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

by James D. Hornfischer

  First thing the next morning, he checked his laundry, then asked after the morning paper. The steward on duty gave it to him. Bode took the paper to the restroom, and ten or fifteen minutes later the steward heard a whoom.

  “I am writing a letter to be delivered to my wife,” his April 18 letter to Admiral Hepburn continued, “which I hope you will forward as soon as practical. Although she is a very courageous and competent person she should have knowledge of the why and wherefore, or a reason for this totally unexpected tragedy descending upon her.

  “I can find no expression to convey to you my regret that the District you command is to be hindered with the culmination of the unfortunate situation in which I find myself. But I am sure that you will be able to understand the reaction caused by a sudden reversal of the path of life and hope and achievement I had been following.”

  The cook asked two janitors if they had heard the noise. They said they had. He came back and checked the laundry and the bedroom door twice, then went downstairs again and asked the two boys again if they were sure they had heard a noise. “Don’t be afraid, there are no bombs here,” one of them said.

  Knocking on doors, calling for the captain, the cook told one of the janitors to climb a ladder and look through the bathroom window. When he came down the janitor said there was a figure lying on the floor, a woman, he thought, because it was wearing a blue bathrobe. Next to the body was a .38 caliber round that had done its work and lay there, bent on the floor.

  “I am sure that the affairs of the Station will progress smoothly and effectively as long as necessary for the arrival of a relief,” Bode wrote to Hepburn. “With assurance of my deep gratitude for your uniformly courteous consideration and the pleasure of my brief service under you. I am sincerely, Howard Bode.”

  “It is the opinion of the convening authority,” the commandant of the 15th Naval District would conclude, “that although all of Captain Howard D. Bode’s conduct up to his last act indicated that he was entirely rational, his reaction to criticism of his professional judgment and conduct as commanding officer of the USS Chicago during the first night action off Savo Island, resulted in a depression and unbalanced mental condition which was the direct cause of his death.”

  The chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery supported that conclusion in its endorsement to Admiral King. “This Bureau concurs with the opinion of the Convening Authority and the Judge Advocate General that the death of Captain Bode occurred as a direct consequence of a severe mental illness characterized by depression, and accordingly is of the opinion that it should be considered not the result of his own misconduct.”

  A notation at the end of his personnel file indicates, apropos of nothing in particular, “Not a war casualty.”

  44

  Ironbottom Sound

  “THE MAGNITUDE OF THE SOLOMONS CAMPAIGN HAS NEVER BEEN fully realized,” Joe Custer wrote. “Some day its detailed, barbaric history will awe the civilized world. The clock had been turned back thousands of years, back to the primitive, on Guadalcanal.”

  That history was quickly in the writing. The surrender ceremony on board the USS Missouri was barely two weeks past when recriminations were flying in the papers. The Marine Corps, it seemed, was working to shape its preferred narrative of the campaign. By that account, the marines had been left high and dry by the Navy and had to make do on their own.

  In the fall of 1945, with the war just two weeks over, The New York Times ran an article in which “senior Marine Corps operations officers” claimed that Ghormley’s secretiveness had been costly at Guadalcanal, early on. “The Australian government, which might have moved to aid Admiral Ghormley, was alienated by his refusal to disclose the nature of his operations, it is said.… If Admiral Ghormley had been less secretive his original force might have been at least doubled, it is said here, and the tremendous tax upon the Marines would have been materially diminished.” Ghormley made an easy target. But with Nimitz strongly allergic to public displays of interservice discord, no one rose to dispute the criticism.

  Out of concern for decorum, Nimitz would long conceal the real reasons for Ghormley’s relief. When Ghormley’s son wrote Nimitz after the war to inquire as to CINCPAC’s rationale, the admiral wrote back: “Your father was relieved by Admiral Halsey because of my belief that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown during the early days of our attempt to capture Guadalcanal from the Japanese. The dispatches he sent to me from his headquarters in Nouméa so alarmed my operations staff officers by their panicky and desperate tone that I decided to replace him with Admiral Halsey—who had been sent to the area for a lookaround.… We parted the very best of friends—and when he was returned to me for employment after he had had some leave at home he served most satisfactorily as Commandant of the 14th Naval District and Commander, Hawaiian Sea Frontier, and we were always on most friendly terms and I admired him and considered him to be my friend.”

  The war’s psychological casualties, from Robert Ghormley to Howard Bode to Alleta Sullivan and on through the years, would never be counted. They were lost in the larger story, for November 1942 had brought the Allies a worldwide turning of the tide. The victories at Guadalcanal and in North Africa, broadly seen, were part of the same worldwide effort. The two major Axis nations could pursue their separate military ambitions, but “their hopes for a combined victory over their enemies still looked to a meeting in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, which had been blocked for the Japanese at Midway and in the Solomons as it was blocked for the Germans in North Africa and the southern part of the Eastern Front,” the historian Gerhard Weinberg observed. A Collier’s editorialist saw this on the day after Christmas 1942: “We don’t claim to be prophets, but we feel constrained to agree with the numerous prophets, analysts and commentators who are saying that the first two weeks of November, 1942, in all probability, were the turning point of the war.”

  Five months later, a contributor to the magazine wondered what had been gained. “We have not begun to penetrate more than Japan’s outpost lines. In sixteen months of war we have taken one airfield and three jungle towns. Japan has captured an empire.… The Japanese could lose all of the Solomons and all of New Guinea and New Britain without endangering any vital point in their empire.”

  But the significance of the Guadalcanal campaign was never about just war matériel or real estate. Though the idea had haunted Yamamoto from the beginning that American victory was inevitable, the outcome was not foreordained by advantages in industry and war production. As the French Army’s performance against Germany in 1940 had suggested, arms and matériel were not sufficient for victory. It had to be seized by men with an active will to fight. On that score Japan had misestimated the United States as, in Weinberg’s words, “unwilling to pay the price in blood and treasure to retake islands of which they had never heard, only to be returned to allies for whose colonial empires they had only disdain.”

  An American defeat was strongly possible well into November. Had such a setback occurred, Ernest King, who two weeks after Pearl Harbor was appointed COMINCH in a major shakeup, would likely have fallen in another one. The campaign would have been written off as his signature folly, a haphazardly conceived fantasy. King’s powerful rivals such as General Hap Arnold would have testified morosely, no doubt, to the folly of the Navy’s ambitions in the war’s secondary theater. That it ended differently is a testament to the fighting character of the fleet at the squadron level. The Navy wasn’t ready for its light forces—its cruisers and destroyers—to be the primary weapons of a naval campaign. By the end of November 1942, it wouldn’t need to use much else to finish the job in the southern Solomons.

  At Guadalcanal from August through November, the Japanese saw for the first time the terrifying aspect of the American nation resolved to total war and bent to slaughter. The Imperial Japanese Navy, well blooded, seemed to lose some of its will to fight. In the decades before the outbreak of the war, Japan came to the negotiating table in
Washington and again in London out of a conviction of its matériel inferiority to the Western navies. Despite its fleet’s achievement in the early stages of the war, a powerful current within the IJN cast it as an underdog against the United States. It compensated for the perceived inferiority through a dedication to training and esprit de corps. After Guadalcanal, pessimism was preeminent again. Not until October 1944—and not in any of the significant amphibious invasions that took place from Tarawa to Peleliu—did Japan again commit heavy surface forces to battle. The reason appears to be the shattering effect of the Guadalcanal defeat on morale.

  Though Japanese losses in planes, pilots, and aircrewmen were terrible at Guadalcanal, far worse than at Midway, the 8th Fleet chief of staff, Toshikazu Ohmae, would cite the U.S. Fleet’s use of radar-controlled gunfire as “the outstanding feature in the Guadalcanal campaign.” The IJN’s first realization, after the Battle of Cape Esperance, that the United States held a meaningful technology advantage at night was “a bad influence upon the morale of the men,” Ohmae wrote. “The once high morale of the Japanese destroyer crews participating in the so-called ‘Tokyo Express’ … soon suffered a letdown. This lack of confidence in night engagements” disclosed “physical and mental defects in the Japanese naval forces which participated in the Guadalcanal sea battle fought from 12th to 14th November.” A Marine veteran of Guadalcanal who became a general and a historian as well, Samuel B. Griffith II, argued that the land fighting had a “decisive nature.” The air and sea actions were “ancillary.” This avoids the fact that if the seas were lost, no level of gallantry would have saved the marines ashore from starvation and attrition. Admiral Halsey drew a convincing parallel. “If our surface forces in this epic battle had been routed our land forces on Guadalcanal would have been in the same position as our forces in the Philippines were at the beginning of the war. Archie Vandegrift would have undoubtedly taken to the hills. Those who had fallen into the hands of the Japanese would have received the same horrible mistreatment our prisoners did on all occasions. Archie Vandegrift would have been the ‘Skinny’ Wainwright of Guadalcanal, and the Bataan Death March would have been repeated.”

  Raymond Spruance credited Kelly Turner foremost among those making courageous decisions prior to November 13. “There were many courageous decisions, from lowest to highest commands, and heroic actions without number. First place among them, however, belongs to the decision of Commander Task Force 67, well knowing the odds and possible destruction of his forces, to send his cruisers and destroyers against the Japanese battleship bombarding force, and the resolute manner in which our ships were led into the resulting battle. The night action of 12–13 November probably saved Henderson Field and made possible subsequent air operations from Guadalcanal.”

  Some would question the value of that sacrifice. The historian Richard B. Frank did not second-guess Callaghan’s tactical decisions, but wrote that the so-called Battle of Friday the 13th (or the Cruiser Night Action) only “purchased one night’s respite for Henderson Field” and “postponed, not stopped, the landing of major Japanese reinforcements.” However, the aviation historian John B. Lundstrom called that melee between ships “the key to Allied success” given what Henderson Field’s fliers were thereby allowed to wreak the following day. The pivotal air attacks on the transport force throughout the day on the fourteenth might not have occurred at all had Abe’s battleships been permitted to work over the airfields. And the meager troop landings that did take place were a fraction of what they might have been had all eleven transports reached Guadalcanal.

  In Admiral King’s analysis, Callaghan’s fight was a triumph, despite the aspersions many, including the president of the Naval War College, Admiral Pye, would cast. “We have come to expect, and to count on, complete courage in battle from officers and men of the United States Navy,” King wrote. “But here, in this engagement, we had displayed for our lasting respect and admiration, a cool but eager gallantry that is above praise. Had this battle not been fought and won, our hold on Guadalcanal would have been gravely endangered.”

  Having confronted the Imperial Japanese Navy’s skill, energy, persistence, and courage, Nimitz identified the key to victory: “training, TRAINING and M-O-R-E T-R-A-I-N-I-N-G,” he wrote King in February. In June 1943, the Navy’s light forces got a new playbook from which to train. Common tactical principles were spelled out in Current Tactical Orders and Doctrine, U.S. Pacific Fleet, known as PAC 10. Its standardization of basic maneuvers helped make possible the victories of 1943, from Kolombangara (July 13) to Empress Augusta Bay (November 1–2) and onward. They also got better weapons. Terrible mechanical problems afflicted U.S. torpedoes in the first year of the war. The scuttlings of the Benham and Hornet were cases in point; in both instances, American destroyers firing on static targets at point-blank range had embarrassing results. Only three of the first eight fired by the Mustin against the Hornet hit and exploded. None of the four that the Gwin fired at the Benham scored.

  The emotional truth of battle was a deeper, more complex matter. Robert Graff had years to think about it, and years not to talk. After serving in three warships he returned to New York to pursue a career in broadcast journalism at NBC. He put the “inhuman existence” of his experiences on the Atlanta out of his mind.

  “War is unlike life,” he said. “It’s a denial of everything you learn life is. And that’s why when you get finished with it, you see that it offers no lessons that can’t be better learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget. A disconnect needs to be made to get yourself cleansed.” His children were after him for thirty-five years to talk about it. “I refused. I said ‘Read it in the history books. I can’t do it justice.’ We were closed up tight as a clam.” He attended the reunions of the Atlanta, the Monterey, and the Flint, a sister ship to the Atlanta, only sparsely. Then the memberships aged, and their associations faded away.

  Before Christmas in 1997, his son, age fifty-five, made him an offer that Graff wished on one level that he could have refused: a trip to Guadalcanal. They would fly there via Fiji and stay in a Japanese-owned hotel in Honaira about ten miles up the coast from Henderson Field. All the arrangements had been made for a five-day trip. Against his better judgment, and years of reflexive avoidance, he agreed to go. They flew out in November 1998.

  “I couldn’t stop crying for most of the five days,” Graff said. “After that trip, it was like finally I’m back in life. Like so many people, I never opened my mouth for fifty years about all of this. Suddenly everything was open. Most people get to that stage only with the help of doctors.”

  They spent the first few days visiting battle sites. There were rusted hulks of trucks and tanks and memorials to fallen Americans and Japanese. The drive out to Cape Esperance took them over twenty-five miles of rough island roads.

  One morning they chartered a dive boat and took it out into Savo Sound armed with bouquets of flowers and leis and a big floating raft. The skipper gave a signal when they arrived over the wreck, 421 feet below. Using the sonor, backing down once or twice and pulling the helm as if he were parking a car, the captain positioned the boat over the wreck, then, on Graff’s request, cut the engines and shut down the air-conditioning system. “We’re right over the Atlanta,” the captain said. Graff wanted silence.

  The Atlanta survivor went to the fantail with a Melanesian Episcopal padre who had helped them make the arrangements. The padre, Graff’s son Christopher, and his grandson Kenneth, who was in his twenties, each said a few words. The grandson talked about how far away the war seemed now, and how it was hard to understand what it was all about because its veterans didn’t like to talk. So far away, and so little to talk about, except the hulk of the ship right below them, lying on her side on a ridge in the mud, her remaining anchor still wedged in the bank to keep her from going aground.

  Somebody read some Scripture, then, stepping onto a diving platform mounted just inches above the surface, Graff began his
eulogy. He addressed it to his former shipmates, whom he could sense all around him. He said that he had come out with his family to honor them and that they were good people and would be always remembered. “From the waters surrounding us, millions of javelins, reflected rays of the sun, blind us with your memory and pierce our hearts.” He wondered whether life had turned out as they all had hoped it would, and said he feared there might not be much to show for everybody’s efforts. “We were the youthful hope of the nation and the promise of mankind. Taking the world as we found it, in our way and in our time, we tried to remake the world—more hope, more possibility, a much larger community for happiness. That is what, years ago, brought us to Guadalcanal.”

  The three men and the padre threw their leis onto the water, and then pushed the raft overboard with a copy of the text of the speech. “And we just stood there and everybody cried watching these float on the surface of the water away from the ship on the current. And then I remember when it was time to go, and the captain started the engine. I impulsively removed the Navy cap I brought with me and flung it into the water with the flowers. And I sat down in the corner of the upper deck and cried a little bit more.

  “Finally we got back to shore, and that was that.”

  PHOTO INSERT

  (Photo Credit: 1)

  Admiral Ernest J. King: “He would acknowledge no mind as superior to his own.”