After absorbing the brunt of the U.S. carrier strikes and seeing one of his two large carriers damaged, Nagumo decided he had had enough. He ordered a withdrawal to Truk. As Nagumo’s carriers turned away north, Tanaka’s transport force was left to joust unprotected with Major Mangrum’s dive-bombers on Henderson Field. The aviators of Marine Fighting Squadron 223 had turned in a brilliant performance on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, intercepting a strike of fifteen bombers escorted by Zero fighters from the carrier Ryujo. They repelled the raid before it ever darkened Henderson Field’s gravel runway, shooting down six Zeros and ten Betty bombers.
On the morning of August 25, after a PBY relocated Tanaka’s transports, now about 150 miles north of Guadalcanal, the Cactus Air Force threw itself into the fray again. Joined by planes from the Enterprise, the land-based Dauntless dive-bomber jockeys bombed and strafed two transports and worked over Tanaka’s flagship, the light cruiser Jintsu. When a flight of B-17s from Espiritu Santo arrived overhead at ten thirty, they found a destroyer, the Mutsuki, tending to a damaged transport. In a rare feat of high-level marksmanship against a naval target—the Flying Fortresses had a poor record hitting ships—the bombers sank the stationary tin can.
Knocked briefly unconscious in the air attacks, Tanaka arose and ordered a withdrawal. If the August 24 carrier clash, soon to be christened the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, had been a tactical draw, Tanaka’s failed reinforcement run transformed it into a U.S. victory. Fletcher, whatever people would say about him later, had helped thwart Japan’s first determined effort to reconquer Guadalcanal. “My worst fears for this operation had come to be realized,” Tanaka would write. It was clear to him that without an explicit plan to coordinate the naval groups or provide the transports with air cover, “it would be folly to land the remainder of this battered force on Guadalcanal.”
A severe judgment would fall on Nagumo for his timid way with his carriers. He had allowed a numerically inferior U.S. force to turn him back. The Americans lost the services of the Enterprise. She, with the heavy cruiser Portland and four destroyers, set course for Pearl Harbor by way of Tongatabu. As the carriers of both nations made tracks for safer waters, a wag in General Vandegrift’s force was said to remark, “Everyone is withdrawing but the Marines.”
* * *
ON AUGUST 25, Ghormley wrote Nimitz, more than a little alarmed. He recounted the matériel deficiencies of his command and requested more bombers—fifty more B-17s and forty B-25 Mitchells—and crews. “CONSIDER SITUATION CRITICAL.” Nimitz absorbed Ghormley’s alarm and processed it into an optimism that he relayed up the chain of command. He wrote to Admiral King, “WE HAVE MADE GOOD START IN OUR OFFENSIVE. WE HAVE SUFFERED MODERATE LOSSES AND DAMAGE WHICH CAN BE ACCEPTED IF REPLACEMENTS ALREADY REQUESTED ARE IMMEDIATELY SENT.” Then he added an uncharacteristic flourish of evangelism, perhaps not wanting King to get too bright a notion of the immediate future: “LET’S NOT LET THIS OFFENSIVE DIE ON THE VINE.”
Four days later, Ghormley’s mood brightened. Notwithstanding the shortages of combat power that had bothered him the day before, now he declared his readiness to parry all threats. “UNTIL THE STRENGTH OF THE HOSTILE MAIN EFFORT IS DETERMINED AND IT HAS BEEN COMMITTED TO A DEFINITE LINE OF ACTION,” he wrote Nimitz on August 29, “I SHOULD KEEP MY CARRIER TASK FORCES CENTRALLY LOCATED, PREPARED TO OPERATE ANYWHERE ON THE FRONT SAMOA–MILNE BAY.”
It was a tall order for his remaining carriers, the Wasp and Saratoga. Holding them in reserve, Ghormley promised to let others worry about the daily business of Guadalcanal’s defense. “FOR THE PRESENT, HOSTILE INFILTRATION TACTICS AND INITIAL SHOCK OF A HOSTILE MAIN EFFORT MAY HAVE TO BE BORNE BY GROUND TROOPS AND LAND-BASED AVIATION. LAND-BASED AVIATION ATTACK AGAINST JAPANESE INFILTRATION MOVES SHOULD EXTRACT A CONSTANT TOLL OF TRANSPORTS AND ESCORTING COMBATANT SHIPS, WHICH THE JAPANESE CANNOT LONG SUSTAIN. SHOULD JAPANESE CARRIER-SUPPORTED MAIN FORCES MOVE TO ATTACK, OUR LAND-BASED AVIATION SHOULD BE ABLE TO EQUALIZE THE OPPOSING CARRIER STRENGTH. IN SHORT IT IS HOPED THAT THE RESULT OF USE OF OUR DEFENSIVE POSITIONS AND LAND-BASED AVIATION MAY CREATE A FAVORABLE SITUATION WHEREIN I CAN DECISIVELY EMPLOY THE CARRIER TASK FORCES, WHETHER ON MY EXTENDED FRONT OR TO THE WESTWARD. IT IS HOPED THAT MY FREEDOM OF ACTION WILL NOT BE CIRCUMSCRIBED BY RESTRICTIVE TASKS OR MISSIONS.”
Nimitz and his staff read these words in bewilderment. Just four days earlier, Ghormley deemed his situation “critical.” Now he was requesting “freedom of action” and professing not to see the direction of the Japanese thrust. Retiring his carriers—and with the Enterprise ordered back to Pearl Harbor for repairs—he was promising to stand ready to defend a twenty-five-hundred-mile front, and assuring high command that the threadbare Cactus Air Force—which by Ghormley’s own count at month’s end had just eight fighters capable of intercepting Japanese bombers and which was struggling to fend off destroyers, much less the entire Combined Fleet—could hold off Nagumo’s still-potent carrier force. In London he had learned, following British operations off Norway and in the Mediterranean, that “surface craft, unless heavily protected by fighters, cannot stand up against shore based aircraft.” But now he was expecting far more than the gallant fliers and ground crews of Henderson Field could deliver.
As it happened, the Japanese had newly settled on the thrust of their “main effort.” With their traditional invasion convoys unable to land by day in the face of American air attacks, and too slow to sneak in and out by night, Yamamoto abandoned sending reinforcements via troopships altogether. As his chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki, wrote, “It is apparent that landing on Guadalcanal by transports is hopeless unless the enemy planes are wiped out.” A new way to bring troops to the embattled island would have to be found. Raizo Tanaka would be asked to repeat his exploit delivering the Ichiki detachment again and again, using not slow transports but swift destroyers and other fast combatants to carry the Japanese Army south.
Several days before the Japanese reinforcements began running, Ghormley wrote MacArthur to state his preferences as to the types of ships he wanted the Southwest Pacific Command’s pilots to strike. Ghormley reckoned that the “greatest immediate threat to success” came from the Japanese surface fleet, and that the highest-priority targets should be aircraft carriers and troop transports. Destroyers were last on his list. Ghormley was not alone in underrating the value of enemy destroyers. That he expressed the thought so clearly on the very day the Japanese settled on them as their principal means of carrying arms and men to Guadalcanal was no small irony.
On the evening of August 28, seven Japanese destroyers approached the island. Sallying within range of Henderson, their vanguard was greeted brutally by the Cactus Air Force’s dive-bombers, who exacted a steep price: the Asagiri sunk, the Shiratsuyu rendered unnavigable, and the Yugiri badly damaged with her commander mortally wounded. It was a remarkable performance against the small, difficult-to-hit ships. The rest of the Japanese flotilla turned back after the grim news was reported. A “perfect failure,” Ugaki called it. But in the week that followed, bad weather prevented the boys from Cactus from blocking the Tokyo Express. Stubbornly maintaining his pace of nightly runs from Rabaul, Tanaka finally landed the last of Ichiki’s and Kawaguchi’s forces—more than five thousand men. Through piecemeal assembly, the Japanese had at last marshaled enough men to undertake their first general counteroffensive on Guadalcanal.
Yamamoto now resolved officially to make Guadalcanal, not New Guinea, the “principal operational zone of the Southeast Area” and postponed the drive to capture Port Moresby. On Guadalcanal, General Kawaguchi’s troops had gathered and, fading into the jungle near Lunga, began planning a renewed assault on Vandegrift’s perimeter.
On August 29, as the bomb-damaged Enterprise steamed toward Pearl Harbor, Admiral Ghormley ordered his remaining carriers, the Wasp and the Saratoga, to take turns reprovisioning at Tongatabu. Until the Japanese fleet made another appearance, the carriers would remain on station in their usual position, 220 miles
southeast of Guadalcanal, flying their planes in protection of convoys traveling from Espiritu Santo to Guadalcanal. A third carrier, the Hornet, was under way south from Pearl Harbor.
Because of the submarine threat, the carrier task force made a practice of steaming at just thirteen knots in order to optimize the efficiency of the sonar gear on their escorting destroyers. But that slow speed increased the ability of submarines to intercept and target them in the first place. On the morning of August 31, Commander Minoru Yokota, captain of the submarine I-26, stalked the Saratoga east of San Cristobál. When he chose his moment to attack, he closed so aggressively that his periscope scratched the hull of a destroyer in the U.S. screen. The Americans spotted his incoming torpedo wakes, but too late to evade. Shortly before 7 a.m., the carrier shook “like a house in a severe earthquake” as a torpedo struck her. The shock wave whiplashed the hull from below the sea to the flag bridge, tossing Admiral Fletcher up into the overhead and inflicting a forehead wound that would make him—much to his embarrassment—the highest-ranking U.S. naval officer to date to receive the Purple Heart. The blast tripped circuit breakers in the Saratoga’s turboelectric drive system, leaving her dead in the water.
The Saratoga was an exceptionally stout ship, built originally as a battle cruiser and converted after the conclusion of naval treaties. Her engineers righted the starboard list by transferring fuel between tanks. Then the cruiser Minneapolis took her in tow, gingerly bringing her along at seven knots. With a stiff headwind, Captain Dewitt C. Ramsey’s flight crews were able to perform the remarkable feat of conducting flight operations while under tow. Twenty-nine of Sara’s strike aircraft got off the deck and flew to Espiritu Santo while their ship was in this infirm condition.
The waters southeast of Guadalcanal would earn the bitter nickname “Torpedo Junction.” Whenever the sound of gunfire or the basso thudding of depth charges were heard, someone would inevitably remark, “Sounds like there’s a function at the junction.” With the Saratoga out of action for three months, Fletcher could no longer survive Ernest King’s acid mistrust. Fletcher’s caution paid no dividends now that his carriers’ favorite haunts, outside range of enemy air attack, were infested with submarines. His reward was a recall to Pearl Harbor in his damaged flagship and, before the year was out, to have his career as a carrier task force commander terminated by the COMINCH. When Leigh Noyes assumed command of Task Force 61, the U.S. Marine Corps no longer had Frank Jack Fletcher, the victor at Midway, to kick around anymore.
But they got plenty more planes. After the Saratoga’s disabling, her valuable air group, like that of the Enterprise, found temporary homes—on the Wasp, on Espiritu Santo, and on Guadalcanal as well. A Marine general with a keen sense of the absurd was said to remark, “What saved Guadalcanal was the loss of so many carriers.”
12
What They Were Built For
IN THE WEEKS AHEAD, THE MOMENTUM OF ATTACK AND DEFENSE would swing daily, diurnally, as the Americans commanded the skies and seas by day, and the Japanese regained them by night. Neither side could effectively fight on the other’s terms. Whipped by Mikawa at Savo Island, the warriors of the U.S. Navy’s surface force would continue to spend much of the month screening carrier task forces or escorting convoys, not roaming the seas as the predators they were meant to be. “It seemed we were on the fringe of battle for months,” Richard Hale of the destroyer Laffey said. “I felt uneasy knowing the real war was only five hundred miles north of us in the Solomons, and we could have run up there in a day’s steaming.”
Ten days before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, a plan circulated briefly, never to be executed, providing for the creation of a “surface attack group” under Fletcher’s cruiser boss, Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, drawing the battleship North Carolina, the heavy cruisers Minneapolis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Salt Lake City, the Atlanta, and four destroyers into a single fighting force should the Japanese fleet come within gun range. Those ships were finally reckoned too valuable to spare in missions other than antiaircraft defense.
The cruiser and destroyermen circling with the task force relished the idea that the surface Navy might one day reassert itself in its traditional role. Japanese destroyers ferrying supplies and men to Guadalcanal disgorged their cargoes mostly unopposed, took potshots at Henderson Field with their main batteries, and headed home. Much as the Japanese 17th Army’s senior leadership hated traveling light, without the heavy weapons and equipment that a transport could have accommodated, but not a destroyer, the activity of the fleet emboldened Japanese artillery crews and mortarmen hidden in the surrounding hills. Their sporadic barrages, along with nightly visits by aircraft that dropped small bombs haphazardly around the island’s northern plain, were a malicious nuisance that kept the marines sleepless.
The principal reason Admiral Yamamoto was hesitating to mount a general attack on the island was his respect for U.S. airpower. Henderson Field was an unsinkable aircraft carrier, host to an interservice brotherhood of aviators whose bonds were strengthening under the test of fire and loss. With the arrival of more Navy pilots and planes, including twenty-four well-seasoned Wildcat jockeys from the Saratoga, the shoestring holding together the American position on Guadalcanal was cinched a little tighter in early September.
Japanese pilots had their own shoestrings to worry about. When the 8th Fleet chief of staff, Toshikazu Ohmae, arrived at Rabaul from Truk in late August, he was appalled by what he saw as a lackadaisical approach to harbor defense, and the evident vulnerability of the whole place. The stronghold at New Britain had just nineteen fighters, twenty-nine medium bombers, and four flying boats at the time. With the Cactus Air Force getting stronger on its feet every day, Imperial pilots suffered worse for the geographic disadvantage. Taking off at first light so that they could strike and return before sunset, at the edge of their fuel envelope, they were bound to a schedule that put them over their target during the same midday window and from the same northwesterly bearing. With forewarning by coastwatchers, Cactus Air Force Wildcat pilots usually had the forty minutes they needed to scramble and reach interception altitude before the enemy planes arrived. Battling close to their base, with fuel tanks full, they had the flexibility to engage, maneuver, and fight that the Japanese lacked. Though many Zero pilots were no novices in long-range missions—the December 8 raid against MacArthur’s airfields on Luzon, launched from Formosa, was a fine example—sustaining daily operations indefinitely over great distances was a steep challenge.
Because the Japanese kept their ships clear of the outer reach of U.S. search planes until late afternoon, Mangrum’s dive-bomber pilots seldom could hit them before dark, even when the weather cooperated. The Marine aviators did their best after nightfall, depending on the elevation of the moon, the position of the clouds, and the light cast by stars. But there were only four or five days a month when the lunar phase permitted nighttime attacks. Bad weather reduced that number. Even by day, dive-bombers could not reliably hit the agile thirty-four-knot Japanese destroyers steered by Tanaka’s veteran shiphandlers. Their skill was impressive. They seemed to know well Guadalcanal’s northern coast, where they usually landed their men and supplies. Despite the hazards of night navigation, the Cactus Air Force’s dawn patrols never found them grounded or struggling in the shallows. “They come right up to the beach … and get them right out. They don’t lose any time,” said Lieutenant Colonel Charles L. Fike, the exec of Marine Air Group 23. “Certainly the means we had at our disposal were not enough. Control of channels of supply there were always in dispute, and the Japanese were more often in control of them than our own Navy. Under those circumstances, we were reluctant to build up the force on Guadalcanal because of the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to meet the supply requirements.”
The rising strength of the Guadalcanal-based aviators taxed the morale of the IJN, too. On the night of August 29, one of Tanaka’s captains refused a direct order to take his four destroyers a
nd attack an inbound American convoy. On a clear night with a full moon, Captain Yonosuke Murakami explained, U.S. planes would have a clear shot at his ships. Tanaka found the explanation “so dumbfounding … that I could not even think of words to reprove him. Blame attached to me, of course, for having such a man in my command.” The next day, physically exhausted and in a fury about the continuing resistance of 17th Army officers to using destroyers for transport, Tanaka found himself done in by his rival service branch. He was relieved of command of the Reinforcement Unit and returned to Truk to rejoin the 2nd Fleet as a destroyer squadron commander.
But Major Mangrum grasped airpower’s limits. “It was difficult for us to understand, while sitting in a foxhole, without adequate surface [ship] support, that we could be expected to maintain the peace and quiet of Guadalcanal,” he said. Nimitz was pressing King for more aircraft of any and all types. Late on the night of September 1, from his headquarters at Pearl, he implored his superior, “Let’s give Cactus the wherewithal to live up to its name. Something for the Japs to remember forever.” But two legs of the air–land–sea tripod weren’t going to get the job done, no matter how stout they were. As Nimitz was beseeching King for more hardware, Vandegrift weighed in with Admiral Turner, copying Ghormley, on what it would take to hold the island.
Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Page 16