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THE LULL IN THE LAST DAYS OF OCTOBER WAS A TIME FOR LICKING wounds. Following the collision of carrier forces off Santa Cruz, the tempo of action slowed to a pace that suited the languid tropical breeze. The flattops withdrew to their bases to tend to their many lacerations. Ashore, the infantry had fought to a standstill as Vandegrift’s men repulsed Hyakutake’s haphazardly executed assaults. Still, the persistence of the Japanese pressure on the airdrome from air, land, and sea exacted a toll from body and mind.
By the end of the month, every one of the nineteen Dauntless pilots from the Saratoga’s Scouting Squadron 3—which had relocated to the island after their carrier was torpedoed on the last day of August—was a casualty, removed from the flying rotation because of illness, fatigue, health-threatening weight loss, or “nervous condition.” For these same reasons squadron mechanics had lost the handle on record keeping and couldn’t perform basic preventive maintenance on planes. They applied themselves only to actual malfunctions, but little could be done for their own breakdowns. The island made short work of all who were sent there, man and machine alike. General Geiger, the commander of Guadalcanal’s air units, gave way to the strain, too. His chief of staff, Brigadier General Louis Woods, would replace him in a changing of the guard that saw the arrival of several new Marine air squadrons as well.
On October 27, Halsey ordered the San Francisco and the Helena, escorted by several destroyers, to leave Task Force 64 and set course for Espiritu Santo, where they would escort three transports carrying reinforcements to Guadalcanal. Kelly Turner, having promised Vandegrift that the Marine commander’s requests for support “have received most earnest attention,” dispatched the fast transports Fuller and Alchiba from Nouméa to ferry a load of heavy artillery, ammunition, and stores. The 155-millimeter guns, set to arrive on November 2, would boost the infantry’s ability to counter the Japanese artillery that threatened Henderson Field from the surrounding hills. Another convoy carrying reinforcements from the 8th Marine Regiment would bolster Vandegrift’s order of battle and enable him to take the offensive ashore.
The detachment of these ships coincided with the dissolution of Admiral Ghormley’s staff. Halsey’s arrival at Nouméa meant the replacement not just of Ghormley, but also of everyone else in his headquarters. Given the idiosyncrasies of Halsey’s style, it was important for him to work with a handpicked team. It had been said only partly in jest that it took a certain type of sailor to serve well with Halsey: He didn’t want anyone who didn’t smoke, drink, or run around with women. Even if that were just playful rhetoric, it must have given a smile to Admiral King, whose wandering hands and eyes were well known to his peers. It certainly suited the first man from Ghormley’s headquarters, Dan Callaghan, his gregarious chief of staff, to find a seagoing combat command under Halsey. Promoted from captain to rear admiral just days before Operation Watchtower began, Callaghan was a seadog at heart. Halsey sent him back to sea in the San Francisco, which Norman Scott had until a few days before made his working home.
Writing the commanders of his surface units on October 30, Halsey observed that “enemy offensives since September 15 have followed the same general pattern”—the carriers operating within a rectangle of sea northeast of Malaita and their reinforcement convoys tracking in through the Slot, descending from the north-northwest. He pointed out that two or three days’ warning of an enemy naval force’s approach was usually available, thanks to the combined efforts of coastwatchers, submarines, and long-range air search. He emphasized the importance of coordinating search efforts with follow-up air and naval attacks. “Submit comment and proposals by earliest air mail,” he wrote.
Halsey had no way to know the full extent of the Japanese quandary. Increasingly, they were operating in a straitjacket zipped tight by the limitations on their supply and oil lifeline. The destroyers of the Tokyo Express made an average of six runs a month to ferry men, arms, and critical consumables to Guadalcanal’s northern coast, the typical run consisting of six destroyer-transports and two destroyers as combat escorts. Their capacity was entirely inadequate. The 17th Army required far more than thirty-six destroyer loads a month. General Hyakutake’s staff calculated its needs as 5 loads of supplies per night, or 150 every month. If the reinforcements of heavy weapons and supporting equipment were added to this, the necessary portage increased to eight hundred runs per month, plus twenty more from fuel-hungry seaplane tenders. 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.
The only feasible way the Japanese had to deprive their enemy of air superiority was to destroy Henderson Field’s air group with bombardment from the sea. And by that same reasoning, the only way the Americans could prevent a repeat of the devastating nighttime ordeal of mid-October was by pressing their surface forces into the fight and seizing control of the night. The wartime “food chain” circled right back to the ancient art of ships grappling with one another on the sea.
Halsey continued to reshuffle his decks as October wound to a close. On the thirtieth, he ordered Norman Scott to take his small task force—the Atlanta and four destroyers—and shell Japanese positions near Point Cruz in support of Marine units that were crossing the Matanikau River to secure Henderson Field’s western flank. The fleet had to get its guns into the fight one way or another.
IN A NOVEMBER 1 ARTICLE headlined, “Navies Manoeuvre for Big Stakes in Solomons,” New York Times reporter Charles Hurd wrote, “In the end, one side or the other of the Guadalcanal contestants will be cut off from supplies.… They now look toward the sea for the next great phase in the contest. That sea and air battle may be fought at any hour or it may not occur for weeks. In any event, we probably will not know about it until the issue has been decided.”
Certainly they wouldn’t if Admiral King had his way. He was no friend of the fourth estate. Hanson Baldwin, covering fleet maneuvers in Panama before the war, was chagrined to find the censors butchering one of his New York Times dispatches because it reported a commander’s golf score. Now that a war was on, restrictions were far more severe. It had been said that King’s preferred approach to press relations would be to remain silent until it was over, then announce, “We won.” “So far as I’m concerned,” King told a correspondent for Collier’s magazine, “information given the public is information which will almost certainly reach the enemy.… I have no intention of giving the enemy anything from which he can derive a shadow of aid and comfort. That’s the way I am, that’s the way I have always been, and that’s the way I always will be.” The secrecy was so tight that The New York Times made it front-page news in mid-October when the Navy officially acknowledged having bases in the New Hebrides and the Fiji Islands.
A Chicago Tribune reporter named Stanley Johnson learned one of the war’s most closely guarded secrets: the breaking of the Japanese code and the Navy’s ability to follow Japanese fleet movements. In an account of Midway appearing in his paper, he revealed the names of participating enemy ships—information that only Tokyo would have. Certain that this would betray the secret of its code-breaking success, the Navy brought charges against the paper, but didn’t seem to have considered the consequences. When the Tribune began editorializing about its persecution by the government—a complaint made plausible by the fact that Secretary Knox had been the publisher of its rival daily before the war—the Navy was unable to reply, since the grounds of its suit were sensitive state secrets. The possibility of a courtroom circus vanished when a grand jury refused to indict.
A fog lay low over fleet operations for the first two months of the South Pacific campaign. Chester Nimitz was a master of showing grace and easy hospitality to reporters who visited him without revealing actual newsworthy information. The Navy insisted that everything was progressing well toward a major U.S. offensive that would push the Japanese back north. When news of the Battle of Savo Island finally broke in mid-October, and word followed a few weeks later that the carrier Wasp was lost, the Navy’s credibility suffered. “So mismanaged was the Navy’s handling of news releases, both as to timing and candor, that according to one informed source the American public grew to believe that the Japanese version of the Pearl Harbor story was more accurate than our own, making Tokyo’s subsequent claims of success all the more plausible,” wrote the historian Lloyd J. Graybar.
Baldwin’s October reporting got him invited to a November meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Strategic Survey Committee, a “solemn conclave” held in the U.S. Public Health Service Building, across from the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue. Baldwin was asked to take a seat at a long table with twenty-five or thirty officers of all services in dress uniforms and testify secretly to what he had seen on Guadalcanal. The hitch was that he could not tell his bosses at the Times about it. He agreed and entered the large meeting room as a witness to events at the front.
“I spoke more frankly, of course, than I was able to do in the pieces I’d written,” Baldwin said. He described how the North Carolina had been torpedoed and how, with but one battleship and one carrier in the theater at the time, “we were just hanging on by our teeth. When I said this about the ship damage and about the cruisers that had been lost at Savo, and I gave them the names of the cruisers in this secret meeting. A Navy captain stood up, violently angry, and said, ‘I object to that, I object to that. This is top-secret information! Admiral King has given the strictest orders that no one is to know about this!’
“Well, of course,” Baldwin told his antagonist, “I understand it’s top-secret information. I haven’t published the names of these ships or the exact losses or details and I don’t expect to. I was asked to come down here in top secrecy and not even tell my paper about it, and I’ve done so.” As the captain kept pressing his case, Baldwin gathered the impression that many of the officers who were there that day, sitting on a committee charged with advising the president on military matters, had no idea what had actually happened in the waters off Guadalcanal back in August. “That,” Baldwin would say, “is a hell of a way to run a war.”
Change was already in the air. When Admiral Spruance first laid eyes on a copy of the Boise’s after-action report from the Battle of Cape Esperance, air-couriered to Pearl Harbor from Nouméa, he gave it to Nimitz, who gave it to King, and all understood what a publicity bonanza it was. So began the process of legend building that would make some ships famous for things they never did, and leave others unknown despite their great deeds. A statement in the report that “the Boise fired on six targets” was conflated in the press to the Boise sinking six ships. A Navy publicist referred to the Boise as a “one-ship task force.” As a result of this hype, few would ever hear of Captain Hoover and the Helena, whose barrels flaked as much paint as the Boise’s had that night off Guadalcanal. When the Boise reached the Philadelphia Navy Yard for repairs in late November, the public saw a living, breathing man-of-war baring her scars—and the accuracy of history was quickly a casualty.
News of the Boise’s performance at Cape Esperance was released simultaneously with, and perhaps as an antidote to, the darker tale of the Battle of Savo Island. As reporters began to challenge the Navy Department’s manipulations, King, in spite of himself, took a page from Nimitz’s book. He began hosting meetings with newsmen at the Virginia home of his attorney and friend, Cornelius Bull. At the first such gathering, on November 6, King circulated among eight reporters, addressing rumors that operations at Guadalcanal were foundering and rebutting the accusation that the Navy was stonewalling press inquiries. He defended his silence during the early phase of the operation on grounds of operational security. “There was every reason to believe that the Japanese did not know the extent of their success,” he said. Breaking a personal oath, he drank alcohol with reporters. The four-hour soirée won them over. “They were for him 100 percent by the time they said good-bye,” one participant said. These “Sunday vesper services,” as the scribes began calling them, would continue at Bull’s home until 1944.
Elmer Davis, the head of the Office of War Information, felt it was essential to publicize the pathbreaking effort in the Solomons, but lamented, “There was no one in Washington who was seeing that the Navy got any credit for what it did, or telling the story in any way, shape or form.” Soon, however, the pubic appetite for tales from the combat zone would be too strong to ignore. If the press had to learn to stay out of the Navy’s way and let it win a war, in time the Navy would learn to stay out of its own way and let its story be told.