motion-picture crews turned their cameras on other subjects.

  AS THE SAN FRANCISCO was approaching the West Coast for her grand reception, an Imperial Army colonel returned to Tokyo from Rabaul after a fact-finding mission to the Southern Area front. Across all services at Japan’s forward-most base, he told high command, there was a wholesale lack of confidence. With the destruction of their reinforcement convoys in November and their faltering hold on New Guinea, both naval and Army high command saw that the end of the struggle was near. The colonel’s report urged the unthinkable: abandonment of Guadalcanal, and the evacuation of its garrison. In the discussion that followed, the concern arose that if word of an evacuation reached the island, the soldiers might take their own lives.

  The Americans had their own setbacks to explore, and their own fact-finding missions to launch. Though victory was within its grasp, the Navy was looking back on the disaster that had nearly derailed it in the beginning with the losses of the Vincennes, Quincy, and Astoria. An old saying later popularized by a veteran of the Solomons naval campaign, John F. Kennedy, went, “Victory has a hundred fathers. Defeat is an orphan.” What then of the parentage a defeat suffered within the context of a larger victory? The Navy seemed bent on isolating it like a cancer.

  On December 20, Ernest King ordered an “informal inquiry into the circumstances attending the loss of these vessels.” Its purpose, he would write, was “to find out exactly what caused the defeat, and second, to determine whether or not any responsible officers involved in the planning and execution of the operations were culpably inefficient.” Three days later, the man who would conduct the investigation reported to King’s headquarters in Washington. His name was Arthur J. Hepburn. The chairman of the Navy’s General Board, a panel of senior admirals that advised the secretary of the Navy, Hepburn was the U.S. admiralty’s most senior man. He had served as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and had a deep expertise in the mysteries of the world’s largest ocean. As an ensign, after the Spanish-American War, he had participated in the U.S. Exploring Expedition, an oceanographic survey of the entire vast Pacific. He was serious, dignified, and reserved. As Hanson Baldwin wrote in a 1936 New York Times profile, “He is not a colorful personality; there are no legends about him on his flagships, no mass of Hepburn anecdota in the fleet. His record speaks for him; he is respected and trusted.” Hepburn served in another role, too, one that is seldom mentioned in the shadow of his other accomplishments: He was the Navy’s director of public relations, the sea service’s principal public affairs man. After reporting to King, Hepburn sat down with Vice Admiral Ghormley in Washington and interrogated him. Ghormley had been puzzled and perturbed since his relief that any specific fault might attach to him for the August 9 disaster off Savo Island. His interrogation by his former superior—Ghormley had been Hepburn’s staff operations officer after his tour in command of the Nevada—opened that wound again. On January 2, 1943, Hepburn reported to CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii. When illness forced Hepburn to the hospital for three weeks, his aide, Commander Donald J. Ramsey, began reviewing documents at the headquarters of CINCPAC.

  WHILE HEPBURN WAS CONVALESCING in Hawaii, American intelligence analysts were starting to divine from movements of troops, aircraft, and ships that the Japanese might be shifting to the strategic defensive. But something in the radio traffic suggested otherwise. Stymied by a change in Japanese ciphers, they took what they could from the radio traffic. Again and again they heard references to something known as “Operation KE,” evidently planned to take place somewhere in New Guinea or the Solomons.

  Nimitz believed Yamamoto might still have plans to strike at and reinforce Guadalcanal. When Halsey’s intelligence staff saw signs in the third week of January that at least three carriers, the Zuikaku, Zuiho, and Junyo, were at Truk, along with the super battleships Yamato and Musashi, there was good reason for vigilance. Confronted with the possibility of another major naval assault, Halsey resolved to finish the replacement of the war-weary Marine units on Guadalcanal while things were still relatively quiet. He ordered transports to bring in the last of the Army’s 25th Division and take off the marines. A powerful element of the South Pacific Area naval force was ordered to support them and cover the withdrawal.

  In desperation, the Imperial General Headquarters had drawn up an even more ambitious plan. As forces gathered at the great naval base in the Carolines, Japan’s service branches were regrouping to defend the central and northern Solomons—and preparing to throw their fullest effort into Operation KE. After five months of attrition, Halsey and his staff were blameless in thinking it was another reinforcement effort.

  Emperor Hirohito was sensitive about the public’s opinion of a campaign that had emerged as a showcase of the Japanese will to fight. In public he held to the view that an opportunity for victory lay for the taking in the Solomons. In an Imperial Rescript broadcast to the nation on December 26, the very same day that the Im
perial General Headquarters decided to withdraw, the emperor declared that “dawn is about to break in the Eastern Sky” and announced that forces then gathering would head toward the Solomons for the decisive battle.

  In a meeting with his high commanders a few days later, however, the Emperor decided to do what until then was unthinkable. The Imperial Army would not reinforce. It would withdraw. Compelling testimony of the morbid state of Japanese soldiers on the island came from diaries taken from the dead. In late December, when deaths by starvation were tolling at a rate of more than a hundred a day, a Japanese Army lieutenant estimated the life expectancy of his comrades as follows: “Those who can stand—30 days. Those who can sit up—3 weeks. Those who cannot sit up—1 week. Those who urinate lying down—3 days. Those who have stopped speaking—2 days. Those who have stopped blinking—tomorrow.” The Japanese were finished throwing good men and machines into the grinder.