Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

by James D. Hornfischer

  The delivery of fuel would proceed on the backs of some unlikely beasts of burden: submarines, barges towed by tugboats, and cargo planes. Ground crews picked through the skeletal remains of the planes destroyed in the bombardment to drain the last of their tanks.

  With the service fleet, submarine force, and cargo aviators extending themselves to help supply the island, it was easy for the riflemen to wonder about the combat fleet. “The Japs have the run of the waters around Guadalcanal,” Marine intelligence officer Herbert Merillat wrote in his diary on October 15. “Where is our Navy, everyone wants to know. I still have confidence in them, and feel sure they are doing something to counter this threat. If not, we are lost.” Surveying the grassy expanse of the Fighter One airstrip, half a mile from Henderson Field, General Geiger said to one of his squadron commanders, “I don’t think we have a goddamn Navy.”

  20

  The Weight of a War

  AFTER THE GREAT CARRIER DUELS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE YEAR, the obituary of the surface fleet had been prematurely written. Even if Scott’s victory did nothing to stop the earth-shattering bombardment that swallowed Henderson Field the next night—he parried the jab, but never saw the roundhouse coming—he had put a dent in the notion of Japanese invincibility and given some swagger to the American light forces.

  Admiral Ghormley’s conservatism would continue to keep the battleship Washington chained to a carrier task force. But the Atlanta, which was designed for a defensive role in a carrier task force, was now thrown into Scott’s fighting line with her eight destroyer-sized turrets.

  The Atlanta’s men understood the practical tradecraft of combat. The ship’s newsletter contained exhortations on various matters of fighting efficiency. During gunnery operations: cotton in the ears. At night on deck: all cigarettes out. At battle stations: watertight doors shut. When a sailor had nothing else to do, he could make a mental map of the locations of fire extinguishers. If your six hundred shipmates all improved the way they performed a single small task, the collective benefit could be large.

  Lloyd Mustin, the deputy boss of the guns, knew what the score was against the Japanese fleet. He vented to his diary, “Call it what you will, their navy is exercising every function of control of the sea and every single resultant advantage is accruing to them.… The usual indecision, fear of a surface fight, trying once more to do it all by plane in the teeth of steadily repeated proofs that it couldn’t be done that way, has now brought us to this. We are forced into a surface fight.” The officers of Samuel Jenkins’s ship took every opportunity to learn from what their counterparts in the San Francisco and the Salt Lake City had experienced against the Japanese. What does it look like when everybody opens fire? What range do you pick them up with the radar? What speeds are they using? What are their reactions? Mustin said, “There were lots of lessons to be learned, and we sought them out eagerly and got the information.”

  The Atlanta had spent the first half of October steaming with Willis Lee’s flagship, the Washington, in defense of the Hornet task force, the only carrier in the theater. When Lee was around, Mustin noticed, the air vibrated differently. “He was the perfect example of an officer who made sure everyone knew what he wanted done.” This knowledge clarified people’s purpose and gave shape to their plans.

  Mustin had the kind of garrulous personality that recommended him for liaison work. The Atlanta’s exec, Commander Dallas Emory, sent him over to the Washington to share stories with her unbloodied gunnery department about the carrier battle in the eastern Solomons and the surface battle off Savo. Mustin found the Washington’s crew “magnificently trained with just a gorgeous morale,” in part because of the intensity of their recent deployment to the Atlantic. There the possibility of an encounter with the German battleship Tirpitz had concentrated their minds. In offset gunnery exercises with the Atlanta, the Washington put on a show.

  With the battleship firing from thirty-five thousand yards, far over the horizon and out of sight except for the top of her mast, Mustin stationed himself on the Atlanta’s fantail with an apparatus to measure and report where the battleship’s projectiles landed. When the Washington let loose, a gout of yellow-brown muzzle smoke would blot the horizon. Then, after a certain lapse of time, came a crash of heavy shells in the sea, followed by a supersonic crack and the rippling roll of the guns from below the horizon. The shells landed smack in the middle of the Atlanta’s wake, raising columns of seawater, closely clustered. Mustin knew the discipline that underlay not only the accuracy but also the tightness of the pattern. Willis Lee and Captain Glenn B. Davis knew what they were doing. “They didn’t come down over and short. They came down right on, meaning that the Washington’s battery was beautifully aligned and beautifully calibrated. Those 2,700-pound armor-piercing projectiles were going to be very bad news for anybody they were ever aimed at.”

  The men on Henderson Field no doubt would have passed the night of October 13–14 very differently had the Navy’s leadership been willing to turn loose the Washington from convoy escort and send her into Savo Sound.

  EVER SINCE HE RETURNED from his visit to SOPAC in early October, Chester Nimitz had fretted over the type of leadership being exercised by his old friend Bob Ghormley. Nimitz had put a sunny face on things for the benefit of the press, telling The New York Times, “The Japanese must not be underestimated. They are brave, resourceful and, for the most part, experienced fighters. But now they are meeting people with those same characteristics and are suffering losses accordingly.” His real feelings were reserved for private conversations with staff. What troubled Nimitz most was something that General Arnold had noted: The closer one got to the fighting front, the higher the level of confidence one found. Defeatism was nowhere more pronounced than in the rear areas.

  When Hanson Baldwin flew into the theater in late September, the New York Times man received a powerful impression of Ghormley. “He was almost despairing. He was heavily overworked and he said, ‘This is a shoestring operation, we haven’t got enough of anything. We’re just hanging on by our teeth.’ He was very frank about this. Here was a time when you needed tough, hard, almost ruthless men. He was a miscast, in my opinion. He should never have been in that job. He was a superb planner and he should have been kept as a planner, but I don’t think he was a good operator.… The staff didn’t share these impressions entirely, but they were becoming infected. So the whole thing was very unpleasant.”

  One of the few failures of leadership that Admiral Nimitz might be accused of was his failure to make sure Ghormley exerted personal command over his South Pacific naval forces. Admiral King’s original directive to Nimitz had stated, “Assume you will make Ghormley Task Force commander at least for Task One [the seizure of Tulagi and Guadalcanal], which he should command in person in the operating area.” Though it was far from clear exactly what this should have meant, it was initially interpreted to be the New Caledonia–New Hebrides area. Ghormley never ventured north of Nouméa.

  In these difficult days, Ghormley summoned one of his operations staff, Lieutenant Charles W. Weaver, and asked him to start keeping a personal log of events. As Weaver explained, “I think he had a premonition then that he was going to have to make an accounting later.”

  In the early hours of October 16, General Vandegrift radioed Ghormley as follows: “THE SITUATION DEMANDS TWO URGENT AND IMMEDIATE STEPS: A: TAKE AND MAINTAIN CONTROL OF SEA AREA ADJACENT TO CACTUS TO PREVENT FURTHER ENEMY LANDINGS AND ENEMY BOMBARDMENT SUCH AS THIS FORCE HAS TAKEN FOR THE LAST 3 NIGHTS. B: REINFORCEMENT OF GROUND FORCES BY AT LEAST 1 DIVISION IN ORDER THAT OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS MAY BE INITIATED TO DESTROY HOSTILE FORCE NOW ON CACTUS.”

  Ghormley read the message and a few hours later sent a dispatch to Nimitz, King, and all the ships under his command, informing them that part B of the request, which would have stripped area bases of their small garrisons, was not possible with the current troop levels in the theater. “URGENTLY NEED THIS AREA 1 ADDITIONAL ARMY INFANTRY DI
VISION. PRESENT FORCES.… INSUFFICIENT TO GARRISON PRESENT BASES AND THEREFORE OBVIOUSLY INADEQUATE [TO] SUPPORT OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS. HAVE NEITHER ON HAND NOR IN SIGHT SUFFICIENT FORCES TO RENDER CACTUS SECURE AGAINST PRESENT INFILTRATION TACTICS.”

  The next message Ghormley sent to Nimitz would be the final straw. Referring to aircraft sighting reports from Canberra indicating the presence of a Japanese aircraft carrier west of the Santa Cruz Islands, he wrote, “THIS APPEARS TO BE ALL OUT ENEMY EFFORT AGAINST CACTUS POSSIBLY OTHER POSITIONS ALSO. MY FORCES TOTALLY INADEQUATE [TO] MEET SITUATION. URGENTLY REQUEST ALL AVIATION REINFORCEMENT POSSIBLE.”

  Lieutenant Ernest Eller was with Nimitz at Pacific Fleet headquarters on the night this message arrived. The mood was already tense. Nimitz was preparing, among other things, to inform his commander in the Aleutians that his roster of warships was to be stripped to fulfill the “overwhelming need for strength in SoPac.” His intelligence section, fresh from predicting one of the Japanese bombardments of Henderson Field, learned from radio intercepts that two enemy carriers were close by, north of the island. Eller called it “one of the few times that I really saw Admiral Nimitz excited, emotionally. He wasn’t demonstrative. But you could see it in his face and his eyes.”

  Late one night Eller overheard a discussion that began behind the closed doors to Nimitz’s office and suddenly swelled and spilled out into the hall. Some members of Nimitz’s staff were speaking to their boss in vehement tones. “The situation looked very dark on Guadalcanal. It looked like the Japanese were about to overrun the airfield,” Eller said. “We’d had heavy ship losses. I guess it was toward midnight. I was still in the office working and came out to listen.” Nimitz’s staff, it seemed, was on the verge of insurrection.

  There was a sense that the fleet was laboring under a hesitating, passive hand. As Nimitz’s intelligence officer, Edwin T. Layton, wrote, “It was evident to all of us at Pearl that Ghormley was faltering. His actions—or lack of them—had abdicated command of the sea to the enemy.” That difficult reality put Nimitz in a bind. Though “it was obvious that [Nimitz] felt that Ghormley had handed over command of the sea to the Japanese,” Nimitz told his staff that he wouldn’t tolerate gloom and defeatism. He certainly didn’t like their suggestion that Ghormley be relieved. This last recommendation, he said with uncharacteristic overstatement, was “mutiny.”

  In fact, the possibility of Ghormley’s relief had come up at staff meetings as early as the first week of September. There were concerns about his health; candidates for his replacement were discussed. Nimitz was said to prefer Kelly Turner for the job, but a certain stigma had attached to the commander of the amphibious force following the early losses in his cruiser force.1 At the time, Nimitz deflected the conversation, saying he would visit Nouméa himself and check on Ghormley’s condition. Now, after long consideration of the style of his leadership and the content of his dispatches, Nimitz concluded not only that Ghormley was “too immersed in detail and not sufficiently bold and aggressive at the right times,” but that he was on the verge of an actual nervous breakdown. Nimitz was no clinician, but he was a perceptive reader of people. If his conclusion was too stark for him to record in its own day, many years later he would state this opinion in no uncertain terms.

  A few days after Nimitz had decried their “mutiny,” Layton and some other staffers decided they needed to see their commander in chief again to press their earlier recommendation. Though the admiral was preparing himself for bed, he agreed to see them for five minutes. “We wasted no time spelling out what was on our minds,” Layton wrote. “The situation was so grave that he could not allow any thought of kindness or sympathy for a brother officer to stand in the way. Nimitz thanked us. He said he understood entirely why we had spoken so frankly. There was no further discussion of the painful issue.”

  Nimitz had burdened Ghormley with his complete and unfaltering trust. It was painful to see his friend waver under it. Nimitz suffered a sleepless night on October 15 before notifying King of his doubts about his SOPAC commander the next morning. “IN VIEW GHORMLEY’S [LATEST DISPATCH] AND OTHER INDICATIONS INCLUDING SOME NOTED DURING MY VISIT I HAVE UNDER CONSIDERATION HIS RELIEF BY HALSEY AT EARLIEST PRACTICABLE TIME. REQUEST YOUR COMMENT.”

  “It was a sore mental struggle and the decision was not reached until after hours of anguished consideration,” Nimitz wrote Catherine. “I feel better now that it has been done. I am very fond of G. and hope I have not made a life enemy. I believe not. The interest of the nation transcends private interests.”

  When Nimitz’s message was decoded in Washington that afternoon, the COMINCH was preoccupied arguing with General Arnold about fifteen groups of Army planes that King believed had been earmarked for the Pacific. His terse reply seemed more like a response to a recommendation than an exchange of views on a tentative idea. Addressed to Nimitz marked, “Personal and Secret / Most Secret,” it contained a single operative word: “APPROVED.” With that, Robert L. Ghormley’s career as a leader in the war zone was over.

  AFTER SCOTT’S VICTORY at Cape Esperance, the Navy made its first public release of details about the sea battles of the previous two months. The public hungered for news of the war’s first American-led offensive. A dispatch went out detailing Scott’s victory over Goto. With this good news cushioning the blow, it also acknowledged the defeat at Savo Island. On his visit to Henderson Field, Hanson Baldwin of The New York Times had sniffed out the latter story, as well as the torpedoing of the North Carolina. Though he itched to file stories, he saw a larger need. American readers certainly deserved to know the truth about Savo. The question was whether it put sailors at risk in the continuing fight. Baldwin wrote a series of stories, including an account of Savo as he had learned it on the beaches of Guadalcanal and the decks of warships. His eventual accounts withheld the number of ships sunk, their names, and the vulnerabilities that resulted in their loss. “I fudged this very carefully because I realized it was very important that the Japs not know exactly how damaged we were.”

  At Espiritu Santo, Norman Scott’s healthy ships scavenged from the wounded. The Salt Lake City, still seeping water through stressed rivets, and the Boise, damaged to within three degrees of her life, were ordered home for repair. Before leaving for Nouméa on October 15, the two cruisers gave up the dregs of their magazines to the San Francisco and the Helena, respectively. The admiral himself visited a hospital ship and paid tribute in the sickbay. “Not once during the entire visit was I answered with a grumble or a bellyache or a whine, but invariably with a grin or at least with an attempt at one,” Scott wrote to his wife, Marjorie, at their home in Washington. “Sometimes the answer would be low, and I would lean well over to make the conversation easier going. It might take a few seconds, and then I would hear, ‘I’m doing pretty well, thank you, sir.’ One like that, and your heart goes right out to him. It is the custom in the Navy to remove one’s cap in the sick bay. Mine will always be off to those men.”

  Scott doffed his cap, too, to his old friend of a quarter century, Bob Ghormley. “Dear Ghorm,” he wrote him, “Going back to our old days of friendship—twenty-four years—I do not feel like saying that I am sorry about this situation of yours. That doesn’t express it. It seems to me, if what you say is literally true, that the change was inevitable. I doubt if many people can really appreciate the endless difficulties you ran up against, beginning with the Cactus show before the 1st of August, when you came into the South Pacific. It is too much to expect that you would not run into a dead end eventually.

  “Now that you have scrapped a good scrap give the guilty ones one more good stiff punch—where it will do our mail the most good.

  “If and when you reach Washington please phone Mrs. Scott. We will both appreciate it.

  “Best luck as ever, Sincerely, Norm.”

  AMONG GHORMLEY’S LAST ACTS as theater commander was to order the still-viable ships of Task Force 64 back into the fray for Savo Sound. The San Francisco, Helena,
and Atlanta, joined by the heavy cruiser Chester and eight destroyers, refueled and departed at daybreak escorted by six destroyers. This powerful squadron was soon augmented by a true heavyweight. The 44,500-ton battleship Washington, Admiral Lee’s flagship, joined them under way. Plans had been drawn up for the Atlanta to go as well, but she received other last-minute orders. She drew an assignment to bombard Japanese positions off Lunga Point, in support of infantry operating behind enemy lines. When Captain Jenkins’s ship arrived on station, Marine officers motored out to her with field maps marked with Japanese troop areas and supply dumps. In just under two hours the Atlanta liberally salted the jungles of northern Guadalcanal with quick-fuzed anti-personnel projectiles that detonated on impact with treetops or the ground; with timed shells that sprayed airbursts across the jungle and fields; and with star shells that coughed burning magnesium that stuck to and scalded everything it touched. By the end of it, the antiaircraft cruiser’s decks fore and aft were blocked by piles of empty brass shell cases, more than four thousand of them all told.