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

by James D. Hornfischer

That the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.

That a war to secure liberty could be waged passionately by men who had none themselves, and that in death all sailors have an unmistakable dignity.

The leading navies of the world were situated in a challenging period between the age of fighting sail and the age of nuclear propulsion when fuel was consumable and therefore a critical limit on their reach. Once the term steaming replaced sailing in the naval lexicon, the concept of an operating radius took root. “If an enemy lay beyond that radius, the fleet might as well be chained to a post,” a maritime historian wrote.

in the art of war, amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics.

What makes the difference is a battle’s impact on the will to fight, and on the ability to impose one’s will on an enemy in the future. Victory is in the mind, not the metal.

One lesson arrived swiftly: that war is the craft of putting ordnance on target decisively, and it is really nothing else.

The first time the South Dakota’s main battery was tested with a full nine-gun broadside, the wave of blast pressure pushed through the passageway where Captain Thomas Gatch was standing, tearing his pants right off him.

When it was all said and done at Guadalcanal, three sailors would die at sea for every infantryman who fell ashore.

Beer received higher priority. Delighted to find a Liberty ship carrying thirty thousand cases, thieves loaded up their boats and spirited the suds up the beach to a secret depot that was quite secure from discovery owing to its location several miles behind Japanese lines—“a fiasco which would be rather deplorable if it weren’t so humorous,” Lloyd Mustin said. “The boat crews knew it too, but by George, they were going to land some beer in a private cache known only to them.”

An old saying later popularized by a veteran of the Solomons naval campaign, John F. Kennedy, went, “Victory has a hundred fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”