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

by James D. Hornfischer

The Pacific’s long swells carried the flotsam of frustrated Western colonial ambitions. The scattered failures of the English, French, Dutch, and Germans were announced by the mélange of place-names woven into the map, from New Britain, Hollandia, and Bougainville to San Cristobál, Choiseul, and the Bismarcks, and by the lack of civilization, or infrastructure. America’s legacy in the South Pacific was unwritten, but those who would begin to write it, for better or worse, were well on their way.

Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki, was filled with a sense of prideful vindication. He would write in his diary that “the conceited British and Americans who regard the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway as supreme victories cannot say anything now.… The enemy must be feeling the autumn in the fortunes of war.” Such verdicts were always debatable. By leaving the area, Mikawa would allow the U.S. Navy to say that the defeated American cruisers had, at the end of the day, kept the enemy from his objective. In early August, autumn had arrived for no one quite yet. The campaign for Guadalcanal had only begun. All the same, the first battle between major naval forces in the South Pacific left no doubt whose navy was master and whose was student. For Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and U.S. commanders all the way down the line, the residual sweet smell of the victories of spring had been borne away on a fell new breeze.

It was clear how far the fleet needed to go to beat the Japanese at a game the Americans thought they owned. The Navy entered the war with a xenophobic professional chauvinism prevailing at almost every level. They would have to overcome it in order to learn how to fight: to exploit new technologies; to change the way crews lived and worked aboard ship; to procure ordnance that actually exploded. More fundamentally, a spirit of “battle-mindedness” was needed in its commanders. Those who had been born with a fighter’s instinct would need little help. But for the majority of officers and men who had never experienced the sudden violence of ship-to-ship combat before, the Battle of Savo Island was a deeply unsettling lesson.

The fight that was taking shape in the southern Solomons was going to be neither a single, climactic World War I–style daylight slugfest nor a repeat of Midway, a dance of search planes and long-range naval air strikes. The South Pacific Forces would draw strength from a foundation of supply and reinforcement built far south of the point of contact with the enemy. And the point of the spear that dueled with the enemy would be the surface fleet—destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, aided by aircraft, whose job would be to seize control of the seaways from the enemy. Neither the Navy nor the Marines had fought a war like this before. Its finer points would be developed, tested, and adjusted on the fly over time.

Halsey was neither a genius nor even a working scholar in any academic or technical field, but he had a quality of brilliance that may have been even more important in a combat capacity. He was, it was said, “brilliant in common sense.” He knew that battles and wars were won not principally with well-drafted paperwork or subtle diplomacy or high materials and engineering ratings aboard ship, but by something quite simple and direct: placing ordnance on target. He knew, working backward from there, that the quality of the mind and spirit of the men distributing that ordnance was at least as important as the mechanical state of the weapons themselves. And he knew that small and simple acts, trivial in themselves but intangibly powerful, raised and perfected that quality; sometimes those things were as prosaic as showing up and listening to people.

One lesson arrived swiftly: that war is the craft of putting ordnance on target decisively, and it is really nothing else. This lesson was being learned the world over in more than a dozen languages. The rigmarole of military life, after all, was designed in part to shape the character of men to respond effectively in that half second where a vital decision must rise instantly from habit. A ship full of pilothouse philosophers, sailors’ lieutenants, and colorful China hands who inspire great fiction will lose a fight in an eye’s blink to a quick, tight, fast-firing crew who snaps their weapons on target and delivers direct fire by the express route. The victors in every battle from Pearl Harbor to El Alamein to Stalingrad had learned this important truth, and now Admiral Scott was among them. On the other side of the world, the Wehrmacht was locked in a death grip with the Russians at Stalingrad. In North Africa, British forces were winning a decisive victory over the Afrika Korps at El Alamein. Such a turning point was soon to be at hand in the South Pacific.

They were cool, efficient, leaderly, and unselfish, according to those who saw them and wrote the reports. “The following men are deserving of commendation”—and this would be written many times in the coming days and weeks—“for the accuracy of his control of the gun battery … at great risk he entered the smoke filled handling rooms #3 and #4 … and directed the damage control parties … for his courage in personally supervising the fire fighting below decks … without thought to his own safety … worked continuously all night and the next day reinforcing shores and operating pumps … it is recommended that this man be advanced to chief … for his heroic action in entering the flames … when after being struck in the neck by shrapnel, although he could in no way determine the extent of his wounds except to feel blood soaking his shirt, calmly identified silhouettes as they appeared … and removing casualties from gun #3 and getting #7 life raft into the water … for his tireless effort and continued excellent performance of duty … directing the fire party to successfully extinguish the fire which helped the ship continue fighting … and rendered valuable aid putting out a fire in compartment C-203-L … for fine assistance in handling casualties of gun #3 … and for helping extinguish fires on clothing.… ” Feats like these would be easily lost, along with the names of their authors, men like Byers, Burris, Morris, and Lovas; Keenum, Kozak, Conn, and Hammack; Kelly, Wholley, Fray, and Ma...

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.”