Gunichi Mikawa went to Chokai’s bridge with Commander Ohmae. They were supremely confident. They peered into the night to see every bridge streaming with the banners that marked them out in the dark. Keen-eyed lookouts could make out and identify every ship by its silhouette or the red or white rings painted around its funnels. All ships were sailing in line of battle: Chokai, Aoba with Admiral Goto aboard, Kinugasa, Furutaka, Kako, the lights Tenryu and Yubari, destroyer Yunagi bringing up the rear. No other navy had so prepared itself for night battle, Mikawa thought, remembering one of the Japanese Navy’s favorite sayings:
“The Americans build things well, but their blue eyes are no match for our dark eyes in night actions.”
One of the things Americans had built well was the sound tracking device installed aboard the submarine S-38, then submerged and tracking Meiyo Maru fourteen miles west of Cape St. George. At about midnight Commander Munson closed to one thousand yards. He fired two torpedoes. Both hit, and Meiyo Maru sank with fourteen officers and 328 men. Her five sister ships were recalled to Rabaul. The first attempt to reinforce Guadalcanal had failed and in the morning sharks were splashing among bloated bodies bound with belts of a thousand stitches.
Another thing well built by the Americans was the radar installed aboard destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot. But this far-ranging electronic eye must also be understood to be effective. Neither Admiral Crutchley nor the destroyer commanders were aware that their search-legs needed to be coordinated. When these picket ships outside Savo stood at the extreme end of their search-legs they left between them a hole in the radar screen twenty-five miles wide. As August 8 neared its end Blue and Ralph Talbot sailed toward each other and then away from each other.
Aboard Talbot lookouts could see past Savo Island to their rear toward Tulagi, where George F. Elliott still burned. Her fire silhouetted some of the ships of the northern force. Over Savo there was a storm making up. Lightning flashes glimmered. The warm moist air was becoming more oppressive. Just before midnight Talbot’s lookouts heard motors overhead.
An airplane with flashing lights flew over them.
Astonished, Talbot’s watch gave immediate warning over the Talk Between Ships. But this and similar alarms were discounted by commanders who considered Mikawa’s scouts to be “friendly.” Would the Japanese dare show lights?
Blue and Talbot sailed on, together and apart, together and apart.
Before midnight the Japanese ships picked up the first marker lamp thirty miles off Cape Esperance. They were on course! Speed was increased to twenty-six knots. Shortly afterward a light was sighted in the direction of Tulagi. Admiral Goto reported that the sky was red over the island.
The ships steamed on …
On Chokai’s bridge Gunichi Mikawa stood erect and tense. His fingers whitened as he gripped the splinter-screen and peered ahead. At 12:40 A.M., August 9, hulking Savo Island loomed out of the darkness. Three minutes later a lookout sighted a ship steaming ahead from right to left. He had seen it on a black night at a distance of five miles.
It was Blue.
“Left rudder,” Mikawa ordered. “Slow to twenty-two knots.”5
Every gun, every eye in the fleet was trained on Blue. The slightest indication that she had seen, and Blue would be blown to bits. Thirty seconds … a minute … and Blue turned about! She reversed course and sailed back to Guadalcanal.
“Ship sighted, twenty degrees to port.”
Heads and guns again swiveled. It was Ralph Talbot, and she was sailing away.
“Right rudder,” Mikawa ordered. “Course one hundred and fifty.”
They went through the gap and the wolves were now in the pasture.
At 1:25 A.M. Mikawa gave the order: “Prepare to fire torpedoes.”
Destroyer Yunagi lost speed and dropped behind to keep an eye on Blue.
“Cruiser, seven degrees port,” a lookout cried, sighting a ship nine miles distant, illuminated in the glow of the burning Elliott. But it was too far north. Mikawa bored on, hunting for the southern force.
“Three cruisers, nine degrees starboard, moving to the right.”
There they were, the ones he wanted, in reality Chicago and Canberra with destroyer Patterson, and Mikawa gave the order: “Commence firing.” Giant steel fish leaped from loaded torpedo tubes and went hissing through the black water. “All ships attack,” Mikawa ordered, and great spiky guns fingered the sky.
At last Patterson had seen the enemy and was broadcasting the tocsin: WARNING! WARNING! STRANGE SHIPS ENTERING HARBOR!
It was too late. The Long Lances were flashing on their way and parachute flares came swaying down from Mikawa’s scout planes. Marines lying on their ponchos in Guadalcanal’s whispering blind rain forests were made suddenly fearful to see all made grotesque and ghostly about them by this wavering pale green light.
Out on the Bay black water glittered evilly under the flares. Chokai in the lead, the Japanese cruisers came on with bellowing guns.
A few seconds later a pair of Mikawa’s deadly steel fish finished their run and rammed with titanic thrust into the hull of Canberra. Twenty-four shells whistled in and broke her body. Her captain and her gunnery officer were killed. Fires started and spread. Canberra was done for and would have to be scuttled.
Another torpedo blew off the bow of Chicago. Captain Bode tumbled topside out of a sound sleep. He had a column of cruisers to shoot at, and he sailed out of the battle in the wrong direction. He also neglected to inform the northern force that he was under attack.
It took the Japanese only a few fiery minutes to blast and rout the southern force, and now Mikawa divided his column and turned left to take on the northern force.
Archer Vandegrift limped painfully below on the mine layer Southard. He had twisted an old football knee leaving McCawley for Admiral Crutchley’s barge. Crutchley had offered to take him to Southard. As they parted, the admiral said: “Vandegrift, I don’t know if I can blame Turner for what he’s doing.”6 The general made no reply. Reproach, at this moment, was beyond him; even if he did think that the behinds of his Marines were somewhat barer than Turner’s, who was leaving in the morning.
Vandegrift was going to Tulagi to see if Rupertus had been able to get any supplies ashore. Guadalcanal had received something less than half of its sixty-day ration, but Tulagi, busy fighting, surely had less.
In Southard’s wardroom Vandegrift gratefully sipped hot coffee, until a sailor’s voice came booming through the bridge tube: “Commodore, you better come up here. All hell’s broke loose!”7
Racing topside unmindful of his bad knee, Vandegrift came on deck to see flares burning far off Southard’s stern and hear the boom of naval guns. He was elated. He thought that the Americans were winning. It might not be too long before Turner would be back.
Suddenly the beams of powerful searchlights slashed the western night.
Astoria was last in column. In 1939 Astoria under Captain Richmond Kelly Turner had carried the ashes of Ambassador Hirosi Saito to Japan from America. Now, in the morning of August 9, Chokai’s big guns were saying thanks. Salvo after salvo of eight-inch shells tore into Astoria. The big ship shuddered and bucked. Like Canberra, like all the other Allied ships and unlike the Japanese, Astoria was heavy with flammable wood, with upholstered wooden wardroom furniture, and her decks and bulkheads were thick with paint and linoleum. Within a few minutes Astoria was a blazing shambles and would sink at noon that day.
It was Aoba who had turned on her searchlights. She caught luckless Quincy with her guns still pointing fore and aft. Quincy swung her guns and fired. Her shells crashed into Chokai’s chartroom. But now Quincy was caught between Mikawa’s two columns. Piece by piece and man by man, Quincy came apart. Her captain died just after he had ordered her helmsman to try to beach the burning cruiser on Savo. She began to turn over. “Abandon ship!” Men scrambled over her side, and some were still clinging to her, like ants on a sinking can, at 2:35 A.M., when Quincy rolled over and dove—
the first American warship to sink to the floor of Iron Bottom Bay.
In the lead, Vincennes was the last to be caught. Searchlights picked her out, too, but she fought back. As Kako’s near-misses sent geysers of water pluming above her, Vincennes hurled shells at Kinugasa and hit her. But then Japanese shells exploded the airplanes on the American’s fantail and Vincennes was doomed. One after another the Japanese cruisers swept by the staggering, burning American ship to rock her with more torpedoes and gunfire. Vincennes sank a few minutes after the death of Quincy.
In thirty-two minutes the Japanese had destroyed four Allied heavy cruisers and damaged another. As they sped toward the regrouping rendezvous northwest of Savo, their wakes washed over a thousand oil-covered American seamen clinging desperately to empty shell cases, life rafts, orange crates—to any piece of flotsam or jetsam that might keep them afloat. Marine Corporal George Chamberlin, wounded five times by shrapnel, was saved when a sailor named Carryl Clement swam to his side, removing Chamberlin’s shoelaces and tying the wounded man’s wrists to ammunition drums. Other wounded were not so fortunate, for Savo’s shores abounded in sharks. Blood attracted them. Throughout the night men vanished with horrible swiftness. At dawn rescue operations would begin and sailors and Marines would stand on the decks of rescue craft to shoot sharks while others hauled 700 survivors aboard, blanching, sometimes, to see men with streamers of tattered flesh flopping on the decks like octopus or others so badly burned that corpsmen could find no place to insert hypodermic needles. But Gunichi Mikawa’s guns had taken the lives of 1270 men and wounded 709 others.
Meanwhile, northwest of Savo, Mikawa prepared to make short and bloody work of the thin-skinned American transports. It was clear to him that he had destroyed the sheep-dogs and the sheep were now his to devour. But then, he faltered.
It was not that he feared any of the remaining warships; he would have been overjoyed to put more enemy combat vessels on the bottom. Mikawa was just not aware of either Admiral Scott’s Eastern Force or Admiral Crutchley in Australia. Mikawa honestly believed that he had sunk five cruisers and four destroyers, almost all of the American warships that his planes had not reported “destroyed.” No, it was the American dive-bombers that Gunichi Mikawa feared. He, too, had been at Midway. All the way down The Slot his chief fear had been for the American carriers. It had seemed incredible to him that he could enter the Bay unchecked. Now, he would not stretch his luck. He would not tarry to be destroyed by American air with the advent of daylight. Like Admiral Fletcher, Admiral Mikawa fled his fears.
At 2:40 A.M. he ordered his ships to make full-speed north for Rabaul.
That afternoon Admiral Turner’s amphibious fleet upped anchor and made full-speed south for New Caledonia.
An hour later a battalion of the First Marines moved from Henderson Field to the beach to take up new positions. The men gaped in amazement at empty Iron Bottom Bay. Even the most obtuse private could grasp the meaning of that vacant expanse of shimmering blue water.
They were all alone.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
KELLY TURNER stood on McCawley’s lower bridge yelling through a megaphone to Archer Vandegrift standing below him in a tossing small boat.
Turner did not know the details but Crutchley’s covering force had been badly mauled. Turner was leaving as soon as his boats had finished fishing survivors from the water. Turner did not say when he would be back. Turner waved and Vandegrift waved, and then the general’s boat beached on Guadalcanal and Vandegrift limped ashore.
He called a meeting of his staff and all regimental and battalion commanders.
They came straggling through the rain to the Division Command Post near Alligator Creek. They were colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors. New beards were sprouting raggedly on their chins. Their eyes were bloodshot and their baggy dungarees were stained with mud. They stood watching the rescue operations on the Bay or speculating on what all the shooting had been about last night. Coffee had been brewed over a smoking, sputtering fire and the hot black liquid was passed around in C-ration cans. Some of the officers cursed when the hot metal burned their lips. Others swore when concussions from the west shook the palm fronds and showered them with rainwater. The explosions were from Canberra being scuttled by torpedo and Astoria dying by compartments.
Offshore, the mists lifted to reveal the foreshortened shape of a prowless cruiser making slowly eastward between two destroyers.
“Chicago,” someone said in a shocked voice.
Archer Vandegrift came out of his tent.
He spoke quickly and bluntly. The Navy was leaving and no one knew when it would be back. Only God could say when and if they would get air cover. They were now open to every form of attack: troops by land, bombs from the air, shells from the sea. And they were to inform every officer and man in their command of this unlovely truth: they were all alone.
But, said Archer Vandegrift softly, his strong jaw lifting, they would also tell their men that Guadalcanal would not be another Bataan. Marines had been surviving such situations as this since 1775. Here also they would survive—and that was all the general had to say.
Now Colonel Gerald Thomas, the division’s operations officer, took over. Thomas said they would now:
Organize the defense of Guadalcanal.
Get the supplies inland.
Finish the airfield.
Patrol.
They were going to hold a perimeter roughly 7500 yards wide from west to east and penetrating inland about 3500 yards. It would be bounded on its eastern or right flank by the Tenaru River and on the west or left by the Kukum Hills. Its northern or seaward front would be the most heavily fortified, because it was here that Vandegrift expected the Japanese to counterattack. Its landward rear would be the most lightly defended, for here the terrain was jungle and jumbled hills and could be held by outposts tied together by roving patrols. The First Marines were to hold the Tenaru and the beach line west to the Lunga River. The Fifth Marines would hold the beach from the Lunga west to Kukum and around back to the Lunga. Colonel Pedro del Valle, commander of the Eleventh Marines, would set up his 75-mm and 105-mm howitzers in central positions from which to strike any point on the line. The 90-mm antiaircraft guns of the Third Defense Battalion were to emplace northwest of Henderson Field, and the 75-mm half-tracks were to dig in north of the airfield to be ready for movement to prepared positions on the beach. In the meantime, Vandegrift would hold his tank company and one battalion from the First Marines in reserve.
This was the line which the Marines were to hold in isolation against an enemy who now possessed the initiative and all the ships, airplanes, guns, and men required to press it. Trained to hit, United States Marines were now being forced to hold.
Except for the damage to Chokai’s chartroom, Admiral Mikawa’s ships had escaped the battle of Savo Island unscathed. Not a plane had pursued them as they sped up The Slot. They were jubilant. At midday of August 9, Mikawa signaled Goto to make for Kavieng with Aoba, Furutaka, Kinugasa, and Kako, while he led the remaining ships to Rabaul.
Early next morning Goto’s ships proceeded confidently toward Kavieng Harbor. As they went, they passed through the eye of a periscope clutched in the hands of Lieutenant Commander J. R. (“Dinty”) Moore aboard submarine S-44. Dinty Moore was excited. The cruisers seemed huge to him. He decided to attack the last in column, Kako. He waited until he was close enough to see the Japanese officers on Kako’s bridge, a distance of about seven hundred yards, and then he fired a spread of four torpedoes and dove.
Thirty-five seconds later the first of Moore’s torpedoes struck Kako with a thunderous explosion. One by one the others hit.
Kako’s boilers blew up. Far below the stricken cruiser, American sailors looked at each other with fearful eyes, listening to the hideous water noises of a disintegrating ship. Kako’s death rattle was worse than the enemy depth charges. It was as though giant chains were being dragged across the submarine’s hu
ll.1 But the submarine survived, as Kako did not, although this solitary American underwater victory of the Guadalcanal campaign was omitted from the paeans of praise which the Japanese press had begun to pour out on the victors of Savo Island.
Eventually and in private, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto would reprimand Gunichi Mikawa for his failure to sink the American transports. In public and immediately, however, Mikawa and his men were hailed as heroes. Victory parades were held in every city, and in Tokyo exulting crowds thronged the streets.
Headlines proclaimed “great war results … unrivalled in world history,” Australia had “absolutely become an orphan of the southwest Pacific.” Twenty-four warships and eleven transports “filled to capacity with Marines” had been sunk.2
The House of Peers directed that a certificate of gratitude be presented to the Minister of the Navy, and English-language broadcasts coyly announced that there was still “plenty room at bottom of Pacific for more American Fleet—ha! ha!”
In America there was silence. There were also disturbing estimates such as the one sent to General Marshall by Major General Millard F. Harmon, commander of Army forces under Admiral Ghormley. On August 11, Harmon wrote: “The thing that impresses me more than anything else in connection with the Solomons action is that we are not prepared ‘to follow-up’ … Can the Marines hold it? There is considerable room for doubt.”3
Admiral King may also have had doubts. He betrayed the possibility of their existence by his exasperated refusal to comment on Japan’s exaggerated reports of Savo. After his public information officer asked him what he should tell Washington’s importunate reporters, King snapped: “Tell them nothing! When it’s over, tell them who won.”4