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GHORMLEY SUSPECTED YAMAMOTO WAS SENDING A POWERFUL welcoming party to greet the newly ensconced aviators at Henderson. An intelligence report from Nimitz’s headquarters ventured a “rough guess,” based on aircraft and submarine reconnaissance, that a heavy Japanese striking force of carriers and battleships could arrive in the area around August 24. This guess had the virtue of being right on the money. Ghormley warned Fletcher, “Indications point strongly to enemy attack in force on Cactus area 23–26 August. From available intelligence … presence of carriers possible but not confirmed.… Important fueling be conducted soonest possible and if practicable one carrier task force at a time retiring for that purpose.”
On the morning of the twenty-third, a search plane flying from Ndeni, in the Santa Cruz Islands, sighted Tanaka’s southbound transports. Pilots from Henderson Field and from Fletcher’s flagship, the Saratoga, winged out to intercept but failed to find them. With this, Fletcher thought that the momentum toward battle had dissipated. That evening, with no targets in sight and with the fleet intelligence summary misleadingly placing Nagumo’s carriers at Truk, he followed Ghormley’s recommendation and sent the Waspand her escorts south to refuel. Hundreds of miles to the north, the powerful Japanese task forces were making tracks in his direction.
The next morning, McCain’s PBY Catalinas found what they were looking for: Japanese carriers. The light carrier Ryujo was 280 miles northwest of Fletcher’s position. Although he was deprived of the Wasp, Fletcher would have his rematch with Nagumo. More than two weeks after the disaster of August 9, the third major aircraft carrier battle of the war was in the offing.
The Americans and the Japanese were well practiced in the new business of carrier combat, from the tricky dance of reconnaissance to the difficult choreography of flight and hangar deck operations, with ordnance gangs and plane handlers muscling their planes into the cycle: load, spot, launch, strike. When planes were fortunate enough to find targets, attacks succeeded or failed on individual pilot skill, the effectiveness of defenses and fighter interception, shiphandling, and, always and ever, luck.
Fletcher deployed his two carriers in separate groups ten miles apart. The Enterprise steamed at the center of a protective circle four thousand yards across that included the battleship North Carolina, the heavy cruiser Portland, the Atlanta, and six destroyers. The Saratoga was screened by the heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans and five destroyers.
A large burden of any carrier commander was deciding when to strike. At 9:35 a.m., having Ryujo but suspecting larger quarry in the area, Fletcher declined to launch his attack. At 11:28 a.m., a second sighting of the Ryujo arrived. Only two hours later, when aircraft from the Ryujoappeared on the Saratoga’s radar, bound to strike Guadalcanal, did Fletcher order the flagship’s strike planes to launch. He threw most of his air group after the Ryujo, thirty SBD Dauntless dive-bombers and eight TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Soon the Catalinas were reporting more carriers, sixty miles northeast of the Ryujo. Thereafter a flood of sighting reports deluged Fletcher. There were three distinct groups of enemy ships within 225 miles—two carrier groups and a cruiser vanguard. Fletcher knew Japanese snoopers had likely sighted him. Nagumo received a sighting report just after two, and an hour later his aviators from the Zuikaku and Shokaku were loaded and airborne. On the wing, in reciprocal directions, flew the opposing strike groups that would decide the outcome of the day.
After 3 p.m., fliers from the Enterprise found the Shokaku and delivered a hit and a near miss: minor damage. Less than an hour later, planes from both U.S. carriers located the sacrificial lamb, the Ryujo. They dove down and struck. When they departed, the Japanese carrier was heavily damaged and stuck circling, a mass of flames.
The counterstrike arrived quickly. Just past four, the North Carolina’s air-search radar detected bogeys at 180 miles. The new sets indicated not only the range and bearing of targets but also their altitude. The arrival of the enemy provoked a general scramble of all available F4F Wildcats. After the loss of the Yorktown at Midway, each carrier’s allotment of fighters was upped from twenty-three to thirty-six, at a corresponding cost to torpedo bomber strength. And so Fletcher’s two carriers put fifty-three Wildcats into the skies. “Old Lexington and Yorktown had never been half so well protected,” Samuel Eliot Morison wrote.
The Japanese formation absorbed the first runs from the American fighter planes, then bore in against the Enterprise and her escorts. A twenty-millimeter gunner on the Enterprise saw a glint of sun on a metal wing and indicated the direction of the plane with a torrent of tracers.
The radio frequency used by the combat air patrol was a frenzy of voices. American pilots hadn’t learned to separate the urgent from the merely important, and with everyone transmitting on a single channel the vital instructions from the shipboard radar controllers were so many whistles in the wind. Down upon the Enterprise fell rivulets of dive-bombers, the Vals peeling off and dropping as if following a spout, down and down, one following the other every few seconds, through dense hanging fields of black smoke stains from flak. “First ones spotted were just on our port bow, diving in,” wrote Lloyd Mustin of the Atlanta. “The sky was just a solid sheet of tracers and shell bursts—impossible to tell your own.” Reaching the release point, the planes let go their explosives, then pulled out or failed to pull out and plunged into the sea.
The blasts of five-inch guns on the collected ships of the task force had risen in seconds from a scattered staccato to the roll of heavy timpani. “Men on other ships said the Atlanta seemed to burst into flame from bow to fantail and from mast tip to water line,” Edward Corboy wrote. She rode off the Enterprise’s starboard bow. Each turret in the antiaircraft cruiser’s main battery could put out a two-gun salvo every four seconds; fifteen salvos and thirty shells a minute, with eight turrets so engaged. The ship’s mascot, a dog named Lucky, was yapping in full voice, running around the decks seeking out his favorite person, the assistant medical officer. “Lieutenant Commander C. C. Garver of Atlanta would cover Lucky’s ears until the action was over,” Corboy wrote, “but the pup would yap furiously all the way through it.” The flak from the U.S. task force was furious and effective. Mustin wrote, “First plane missed and flew off. Second and third missed and crashed. Some came apart in mid-air, some fell wildly out of control, some came down burning, and some just flew on into the water in various stages of pullout. Majority of all that attacked was shot down.” Of eighty incoming planes, it was estimated that fewer than ten escaped. American pilots entered that buzz saw at their peril. When the Enterprise air group commander, Lieutenant Commander Maxwell F. Leslie, flew past the North Carolina, his Avenger took several hits but his relief at his luck was sufficient to keep him good-humored about it. He congratulated the battleship’s gunners for shooting well.
The Val pilots who lined up on the Enterprise were a persistent group. Enough of them survived to deal her six damaging blows: three bomb hits, and three near misses. The first hit the after elevator near the starboard gun gallery, penetrated five decks, and exploded deep within the ship. Half a minute later, a second bomb hit just fifteen feet from where the first one had, exploding instantly and igniting powder bags that started deck fires. The third bomb hit just aft of the island, on the number two elevator. Though it only partially exploded, it was enough to tear a ten-foot hole in the flight deck and disable the critically important elevator.
As bombs lanced down into and around the carrier, Admiral Kinkaid and his staff were tossed around the flag bridge by the shocks. Seventy-four Enterprise men would die, but it could have been far worse. The ship was saved by a little luck, and a lot of determination by her firefighters. The small blazes throughout the ship were quickly conquered; it was the timely work they did just minutes before the attack, draining and venting the gas lines and filling them with carbon dioxide, that prevented a far worse result. The flagship would live to fight again. With holes in her flight deck patched with sheet metal, she turned into the southeasterly wind to begin recovering aircraft.
Ninety minutes after the last Val had departed, the helmsman noticed a serious and potentially fatal problem: The carrier had lost steering control. A flood of water and firefighting foam had swamped the steering engine room, disabling the engine that moved the rudder and freezing the ship in a starboard turn. Recovery of aircraft ceased as the ship circled out of control. While she sheered through the formation, her officer-of-the-deck blasted her whistle in warning to smaller ships in her path.
On a PPI scope in the pilothouse, Captain Arthur C. Davis watched as the next wave of Japanese aircraft inched toward his wounded carrier. The southeast-bound gaggle of enemy planes passed just fifty miles to the Enterprise’s southwest. The reprieve gave the crew time to make critical repairs. Aiming to restore steering, a chief machinist named William A. Smith strapped on a rescue breather and, joined by one of his division mates, Cecil S. Robinson, ventured belowdecks, where temperatures surpassed 170 degrees. Finding the steering engine room through the suffocating heat, Smith managed to start a standby motor, restoring steering control to the bridge after thirty-eight minutes. The Enterprise air group was flown off to the Wasp, the Saratoga, and area islands. Freed from duty to the departing aircraft carrier, the North Carolina, the Atlanta, and two destroyers were sent to join the Saratoga group.
After absorbing the brunt of the U.S. carrier strikes and seeing one of his two large carriers damaged, Nagumo decided he had had enough. He ordered a withdrawal to Truk. As Nagumo’s carriers turned away north, Tanaka’s transport force was left to joust unprotected with Major Mangrum’s dive-bombers on Henderson Field. The aviators of Marine Fighting Squadron 223 had turned in a brilliant performance on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, intercepting a strike of fifteen bombers escorted by Zero fighters from the carrier Ryujo. They repelled the raid before it ever darkened Henderson Field’s gravel runway, shooting down six Zeros and ten Betty bombers.
On the morning of August 25, after a PBY relocated Tanaka’s transports, now about 150 miles north of Guadalcanal, the Cactus Air Force threw itself into the fray again. Joined by planes from the Enterprise, the land-based Dauntless dive-bomber jockeys bombed and strafed two transports and worked over Tanaka’s flagship, the light cruiser Jintsu. When a flight of B-17s from Espiritu Santo arrived overhead at ten thirty, they found a destroyer, the Mutsuki, tending to a damaged transport. In a rare feat of high-level marksmanship against a naval target—the Flying Fortresses had a poor record hitting ships—the bombers sank the stationary tin can.
Knocked briefly unconscious in the air attacks, Tanaka arose and ordered a withdrawal. If the August 24 carrier clash, soon to be christened the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, had been a tactical draw, Tanaka’s failed reinforcement run transformed it into a U.S. victory. Fletcher, whatever people would say about him later, had helped thwart Japan’s first determined effort to reconquer Guadalcanal. “My worst fears for this operation had come to be realized,” Tanaka would write. It was clear to him that without an explicit plan to coordinate the naval groups or provide the transports with air cover, “it would be folly to land the remainder of this battered force on Guadalcanal.”
A severe judgment would fall on Nagumo for his timid way with his carriers. He had allowed a numerically inferior U.S. force to turn him back. The Americans lost the services of the Enterprise. She, with the heavy cruiser Portland and four destroyers, set course for Pearl Harbor by way of Tongatabu. As the carriers of both nations made tracks for safer waters, a wag in General Vandegrift’s force was said to remark, “Everyone is withdrawing but the Marines.”
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ON AUGUST 25, Ghormley wrote Nimitz, more than a little alarmed. He recounted the matériel deficiencies of his command and requested more bombers—fifty more B-17s and forty B-25 Mitchells—and crews. “CONSIDER SITUATION CRITICAL.” Nimitz absorbed Ghormley’s alarm and processed it into an optimism that he relayed up the chain of command. He wrote to Admiral King, “WE HAVE MADE GOOD START IN OUR OFFENSIVE. WE HAVE SUFFERED MODERATE LOSSES AND DAMAGE WHICH CAN BE ACCEPTED IF REPLACEMENTS ALREADY REQUESTED ARE IMMEDIATELY SENT.” Then he added an uncharacteristic flourish of evangelism, perhaps not wanting King to get too bright a notion of the immediate future: “LET’S NOT LET THIS OFFENSIVE DIE ON THE VINE.”
Four days later, Ghormley’s mood brightened. Notwithstanding the shortages of combat power that had bothered him the day before, now he declared his readiness to parry all threats. “UNTIL THE STRENGTH OF THE HOSTILE MAIN EFFORT IS DETERMINED AND IT HAS BEEN COMMITTED TO A DEFINITE LINE OF ACTION,” he wrote Nimitz on August 29, “I SHOULD KEEP MY CARRIER TASK FORCES CENTRALLY LOCATED, PREPARED TO OPERATE ANYWHERE ON THE FRONT SAMOA–MILNE BAY.”
It was a tall order for his remaining carriers, the Wasp and Saratoga. Holding them in reserve, Ghormley promised to let others worry about the daily business of Guadalcanal’s defense. “FOR THE PRESENT, HOSTILE INFILTRATION TACTICS AND INITIAL SHOCK OF A HOSTILE MAIN EFFORT MAY HAVE TO BE BORNE BY GROUND TROOPS AND LAND-BASED AVIATION. LAND-BASED AVIATION ATTACK AGAINST JAPANESE INFILTRATION MOVES SHOULD EXTRACT A CONSTANT TOLL OF TRANSPORTS AND ESCORTING COMBATANT SHIPS, WHICH THE JAPANESE CANNOT LONG SUSTAIN. SHOULD JAPANESE CARRIER-SUPPORTED MAIN FORCES MOVE TO ATTACK, OUR LAND-BASED AVIATION SHOULD BE ABLE TO EQUALIZE THE OPPOSING CARRIER STRENGTH. IN SHORT IT IS HOPED THAT THE RESULT OF USE OF OUR DEFENSIVE POSITIONS AND LAND-BASED AVIATION MAY CREATE A FAVORABLE SITUATION WHEREIN I CAN DECISIVELY EMPLOY THE CARRIER TASK FORCES, WHETHER ON MY EXTENDED FRONT OR TO THE WESTWARD. IT IS HOPED THAT MY FREEDOM OF ACTION WILL NOT BE CIRCUMSCRIBED BY RESTRICTIVE TASKS OR MISSIONS.”
Nimitz and his staff read these words in bewilderment. Just four days earlier, Ghormley deemed his situation “critical.” Now he was requesting “freedom of action” and professing not to see the direction of the Japanese thrust. Retiring his carriers—and with the Enterprise ordered back to Pearl Harbor for repairs—he was promising to stand ready to defend a twenty-five-hundred-mile front, and assuring high command that the threadbare Cactus Air Force—which by Ghormley’s own count at month’s end had just eight fighters capable of intercepting Japanese bombers and which was struggling to fend off destroyers, much less the entire Combined Fleet—could hold off Nagumo’s still-potent carrier force. In London he had learned, following British operations off Norway and in the Mediterranean, that “surface craft, unless heavily protected by fighters, cannot stand up against shore based aircraft.” But now he was expecting far more than the gallant fliers and ground crews of Henderson Field could deliver.
As it happened, the Japanese had newly settled on the thrust of their “main effort.” With their traditional invasion convoys unable to land by day in the face of American air attacks, and too slow to sneak in and out by night, Yamamoto abandoned sending reinforcements via troopships altogether. As his chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki, wrote, “It is apparent that landing on Guadalcanal by transports is hopeless unless the enemy planes are wiped out.” A new way to bring troops to the embattled island would have to be found. Raizo Tanaka would be asked to repeat his exploit delivering the Ichiki detachment again and again, using not slow transports but swift destroyers and other fast combatants to carry the Japanese Army south.
Several days before the Japanese reinforcements began running, Ghormley wrote MacArthur to state his preferences as to the types of ships he wanted the Southwest Pacific Command’s pilots to strike. Ghormley reckoned that the “greatest immediate threat to success” came from the Japanese surface fleet, and that the highest-priority targets should be aircraft carriers and troop transports. Destroyers were last on his list. Ghormley was not alone in underrating the value of enemy destroyers. That he expressed the thought so clearly on the very day the Japanese settled on them as their principal means of carrying arms and men to Guadalcanal was no small irony.
On the evening of August 28, seven Japanese destroyers approached the island. Sallying within range of Henderson, their vanguard was greeted brutally by the Cactus Air Force’s dive-bombers, who exacted a steep price: the Asagiri sunk, the Shiratsuyu rendered unnavigable, and the Yugiri badly damaged with her commander mortally wounded. It was a remarkable performance against the small, difficult-to-hit ships. The rest of the Japanese flotilla turned back after the grim news was reported. A “perfect failure,” Ugaki called it. But in the week that followed, bad weather prevented the boys from Cactus from blocking the Tokyo Express. Stubbornly maintaining his pace of nightly runs from Rabaul, Tanaka finally landed the last of Ichiki’s and Kawaguchi’s forces—more than five thousand men. Through piecemeal assembly, the Japanese had at last marshaled enough men to undertake their first general counteroffensive on Guadalcanal.
Yamamoto now resolved officially to make Guadalcanal, not New Guinea, the “principal operational zone of the Southeast Area” and postponed the drive to capture Port Moresby. On Guadalcanal, General Kawaguchi’s troops had gathered and, fading into the jungle near Lunga, began planning a renewed assault on Vandegrift’s perimeter.
On August 29, as the bomb-damaged Enterprise steamed toward Pearl Harbor, Admiral Ghormley ordered his remaining carriers, the Wasp and the Saratoga, to take turns reprovisioning at Tongatabu. Until the Japanese fleet made another appearance, the carriers would remain on station in their usual position, 220 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, flying their planes in protection of convoys traveling from Espiritu Santo to Guadalcanal. A third carrier, the Hornet, was under way south from Pearl Harbor.
Because of the submarine threat, the carrier task force made a practice of steaming at just thirteen knots in order to optimize the efficiency of the sonar gear on their escorting destroyers. But that slow speed increased the ability of submarines to intercept and target them in the first place. On the morning of August 31, Commander Minoru Yokota, captain of the submarine I-26, stalked the Saratoga east of San Cristobál. When he chose his moment to attack, he closed so aggressively that his periscope scratched the hull of a destroyer in the U.S. screen. The Americans spotted his incoming torpedo wakes, but too late to evade. Shortly before 7 a.m., the carrier shook “like a house in a severe earthquake” as a torpedo struck her. The shock wave whiplashed the hull from below the sea to the flag bridge, tossing Admiral Fletcher up into the overhead and inflicting a forehead wound that would make him—much to his embarrassment—the highest-ranking U.S. naval officer to date to receive the Purple Heart. The blast tripped circuit breakers in the Saratoga’s turboelectric drive system, leaving her dead in the water.
The Saratoga was an exceptionally stout ship, built originally as a battle cruiser and converted after the conclusion of naval treaties. Her engineers righted the starboard list by transferring fuel between tanks. Then the cruiser Minneapolis took her in tow, gingerly bringing her along at seven knots. With a stiff headwind, Captain Dewitt C. Ramsey’s flight crews were able to perform the remarkable feat of conducting flight operations while under tow. Twenty-nine of Sara’s strike aircraft got off the deck and flew to Espiritu Santo while their ship was in this infirm condition.
The waters southeast of Guadalcanal would earn the bitter nickname “Torpedo Junction.” Whenever the sound of gunfire or the basso thudding of depth charges were heard, someone would inevitably remark, “Sounds like there’s a function at the junction.” With the Saratoga out of action for three months, Fletcher could no longer survive Ernest King’s acid mistrust. Fletcher’s caution paid no dividends now that his carriers’ favorite haunts, outside range of enemy air attack, were infested with submarines. His reward was a recall to Pearl Harbor in his damaged flagship and, before the year was out, to have his career as a carrier task force commander terminated by the COMINCH. When Leigh Noyes assumed command of Task Force 61, the U.S. Marine Corps no longer had Frank Jack Fletcher, the victor at Midway, to kick around anymore.
But they got plenty more planes. After the Saratoga’s disabling, her valuable air group, like that of the Enterprise, found temporary homes—on the Wasp, on Espiritu Santo, and on Guadalcanal as well. A Marine general with a keen sense of the absurd was said to remark, “What saved Guadalcanal was the loss of so many carriers.”