25
LEAVING THEIR DAYS AS A CARRIER TASK FORCE ESCORT IN THEIR wake, relieved to be out of the submarine-haunted waters of Torpedo Junction, the men of the antiaircraft cruiser Atlanta entered Sealark Channel, approached Lunga Point, and laid eyes on a new battlefield ashore. “In the half dawn,” Edward Corboy wrote, “we could see our planes landing and taking off with their lights on. Flashing shell bursts lighted the scene at intervals as the Marines and the Japs traded early morning punches.”
A Marine major came aboard by motor launch to aid in gunfire spotting. When the Atlanta cruised within range of enemy territory, she opened fire, aided by an Airacobra pilot, who circled overhead, diving to point out targets and radioing corrections to the ship. Norman Scott’s squadron worked over the coastline from the Matanikau delta up to Tassafaronga Point. By the time they were finished, the gray paint was peeled back from the Atlanta’s rifle bores, her fantail littered with five-inch shell cases and spent powder cans, and the known artillery emplacements and supply and ammunition dumps considerably less useful to the Japanese. As the deck force broke out the fire hoses to cool down the barrels, the major boarded a launch to return to shore. Tears welled in his eyes. “He couldn’t thank us enough,” Corboy said. “The raking we gave that coast made history in the Solomons.”
Promised help by Halsey and expecting further reinforcements, General Vandegrift had issued an operation order on October 30 calling for an offensive push west of Henderson Field. Rising out of their defensive crouch and venturing into the west, his men would try to drive the Japanese beyond artillery range of the airfield and encircle any units dug in on the Matanikau River delta. On November 1, two battalions of the 5th Marines, well supported by artillery, crossed the Matanikau and tore into enemy positions. Thoroughly exhausted and beset by malaria, the Japanese melted against the onslaught. Vandegrift lacked the men both to hold his airfield perimeter and sustain a serious offensive, and that spared the remnants of the 2nd (Sendai) Division from a far worse fate.
The fleet, for its part, had multiple roles, each challenging in its own right: to cover and protect the supply lines to Guadalcanal, to throw gunfire in support of Marine positions ashore, and to counter the expected thrust by enemy combat ships, submarines, or aircraft. Halsey gave Turner overall command of naval forces in the Guadalcanal area, and Callaghan and Scott command of the cruiser task forces that were haphazardly assembled from them. Kinkaid was replenishing in Nouméa with the wounded Enterprise,while the battleships of Lee’s Task Force 64 lurked south of Guadalcanal, out of range of Japanese air attacks.
Still recovering from the carrier battle and pressured by the need to assign combat vessels to escort duty, Halsey did not concentrate his major surface warships in a striking force. He made do with what he had, peeling off the cruisers and destroyers escorting convoys as they came north and sending them out hunting. On November 4, as Vandegrift was pushing west along the coast, Turner ordered the San Francisco, the Helena, and the destroyer Sterett to lash at Japanese positions. In four passes along the shore, the Helena put out more than twelve hundred rounds of six-inch fire, and four hundred rounds of five-inch. It was little more than a live-fire exercise, but it sufficed to get Dan Callaghan, in his flagship, the San Francisco, acquainted with his tools.
The Japanese seemed unnerved by this aggressive use of U.S. naval might. The Tokyo Express, stretched as it was, did not have the stomach to confront American cruisers without heavier support from the Combined Fleet. According to Turner, captured documents and diaries suggested that the presence of U.S. warships at this time deterred the IJN from bringing in thousands more reinforcements for an attack on Henderson Field.
Its desperate position on Guadalcanal led the 17th Army to beseech the IJN for emergency reinforcements and support from the 11th Air Fleet. At first light on November 5, Admiral Tsukuhara’s aviators swarmed aloft. The twenty-seven Bettys and two dozen Zeros were foiled from attacking by heavy cloud cover over the airfield. Naval forces had better luck. That night the light cruiser Tenryu led fifteen destroyers to their unloading points off Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance, where they dropped a regiment of troops, which promptly rallied to confront Vandegrift’s advance. These men were just the first wave of a far more ambitious effort. U.S. snoopers monitoring radio transmissions from Truk and Rabaul had hints of a scheme that entailed forces much larger than the Tokyo Express runs did. Yamamoto was marshaling resources to deliver an entire division to the embattled island.
The next day a coastwatcher in southern Bougainville reported thirty-three Japanese vessels off Shortland Island. Two days later, on November 8, another coastwatcher warned of a dozen transports steaming southeast through Buka Passage, on the northern tip of Bougainville.
On November 8, Halsey landed on Henderson Field for a tour of ground zero in the ongoing campaign. He knew that an all-out enemy attempt to retake the island was near. As he considered his own next move, it was time for him to confront the consequences of his gamble off Santa Cruz a few weeks earlier. The decision to throw his only two carrier groups at a superior Japanese force had cost him the Hornet and made the damaged Enterprise too valuable to lose. The inestimable value of that lone remaining carrier would keep Willis Lee’s battleships, the Washington and the South Dakota, the most powerful available surface unit in the entire Pacific Fleet, tethered to the Enterprise for protection. Once again, the marines ashore would be left exposed for lack of robust carrier support. And once again, it would be the Navy’s light forces that mustered to their defense.
Receiving Halsey for dinner, Vandegrift instructed his mess attendant to serve his superior the best meal possible. “I know we haven’t got much, but make it good for the Admiral,” he told them. On a disease-ridden mud pit of a battlefield, a can of Spam is four-star cuisine. Vandegrift’s cook took some beans and dehydrated potatoes and added chunks of the canned meat to make a salty gray stew. He followed that coarse course with slices of cooked Spam with boiled beans. A peach cobbler made from soggy canned fruit was dessert.
As the plates were cleared, Halsey said, “I’d like to compliment the cook on our dinner.” So Vandegrift summoned a big, red-faced sergeant who appeared to have been pulled from the front lines for this special duty. Halsey said to him, “Son, I want to compliment you. That’s as fine a dinner as I could have got in the Waldorf-Astoria. That soup was out of this world. I’ve never had Spam or meat cooked like that. And those beans were just right on the spot. That pie you had, that cobbler, why even my mother couldn’t have made that.” The sergeant grew redder and redder in the face as Halsey spoke, and finally all he could say was, “Aw, Admiral, horse … stuff.”
That night a Japanese destroyer approached Guadalcanal’s shoreline and gave the South Pacific boss a sterner rebuke. Without any protection from his own fleet, Halsey found himself first embarrassed, then gripped by rank fear as Henderson Field absorbed the barrage. “It wasn’t the noise that kept me awake; it was fright,” he would write. “I called myself yellow—and worse—and told myself, ‘Go to sleep, you damned coward!’ but it didn’t do any good; I couldn’t obey orders.”
Three U.S. convoys were en route to Guadalcanal. Having returned to Espiritu Santo, where they hauled aboard new stocks of five-inch ammunition to replenish their depleted magazines, the men of the Atlanta found themselves ordered back to sea. At 8:30 a.m. on November 9, with Norman Scott aboard as task force commander, the Atlanta led four destroyers, the Aaron Ward, Fletcher, Lardner, and McCalla, out of Espiritu Santo escorting three cargo ships. Before dawn on the tenth, another group left Espiritu Santo—the San Francisco, embarking Rear Admiral Callaghan and commanded by Captain Cassin Young, who had relieved Captain Charles H. McMorris with the heavy cruiser Pensacola, the Helena, and the destroyers Cushing, Laffey, Sterett, Shaw, Gwin, Preston, and Buchanan.Admiral Turner himself was under way from Nouméa leading a group labeled Task Force 67. His flagship, the transport McCawley, led the transports President Jackson, President Adams, and Crescent City, escorted by the cruisers Portland and Juneau and the destroyers O’Bannon, Barton, and Monssen. After the transports had safely reached anchorage, Turner decided to assemble the cruisers and destroyers into a single striking force.
On the morning of the eleventh, Scott’s Atlanta task force reached Guadalcanal, and its three transports started unloading troops near Lunga Point. After dark, Scott’s warship escort joined Callaghan’s. Turner’s amphibs landed six thousand men, bringing the U.S. garrison on Guadalcanal to twenty-nine thousand. Halsey ordered the Pensacola and two destroyers, the Preston and Gwin, to return and fortify the Enterprise task force. That night the combined cruiser force swept Savo Sound but found nothing. At dawn on the twelfth, another group of transports arrived and anchored off Kukum. As these vessels came under fire from a Japanese shore battery after sunrise, the Helena, Shaw, and Barton silenced it.
The quiet of early morning was a surreal time, the sea glassy calm, the clear sky warmed by a bright sun. Inbound Japanese planes were still hundreds of miles away. On the Helena, blasting unseen targets ashore, “The gunners fired as though at rehearsal—as though Guadalcanal were a target being towed past for their convenience,” Chick Morris wrote. “For more than an hour our bombardment mowed down the island’s coconut trees and drilled tunnels in the jungle. Seabee bulldozers might have done the job as well, but hardly with such fantastic speed. As the shells burst upon impact, spraying shrapnel for yards around, we watched enemy troops scrambling in panic up the hillsides. We watched them die.” The destroyers Buchanan and Cushing razed the shoreline westward, destroying several dozen small barges lying along the beach and enemy ammunition and supply dumps farther inland.
Valuable though this work was for the infantry, the Navy’s greatest challenge lay at sea. And in Norman Scott, the fleet had the right man available to meet it. In the Battle of Cape Esperance, he had stared into the void of night, squinted at the flash of enemy powder, studied the silhouettes of unknown ships, and carried his force through to a victory. Though it wasn’t a resounding victory, it had put vital seasoning into a man who was by nature already a fighter. Afterward, Scott had the sole claim to status as a victorious surface-force commander. He had absorbed the lessons of his experience and acted on them with a focused seriousness.
One lesson arrived swiftly: that war is the craft of putting ordnance on target decisively, and it is really nothing else. This lesson was being learned the world over in more than a dozen languages. The rigmarole of military life, after all, was designed in part to shape the character of men to respond effectively in that half second where a vital decision must rise instantly from habit. A ship full of pilothouse philosophers, sailors’ lieutenants, and colorful China hands who inspire great fiction will lose a fight in an eye’s blink to a quick, tight, fast-firing crew who snaps their weapons on target and delivers direct fire by the express route. The victors in every battle from Pearl Harbor to El Alamein to Stalingrad had learned this important truth, and now Admiral Scott was among them. On the other side of the world, the Wehrmacht was locked in a death grip with the Russians at Stalingrad. In North Africa, British forces were winning a decisive victory over the Afrika Korps at El Alamein. Such a turning point was soon to be at hand in the South Pacific.
Seasoned under fire and wise to how he might have won previous fights still more convincingly, Scott knew what tools worked best. Like Turner, he had had time to think through the lessons of experience against the Tokyo Express. “FOR OPERATIONS AGAINST JAP LIGHT FORCES,” Scott wrote Halsey on the eighth, “SUBMIT NECESSITY FOR GUNS LARGER THAN FIVE-INCH. JAP STRENGTH IN TORPEDOES NECESSITATES EARLY EFFECTIVE HITS WHICH CAN ONLY BE MADE BY LARGER GUNS. EFFECTIVENESS OF FIVE-INCH AA FOR SINKING DD IS DOUBTFUL. ATLANTA CARRIES ONLY ABOUT 10 PERCENT COMMON MARK 32. IN ORDER MAKE BEST USE OF OUR DOUBTFUL TORPEDOES DDS WITH TWO OR MORE MOUNTS SHOULD BE ASSIGNED STRIKING GROUPS.”
Good men had died for Scott to gain these insights. Given his emphasis on larger guns, he must have lamented the order that detached Pensacola from the area. Having won at Cape Esperance largely on the blowtorching output of the Helena’s and Boise’s six-inch batteries, he preferred heavy-gunned ships to antiaircraft cruisers. But the Pensacola had her problems. The first of the new eight-inch-gunned cruisers built to treaty restrictions, she had a tendency to roll even in moderate seas, which compromised the accuracy of her guns. Her seams tended to pop whenever a full salvo was fired. So while the Juneau or the Atlanta might have seemed better suited to protecting SOPAC’s last aircraft carrier, the Pensacola got that job and the antiaircraft cruisers were thrown into the line despite Scott’s wishes.
The Atlanta didn’t have the additional space that other flagships had for an admiral and his staff, but Scott didn’t mind. “He spent a great deal of time on the bridge just as a unit commander does in a destroyer flagship,” Lloyd Mustin, the Atlanta’s assistant gunnery officer, said. “The captain’s chair was in the traditional starboard corner of the pilot house. There was a similar chair on the port side. Admiral Scott inhabited that through many long hours, day and night. The officers of the deck spent hours with him in the pilothouse. Sitting inside the door to the bridge wing, feet up on a chair, he was accessible, friendly, and conversational. He discussed anything and everything.” Typically an admiral kept his own staff apart from the captain’s wardroom. But Scott didn’t mind mingling with the leadership on his host flagship. “We were the eyes and ears of the captain of the ship. We were also Admiral Scott’s eyes and ears when he was not on the bridge,” Mustin said.
Then a dispatch came down from Kelly Turner’s headquarters. It was a shocker. It said, in effect, that when Callaghan’s and Scott’s forces merged into a single force, to be designated Task Group 67.4, Scott would take second seat to Callaghan. Halsey was personally close to Scott. But because Callaghan had held the rank of rear admiral for fifteen days longer than Scott, tradition forced an absurd result: Callaghan, the chief of staff to a theater commander who had been removed for his lack of battle-mindedness, was relieving Scott, the only proven brawler in the American surface fleet admiralty, as officer in tactical command of the striking force.
When Callaghan served in the heavy cruiser New Orleans, he befriended a medical officer named Ross McIntire. When McIntire became President Franklin Roosevelt’s personal physician, he recommended Callaghan as the president’s naval aide. Receiving the assignment to shore duty at a point when his advancement depended on gaining command of a major warship distressed Callaghan deeply, but he tried to make the best of it. In the spring of 1941, he pleaded for sea duty, and the president released him to command the San Francisco. A year later, he was ordered to serve as Ghormley’s chief of staff. In October, the cycle seemed to repeat itself when Callaghan was cast loose after Halsey’s arrival, and the best billet available to him—the nearest hull in the storm—was, once again, his old ship.
The news of his return to sea was met with joy in the San Francisco, where he had earned the nickname “Uncle Dan” for his collegial way. The men of Task Force 67’s other heavy cruiser, the Portland, were pleased, too, for Callaghan had once been their exec, a role in which he had achieved the nearly impossible: becoming popular in the always-difficult position of the captain’s stern right hand. Oakland-born and San Francisco–educated, Callaghan had turned prematurely gray, it was said, after a court-martial in 1915 (fully acquitted) for allegedly mismanaging some engine room equipment while serving as the engineering officer in the destroyer Truxtun.
The news of his elevation now hit the Atlanta hard. The crew, overjoyed when Scott came aboard with his flag, was deflated by his relief. The prestige of serving as flagship to a victorious admiral had been considerable. Now, though he would remain aboard, Scott would have nothing of substance to do but advise and consult (if ever asked) and follow Callaghan’s orders. It would strike more than a few fighting sailors as a shame that the Navy was taking Scott’s expensively earned curriculum of experience effectively out of circulation.
What didn’t change as a result of Scott’s replacement was the Atlanta’s assignment to roam with the street fighters. Ironically enough, Scott himself probably wouldn’t have kept her in the task force had he been in charge of its composition. In this stout company, an antiaircraft cruiser was as out of place as a fox in a pack of wolves.
AS THE AMERICANS were gathering, U.S. radio intelligence learned of large enemy naval forces gathering in the north. Back at Nouméa after his visit to Henderson Field, Halsey studied the briefings of CINCPAC radio cryptanalysts. Nearly foiled because of changes the enemy had made in their code groups and call signs, they still made a fair appraisal of the naval forces Yamamoto had ordered into action at virtually the same time Halsey was dining with Vandegrift on November 8. In the coming days, the enemy’s order of battle would be appraised in the aggregate as having two carriers, four battleships, five heavy cruisers, and about thirty destroyers. This assessment was mostly accurate, though it overestimated the carrier power available to the Japanese and did not reveal the complicated deployment plan that Admiral Yamamoto had settled on.
Issued to his fleet on November 8, the Japanese operation order was designed to bring the eleven troop transports under Admiral Tanaka to unloading points off Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance. Carrying seven thousand troops, twenty days of supplies for thirty thousand men, and loads of artillery ordnance, they were escorted by a dozen destroyers. Much farther to the east, standing sentinel for the transports, was a powerful element of the Combined Fleet known as the Advance Force, under Admiral Kondo. It contained the battleships Hiei, Kirishima, Kongo, and Haruna,three heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and twenty-one destroyers. Separately, Admiral Mikawa commanded a striking force with four heavy cruisers, the Chokai, Kinugasa, Kumano, and Maya. Owing to battle damage and severe attrition to air groups, only one aircraft carrier, the Junyo,was available to lend air cover to this major operation. The report also indicated a massing of air strength at Buin, which would launch concentrated attacks three days before the landings. Though their troops were starving and their pilot ranks thinning, the Japanese had by no means given up on Guadalcanal. The heavy striking power of the Japanese battleship force was still to meet its match.
In the second week of November, the Guadalcanal campaign entered a kinetic new phase. In a letter to Callaghan concerning the future operations of Task Force 67, Turner had forecast the nature of the coming Japanese assault like a meteorologist: air attacks beginning on the tenth and continuing daily with increasing strength; the departure of a troop convoy from Buin with escorts; a separate sortie by battleships and cruisers to bombard Henderson Field; a strike by enemy carrier planes; and then the crowning blow, an amphibious landing near Cape Esperance or Koli Point, supported by another naval bombardment. The Japanese were a day or so behind the initial reports of this cycle, but they were coming, like a violent storm front that would not be turned aside.
How to array his available forces against the oncoming heavy surface group, arguably the most dangerous threat, was the most pressing decision Turner faced. Since no enemy transports had yet been sighted with it, he saw two possible purposes as to the Japanese mission: to attack his transports during the night, or to bombard Henderson Field and Vandegrift’s infantry positions. Turner’s options, then, were to keep his combatant ships close to the anchorage in order to guard his transports, or send them out to do battle in the open sea and keep the IJN’s guns away from Henderson Field.
Seeing that control of the nighttime sea was vital, Turner made the latter choice. Rather than see to his own immediate safety, he detached Task Force 67’s entire supporting cruiser force, stripping the transport anchorage of the major ships of its screen, and gave it all to Callaghan. This was a significant gamble, for Turner could well have kept the warships close to the landing area, protecting his anchorage. Clearly he had had time to consider the errors of the campaign’s early days, when divided cruiser forces, deployed piecemeal in Savo Sound, had been dispatched with ease by a concentrated enemy flotilla. Improvision was always the order of the day. But the convergence of three separate convoys into the area all at once now offered an opportunity to concentrate. Turner wrote Callaghan, “It looks this time like the enemy is finally about to make an all-out effort against Cactus.… If you can really strike the enemy hard, it will be more important for you to do that than to protect my transports. Good luck to you, Dan. God bless all of you and give you strength.”
Halsey was painfully aware that his only carrier, the Enterprise, would be without the use of her forward elevator until near the end of the month. Nonetheless, he knew that whatever airpower she could throw into the coming fight would be indispensable. Accordingly, on the morning of November 11, Halsey ordered the Enterprise task force to get north from Nouméa with instructions to take positions two hundred miles south of San Cristobál and strike Japanese shipping near Guadalcanal. Given the poor state of repair of her forward elevator, it was risky to commit the Enterprise into battle again, and this may be why Halsey’s decision to send her north was too late to allow the carrier to be in position to strike enemy forces then en route south. He had briefly considered detaching her air group to Espiritu Santo. But could not afford to throw the dice as aggressively as he had at Santa Cruz, and he knew it. He held Admiral Lee’s battleship group in the south with the Enterprise for the time being, too. They were a powerful reserve.
Turner’s election to commit his entire combatant force for an open-sea encounter was the only practical possibility under the circumstances. As Hanson Baldwin informed the readers of The New York Times as the lead-up to the Santa Cruz carrier battle, “We must establish local naval superiority around Guadalcanal.… This can be done only by the continuous use of surface craft; air power is also absolutely essential to this end, but, as we have seen, alone it is not enough, alone it cannot prevent the Japanese from constant nightly infiltration by sea into Guadalcanal.” There was no other way to deflect an enemy surface force at night than to go all-in with the surface forces, whose “smashing offensive spirit,” Baldwin wrote, was key to everything. If they prevailed, and if the destruction of the airfield was thereby prevented, the Cactus Air Force would be free to strike the stragglers at will during that morning sanctuary when even the earliest-rising Japanese planes would still be hours away.
U.S. Navy Combat Task Forces in the South Pacific
(as of November 12, 1942)
TASK GROUP 67.4
(Cruiser Support Group)
Rear Adm. Daniel J. Callaghan
San Francisco (CA)
Portland (CA)
Helena (CL)
Atlanta (CLAA)
Juneau (CLAA)
Cushing (DD)
Laffey (DD)
Sterett (DD)
O’Bannon (DD)
Aaron Ward (DD)
Barton (DD)
Monssen (DD)
Fletcher (DD)
TASK FORCE 16
(Carrier Task Force)
Vice Adm. Thomas E. Kinkaid
Enterprise (CV) (damaged)
Northampton (CA)
Pensacola (CA)
San Diego (CLAA)
Morris (DD)
Hughes (DD)
Russell (DD)
Clark (DD)
Anderson (DD)
TASK FORCE 64
(Battleship Support Group)
Rear Adm. Willis A. Lee
Washington (BB)
South Dakota (BB) (damaged)
Preston (DD)
Gwin (DD)
Benham (DD)
Walke (DD)
Now it would be Kelly Turner’s turn to be a riverboat gambler. On Dan Callaghan’s untested shoulders he would gamble his entire command.