That mid-October was the bleakest moment of the campaign. The long shadows of Bataan and Wake Island were cast across the Lunga perimeter. Many men seemed dazed and listless, and gazed vaguely off into the distance. The marines called it the “thousand-yard stare.” Aviators who had lost their planes collected whatever weapons they could find and joined the infantrymen in the trenches. Since August 7, the besieged marines had bucked themselves up with mordant humor and a brawny esprit de corps. Now, increasingly, they flared up at one another and exchanged heated words over small annoyances. “Everyone made mistakes,” wrote Colonel Twining. “Orders miscarried. Communications failed. Execution was sluggish.”58
The Japanese army, now heavily reinforced on the western flank, began probing attacks along the Matanikau River. Vandegrift fortified his lines, but he was not entirely confident they would withstand a concerted assault. Retreat and even surrender became a thinkable prospect. D-2, the 1st Division intelligence staff, began burning their classified records. Units made plans to melt into the jungle hills, live off the land, and wage a guerrilla war as long as they could. “We all feared defeat and capture, I think,” recalled Tony Betchik, an F4F crew chief. “We were afraid they were going to leave us there.”59 A navy air officer, Lieutenant Commander John E. Lawrence, recalled the insidious effects of “the hopelessness, the feeling that nobody gave a curse whether we lived or died. It soaked into you until you couldn’t trust your own mind.”60
According to Twining’s postwar memoir, Ghormley authorized Vandegrift to surrender his forces if the position became hopeless. (No such dispatch has survived, but it is precisely the sort of document one might expect to slip into oblivion.) Among the 1st Division staff, there was hushed talk of a last stand. Vandegrift ordered contingency plans for a fighting retreat up the Lunga River. Twining studied the issue and recommended another option—moving the marines down the coast to the east, where they could establish interim defensive lines at each river and preserve the possibility of evacuation by sea.
The despair reached all the way back to the United States. The New York Times wrote about the Guadalcanal campaign in a valedictory tone. Speaking to reporters in Washington, Secretary Knox refused to guarantee that the island could be held. He had been embarrassed by his boastful confidence immediately before the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, and was determined not to commit another such gaffe.
IF THE GRIM DISPATCHES FROM GUADALCANAL were not enough, Admiral Ghormley was badly shaken by an October 16 aerial sighting report placing a Japanese aircraft carrier just to the west of Ndeni—an island that lay 330 miles east of Henderson Field, dangerously near the supply route between Espiritu Santo and Guadalcanal. The report was in error, and was soon corrected, but not before it elicited from Ghormley a pitiable cri de coeur. To Nimitz and King, he cabled, “This appears to be all out enemy effort against CACTUS possibly other positions also. My forces totally inadequate [to] meet situation. Urgently request all aviation reinforcement possible.”61
The embattled South Pacific commander had never really bought into the WATCHTOWER offensive. King had thrown it into his lap when he was still setting up the rudiments of his new command, before he had assembled an adequate staff or even established a permanent headquarters. His logistical problems were undoubtedly more severe than those faced by any other Allied theater commander, but Ghormley had made a bad habit of asking for reinforcements that he knew did not exist. From the start of the campaign, he and his staff had seemed stressed and uncertain. When the French colonialists at Noumea had resisted providing an administrative building, he had accepted the rebuff with a born diplomat’s equanimity, and operated from the cramped and fetid precincts of his flagship. He had failed to appear in person at vital command summits, particularly the planning conference on board the Saratoga (July 26) that preceded the landing at Guadalcanal. Unlike McCain, Turner, Harmon, and Nimitz, he had never set foot on Guadalcanal.
During his recent inspection tour, Nimitz had observed his old friend closely. His observations confirmed the reports that he must have been gathering from many sources. Ghormley was not up to the job; he would have to be relieved and replaced.
No less a figure than FDR bore a share of the responsibility. Ghormley had been special naval observer in London until he was replaced in that job by Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark, who in turn yielded the job of chief of naval operations (CNO) to King. Stark’s transfer to London in April 1942 was really a face-saving demotion that allowed King to wield simultaneously the two most powerful commands in the navy (CNO and COMINCH). But it put Ghormley out of a job, and that didn’t sit right with the president, who had known the admiral for more than a quarter of a century. FDR asked his naval aide, Commander John L. McCrea, “What’s going to happen to Ghormley?” McCrea had no idea and said so, adding that Ghormley was likely to lose his temporary three-star rank and revert to his permanent rank of rear admiral. FDR replied, “Well, tell Ernie King for me that I think it rather unfair because we have to find a place for Stark that Ghormley is to lose his rank as vice admiral.”62 Coming from the commander in chief, that amounted to an order to find Ghormley another three-star billet.
In retrospect, Nimitz should probably have relieved Ghormley in September, during or immediately after his inspection tour to the South Pacific. There is evidence that King and Nimitz had discussed a change at SOPAC as early as their meeting in San Francisco on September 7.63 But Ghormley was an honorable officer who had given forty years of his life to the service. He had been one of the stars of his class, a man (like Nimitz and King) whose talent, dedication, and hard work had marked him at an early age for rapid promotion. There was no way around the fact that relieving him would leave the stain of failure on his career and legacy. It was a painful duty to strike such a blow against a brother officer, and Nimitz hesitated to do it.
In a meeting at Pearl Harbor on October 15, senior members of the CINCPAC staff put the issue to their boss with a forcefulness and candor that crept up to the edge of insubordination. According to fleet intelligence officer Edwin Layton, they urged that “personalities should be set aside and that the commander South Pacific should be replaced by someone who could do a more effective job.”64 Whatever the merits of their case, that was not the way things were supposed to be done in the navy, and Nimitz hotly reprimanded them for “mutiny.” Undeterred, a delegation of officers reiterated their case later that night during a visit to Nimitz’s Makalapa quarters, where the CINCPAC greeted them in his pajamas. Bill Halsey had orders to take over command of the carrier task forces, and was at that moment en route to the South Pacific. It would be a simple matter of directing Halsey to Noumea, and then ordering him to relieve Ghormley as COMSOPAC. Nimitz was subdued, but noncommittal.
The following morning came Ghormley’s dispatch (160440) bewailing his “totally inadequate” forces. Nimitz fired off an ultra-secret dispatch for King’s eyes only: “In view Ghormley’s 160440 and other indications, including some noted during my visit, I have under consideration his relief by Halsey at earliest practicable time. Request your comment.”65 King briefly replied: “Approved.”66
Halsey, overnighting at Canton Island, was directed to fly directly to Noumea. His Coronado let down in the harbor at 2:00 p.m. on October 18. A whaleboat carrying Ghormley’s flag lieutenant came alongside, and the lieutenant handed Halsey a sealed envelope, inside of which was another sealed envelope marked “SECRET.” It was a dispatch from Nimitz directing Halsey to relieve Ghormley as COMSOPAC immediately.
One of Halsey’s staff recorded the admiral’s exact words: “Jesus Christ and General Jackson! This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!”67
* In May, Admiral Halsey had been laid low by a skin breakout after several months of continuous command of a carrier task force.
† Churchill was receiving similar jeremiads from his RAF commanders. See “Air Marshal A. T. Harris to Prime Minister, Personal and Secret,” June 17, 1942, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, Book 5:
The Air Offensive, Box 313.
‡ Known in Japan as the “Second Battle of Savo Island.”
Chapter Six
THE MEMOIRS, DIARIES, AND ORAL HISTORIES ARE UNANIMOUSLY agreed. The news that Halsey had taken charge brought a sudden upwelling in morale through the theater. “I’ll never forget it,” recalled a navy air officer on Guadalcanal. “One minute we were too limp with malaria to crawl out of our foxholes; the next, we were running around whooping like kids. . . . If morale had been enough, we’d have won the war right there.”1 Halsey was known as an aggressive, emotional, risk-taking warrior who loved nothing more than to attack. The marines called him a “rough brush”2—that is, an artist who painted in big strokes rather than a draftsman who drew fine lines. He would not be deterred by subtle arguments of strategy and tactics—he would simply throw everything he had at the enemy and slug it out until the issue was decided.
The “rough brush” was an old and venerated tradition of American naval leadership, dating back to John Paul Jones’s “I have not yet begun to fight!,” James Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship!,” and David Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” In October 1942, it was precisely the attitude needed in the South Pacific. It lifted men’s spirits and gave them hope. But it is also worth considering how close the Allies came to the brink of ruinous defeat in the Solomons. If the fortunes of war had turned a bit differently in the climactic naval battles of late October and November, American seapower might have been garroted and the marines cut off and overrun. In that case, Halsey’s characteristic daring and aggression would have been condemned as unreasoning and rash (as indeed it would be two years later, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf).
At the very outset of his command, the new COMSOPAC faced a stark choice. He could push all his chips into the middle of the table, or he could fold and wait to be dealt a better hand. It was his duty to give due consideration to the second option, demoralizing as it was. His long-term chief of staff, Admiral Robert B. Carney, maintained that Halsey was never quite as madcap or impulsive as the newspapers liked to portray him. His garish boasts and his exhortations to “Kill more Japs!” and “Keep ’em dying!” were always aimed down the ranks, as a spur to morale. When Vandegrift flew into Noumea for a command summit on October 23, Halsey listened more than he spoke. He listened to Vandegrift, then to Turner; he let silence fall over the wardroom while he smoked a cigarette, drummed his fingers on the table, and turned the issues over in his mind. Finally he asked the general, without fanfare, “Can you hold?”3
“Yes, I can hold,” Vandegrift replied. “But I have to have more active support than I have been getting.”4 Halsey promised to send everything he had.
It was evident that a big Japanese naval offensive was shaping up. Communications intelligence was far from perfect, at the moment, but the new COMSOPAC knew the Japanese fleet would include more than two flattops (perhaps as many as four) and a large force of surface ships, including at least four battleships. Halsey had two carrier task forces, built around the Hornet and Enterprise. The latter, having been damaged in August and patched up at Pearl Harbor, rendezvoused with the Hornet northwest of Espiritu Santo at 3:45 p.m. on October 24. The two groups were combined into Task Force 61, under the command of Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid—the two carriers, the battleship South Dakota, six cruisers, and fourteen destroyers. That force was little more than half the size of the Japanese fleet descending on the region. In an aggressive and potentially dangerous move, Halsey threw virtually everything he had into the fight. Kinkaid was ordered to sweep north of the Santa Cruz Islands and seek battle with the enemy.
RADIO MONITORS ON THE YAMATO had picked up a United Press report, broadcast from Hawaii, referring to plans in the making for “a major sea and air battle soon near the Solomons.”5 It did not escape Admiral Ugaki’s attention that Americans were about to go to the polls for midterm congressional elections. Would FDR order a major operation to coincide with America’s Navy Day (October 27), in hopes of stirring up voter support for his party? That chain of reasoning was badly flawed, but the Combined Fleet staff had nonetheless surmised correctly that Halsey would throw all available naval forces into the defense of Guadalcanal. The Japanese army and navy gathered strength for an all-out sea-air-ground offensive, with the dual ambitions of seizing Henderson Field and wiping out the American fleet.
The Japanese fleet was the largest assembled since the Midway offensive: two fleet carriers, two light carriers, and four battleships, with many supporting cruisers, destroyers, and auxiliaries, sixty-one ships altogether. As at Midway, the Japanese plan called for a partition of naval forces into several, widely separated groups. The advance or van of the Japanese fleet would be led by Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, who flew his flag in the cruiser Atago, and would include two battleships, five cruisers, ten destroyers, and a light flattop, the Junyo. A scouting line (and decoy force) of surface warships and one light carrier would steam about a hundred miles ahead of the two big fleet carriers, Shokaku and Zuikaku. As in the August battle, the Japanese commanders hoped that the Americans’ initial carrier airstrike would fall on the scouting line. The various elements would converge on Guadalcanal after the Japanese army had broken through Vandegrift’s perimeter and overrun the airfield.
The Japanese army was in force on Guadalcanal, but it continued to operate under the heavy disadvantages of poor communications and the rigors of an unforgiving jungle terrain. The scheduled assault on Vandegrift’s lines was twice delayed (from October 22 to October 24, local date), and when it began, it quickly deteriorated into a series of small, confused unit encounters. The marines held their well-fortified lines and exacted a bloody toll on the attackers, who suffered casualties at the ratio of about seven to one. At dawn on the morning of October 25, however, a Japanese soldier thought he saw green-white flares over Henderson, the agreed signal that the airfield had been captured, and the Japanese army radioed the defective information to Rabaul. It was relayed to Ugaki and Yamamoto, and the Yamato’s towering radio antennae told Kondo and Nagumo to charge south toward the island and seek battle with the American fleet. The advance force passed through Indispensable Strait, north of Malaita. There it was intercepted by five SBDs from Guadalcanal, which planted bombs on a destroyer and a light cruiser, the Yura. The ships turned tail and ran, leaving the stricken Yura to be abandoned and scuttled.
Task Force 61 had meanwhile advanced along the northern shoals of the Santa Cruz group, and then turned southwest toward a point just east of San Cristobal. Throughout the long daylight hours of October 25, the two fleets steamed toward one another as air patrols reached out and probed ahead. A PBY spotted two big Japanese carriers at 11:03 a.m., but in a position 355 nautical miles from Task Force 61, far out of range. At 12:50 p.m., the seaplane tender Curtiss relayed a sighting report from one of her seaplanes, reporting two Japanese carriers to the northwest, 360 miles away. Closing on the enemy at near-maximum speed, Kinkaid made the chancy decision to launch a twenty-nine-plane composite strike. The planes went out to the end of their search vectors, continued eighty miles to the northwest, and finally turned back in the failing light. The F4F pilots of Fighting Squadron Ten flew for three and a half hours at 17,000 feet, exhausting themselves, their oxygen supply, and their fuel.6 As they spiraled down through broken cloud cover, the Enterprise was nowhere to be seen. Running on fumes, they descended to just 15 to 20 feet above the sea, until Swede Vejtasa caught sight of an oil slick reflected in his own running lights. The Wildcats followed that greasy trail for forty-five miles and found the ship.7 Several were forced to ditch at sea due to fuel exhaustion, or crashed while trying to land on the Enterprise in darkness.8
A full moon rose in the east and threw enough light across the sea to accommodate nighttime air searches. PBYs from Ndeni continued to blanket the area. At 3:10 a.m., one spotted the long, darkened flight deck of the Zuikaku. Kinkaid cocked his air group for a night bombing attack, and the aircrews remained in their ready
rooms all night. But without further confirmation of the enemy fleet’s position, the admiral prudently chose to keep the strike on deck until dawn.
At first light on October 26, the two groups were only about 200 miles apart. The weather was fair, with clear visibility above and below a 2,000-foot layer of scattered cumulus and stratocumulus clouds. The sea was smooth and the northwest breeze less than 10 knots.9 Passing rainsqualls would continue throughout the day. Two Dauntlesses of Kinkaid’s morning search flight discovered the Zuiho at 7:40 a.m. and attacked her directly. Both dive-bombers scored, pitching their 500-pound bombs into the middle of her flight deck. The little flattop survived but could neither launch nor recover aircraft for the remainder of the battle.10
About ten minutes later, some miles north, two more Enterprise SBDs discovered the Shokaku and Zuikaku. They radioed the contact report and prepared to dive, but defending Zeros broke up the attack. Both planes escaped by dodging into a cloud bank.
Nagumo and Kinkaid now hurled their principal airstrikes at one another. Strung out over fifty or sixty miles in three separated groups, the American planes were vulnerable to the concentrated attentions of the Zeros passing on a reciprocal heading. Nine Japanese fighters dived unseen out of the sun on the Enterprise torpedo planes of VT-10, and sent three TBFs down in flames before the American aircrews had even registered the enemy’s presence.11 Misleading oddments of radio chatter confused and misled aviators in the trailing squadrons. The surviving Enterprise Avengers had lost altitude in their tussle with the Zeros, thus shrinking their visible horizon. Finding no carriers, they attacked the Chikuma, inflicting heavy damage on the Japanese cruiser but failing to sink her.12 At 10:50, the first wave of Hornet planes converged on the Shokaku. Lieutenant Commander William J. “Gus” Widhelm, commander of the Hornet’s VS-8, kept his tracers centered on a Zero coming directly toward him in a head-on run and blew the plane apart, then dived sharply to evade the oncoming debris. A second Zero darted in from a high side and fired two or more 20mm rounds into his engine with a full deflection shot. Widhelm’s engine emitted black oil smoke, then seized, and he dropped out of the battle. (He ditched safely and was recovered later with his radio-gunner, George D. Stokely.) Though he had been roughly handled by the Zeros, Widhelm’s determination to manage his aircraft like a fighter rather than a dive-bomber had diverted the enemy’s attention from the remaining Hornet SBDs, which reached their attacking positions and pushed into their dives.13