Neptune's Inferno Read online

  Also by James D. Hornfischer

  The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004)

  Ship of Ghosts (2006)

  Bantam Books New York

  (Photo Credit: Title Page)

  Copyright © 2011 by James D. Hornfischer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Excerpts from unpublished writings by Robert D. Graff copyright © 2011 by Robert D. Graff. Used by permission.

  Endpaper map by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Interior maps by Lum Pennington

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hornfischer, James D.

  Neptune’s inferno: the U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal / James D. Hornfischer.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90807-7

  1. Guadalcanal, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942–1943. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American. 3. United States. Navy—History—World War, 1939–1945. 4. United States. Navy—Biography. 5. Veterans—United States—Interviews. 6. Guadalcanal, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942–1943—Personal narratives, American. I. Title.

  D767.98.H665 2011

  940.54’265933—dc22

  2010027231

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  In memory:

  CHARLES D. GROJEAN

  Rear Admiral, USN

  1923–2008

  Sailor, Leader, Teacher

  Never have the gods of all the tribes put upon the seas such monsters as man now sends over them.… Their steel bowels, grinding and rumbling below the splash of the sea, are fed on quarried rock. Their arteries are steel, their nerves copper, their blood red and blue flames. With the prescience of the supernatural, they peer into space. Their voices scream through gales, and they whisper together over a thousand miles of sea. They reach out and destroy that which the eye of man cannot perceive.

  But … all this terribleness will vanish, returning again into the inanimate whenever the capacity and vigor of the guiding mind deteriorates or is worn down by the years that have stolen away the quick grasp of youth.

  —Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (1909)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  MAPS

  TABLES

  PROLOGUE: Eighty-two Ships

  PART I

  SEA OF TROUBLES

  1: Trip Wire

  2: A Great Gray Fleet

  3: The First D-Day

  4: Nothing Worthy of Your Majesty’s Attention

  5: Fly the Carriers

  6: A Captain in the Fog

  7: The Martyring of Task Group 62.6

  8: Burning in the Rain

  PART II

  FIGHTING FLEET RISING

  9: A New Kind of Fight

  10: The Tokyo Express

  11: A Function at the Junction

  12: What They Were Built For

  13: The Warriors

  14: The Devil May Care

  15: The Visit

  16: Night of a New Moon

  17: Pulling the Trigger

  18: “Pour It to ’Em”

  PART III

  STORM TIDE

  19: All Hell’s Eve

  20: The Weight of a War

  21: Enter Fighting

  22: “Strike—Repeat, Strike”

  23: Santa Cruz

  24: Secret History

  25: Turner’s Choice

  26: Suicide

  27: Black Friday

  28: Into the Light

  29: The Killing Salvo

  30: Death in the Machine Age

  31: Point Blank

  32: Among the Shadows

  33: Atlanta Burning

  34: Cruiser in the Sky

  35: Regardless of Losses

  PART IV

  THE THUNDERING

  36: The Giants Ride

  37: The Gun Club

  38: The Kind of Men Who Win a War

  39: On the Spot

  40: The Futility of Learning

  41: Future Rising

  42: Report and Echo

  43: The Opinion of Convening Authority

  44: Ironbottom Sound

  Photo Insert

  Acknowledgments

  Ships and Aircraft Types of the Guadalcanal Campaign

  Naval Battles of the Guadalcanal Campaign

  Total Naval Losses at Guadalcanal

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  MAPS

  Pacific Ocean Area

  The Slot

  Battle of Savo Island

  Battle of Cape Esperance

  Cruiser Night Action

  Morning After in Ironbottom Sound

  Battleship Night Action

  Battle of Tassafaronga

  TABLES

  The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal, August 1942

  Order of Battle—Battle of Savo Island

  Shipboard Gunnery and Fire-Control Systems

  Order of Battle—Battle of Cape Esperance

  The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal (as of October 18, 1942)

  U.S. Navy Combat Task Forces in the South Pacific (as of October 26, 1942)

  The Japanese in the Battle of Santa Cruz

  U.S. Navy Combat Task Forces in the South Pacific (as of November 12, 1942)

  Order of Battle—The Cruiser Night Action

  Order of Battle—The Battleship Night Action

  Order of Battle—Battle of Tassafaronga

  PROLOGUE

  Eighty-two Ships

  ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 1942, EIGHTY-TWO U.S. NAVY SHIPS MANNED by forty thousand sailors, shepherding a force of sixteen thousand U.S. Marines, reached their destination in a remote southern ocean and spent the next hundred days immersed in a curriculum of cruel and timeless lessons. No fighting navy had ever been so speedily and explosively educated. In the conflict that rolled through the end of that trembling year, they and the thousands more who followed them learned that technology was important, but that guts and guile mattered more. That swiftness was more deadly than strength, and that well-packaged surprise usually beat them both. That if it looked like the enemy was coming, the enemy probably was coming and you ought to tell somebody, maybe even everybody. 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.

  Sailors in the war zone learned the arcane lore of bad luck and its many manifestations, from the sight of rats leaving a ship in port (a sign that she will be sunk) to the act of whistling while at sea (inviting violent winds) to the follies of opening fire first on a Sunday or beginning a voyage on a Friday (the consequences of which were certain but nonspecific, and thus all the more frightful).

  They learned to tell the red-orange blossoms of shells hitting targets from the faster flashes of muzzles firing the other way. That hard steel burns. That any ship can look shipshape, but if you really want to take her measure, check her turret alignments. That torpedoes, and sometimes radios, keep their own fickle counsel about when they will work. 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.

  Some of these were the lessons of any war, truisms relearned for the hundredth time by the latest generati
on to face its trials. Victory always tended to fly with the first effective salvo. Others were novel, the product of untested technologies and tactics, unique to the circumstances of America’s first offensive in the Pacific: that you could win a campaign on the backs of stevedores expert in the lethal craft of combat-loading cargo ships; that the little image of an enemy ship on a radar scope will flinch visibly when heavily struck; that rapid partial salvo fire from a director-controlled main battery reduces the salvo interval period but complicates the correction of ranges and spots.

  In the far South Pacific, you were lucky if your sighting report ever reached its recipient. Even then, the plainest statement of fact might be subject to two or more interpretations of meaning. You learned that warships smashed and left dead in the night could resurrect themselves by the rise of morning, that circumstances could conspire to make your enemy seem much shrewder than he ever really could be, and that as bad as things might seem in the midst of combat, they might well be far worse for him. That you could learn from your opponent’s success if your pride permitted it, and that the best course of action often ran straight into the barriers of your worst biases and fears. That some of the worst thrashings you took could look like victories tomorrow. That good was never good enough, and if you wanted Neptune to laugh, all you had to do was show him your operations plan.

  This book tells the story of how the U.S. Navy learned these and many other lessons during its first major campaign of the twentieth century: the struggle for the southern Solomon Islands in 1942. The American fleet landed its marines on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in early August. The Japanese were beaten by mid-November and evacuated in February. What happened in between was a story of how America gambles on the grand scale, wings it, and wins. Top commanders on both sides were slain in battle or perished afterward amid the shame of inquiries and interrogations. A more lasting pain beset the living. Reputations were shattered, grudges nursed. The Marine Corps would compose a rousing institutional anthem from the notion, partly true, that the Navy had abandoned them in the fight’s critical early going. But the full story of the campaign turns the tale in another direction, seldom appreciated. Soon enough, the fleet threw itself fully into the breach, and by the end of it all, almost three sailors had died in battle at sea for every infantryman who fell ashore. The Corps’ debt to the Navy was never greater.

  The American landings on Guadalcanal developed into the most sustained and vicious fight of the Pacific war. Seven major naval actions were the result, five of them principally ship-versus-ship battles fought at night, the other two decided by aircraft by day. The nickname the Americans coined for the waters that hosted most of the carnage, “Ironbottom Sound,” suited the startling scale of destruction: The U.S. Navy lost twenty-four major warships; the Japanese lost twenty-four. Aircraft losses, too, were nearly equal: America lost 436, Japan 440. The human toll was horrific. Ashore, U.S. Marine and Army killed in action were 1,592 (out of 60,000 landed). The number of Americans killed at sea topped five thousand. Japanese deaths set the bloody pace for the rest of the war, with 20,800 soldiers lost on the island and probably 4,000 sailors at sea. Through the end of 1942, the news reports of Guadalcanal spun a narrative whose twists required no fictionalizing for high drama, though they did need some careful parsing and management, or so the Navy thought at the time. Franklin Roosevelt competed with “Tokyo Rose” to shape the tale on the public airwaves.

  In their trial against the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the waters off Guadalcanal, the Navy mastered a new kind of fight. Expeditionary war was a new kind of enterprise, and its scale at Guadalcanal was surpassed only by its combatants’ thoroughgoing deficits in matériel, preparation, and understanding of their enemy. It was the most critical major military operation America would ever run on such a threadbare shoestring. As its principal players would admit afterward, the puzzle of victory was solved on the fly and on the cheap, in terms of resources if not lives. The campaign featured tight interdependence among warriors of the air, land, and sea. For the infantry to seize and hold the island, ships had to control the sea. For a fleet to control the sea, the pilots had to fly from the island’s airfield. For the pilots to fly from the airfield, the infantry had to hold the island. That tripod stood only by the strength of all three legs. In the end, though, it was principally a navy’s battle to win. And despite the ostensible lesson of the Battle of Midway, which had supposedly crowned the aircraft carrier as queen of the seas, the combat sailors of America’s surface fleet had a more than incidental voice in who would prevail. For most of the campaign, Guadalcanal was a contest of equals, perhaps the only major battle in the Pacific where the United States and Japan fought from positions of parity. Its outcome was often in doubt.

  This book develops the story of the travails and difficult triumphs of the U.S. Navy during its first offensive of World War II, as it navigated a steeply canted learning curve. It emphasizes the human textures of the campaign and looks anew at the decisions and relationships of the commanders who guided it.

  The novelist James Michener wrote long ago, “They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge.” The founders of the U.S. Navy, having faced their own moments of decision, from John Paul Jones off Flamborough Head to Stephen Decatur against the Barbary Pirates, would have felt kinship with the men of the South Pacific Forces. There as everywhere, men in uniform fought like impulsive humans almost always have: stubbornly, viciously, brilliantly, wastefully, earnestly, stupidly, gallantly. At Guadalcanal, so distant on the ear, a naval legacy continued, and by their example in that bitter campaign the long shadows of their American quality reach right on up to the present.

  The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

  Operation Watchtower (as of October 18, 1942)

  ADM ERNEST J. KING

  Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH)

  Washington, DC

  ADM CHESTER W. NIMITZ

  Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC)

  Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

  VADM WILLIAM F. HALSEY, JR.

  Commander, South Pacific Forces (COMSOPAC)

  Nouméa, New Caledonia (USS Argonne)

  VADM FRANK JACK FLETCHER

  Commander, Expeditionary Force

  Task Force 61 (USS Saratoga)

  RADM LEIGH

  NOYES

  Commander

  Air Support Forces

  Task Group 61.1

  (USS Wasp)

  RADM RICHMOND

  KELLY TURNER

  Commander

  Amphibious Force

  Task Force 62

  (USS McCawley)

  RADM JOHN

  S. MCCAIN

  Commander

  Aircraft (land-based)

  Task Force 63

  (Efate, New Hebrides)

  VADM FLETCHER

  TF 11 (USS Saratoga)

  RADM NOYES

  TF 18 (USS Wasp)

  MGEN ALEXANDER

  A. VANDEGRIFT

  Commander,

  1st Marine Division

  RADM THOMAS

  KINKAID

  TF 16 (USS Enterprise)

  RADM VICTOR A. C. CRUTCHLEY, ROYAL NAVY

  Commander, Cruiser Covering Force

  Task Force 44 (HMAS Australia)

  (Photo Credit: P.1)

  “It is better to be bombed into the next world than to live in this one as a slave to anybody or any foreign system. It is that attitude which, we believe, will eventually win this war.”

  —Collier’s, “A United People,” January 17, 1942

  1

  Trip Wire

  TWO YEARS BEFORE THE WAR BEGAN, AN OLD SPANISH PRIEST IN A Filipino village said to an American journa
list, “The Pacific: Of itself it may not be eternity. Yet certainly you can find in it the scale, the pattern of the coming days of man. The Mediterranean was the sea of destiny of the Ancient World; the Atlantic, of what you call the Old World. I have thought much about this, and I believe the Pacific holds the destiny of your New World. Men now living will see the shape of the future rising from its waters.”

  The vessel of that ocean held more than half the water on earth, its expanse larger than all the landmasses of the world. Its beauty was elemental, its time of a meter and its distances of a magnitude that Americans could only begin to apprehend from the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts. It was essential and different and compelling and important, whether one measured it by grid coordinates, assessed it by geopolitics and national interests, or sought its prospects above the clouds. And when war came, it was plain to see that the shape of the future, whatever it was to be, was emerging from that trackless basin of brine.