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

by James D. Hornfischer

Thus a certain tension arose whenever Fletcher sought to apply Nimitz’s principle of calculated risk. What risks deserved his highest concern: the risks to the expeditionary force (and by extension the landing force, which was the whole outfit’s reason for being), or the risks to his carriers, the ships that the Navy valued most?

When U.S. servicemen first arrived on Nouméa in March, it became clear that the affection of Frenchmen for Americans was inversely proportional to the proximity of an Axis power. In negotiating for use of the island, Ghormley found the colonial administration fearful for its sovereignty. Well seasoned in the sensitivities of European diplomacy, Ghormley assured De Gaulle’s man that the United States had no permanent imperial ambitions in New Caledonia. America’s intention, Ghormley said, was solely to defeat Japan. When pressed, he pointed to the likely treatment the French would receive after a Japanese conquest. He found the people of the islands considerably more appreciative than their government, if for reasons that hardly seemed helpful in the middle of a total war against world fascism. According to the Navy’s official history of the South Pacific Area, “Almost every French civilian hopes America will stay in the area to curb the British; and the British civilians hope we will stay to discipline the French.”

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.

Admiral King saw the need to relearn his trade from the ground up. He understood that in the art of war, amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics. Ernest King was a professional. “The war has been variously termed a war of production and a war of machines,” he wrote. “Whatever else it is, so far as the United States is concerned, it is a war of logistics. The ways and means to supply and support our forces in all parts of the world—including the Army of course—have presented problems nothing short of colossal and have required the most careful and intricate planning. The profound effect of logistics on our strategic decisions are not likely to have full significance to those who do not have to traverse the tremendous distances in the Pacific. It is no easy matter in a global war to have the right materials in the right places at the right times in the right quantities.”

The Japanese Army’s hubris and ambition were part of the problem. Famed for its iron discipline, it failed to discipline its ends to its means. The 17th Army stubbornly refused to abandon its failing bid to cross New Guinea’s central range and seize Port Moresby. This strained both resources and attention. The Imperial Japanese Navy saw the limitations more clearly. “Unless Guadalcanal is settled,” Ugaki wrote, “we cannot hope for any further development in this area.” A continuous realignment of means with shifting ends took place as both sides wrestled with complexities of the battlefield that were seldom apparent at the game table. On September 11, Turner and McCain met with General Vandegrift to plan their resistance to an expected Japanese attack that the U.S. fleet would be in no position to stop. Early that morning, Ghormley wrote Nimitz again to recount the deficits and laxities of the various components of SOPAC, “SITUATION AS I VIEW IT TODAY IS EXTREMELY CRITICAL.” Not wanting the carriers to seek battle unnecessarily, Ghormley ordered Noyes to keep them south of 12 degrees South latitude, about 150 miles south of Henderson Field. With land-based air strength on Guadalcanal down to eleven Wildcats and twenty-two Dauntlesses, once again the marines were left to their devices to endure air attacks, bombardment by naval gunfire, and seaborne landings of enemy reinforcements. On the night of September 13, the defenders of Henderson Field faced their most serious test...

Good commanders helped their men get past their limitations, be they mechanical or psychological. The lessons Scott’s fighters learned were duly circulated fleetwide in bulletins. The problem of “buck fever”—the initial overeagerness of gun crews, firing before solutions were ready—had only one cure: the sobriety that came with experience. Special effort had to be made to keep fire controlmen informed of radar readings whenever a ship began the game of musical chairs that was going to battle stations. As key people changed stations, the flow of critical information could freeze. On some ships, including Scott’s flagship, the San Francisco, the first salvo from the main battery reliably knocked the delicate instrumentation of the FC radar out of operation. The shock of the main battery could jolt the foremast hard enough to throw the man aiming the director off his target, sometimes carrying the aim of the searchlight operator with him. In a light rain, those searchlights were ineffective beyond five thousand yards, like automotive high beams in a fogbank. Cold guns were full of surprises with their quirky ballistic properties. And as always, a ship-to-ship shootout after dark was a harrowing affair that confounded the senses, like riding a galloping bronco through a foggy night while aiming a rifle at a target that lies beyond a burning building. Simply put, there were no panaceas to defeat the sailor’s age-old foe, Murphy’s Law, and the universal problem of entropy.

As the historian Jonathan Parshall has calculated, that level of effort would have taken half of the Imperial Navy’s monthly allotment of fuel. Measured in terms of tonnage delivered per unit of oil burned, cargo ships were thirty times as efficient as destroyer-transports. But use of the slow ships was fruitless as long as U.S. pilots controlled the skies of the Slot. It was a difficult problem: Without the heavier capacity of those larger vessels, Imperial ground forces would be unlikely to take the airfield.

Then a dispatch came down from Kelly Turner’s headquarters. It was a shocker. It said, in effect, that when Callaghan’s and Scott’s forces merged into a single force, to be designated Task Group 67.4, Scott would take second seat to Callaghan. Halsey was personally close to Scott. But because Callaghan had held the rank of rear admiral for fifteen days longer than Scott, tradition forced an absurd result: Callaghan, the chief of staff to a theater commander who had been removed for his lack of battle-mindedness, was relieving Scott, the only proven brawler in the American surface fleet admiralty, as officer in tactical command of the striking force.

It was a mystery to participants then and to analysts in decades to come why Callaghan never issued a written battle plan to his commanders. As Bruce McCandless, the San Francisco’s officer-of-the-deck, saw it, a slight turn to the right at the outset, away from the oncoming Japanese swarm, would have “crossed the T” of Abe’s force, bringing the American formation on a course perpendicular to that of the Japanese. This textbook naval maneuver, performed by Norman Scott at Cape Esperance, would have enabled all the U.S. ships to fire full broadsides and the destroyers at either end of Callaghan’s line to attack with torpedoes on the bows. It “should have sufficed to derail this Tokyo Express,” McCandless would write. This was the clarity of hindsight. In the present, there had been no tactical planning. There is no evidence Callaghan ever communicated his expectations to his subordinates.

Halsey’s decision to throw his two battleships into the breach was vindicated by victory. It was the sort of risk that Nimitz had implicitly counseled against, and that Fletcher had forsworn with his carriers. “Our battleships,” Lee wrote, “are neither designed nor armed for close range night actions with enemy light forces. A few minutes intense fire, at short range, from secondary battery guns can, and did, render one of our new battleships deaf, dumb, blind and impotent through destruction of radar, radio and fire control circuits.” Halsey would say of his decision to send in Lee’s battleships: “How are all the experts going to comment now? The use we made of them defied all conventions, narrow waters, submarine menace, and destroyers at night. Despite that, the books, and the learned and ponderous words of the highbrows, it worked.” Naval tacticians would find it tempting to undervalue what Lee accomplished that night, saying the Washington did what any modern battleship should do to a smaller specimen of the previous generation. But his victory was anything but an anticlimax foretold in a war lab—especially to the men who were there. Had Lee not confronted Kondo, the airfield would have been a feast for the IJN that night and perhaps into the next morning. If Henderson Field had been neutralized, the Enterprise would have been the only source of U.S. airpower left in the combat area, and a feeble one at that: When the carrier retired south, she had only eighteen Wildc...

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.

"Halsey acted foolishly." - Marco Ramius (The Hunt for Red October) I'm not sure which incident the fictional Ramius was referring to, but this could be one of them.

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.”

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.

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.”

The way America handled its “first team” differed markedly from Japan’s. The Americans brought them home after their inaugural experience under sustained fire and employed them to train the next wave. The Japanese left them on the front to fight until the inevitable happened, and saw their human assets waste away. It was a gilded luxury that the Marine Corps could send home its first fighter ace, the commander of one of the most decorated squadrons in the Solomons, Captain John L. Smith, give him his Medal of Honor, and refuse his requests to return to combat, “not until you have trained 150 John L. Smiths.” A less dramatic case, but more typical of the system, was Edgar Harrison, a fire controlman from the San Francisco. He took his battle experience to the Navy’s technical schools, becoming the first instructor on the new Mark 56 fire-control system, developed to repel attacks by kamikaze aircraft.

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.

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.