In Wellington, Vandegrift’s intelligence staff had strewn tables in a hotel conference room with sensitive maps, documents, and aerial photographs. One night a drunken civilian reportedly wandered through the lobby and down a hall, passed two MPs at an open door, and blundered straight into Watchtower’s intelligence nerve center. “I have smiled many times at reports that only the general knew where we were going,” a photographer assigned to the intelligence section, Thayer Soule, wrote. “All headquarters knew. Why the word didn’t leak to the enemy, I will never know.”
After Midway, when the Japanese began changing their high-level operational code groups, U.S. cryptanalysts were left to deduce enemy movements from the patterns of radio traffic, instead of by deciphering their actual content. On July 30, New Zealand’s prime minister, Peter Fraser, was quoted in the Auckland newspaper as saying that an Allied offensive was imminent. Ghormley wrote, “I informed him of how this matter had perturbed me, as I feared it would put the Japs on their guard.”
Most of the sailors assigned to Watchtower needed no imagination to envision the destructive handiwork of their enemy. The men of the cruiser Astoria, at sea when Pearl Harbor was hit, had come home on December 13 to behold the Pacific battle line laid to waste and the docks of Ford Island lined with caskets. Ruined ships still burned, wreathed in a flotsam of shattered wood and human remains. Men from the battleships, many of them now without stations, were shuffled like spare parts. The Astoria filled out her increased wartime complement with these castoffs. Most of them were eager for a lick at the enemy. Some felt they had had enough. “I had experienced what the Japanese could do,” said a sailor who transferred to the Astoria from one of the stricken battleships, “and I wasn’t keen to go out and tangle with them again.”
The Astoria’s captain at the time took Pearl Harbor’s ruin especially hard. When the reality registered with Preston B. Haines about the battle fleet—and about his son, killed on board a destroyer—he was no longer fit for command. Detached for treatment at the naval hospital, Haines was relieved by Captain Francis W. Scanland, recently displaced from command of the battleship Nevada, hit in the attack. Another cruiser assigned to Watchtower, the Chicago, was commanded by an orphaned battleship skipper. Howard D. Bode was ashore when the end came for the USS Oklahoma. His life may have been spared, but the effects of this and coming traumas would weigh heavily on his mind, too.
Captains were fortunate to find help for their troubles. They were given command of a multitude and saddled with fault for their failings. The bargain they made for their privileged place was the right to be last off the ship if the worst came to pass. Burdens grew heavier the higher one ascended in rank. Captains concerned themselves with ships and crews, commodores with squadrons, task force commanders with objectives, and theater commanders with campaigns. The burdens of sailors weighed mostly on the muscles. The weight of leadership was subtler and heavier. It could test the conscience.
The men on the Astoria were thrilled, defiant, and unnerved that the Japanese propaganda ministry had expressly marked their ship as a priority target. In April 1939, their ship had traveled to Japan to bring home the ashes of the recently deceased Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Overhauled and freshly painted at Norfolk, with the urn holding the remains of Hiroshi Saito mounted on a special platform in the band room, the Astoria spent 158 days crossing the world, more as a gesture of the government’s respect to Saito individually than a sign of international rapprochement. Tensions were high from the sinking of the U.S. gunboat Panay just seventeen months earlier in the Yangtze River near Nanking. The captain of the Astoria on that visit was the man who would command the entire Guadalcanal amphibious force: Richmond Kelly Turner.
Ever since the triumphant visit of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet to Japan in 1908, almost as soon as Admiral Sperry’s squadron departed, attitudes between the Pacific naval powers had hardened. From then on, Japanese naval exercises were predicated on the idea of fighting the U.S. Navy. Soon after the Washington Treaty was concluded in 1922, limiting construction of heavy combatant vessels, the Imperial Japanese Navy began organizing its cruisers and destroyers into special squadrons trained in night combat with an eye toward waging and winning a war of attrition. The Japanese fleet, it was said, adopted a seven-day workweek for training—“Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday.”
Despite the unpleasantness over the Panay incident and the perking suspicions that would be the fuse to war, the diplomatic touches on that 1939 visit were extravagant. The Astoria entered Yokohama flying a Japanese naval ensign from her truck. Like the Great White Fleet before her, she traded salvos of greeting with Japanese warships. Though her photographer’s mates took furtive shots of naval installations along the way, espionage was not the order of the day. Intimidation always was. From the Astoria’s largest men, Captain Turner selected a two-hundred-man landing party. Dressed in shore blues and flat hats—including, to their dismay, some proud members of the shipboard Marine detachment—they provided the escort and funeral party for Ambassador Saito’s cortege. At a tea party hosted by the Foreign Ministry, Turner was photographed sitting next to a two-star named Isoroku Yamamoto.
The last U.S. warship to visit Japan before the outbreak of war, the Astoria made as strong an impression on the Japanese as the Rising Sun made on her crew. As one of the Astoria’s chief petty officers put it, “I never could figure out how one country could produce such nice women and such sons-of-bitches for men.” Those men (or their propagandists) would well remember the Astoria.
Turner cultivated the Astoria’s pride as a fighting ship during his two years as a captain in “the Pineapple Fleet,” as the Hawaiian Detachment was known. In peacetime, there were no battles to fight. His crew became connoisseurs of the varied pleasures of international ports of call: In Manila, girls. In Honolulu, girls—and ninety-nine enlisted competitors for every one, or so it seemed. The odds were far better in Hawaii’s “happy houses,” where the hosts, like their seafaring customers, were known to be safe because every week, until a controversy broke in the papers, it was the Navy’s own doctors who examined them.
A ship’s history was like a fine wine that gained character with age. The fact that the Great White Fleet had nearly stranded itself at sea for lack of fuel was long forgotten by the time its journey became the emblem of romantic naval adventure. The present was paint-scraping gray drudgery, the future an unguessable puzzle. Captain Turner was a distant memory by the time William G. Greenman took command of the Astoria and led her during the Guadalcanal operation.
At sunset, the sailors of the Astoria, like every other ship in Admiral Fletcher’s expeditionary force, found their gazes drawn high to the starscape that emerged like a field of diamonds on velvet. Enjoyment of such a spectacle required a topside perch, now that all portholes had been welded over in favor of hull integrity. On watch under the stars or secure in their welded-down hulls of steel, sailors had time to indulge in the endless superstitions of the seagoing warrior caste.
The wisdom of higher rank did little to dispel either anticipation or foreboding. On Oahu on a summer evening, where the sunset cast the naval base in red and bronze hues, Chester Nimitz had a direct view of Pearl Harbor’s largely vacant dry docks where the cruisers—which belonged to the anachronistically named Scouting Force, once subservient to the battleships of the Battle Force but now powerfully unleashed on their own—had till recently been moored. In the months after the attack, the impression all around the harbor had been of a blooded fleet resurgent: battleships being righted and taken away for repair; carriers, cruisers, destroyers, subs, and auxiliaries coming and going. With the East Loch largely empty now, the fleet under way, Nimitz chafed about the future. He awaited word of the rendezvous in Fiji, and from King the latest news of what reinforcements could be marshaled to support the operation. From MacArthur, no doubt, the next shoe would soon drop in the maverick Southwest Pacific boss’s ongoing campaign to claim lea
dership of the war against Japan.
Two months ago, as his forces approached Midway, Nimitz had told his commanders, “You will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you will interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting … greater damage on the enemy.” As the day of the invasion came closer, he calculated and recalculated his exposure. What balance needed to be struck between prudent defense and aggressive offense? With three carrier task forces in the South Pacific and just one to protect Hawaiian waters, was he now exposed to another Japanese raid on Hawaii? What were the opportunities, and what were the risks?
With the departure of the Operation Watchtower task forces, Nimitz no longer had enough fighter planes at Pearl Harbor to resist a concentrated air attack. His submarine force was scattered to three horizons. Several more Marine Corps regiments were scheduled to reach the Pacific before year’s end, but they hadn’t even begun their amphibious training. Given inadequate fuel and a threadbare destroyer force, the battleships would not be sent to the combat theater. At the end of the day Watchtower was all a very big gamble.
Nimitz pondered these and other questions while shooting targets at the pistol range, a diversion recommended by his doctor as a way to channel the mounting stress. He was sociable enough with his staff, always game to swim or run with younger officers who were willing to be outperformed by an old man. Nimitz’s competitive instincts ran mostly in another direction. As he diverted his tired mind through the iron sights of a target pistol, he was really only concerned with being outperformed by the Japanese.
ON JULY 26, twelve days out from D-Day on Guadalcanal, the Watchtower amphibious task force arrived in the Fiji Islands for rehearsals. Three years before, in 1939, a similar scene had unfolded off a small Puerto Rican island leased by the Marine Corps. The cast of characters then included several of the principal players now, and they had seen firsthand the possibilities and pitfalls of an amphibious war. President Roosevelt, joined by his naval aide Captain Daniel J. Callaghan, observed from the polished teak deck of the heavy cruiser Houston.
Three years later now, at Fiji, it was a misfire. As the landing craft approached their objective, Koro Island, everyone could see that the shoreline was nothing like what was expected. The tide was lower than forecast, and thus the reefs higher. “I saw that its shore was ringed with a coral reef, black and sharp,” wrote a transport officer, “like shark’s teeth that would have chewed our boats to pieces.” The Marines abandoned the exercise. Cruisers practiced their shore bombardment patterns, planes strafed targets. Other than that, the rehearsal in the Fijis bore no resemblance to what had been drawn up on paper. In this respect it may have been the best possible preparation for invasions to come.
While the transports were rehearsing, the senior commanders of Operation Watchtower held a conference on board the carrier Saratoga. Later, people would say it was impossible to exaggerate the importance of this meeting, even if one thing that stands out about it was the absence of the theater commander, Vice Admiral Ghormley, who was still preparing to move his headquarters from Auckland to Nouméa in New Caledonia. Chaired by Vice Admiral Fletcher, the expeditionary force commander, the conference included Kelly Turner (commander of the amphibious force), General Vandegrift (the commander of the landing force), Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes (Fletcher’s subordinate in the carrier force), Rear Admiral Kinkaid (commander of the Enterprise task force), and Rear Admiral John (Slew) McCain (commander of land-based Navy aircraft in the area). Ghormley was represented by his chief of staff, Captain Daniel Callaghan.
Among the challenges the commanders faced was how to get the operation through the blind alley they had entered through haste. “From an intelligence point of view,” a Marine Corps historian would write, “the Guadalcanal-Tulagi landings can hardly be described as more than a stab in the dark.” When navigators found their charts of the Solomons and spread them across their dead-reckoning tables, they found that the documents had last been updated more than a generation ago, and were drafted on such a large scale as to be useless in operational planning. The direction of magnetic north indicated on them varied from present readings. Nor did they show topography. Sketches hastily produced from recent aerial photographs had large blank areas where clouds had covered the ground on the day the photos were shot.
It was at this meeting, for the first time, that the commanders saw their operation orders. Admiral Kinkaid wrote, “Some of us were until then unaware of the procedure to be followed. Plans had been made hurriedly and many details remained to be worked out.” Ghormley hadn’t yet seen the orders, either. Owing to the strict radio silence, the area commander would not actually receive Fletcher’s detailed operations plan until the campaign was about a month under way, leaving him in the dark about the specifics of the invasion even as he pulled up stakes and relocated to Nouméa.
The hostility that boiled over between Frank Jack Fletcher and Kelly Turner shocked the other participants. They spoke to each other like enemies. It was well known that Admiral King didn’t trust Fletcher’s competence. A junior member of Fletcher’s own staff had spread unflattering rumors of his intellectual ability. In this assessment, he was “neither sharp nor perspicacious,” “uninformed and to a certain extent uninformable,” and “antiquated to the extent that he was approaching senility.” Seeing as Turner was freshly detached from King’s staff, no doubt he shared these doubts about his competence. Fletcher had at least two things going for him that pushed him through the ranks and ensured his place in command: a track record of victory and Chester Nimitz’s favor. Nimitz stood against King on the question of Fletcher’s role, recommending him for promotion to vice admiral and appointment to task force commander.
The most contentious issue at the conference was the duration of the carrier air support Fletcher would provide the landing force. Nimitz’s directive indicated that the Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp would provide badly needed air cover over Guadalcanal for “about three days.” A fist-banging argument developed from that lack of specificity. Turner and Vandegrift had said they needed five days of protection to unload their transports and cargo ships at the beach, even though the operations plan called for the supply train to withdraw after three. King and Nimitz reportedly instructed Fletcher not to keep the carrier task force, under the tactical control of Admiral Leigh Noyes, in the area for “longer than two or three days at the most.” Forrest Sherman, the captain of the Wasp, said after the war, “I am sure that [Noyes] returned with the understanding that carrier air support would be required only two days. That this was unrealistic is now quite apparent, but we had never conducted such an operation before and had much to learn.”
Though Turner did believe he could unload his transports in the time offered by Fletcher, he worried about the cargo ships. In New Zealand, there had been no time to reconfigure their loads for combat deployment. They had arrived in Wellington loaded to fill every hold as efficiently as possible. Combat loading was a different art that required the most urgently needed items—ammunition and food—to be loaded last so that they could be unloaded first.
The Marine commanders at the meeting, General Vandegrift and his assistant chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Merrill B. Twining, were aghast as Fletcher explained his intention to pull out the carriers after August 9. Vandegrift didn’t think Fletcher was well briefed on the landing plan. That plan promised to leave the Marines unprotected against air attack, except for what they themselves could muster from the island. “My Dutch blood was beginning to boil,” Vandegrift would write, “but I forced myself to remain calm while explaining to Fletcher that the days of landing a small force and leaving were over. Although Turner heatedly backed me, Fletcher curtly announced that he would stay until the third day. With that he dismissed the conference.”
The argument was a product, too, of the unwieldy table of organization. Fletcher, the commander of the whole expeditionary force, was also t
he commander of the Saratoga carrier task force, one of three such groups in the larger force. He was, in effect, conducting a symphony from the second chair in the violin section. His conflicting responsibilities created at least one perverse incentive, and an errant expectation. The expectation was that Fletcher would place priority on what was best for the overall operation. The perverse incentive was that he was and always would be a carrier man whose first thoughts were given to the well-being of his flattops. Thus a certain tension arose whenever Fletcher sought to apply Nimitz’s principle of calculated risk. What risks deserved his highest concern: the risks to the expeditionary force (and by extension the landing force, which was the whole outfit’s reason for being), or the risks to his carriers, the ships that the Navy valued most?
The Navy had been cautious with its carriers since hostilities began. During planning for the Wake Island relief expedition, which was launched and then abandoned, Admiral Pye decided that the carriers were more important than Wake itself. With that decision, the Navy had won the resentment of every marine in the fleet. Was Guadalcanal any more important than Wake? Presumably it was, for many reasons. But these questions, never addressed authoritatively, were left to surface unbidden at the Saratoga conference on July 26.
Fuel was another concern that urged limited exposure in the theater. The heavy ships had fuel to operate for three days at cruising speed, or fifteen knots, and four more days at battle speed, or twenty-five knots. With three days left to travel at the time the estimate was made, the fleet would have just enough fuel for four days of combat operations. For a cautious commander such as Fletcher, whose concern over refueling was well known and had already earned him the wrath of Admiral King, those were numbers worth paying attention to. Turner and Vandegrift would take all the protection Fletcher would give them. Every twenty-four-hour interval was critical. That he insisted on withdrawing after D day plus two was a continuing frustration to them.
Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Page 5