Neptune's Inferno

by James D. Hornfischer

  “You may not care to bother with this letter but please do as it will probly relieve the heartaches of seven people who morn the loss of a dear Boy just 20 years old, who was on the ship Astoria in battle. this is his grandfather writeing you for more information. He was dearly loved by me and his grandmother who passed away on the night of August 9th 42.” (All typos in quotations are sic.)

  Another correspondent had a son on the Quincy, now missing in action. Could he have swum to land or been taken prisoner? “If he is in a hospital would they let him write home and tell me where he is? My son’s wife is to have a baby some time this month.… We grasp at any opportunity to contact someone who may have known our boy.… We shall never tire of listening to anything connected with the last days of the life of the Astoria.”

  Someone in the War Department got the idea to send veterans of America’s first victorious campaign around the country to factories, bolstering morale. By 1943, absenteeism was becoming a serious problem in the war industries. With women pressed into full-time service in the workforce, adding to their responsibilities as homemakers, many found the dual commitments difficult to sustain. Edgar Harrison of the San Francisco was called to duty in this effort. A speech was written for him, and he went out to testify to his experiences.

  “This young man could be any of your sons or husbands,” the executive who introduced him at one event said. “He’s going to tell you about a battle you just heard about on radio.” The speeches were made as bloody as the mores of public presentation would allow. For three months Harrison traveled to the manufacturing plants of the Midwest and Northeast, doing four or five speeches a day, always hitting the shift changes when the audience was double. “Guys would walk up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes, shake my hand, and not say a word. Everybody knew somebody in the Army or Navy,” he said.

  One morning in early 1943, before a speech at the Cadillac plant in Cadillac, Michigan, he was escorted to a railroad siding behind a large building and asked to paint his name on a large piece of steel on a flatcar. Then he was invited to follow it through every manufacturing phase on the assembly line, until, three hours later, it was driven off the end of the line, part of a finished Sherman tank.

  Tom and Alleta Sullivan, gold-star parents of the five boys from the Juneau, began a speaking tour in February that took them to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Hartford, and through the heartland, slated to end with the launching in San Francisco of a new destroyer named after their sons. At a whistlestop in Chicago several weeks along, a survivor from the ship, Allen Heyn, confided to them what had really happened to George, their oldest, during his ordeal at sea.

  They would inspire untold thousands of people in more than two hundred appearances nationwide before they returned to Waterloo and the public eye wandered elsewhere. Back home, they would be left to contend with the smaller minds of their community who suspected the couple of cashing in on their sons’ loss. They would never feel at home in Waterloo again. And it finally became too much. In San Francisco the first week of April, at the launching of the USS The Sullivans, Alleta broke a champagne bottle against the hull and smiled graciously for the cameras. Before the ceremony could end, however, her strength gave out. She buckled and fell to the ground sobbing.

  EARLY 1943 WAS A TIME of many reckonings. Foremost among them, in the echoing halls of the Navy’s culture of reputation at least, was Admiral Hepburn’s inquisition into the failures that decided the Battle of Savo Island.

  After recovering from his illness in Hawaii, he went quickly to work, inspecting Admiral Nimitz’s files and then interrogating Commander H. B. Heneberger, the senior surviving officer of the Quincy, and Commander Elijah W. Irish, the navigator of the Chicago. He boarded the next available ship for Nouméa, where he met with Admiral Halsey. Then, on February 16, he took his inquiry to Australia.

  Interservice niceties were needed to gain an audience with Admiral Crutchley, still serving under U.S. command but now with Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Forces. Hepburn found the British officer’s account of the battle, filed in Brisbane, “the most complete and lucid report of the entire operation,” though of course Crutchley was miles away when it took place. Perhaps out of the respect thus gained, Hepburn would write that he “conferred with” (rather than “interrogated”) Crutchley in Melbourne, on board the vessel that had been excused from disaster on August 9, the cruiser Australia. At Canberra, Hepburn was received by Australia’s governor-general and attended a meeting of the War Council. He returned to Nouméa to interrogate Admiral Turner, then flew home to Pearl Harbor to examine Captain Greenman and begin work on his report to Admiral King.

  Only then, on April 2, did Hepburn fly back to the mainland to interrogate the two officers whose culpable inefficiency he was beginning to see most clearly: Captain Riefkohl of the Vincennes and Captain Bode of the Chicago. Shrewd interrogators will often save the most difficult sessions for last. Armed with deep knowledge of the facts, and with his report largely already drafted, Arthur J. Hepburn arrived in Corpus Christi and prepared for the final stage of his inquest.

  43

  The Opinion of

  Convening Authority

  SOME OFFICERS SAW SUCCESS AND FAILURE AS PRODUCTS OF TEAMWORK. “No one man was responsible for our success in the Pacific,” wrote Charles W. Weaver, Ghormley’s assistant operations officer. “It was a team effort by many good men. Others, of lesser stature, are scrambling now in their memoirs to remind posterity that they won the war.” The Navy was now well along chasing something else: accountability from those who had marred its successful campaign with an avoidable defeat in the Battle of Savo Island.

  The fleet seemed to find it irresistible to refight the battle. Retrospectively, wisdom abounded as to what commanders should have done, what risks they should have embraced or avoided. It had always been so. As a Roman general, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, observed in 168 BC, “In every circle, and, truly, at every table, there are people who lead armies into Macedonia.”

  Admiral King’s flag secretary, Captain George L. Russell, noted that the exercise was significantly academic in nature. “The deficiencies which manifested themselves in this action, with particular reference to communications and the condition of readiness, together with erroneous conceptions of how to conduct this type of operation, have long since been corrected,” he wrote. Long after it had ceased to matter, the Navy would deliver a verdict on its failings. As salve for its own institutional pride perhaps, or for bereaved relatives still mourning their losses, Admiral Hepburn would find his “culpable inefficiency.”

  A critic could find a long list of candidates to blame for the many errors of the Guadalcanal campaign: Riefkohl for failure to keep watch and his mystifyingly persistent belief that Mikawa’s cruisers were friendly. Turner for not understanding the limits of the radar he relied on. Crutchley for removing the Australia from her patrol station without communicating his intentions up or down the chain of command. McCain for failing to report the cancellation of a critical air search. Fletcher and his superiors for the inability to mediate, arbitrate, or otherwise control a serious disagreement about the use of the carriers on the eve of a critical operation. Ghormley for his absorption in detail and absence in body and spirit from the combat zone. Halsey for his spendthrift way with his carriers in October, and for his miscommunications with Kinkaid that prevented Willis Lee from moving north with the Washington in time to help Callaghan’s cruisers on the night of November 13. Callaghan and Wright for not exploiting a radar advantage against a surprised foe. The journalist and critic I. F. Stone would call the state of mind that permitted the Pearl Harbor attack “sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency.” That syndrome was at work on August 9, and the result was another virtuoso performance by the blitz-minded Imperial Japanese Navy.

  The day before his relief by Halsey, Ghormley prepared a commentary that cast the defeat at Savo Island as a result of flawed battle doctrine. His pre
liminary conclusion was that Kelly Turner’s instructions to Crutchley’s screening force were “too indefinite in regard to what the units of that group were to do and how they were to accomplish their tasks.” Though Turner had written to Hepburn, “I was satisfied with arrangements, and hoped that the enemy would attack,” Ghormley observed that those arrangements were woefully inadequate. “No special battle plan was prescribed to cover the possibility of a surface ship night attack,” he wrote, also observing that Turner’s instructions to the two radar pickets, the destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot, “were faulty in requiring them to ‘shadow’ an enemy force and report them frequently. Time and space did not permit the employment of tactics of this nature.” Neither Turner nor Crutchley, Ghormley observed, had decided how the two cruiser groups on patrol that night might coordinate in the event of enemy contact.

  Stickling and insistent in some matters, Hepburn was laissez-faire in others. He didn’t worry about the lack of a battle plan: “Only one plan of battle was practicable, viz., bring batteries to bear as quickly as possible,” he wrote in his fifty-four-page “informal inquiry.” He continued, “In my opinion, the important causes of the defeat suffered in this action are to be found in reasons other than those discussed above, and which fall within the general category of ‘Readiness for Action.’ ”

  Turner would angrily rebut the accusation that he had been passive in the face of Mikawa’s threat. “I have been accused of being and doing many things but nobody before has ever accused me of sitting on my arse and doing nothing,” he would tell his biographer. “If I had known of any ‘approaching’ Jap force I would have done something—maybe the wrong thing, but I would have done something.… What I failed to do was to assume that the g.d. pilots couldn’t count and couldn’t identify and wouldn’t do their job and stick around and trail the Japs and send through a later report. And I failed to assume that McCain wouldn’t keep me informed of what his pilots were or were not doing. And I failed to guess that despite the reported composition of the force, and the reported course, and the reported speed, the Japs were headed for me via a detour, just like we arrived at Guadalcanal via a detour. I wouldn’t mind if they said that I was too damned dumb to have crystal-balled these things, but to write that I was told of an ‘approaching force’ and then didn’t do anything, that’s an unprintable, unprintable, unprintable lie.

  “Nobody reported an ‘approaching force’ to me. They reported a force which could and did approach, but they reported another kind of force headed another kind of way. It was a masterful failure of air reconnaissance and my fellow aviators.”

  When misfortune came, no one’s career was safe from a sudden change in the weather. Gilbert Hoover lost his seagoing career in Halsey’s storm. Even Admiral Raymond Spruance, Nimitz’s chief of staff and widely considered one of the Navy’s most capacious minds, had taken lumps for what some critics deemed his excessive caution in the Battle of Midway. The experience soured him on second-guessing: “I have always hesitated to sit in judgment of the responsible man on the spot, unless it was obvious to me at the time he was making a grave error in judgment. Even in that case I wanted to hear his side of the matter before I made any final judgment.”

  Hepburn acknowledged some of this. “There is generally a twilight zone lying between culpable inefficiency on the one hand and a more or less excusable error of judgment on the other.” But when he released his report on May 13, five weeks after finishing his interrogations and resuming his duties as chairman of the General Board, Hepburn’s conclusions shone like a harsh ray through that twilight.

  “In my opinion the primary cause of defeat must be ascribed generally to the complete surprise achieved by the enemy,” he began. It was in the specific reasons for this surprise that culpable inefficiency lay. In order of importance, those reasons were: an inadequate condition of readiness on all ships to meet a sudden night attack, a failure to understand the telltale presence of enemy planes beforehand, a misplaced confidence in the radar pickets, delayed reports of enemy contact, and a communications breakdown regarding the canceled air-search mission. As a “contributory cause,” Hepburn cited Fletcher’s withdrawal of the carriers on August 9, which made necessary Crutchley’s departure to the conference, which enabled the confused command arrangement for the southern cruiser group.

  Though Captain Riefkohl’s leadership of the northern cruiser group was “far from impressive,” plying a box-shaped patrol course that Hepburn deemed poorly conceived, “there is only one instance in the circumstances immediately attendant upon the Savo Island Battle in which censure is definitely indicated and in which the foregoing considerations”—about the “twilight zone”—“did not apply. That was in the action, or inaction, of the Commanding Officer of the Chicago.”

  Hepburn thought Howard Bode culpable on two counts: the decision to remain at the rear of the formation—“a severe indictment of his professional judgment”; and to steam away from the battle zone for thirty-five minutes—“unexplainable.” Hepburn’s criticism was oddly self-canceling. He allowed that “it would be difficult to sustain a charge that his decision, or lack of decision, resulted in greater damage than actually occurred.” He also saw that the most likely result, had Bode made the choices that presumably Hepburn would have made, would have been largely the same—“the Chicago would have been sunk instead of the Canberra.” Nonetheless, Bode in the end was the only officer deemed culpably inefficient by the Navy’s lone inquisitor and judge.

  Afterward, in his endorsement to Hepburn’s report, King wrote to James Forrestal: “Granting that the immediate cause of our losses was the surprise attack, the question is whether or not any officer should be held accountable for failing to anticipate it. Considering that this was the first battle experience for most of the ships participating in the operation and for most of the flag officers involved, and that consequently it was the first time that most of them had been in the position of ‘kill or be killed,’ the answer to that specific question, in my judgment, must be in the negative. They simply had not learned how and when to stay on the alert.” King specifically exonerated Turner and Crutchley for the way they had deployed the cruisers. Regarding Bode in particular, King was silent.

  Captain Russell wasn’t having any of it. Admiral King’s flag secretary wrote, “It does not necessarily follow that because we took a beating, somebody must be the goat. The operation was undoubtedly hastily planned, and poorly executed, and there was no small amount of stupidity, but to me it is more of an object lesson in how not to fight than it is a failure for which some one should hang.”

  Bode didn’t hang. He was assigned to command the 15th Naval District, headquartered at the Balboa Naval Station in the Panama Canal Zone. His transfer to such a backwater would brand him forever as having fallen short of the mark.

  He had aspired to flag rank and had always seemed to carry himself as if he would get there. His strict and severe manner might have been an attempt at redemption for a lapse that marred his early career. As a midshipman at the Naval Academy, he had gotten into trouble with three other upperclassmen for hazing. It was a mild offense and typical of the time, but because Bode was caught at it shortly after the superintendent had issued a warning, Bode got a hundred demerits, was confined to academy premises, and lost the privilege of attending the Army–Navy football game. The episode and its aftermath were page-one news in the Sunday New York Times in the autumn of 1910.

  From his first day in Panama, Bode “seemed to be under some sort of a strain, and it was very noticeable to me and to the officers,” a reserve lieutenant commander said. “He talked a great deal about wondering why he had been sent here, and before he got out of the plane asked a number of questions as to what kind of a place he was coming to, and couldn’t understand why he had been ordered here because he was a combat man.

  “He told me a number of times that he did not contemplate being here very long, and shortly after he arrived, within a day or so, he told me he wo
uld be out in about two weeks.” That was when Admiral Hepburn came calling, summoning him to Corpus Christi.

  The interrogations, which took place on April 2–3, did not go well for Bode. No one saw him for about a week. When he came back, he had a much more sanguine outlook. He was conversational and seemed acclimated to his new assignment. He invited younger officers to visit him and enjoy some scotch. “It was one of the most pleasant talks I had had with him since he had been attached to the Station,” the officer said. The only thing he saw fit to complain about was the speed with which his letters home were reaching his wife.

  Bode knew from the tone of Hepburn’s questioning that his conduct was under scrutiny. But an inquiry, if undertaken in the right frame of mind, can be a motivator to change and redemption. Guadalcanal was supposed to have been his chance to redeem the loss of the Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor. (Bode was blameless for being ashore that morning, but captains never fully escape their responsibility.) Now he needed redemption for Guadalcanal, too, a double dose.

  After returning to Panama from Texas, Bode wrote to Hepburn twice, explaining his decisions that night in greater clarity than he had mustered in his stunned state during the interrogation. He had lost track of the Chicago’s course heading after maneuvering to avoid torpedoes, he said. He had thought he was standing out to the northwest and hoped to rendezvous with the Vincennes group and reengage the enemy to seaward. When he noticed the quiet night around him and suggested reversing course, his navigator advised against it. “Although there are probably other minor details which might promote a fuller understanding, I think the above will clarify the situation attending the two points of criticism. I do hope that your cold is better,” he closed, “and that you had a comfortable trip from New Orleans.”