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“ON CALM DAYS THE LIGHT BLUE HIGHWAY WITH ITS FROTHY CURBSTONES stretches along the great flat ocean to the horizon. This highway needs no signs; it tells friend and foe alike a ship has passed this way. If you follow along this road, your seaman-sharp eyes telling you where we zigged and where we zagged, you will come finally to the thrashing turbulence forced out by our screws; you will have arrived at our fantail, the after limits of a waterborne military community. And should you follow along the welded smooth side of our hull, past the splashing overboard discharges, you will soon come to the swishing white bow-wave, jumping constantly clear, and to the sharp stem cleaving the unmarked sea ahead, these extremities of our life.”
The froth of bubbles that the USS Atlanta had left behind reached all the way to the northeastern seaboard. The young reservist who wrote these words, a New Yorker named Robert Graff, was new to the fleet but already in its thrall. In the rush of the past year, he had learned what his shipmates were capable of. The good ones on the good days became as brothers. Even some of the bad ones were just the kind of men you wanted on your side in a fight. A ship was a small world and one they came to love, even as its narrow steel enclosure restricted their immediate prospects and carried them, with few diversions, toward a deadly struggle.
The salad days of her prewar launching in New York were a dimming memory. The ceremonial flourish that attended the launch of the ship had been spectacular. The country’s most popular purveyor of heavily freighted romance, Mrs. John R. Marsh, better known by her pen name,Margaret Mitchell, had been on hand in Kearny, New Jersey, on September 12, 1941, to celebrate the launching. With a quick two-handed swing, the author of Gone with the Wind smashed a bottle of champagne over an after turret housing and christened the lead ship of a new class of cruiser. Moored in the finishing basin at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, their decks fouled with electrical cabling and acetylene hoses and pneumatic hardware, unfinished fixtures and unfixed weaponry, two of the new type stood as sisters: the Atlanta and the Juneau.
Like shipyards coast-to-coast, Kearny, New Jersey, was a festival of naval industry. Half a dozen destroyers and twice that many merchantmen crowded the docks up and down the river. But the Atlanta and Juneau stood out. What was most noticeable about them, before they were finished out with thousands of fittings, riggings, and shapely facets of superstructure, was the extent of their main battery. The arrangement of the twin-mounted five-inch turrets, three rising forward and three descending aft, with two more in hip positions amidships, helped give them their characteristic lines. The forest of barrels was suited to the mission of the Atlanta class: to provide antiaircraft defense for a task force. They had the largest single broadside of heavy antiaircraft weaponry of any vessel in any fleet, nearly half again that of the latest U.S. fast battleships that were five times their displacement. Though antiaircraft cruisers were fitted with the destroyer’s traditional armament of torpedoes and depth charges, the Atlanta was the embodiment of a navy built for a new kind of war. She was a welterweight ship with a middleweight jab. Her batteries were numerous enough to fend off multiple destroyers in a surface action, and put a dent in the most vigorous air attack as well.
The Atlanta’s assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Lloyd M. Mustin, showed visitors this thick grove of firepower “with the same pride a mother would introduce her children,” said Edward Corboy, another Atlanta officer. A new ship was a complex system full of small flaws to fix. Mustin found that the Atlanta’s SC radar transmitter couldn’t send signals powerful enough to survive transmission through the foremast’s eighty-foot run of coaxial cable, bounce off a target, and return back through the receiver and the long cable to the radar room and produce a usable echo. He arranged for preamplifiers to boost the signal and, with adjustments to the receiver’s sensitivity, found that he could detect aircraft at fifty to sixty miles and surface ships at fifteen to twenty. He also saw to it that the Atlanta was outfitted with the new Mark 37 gun director. Coupled with the new high-frequency model FD fire-control radar, whose narrow beams returned a precise range on a target after it was located by the search radar, and a late-model power-drive gunsight that enabled him to slew rapidly to acquire targets, they were a powerful package. In impromptu training sessions, director crews zeroed their sights on subway trains carrying oblivious commuters across Manhattan’s East River bridges.
Three months later, on the day before Christmas, the ship was finished and ready for commissioning into the fleet. Under overcast skies at the New York Navy Yard, Margaret Mitchell was on hand again. As soon as she finished her remarks, the sun broke through over Brooklyn, catching sharply on the swords of officers and flashing on the gray sides of all those gun turrets. “A rather dull tableau suddenly was a scene of splendor,” Edward Corboy said. For the plankowners on the first U.S. warship commissioned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was an auspicious sign.
Under command of Captain Samuel P. Jenkins, the Atlanta shook down in the Chesapeake Bay, ran speed trials off the Maine coast, and was headed for the Pacific before many of her systems were complete. One didn’t have to be a veteran, or even a man, to admire her hard, monochromatic elegance. Elizabeth Shaw, the wife of one of her lieutenants, would write, “To my artist’s eye she was a thing of beauty and a true oceanic lady.” The wives had followed her on the journey from Atlantic to Pacific coast. At each place they were forbidden to board the ship, just as their husbands were forbidden from going ashore. Secrecy was the byword of the wartime Navy. Rumors were floated that arctic-weather clothing was due to arrive—“a glorious hoax,” Shaw wrote, “to keep the ship’s destination a secret even from the officers, for fear someone would tell a wife who would gossip.”
When the Atlanta arrived at Pearl Harbor on May 6, with orders to join Task Force 16, the Enterprise carrier task force, the Arizona’s commissioning pennant could still be seen flying above the wreck in mournful defiance. Death was persistent still. A thousand and a half bodies were believed to reside within the sunken battleships. The triumphs of Japanese airpower strongly suggested the need for task force defenses bolstered by ships like the Atlanta.
After taking part in the defense of Midway, the Atlanta returned to Pearl Harbor and soon found herself with new orders. When Jenkins announced to his crew that their destination was Tongatabu, the Navy’s South Pacific fueling base south of Samoa, all hands wondered why. “I think the answer lies in the Solomons,” an officer speculated.
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ON JUNE 22, 1942, thousands of well-equipped riflemen of the 1st Marine Division loaded into troop ships at San Francisco, passed Alcatraz, steamed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and set out into the Pacific’s first long swells. An uncertain future lay dead ahead. The weather decks were packed with men looking back.
The convoy carrying forces from the 1st Marine Division, under Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, was three days under way when Ernest King informed George Marshall that these men would be the tip of the first spear he would throw at Japan’s Pacific imperium. On July 2, King sent Nimitz a “super secret” dispatch that outlined the Navy plan. Code-named Operation Watchtower, it was an invasion plan whose first stage, known as Task One, was the seizure of the Santa Cruz Islands, Tulagi, and “adjacent positions.”
Given a “golden opportunity” by the victory at Midway, King directed Nimitz to begin preparations to go on the attack. No one expected an offensive to begin prior to the late fall of 1942. According to cynics, King believed the surest way to draw more resources to the Pacific was to send thousands of infantry where the prospect of their defeat would be intolerable. But it was clearly a genuine strategic threat that moved him most. According to Vandegrift, “What he jammed down the throats of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that just possibly the mighty Japanese had overextended. He saw that just possibly a strike by us could halt their eastward parade.”
The signs were clear that the Japanese had their own aggressive designs on the deep South Pacific. There were new concentrations of submarines and air units at Rabaul. But with the airfield project revealed, King considered it “absolutely essential to stop the southward advance of the enemy at that point and at that time,” and stated his views forcibly to Marshall. Conferring with Nimitz, King accelerated planning and substituted Guadalcanal, an “adjacent position” not mentioned in the original plan, for Santa Cruz. “King’s reiteration of attack, seize the initiative, and do it now was beginning to take on the throbbing insistence of a war drum.”
King deflected General Marshall’s attempt to give Operation Watchtower to Army control. On June 25, Marshall had written to King that Guadalcanal and Tulagi fell within the sphere of Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command (SOWESPAC), rather than the Navy’s South Pacific Area (SOPAC). Recognizing that the key to any such operation would be Marine Corps infantry who would necessarily operate with the fleet, King quashed the idea immediately, responding to Marshall that the operation “must be conducted under the direction of CINCPAC and cannot be conducted in any other way.” Marshall conceded to the Navy the responsibility for the first of the three tasks in the seizure of the southern Solomons. He handed the second and third tasks, the capture of the rest of the Solomon Islands and the neutralization and conquest of Rabaul, to MacArthur. Marshall moved the line dividing SOWESPAC from SOPAC, originally drawn to run straight through the southern Solomons, slightly westward to give the fleet exclusive domain over Task One. There were still too many cooks in the kitchen, but the hot appetizer would be the Navy’s dish to serve.
Guadalcanal was thirty-six hundred miles from Pearl Harbor. Measuring distance from Pacific Fleet headquarters, an expedition to assault Yokohama would have been just as long. But King and Nimitz would beat Yamamoto to the punch. D-Day on Red Beach was set for August 1.
WHEN GENERAL VANDEGRIFT was at last given the details of Operation Watchtower, several days under way for his staging area in Wellington, New Zealand, he was aghast at the speed required of him. The timetable allowed precious little time for preparation and training: They were to set foot on hostile shores on August 1. His superior, the commander of the South Pacific Forces, Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, joined General MacArthur in Melbourne, Australia, on July 8 to advise a postponement because of a lack of preparation and the inadequacy of friendly air cover over the invasion target. Though MacArthur had been written out of the invasion plan itself, he would still be relied upon to furnish air support to Navy forces with his long-range bombers, useful for both search and attack.
The request, when it reached him, outraged King. He believed the offensive, on the drawing board for months, needed rapid execution. King told General Marshall, “Three weeks ago, MacArthur stated that if he could be furnished amphibious forces and two carriers, he could push right through to Rabaul. He now feels that he not only cannot undertake this operation but not even the Tulagi operation.” The admiral thought MacArthur, who was marshaling Army forces to dislodge the Japanese from eastern New Guinea, was pouting over the decision to remove Operation Watchtower from his domain. He was. King had outmuscled him and the first offensive of the war was going to be a Navy and Marine Corps show. The messianic commander of the Southwest Pacific didn’t like anything about that.
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THE AMERICAN FLEET supporting the Marines was gathering piecemeal. Dispersed all around the eastern Pacific by the demands of combat operations to date, from the Coral Sea to Midway to the Aleutian Islands, three aircraft carrier task forces were assigned to the operation. The Wasp and Saratoga, which had missed the battles at Midway and Coral Sea, would join the Enterprise, a veteran of Midway and the Doolittle raid, in the Operation Watchtower combat task force. Meanwhile, Vandegrift’s amphibious element was scheduled to rendezvous with them in the Fiji Islands to rehearse the landings.
During the last week of June, the Saratoga and sixteen other warships—four heavy cruisers, six destroyers, two oilers, and four transports—were under way south for Tongatabu, the fueling base in the Tonga Islands. On July 1, the Wasp departed San Diego with the transports President Adams, President Hayes, President Jackson, Crescent City, and a surface escort composed of the cruisers Vincennes, Quincy, San Juan, and seven destroyers. The Enterprise carrier force left Hawaii soon after the Saratoga did, conducting gunnery practice on the way. The rigidly programmed exercises, which involved firing on target sleds towed behind slow-moving fleet tugs, and then at sleeves towed by planes, did little to simulate what awaited them in the southern waters. For the gunners and fire controlmen in the cruisers San Francisco, Portland, and Atlanta, however, the chance to calibrate their radar and check the precision with which their directors aimed their remote-controlled guns was welcome. Everyone knew that a living enemy, long sought, would soon be near.
The streams of combat vessels flowing toward the South Pacific consisted mainly of “light forces,” as cruisers and destroyers were known. The battleship fleet was essentially confined to station on the West Coast. Many sailors wondered why eight months after December 7 those battleships, fully repaired and modernized, would have no role in the battle for the South Pacific.
On the eve of the war against Japan, the U.S. fleet had seventeen battleships in commission: fifteen prewar dreadnoughts and two of a fast new breed, the North Carolina and the Washington. Of the nine assigned to the Pacific, only the Colorado, refitting at Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, escaped December 7 unscarred. Two weeks after the attack, the three battleships whose damage was least, the Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, were under way on their own power for the West Coast. By early March, those three wagons were ready for war again, repaired, modernized, and joined with the Colorado. By mid-August 1942, Task Force 1, as the Pacific battleship squadron was known, had been bolstered by three transfers from the Atlantic, the Idaho, Mississippi, and New Mexico. By any measure this force of seven restored battleships was superior to the one that had been struck at anchor in Oahu.
Their tenure in Hawaii was short-lived. Only four days after arriving, the Tennessee was ordered to Puget Sound for more refitting. The Pennsylvania followed within a month, and the Idaho for gunnery trials requested by Admiral King. They spent the early months of the war running exercises in unthreatened waters. None of the old battleships would reach the Solomons until after the fight for Guadalcanal was settled.
The reason was their vast appetite for fuel. There were limits on the Navy’s ability to transport and store bunker oil in the Pacific. The success of Germany’s U-boat campaign required a massive redirection of the tanker fleet to the Atlantic to sustain the flow of oil to England. By the time the shuffle was complete, Nimitz had just seven tankers at his disposal. That was crippling to operations, given what fuel hogs the old battleships were. Task Force 1, including its escorts, burned three hundred thousand barrels of oil in a month—the total oil storage capacity of the entire Pacific in early 1942. A carrier task force was almost as thirsty. The Navy had enough fuel available to operate either its carriers or its battleships. As between the two, no combat commander alive doubted which choice to make. Admiral King urged “continuous study” of the problem, but Nimitz vetoed any proposal to operate the old battleships out of Pearl. The math simply didn’t work.
The sight of great battleships lolling at anchor in the harbor at San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, deeply chagrined the cruisermen and destroyer sailors who would carry the fight against Japan. “We’re up against a navy that doesn’t keep its battleships home,” the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin complained to his diary in May. When men from the smaller ships went out on liberty, it was hard to resist raising provocative questions with any battleship sailors they might meet in the bars. The responses were usually fielded with fists. Now the energies of the oceanbound sailors of the Enterprise and the Atlanta were directed toward another fight.
From Pearl, the route to Tongatabu traced the arc of 160 West longitude. Down this imaginary path went the Enterprise and, broad on her bows, the Atlanta and the Portland. Veterans of the Doolittle raid and victors at Midway, the ships of Task Force 16 were bolstered by the presence of a majestic newcomer churning the seas in the Enterprise’s wake. This was the North Carolina, the first of a powerful new type of battleship, fast, armed with nine sixteen-inch rifles and a steel forest of twin-mounted five-inch guns. She could keep up with the carriers at cruising speeds and burned 30 percent less fuel than did the older battleships.
But logistics were as important as firepower. As General Dwight D. Eisenhower huddled with his staff in London planning the North Africa landings, half a world away, in Auckland, General Vandegrift was figuring out how to get his ships loaded with men, arms, and two months of supplies, plan landings on a hostile and deeply unfamiliar beach, issue operational orders to his field commanders, and run dress rehearsals. The pressure on American planners to allocate scarce resources effectively was immense worldwide. What little cargo and tanker capacity could be thrown into the southern Solomons operation was a zero-sum deduction from the strength of the Atlantic convoys that kept Great Britain going. In both theaters, the Mediterranean and the South Pacific, America would proceed on a shoestring, and that name, Operation Shoestring, would emerge as Nimitz’s joking moniker for the Guadalcanal operation, even as the invasion fleet was being marshaled toward its faraway goal.
WHEN ADMIRAL GHORMLEY received Nimitz’s directive to seize Guadalcanal, he summoned a staff officer and asked for charts of the region. “What in the world does this place look like, in the scheme of things?” Ghormley wanted to know. “The knowledge of the geography of the Pacific was hazy to American citizens generally,” Ghormley wrote, “and even to many of those in high places who were vitally concerned with the war effort.… We were pioneers, and accepted that fact.”
The oldest of six children of a Presbyterian missionary from Portland, Oregon, Bob Ghormley had a knack for going where the action was. On August 15, 1940, he had arrived in London to serve as a “special naval observer” to his president just as Germany’s aerial bombing of Britain, the Blitz, began. In October he wrote Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, “Since my arrival here 2 months ago, I am impressed with the fact that this is a war laboratory which the British Government is more or less placing at our disposal. We are and must take every advantage possible of these facilities for gaining more knowledge and applying it practically to our own Navy.”
President Roosevelt was eager for firsthand news on how the British people were holding up under the aerial siege. “Every day I was in London I felt more and more that England and, in fact, civilization was in great danger, and that the United States was the only country which could turn the tide,” he wrote. His was a diplomatically sensitive position, for Ghormley’s nebulous authority opened FDR to charges that the president was making “secret treaties” with Britain. In a presidential election year in which voices favoring isolationism were strong, the merest hint of an undeclared military alliance with England could have had complicated consequences.
In his personal role as an agent of the White House, Ghormley enabled President Roosevelt to bypass Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and the State Department in communicating with 10 Downing Street. Meeting frequently with the British Admiralty and Air Ministry, Ghormley helped negotiate the ABC-1 agreement, articulating the Allied grand strategy for confronting the Axis worldwide. He exchanged candid correspondence with the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, on a wide range of subjects: convoy routes, Atlantic naval bases, the state of play on the Eastern Front, new war technologies from magnetic mines to radar, and the efficacy of RAF bombers and fleet units against German warships. Ghormley was also a fierce partisan for his own Navy in its intramural wars with other U.S. service branches. He reported to FDR on the malign machinations of Hitler—and to Stark on the schemes of the U.S. Army Air Corps to establish a “United Air Force,” which the fleet viewed as a threat to autonomous naval airpower.
Influential though Ghormley was—some press reports lauded him as America’s premier naval strategist—his selection to command the South Pacific Forces came as a surprise to his peers. His last sea duty was in 1936, as captain of the battleship Nevada. He had never been to sea as a flag officer. Other admirals had much more experience afloat. Halsey and Fletcher had been successful carrier commanders. Nimitz’s first choice had been Admiral William S. Pye, the interim Pacific commander in chief after Husband Kimmel’s dismissal following the Pearl Harbor investigation, but King vetoed him. It is possible that Ghormley’s highest-ranking admirer, FDR himself, had a hand in giving him the job.
Ghormley left London in April 1942, stopping over in Washington to build a staff from the remnants of the dissolved Asiatic Fleet. He had a hard time finding men with suitable experience. His coding and communications staffs in particular were either untrained or reservists with no experience with current fleet procedures and doctrines. He chose as his chief of staff an officer with political connections, Franklin Roosevelt’s former naval aide, Captain Daniel J. Callaghan.
His appointment to command the South Pacific Forces carried him to the other side of the world with scarcely a week to sit still in one place. On his journey from Pearl through the necklace of South Pacific naval and Army bases—Palmyra, Canton, and Fiji, then to New Zealand and finally Nouméa—the yawning distances between points of strategic interest would unsettle him. East to west, it spanned the same distance as New York to Berlin. Its northern boundary was the equator; to the south, the South Pole. Ghormley hadn’t served in the Pacific in thirty years. It was unfamiliar terrain.
From his time at Main Navy, Ghormley was familiar with plans to throw back a Japanese attack. He had no illusions about the nature of his enemy. He saw the Japanese as “dissatisfied, proud, grasping and aggressive. They would stop at nothing to gain their ends.” But the South Pacific Area would be a difficult place to fight them. Coming to the Pacific from the confines of London under siege, with scarcely a chance to acclimate, Ghormley would seem overwhelmed from the start by the unbounded expanses of sea. As one of his deputies would discover as a matter of first impression: “Robinson Crusoe should be required reading for anyone who is setting up an advanced base in the South Pacific islands.… There is no such thing as living off the country in the South Pacific, unless you live on coconuts alone.”
The Pacific’s long swells carried the flotsam of frustrated Western colonial ambitions. The scattered failures of the English, French, Dutch, and Germans were announced by the mélange of place-names woven into the map, from New Britain, Hollandia, and Bougainville to San Cristobál, Choiseul, and the Bismarcks, and by the lack of civilization, or infrastructure. America’s legacy in the South Pacific was unwritten, but those who would begin to write it, for better or worse, were well on their way.
(Photo Credit: 2.1)