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

by James D. Hornfischer

  Even Chester Nimitz’s moderating voice couldn’t overcome the damning effect of Halsey’s memo. As reports and memoranda proceed up the Navy’s chain of command, commanders are given the chance to add their own comments, or “endorsements,” for the benefit of higher-ups. In his December 4 endorsement to Admiral King’s copy of the memo, Nimitz acknowledged the difficult trial Hoover faced, confronted with a hard decision in perilous waters. He stated that the failure of the B-17 to report the loss of the Juneau in time was not Hoover’s fault. Referring to sighting reports Hoover had received of enemy carriers, surface ships, and submarines nearby, he wrote, “Under these conditions the situation confronting Captain Hoover was one in which the necessity for getting his damaged ships back to a base was balanced against the natural instinct of every naval officer to go to the rescue of officers and men in distress and danger. Whatever may be the opinion of Captain Hoover’s decision in this matter, he was the responsible officer on the spot and, from his war record, which includes two important night engagements, his courage may not be questioned.” Breaking with Halsey, Nimitz recommended that King give Hoover “a suitable command at sea” after some time to rest.

  It didn’t matter. In the competitive, political world of the admiralty, written criticism from an area commander was inerasable, a terminal act. Halsey’s impulsive disgust could not be unwritten, not by the Pacific Ocean Area commander in chief, and not even by Halsey himself after he later admitted that he had acted unjustly and in haste. The variances in Halsey’s written accounts of his evaluation of Hoover’s performance are curious. In his memoirs he offered “a confession of a grievous mistake.… I concluded that I had been guilty of an injustice.” The draft manuscript of his memoirs offers a fuller discussion of these events than appears in the published version.

  CinCPac was in disagreement with me on my judgment, wondering if I had done an injustice to a man who had had a magnificent combat record. I was finally convinced that this man at the time in question was suffering from an aggravated case of combat fatigue and that his guts alone had kept him going. In modern warfare guts are not always enough—a man’s brain must be clear. I wrote an official letter stating my belief that this officer had been suffering from combat fatigue at that time and that I had possibly committed an error of judgment in detaching him under such drastic circumstances. I requested that he be given a combatant command and stated that I should be delighted to have him in such a position under my command. I am afraid that my late action in attempting to clear this officer of the stigma that resulted from my detaching him had not been successful although it most certainly alleviated his feelings. I am deeply regretful of the whole incident. I have already acknowledged my mistake to him and to the Navy Department, and here I acknowledge it publicly. It is a tribute to the caliber of this officer that our personal relations are excellent.

  In the published version, Halsey added that “Hoover’s decision was in the best interests of victory,” even as he removed the mea culpa about the tardiness of his change of heart and recast his role, in his account of how the original judgment was reached, from skeptical lead inquisitor to reluctant rubber-stamper of a staff recommendation.

  In Nimitz’s careful handling of the Hoover question, Halsey must have eventually seen the virtue of restraint in second-guessing combat commanders.1 Still, the Navy felt the need to arbitrate questions of culpability for defeat, even during wartime. Just as the Guadalcanal campaign was turning its way, it was preparing to launch an investigation into the causes of the fiasco that was the Battle of Savo Island.

  DAN CALLAGHAN AND Norman Scott, in death, had shown an aggressive style that would carry the Navy’s surface forces to victory. Willis Lee continued in that spirit, refining the state of the art with his battleships. They and their fighting sailors had stopped the Tokyo Express cold in November. Still, there was plenty of fodder for recrimination, for the surface fleet’s first victories were won despite many avoidable errors.

  Admiral Pye, from his billet as president of the Naval War College, criticized Callaghan’s preparations and dispositions. “Orders such as ‘Give them hell’ and ‘We want the big ones’ make better newspaper headlines than they do battle plans.… A study of the naval actions so far in this war gives the impression that such successes as we have had have been largely due to the individual excellence of our ships and their crews, and not to exceptionally good use made of them by the commanders.” Sharp words flew about what commanders did and should have done, but in death Scott and Callaghan were spared the indignity of inquiry. Concerning Callaghan’s performance, Pye finally concluded, “There is no telling ‘what might have been.’ In this case we seem to have got some of the breaks of luck that the enemy got in the Battle of Savo Island. On the other hand, we seem to have repeated some of the errors—even exaggerated them—made a month earlier in the Battle of Cape Esperance.”

  The victories of November added new complexity to the arguments in Washington about where America’s principal worldwide axis of effort should lie and opened up new avenues of possibility to take the offensive against the Japanese. Nimitz and MacArthur would long argue how best to exploit these. On October 24, as the Battle of Santa Cruz was looming, President Roosevelt had said a diversion of resources to hold Guadalcanal was needed to “take advantage of our success.” Pressured by both Admiral King and General Marshall not to neglect the Pacific—“We cannot permit the present critical situation in the Southwest Pacific to develop into a second Bataan,” they wrote—Roosevelt agreed to a cutback of forces flowing to England. As Major General Thomas T. Handy of the U.S. Army General Staff confided to General Marshall, “our main amphibious operations in 1943 are likely to be in the Pacific” and called the argument about Germany-first or Japan-first “largely academic.”

  Now one of the Army’s foremost strategists, Lieutenant General Stanley Embick, provided a forceful rationale for abandoning the worldwide strategy long held to, at least in name, by the American and British commands. He pointed out on November 20 that under the prewar ABC-1 agreement, Britain was supposed to take first responsibility for the Far East theater while the U.S. fleet diverted Japan by threatening its flank. In reality, of course, those two roles were inverted. In line with the realities of geography and heavy industry, the Americans had taken the lead in their western ocean. And the fact of that leadership, Embick believed, changed everything. “Having assumed this commitment the U.S. must therefore maintain their position as a first charge,” he wrote.

  With even Army leaders advocating a Pacific-first strategy, the state of joint strategic planning was tenuous at best. Far from solving any problems, the diverse opinion within the Army allowed the old arguments among the services, and among the Allies, to gain new fervor. The lack of a consensus within American ranks effectively left Germany-first to exist only in the minds of politicians. The numbers spoke for themselves: At the end of 1942, the United States would field nearly 25 percent more combat troops in the Pacific than it did in England and North Africa, 464,000 to 378,000. The gap between Roosevelt’s words and his military’s work caused Britain’s service chiefs to lament the very idea of combined planning with their Atlantic cousins. Their best insurance against America pursuing a full-on Pacific-first strategy was Churchill’s friendship with Roosevelt. If Japan was traumatized by the bulldog savagery of the American defense of Guadalcanal, the British didn’t care much for its implications, either.

  ON THE MORNING OF November 23, Halsey wrote to his commanders to describe the array of new naval forces flowing into the South Pacific. The Saratoga was coming back. With the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan and a squadron of destroyers, she would re-form the nucleus of Task Force 11. The Enterprise, with the antiaircraft cruiser San Diego and Hoover’s old Desron 2, would continue to comprise Task Force 16. Lee, shorn of the South Dakota now but soon to be given two more fast battleships, the repaired North Carolina and the brand-new Indiana, flew Task Force 64’s flag in the Washington. With the
fuel oil bottleneck finally easing, two older battleships, the Maryland and Colorado, would come south as Task Force 65 under Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill.

  Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, whom Halsey relieved of command of Task Force 16 because a better-qualified aviation man, Rear Admiral Frederick C. Sherman, was available, would take the cruiser striking force, Task Force 67, with the heavies Northampton, Pensacola, New Orleans, the light cruisers Honolulu and Helena, and six destroyers. Task Force 66 came into being as well, with eight destroyers.

  Five days later, Halsey announced their new strategic objective, Rabaul. He wrote MacArthur saying that New Guinea couldn’t be secured until the Japanese strongpoint in the Bismarcks was under American control. He also staked the Navy’s claim to the job, arguing that the attack against Rabaul “must be amphibious along the Solomons with New Guinea land position basically a supporting one only. I am currently reinforcing Cactus position and expediting means of operating heavy air from there. It is my belief that the sound procedure at this time is to maintain as strong a land and air pressure against the Japanese Buna position as your lines of communication permit, and continue to extract a constant toll of Japanese shipping, an attrition which if continued at the present rate he can not long sustain.” The attrition wasn’t easy on the Americans, either. Even with the new naval units on hand, Halsey’s plan to surge toward Rabaul, much like MacArthur’s similar concept earlier that year, seemed ambitious with the limited amphibious resources he had immediately at hand.

  In late November Halsey received his fourth star, elevating him from vice admiral to admiral. When it was discovered that Nouméa was short of four-star pins for his epaulets, the Navy obtained a pair of two-star pins from a Marine major general and had them reconfigured by a repair ship’s welding shop. After Vice Admiral William L. Calhoun presented Halsey with the makeshift four-star insignia, Halsey turned in his three-star pins and said, “Send one of these to Mrs. Scott and the other to Mrs. Callaghan. Tell them it was their husbands’ bravery that got me my new ones.”

  Whatever else could be said of William F. Halsey, no one would complain that he didn’t lead from the front. He had felt the concussion of Japanese gunfire. And as November came to an end, the Japanese would demonstrate that they had a few good salvos left in them. They had not yet given up on Jack London’s least favorite island.

  1 Less than two years after impulsively sandbagging Hoover, Halsey himself benefitted from Nimitz’s restraint when accusations flew after the Leyte Gulf campaign that he had handled his task force carelessly. See Hornfischer, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, pp. 126–131.

  40

  The Futility of Learning

  AFTER THE STEEL-MAULING BATTLES OF NOVEMBER, BOTH FLEETS were left to improvise. The night of November 30–December 1 saw the first attempt by the Tokyo Express to deliver supplies using drums lashed together with ropes. Destroyers would steam in close to shore, then drop the drums overboard for small craft to retrieve for the troops. Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka was the architect of the new approach.

  In the face of the daily distress calls from the supply-straitened Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal, the officers of Destroyer Squadron 2 were resigned to the new role forced upon them. Tanaka’s chief of staff, Commander Yasumi Toyama, lamented bitterly, “Ahhh, we are more a freighter convoy than a fighting squadron these days. The damn Yankees have dubbed us the Tokyo Express. We transport cargo to that cursed island, and our orders are to flee rather than fight. What a stupid thing!” For the crews of fighting ships, the life of the blockade runner was “a strenuous and unsatisfying routine.”

  On November 27, Tanaka steamed south from the Shortlands on a high-speed convoy run. Their sortie was not long a secret. Quickly the American patrol planes spied them from above the clouds: eight destroyers, six serving as transports, laden with supplies, magazines at half capacity, carrying eight torpedoes instead of the usual sixteen, to save on weight.

  Planning for its reception was well along. As Tanaka was leaving Rabaul, Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid was sitting down to apply the knowledge the surface fleet had purchased with the lives of more than four thousand men to date. He was rewriting Task Force 67’s operations plan. Op Plan 1–42 applied recent experience methodically. The confusions of early battles would be banished by forethought. Ship captains would know what to do automatically. Certain procedures would be established and used by default. The task force would be organized and deployed to reflect a best-practices approach to battle. Norman Scott’s improvised doctrine of night battle would be refined, encoded as doctrine, and circulated for general use.

  Except for the use of the radar, whose virtues were now well recognized, the new doctrine sounded a lot like what the Japanese had been doing from the start. As the enemy was scouted by radar (the Japanese used ship-launched floatplanes to the same end), the destroyers would surge forward independently at first contact to make a surprise torpedo attack. Then, as the time of their impact came, the cruisers, till then standing off at more than twelve thousand yards, would open fire while their aircraft lazed overhead dropping flares. If targets were lost, star shells could be used, but searchlights were strictly forbidden. All that was needed to turn the plan to a victory were more good ships and another cast of sailors willing to risk their lives to put ordnance on target first.

  As the ships most recently assigned to Task Force 67 licked their wounds and headed home for repair, as new steel plates replaced those shattered in battle, a new task force came together at Espiritu Santo. Its haphazard nature was, once again, a reflection of the perpetual emergency besetting Admiral Halsey. He would refer to its composition as “a compromise dictated by necessity.” Cruisers were borrowed from carrier task forces, destroyers from convoy assignment. They would be the same men who had lined the rails at Espiritu Santo and given the San Francisco a thunderous cheer. They came together at the end of November as a reconstituted Task Force 67 and made ready to fend off the Tokyo Express once again.

  At Naval Base Guadalcanal, Lloyd Mustin and his operations team were working on the fly, too, trying to find a way to better use the daring but undisciplined PT boat force assigned to the area. The squadron now had fifteen boats, up from just four a few weeks earlier. But given the fluid and occasionally slipshod organization at Tulagi, Mustin found it hard to coordinate their sorties with the other naval forces in the area. Some destroyer commanders resisted involving their tin cans with the “hooligan Navy,” mainly out of fear that it would be difficult to keep from stepping on one another’s toes. “I thought we had better improve that,” Mustin said, “or somebody was going to get hurt.” Having seen the value of the intelligence that PT skippers acquired during their patrols in Savo Sound, Mustin chose, in the name of better cooperation, a PT boat man as his assistant operations officer. They figured out how many boats were available nightly, determined how frequently they could be used, set up patrol schedules, and began innovating new approaches to attacking the Japanese submarines and destroyers in the waters off Guadalcanal. Finding that Japanese destroyers could catch and run down PT boats on a clear night, he settled on a game of cat and mouse. The young PT boat officers learned to avoid being silhouetted in open water while avoiding flat water that would show their wakes, and to attack using diversions, with some boats working as decoys while boats closer to shore rushed in. As they changed their schemes, the Japanese did, too.

  On the night of November 30, however, the PT boats were ordered to stay put at Tulagi. Something larger than they were cut out for was brewing that night. It was another run of the Tokyo Express, eight destroyers under Rear Admiral Tanaka. A large American force was gathering at Espiritu Santo to intercept him.

  True to form, the Navy, on the eve of the mission, replaced Kinkaid with a new commander. Kinkaid balked at his reassignment from a carrier task force and wanted no further part of the South Pacific. And so, as Dan Callaghan had supplanted Norman Scott, as Cassin Young and Joe Hubbard had relieved Charles McMorr
is and Mark Crouter on the San Francisco, Rear Admiral Carleton Wright now became the officer in tactical command of Task Force 67. Long of service in the South Pacific but new to surface combat, Wright flew his flag in the newly arrived Minneapolis, leading a scratch team of four other cruisers—the New Orleans, Pensacola, Honolulu, and Northampton.

  These newcomers to the Ironbottom Sound surface striking force, most of them reassigned from carrier escort duty, were a bit like replacement troops going forward to the front lines from rear-area antiaircraft battalions. They wore the same uniforms and wielded the same weapons, but they weren’t wise in the bitter discipline of close combat. None of the four cruisers had had any part in the four surface actions fought in Savo Sound to this point. It could not be said, either, that they were commanded by the officer best equipped to prepare them for that new type of fight. The only surface-force flag officer alive who had fought and beaten the Japanese Navy, Willis Lee, was back in port with his squadron, tending to the Washington at Nouméa. Though both were veteran cruiser commanders, neither Kinkaid nor Wright had fought a night action before, nor executed a tactical plan such as they were now designing.

  They departed Espiritu Santo’s Segond Channel anchorage at 11:30 p.m. on November 29, following a van composed of the destroyers Fletcher, Drayton, Maury, and Perkins. When they reached the eastern entrance to Lengo Channel at nine forty the next night, Wright’s task force encountered some friendly transports. Augmenting his tag team, Halsey ordered two of their escorts, the Lamson and Lardner, to fall in astern the Northampton. And so another pickup squad with fresh leadership and big ideas headed north toward its destiny.