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ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO, LIKE HIS STAFF AND COMMANDERS throughout the South Seas fleet, was shocked by the savagery of Abe’s fight with Callaghan. The grinding of steel tooth and nail was like nothing they had seen from the U.S. Navy. The Americans weren’t known to be such fighters. At Cape Esperance in October, Goto had lost a cruiser but gave, in death, nearly as good as he got en route to accomplishing his larger mission, unleashing two battleships against Henderson Field. A month later now, Callaghan had done what his Navy had not been able to do thus far in the war. He had crippled a battleship, the Hiei, and left her to Henderson Field’s vultures. The 36,600-ton warship was to the Imperial Japanese Navy something like what the HMS Hood had been to the Royal Navy before her loss in May 1941: older, smaller, and less powerful than the state-of-art newcomers to whom she played second chair, but an object of nostalgic affection because of her link to the Imperial palace. Hirohito himself had sailed in the Hiei. Her loss was a heavy blow.
After Callaghan thwarted Abe on the night of November 12–13, inflicting the loss of the Hiei and two destroyers, the Akatsuki and Yudachi, Henderson Field was assured of staying in business at least one more day. Accordingly, Yamamoto knew it was folly to allow Tanaka’s eleven irreplaceable troop transports to proceed to Guadalcanal. Postponing plans to land the convoy until the fourteenth, he ordered it to withdraw to Shortland Island at the head of the Slot and await further orders. Yamamoto then turned his attention to renewing the effort to bring the Cactus Air Force under his fleet’s big guns.
The battleship Kirishima, which had left the fracas with Callaghan and company largely unscathed, would be the centerpiece of another powerful bombardment sortie. When Yamamoto ordered Admiral Kondo to take her back to Guadalcanal for another attack, Kondo gathered up two newcomers to the fight in the Slot, the heavy cruisers Atago and Takao, to join her. The light cruisers Nagara and Sendai were attached as well, leading nine destroyers. Yamamoto had only reluctantly approved the scuttling of the Hiei.Vengeance would belong, if at all, to the ship that sailed with her that night, the Kirishima. The IJN’s developing failure of nerve was now manifest. As the Kirishima headed back toward Guadalcanal under Admiral Kondo, it was telling that she was not joined by her mighty sister ships, the Kongo and Haruna, which Kondo left behind to screen the carriers. Committing battleships was the final gamble. Yamamoto chose to send just one of his three into the next fight.
Admiral Halsey would take a very different approach. Knowing from dispatches that another major naval attack was gathering, the SOPAC commander decided he could no longer play it safe with his sole remaining carrier, the Enterprise, and her powerful accompaniment of battleships. The men on Guadalcanal needed the fleet now more than ever before.
After the beating Callaghan had taken, Halsey knew that his cruiser striking force didn’t have much left to offer. His sole remaining carrier, the Enterprise, didn’t, either. When she was ordered north from Nouméa toward Guadalcanal, the carrier still had a crew of eighty-five repair technicians aboard, working to fix the disabled forward elevator. She trailed an oil slick. “This was the tightest spot that I was ever in during the entire war,” Halsey would write.
“If any principle of naval warfare is burned into my brain, it is that the best defense is a strong offense—that, as Lord Nelson wrote in a memorandum to his officers before the Battle of Trafalgar, ‘No Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy.’ ” Now there were few other options. Willis Lee’s battleships were his “only recourse.” Their long days of steaming as sentinels, protecting other ships instead of attacking the enemy, were over. Shortly before 5 p.m. on November 13, Halsey broke every lesson he’d learned at the Naval War College. He decided to send in his battleships. He directed Admiral Kinkaid, commanding the Enterprise task force, to turn loose his big boys to enter the fight.
When Willis Lee received the signal via blinker light from the Enterprise to detach his heavy combatants from Task Force 16 and run north, and further learned that Halsey expected him to arrive off Guadalcanal by early morning on the fourteenth, Lee broke radio silence to inquire, “What do you think we have—wings?” Lee was in no position to get there so soon. When the Washington and South Dakota, joined by the four destroyers that happened to have the most fuel—the Preston, Gwin, Walke, and Benham—left the Enterprise task force at sunset and set a northward course, they were about 150 miles farther south than Halsey thought they should be.
This was the consequence of Kinkaid misunderstanding the orders from Halsey that directed him where to operate. When he was instructed to keep his task force near a particular line of latitude, Kinkaid understood the line as a limit on his northern movement and stayed well south of it. Having paid a high cost for Halsey’s bold, some would say reckless, employment of the precious carriers at Santa Cruz—a cost that included not only the Hornet, but also his own reputation among aviation admirals, who felt he needlessly delayed launching a strike after the enemy was spotted—Kinkaid was probably in a mood for caution now.
The direction of the wind was another problem. With a southerly prevailing wind, Kinakid had to reverse course 180 degrees and head south, into the wind, in order to generate a headwind strong enough to launch or recover aircraft. This was one of the reasons Task Force 16 was farther south than many thought it should have been.
When a SOPAC staff officer, Charles Weaver, informed Halsey and Miles Browning that Lee could not reach the battle area on the night of November 13–14, he was met with a furious response. “You can well imagine the blast I got from my seniors who were sure that Lee was in a good position to intercept.” Having pledged to Vandegrift that he would support the marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal with everything he had at his disposal, Halsey was chagrined to be forced to notify the general that neither his battleships nor any American naval units would be on hand that night to defend Guadalcanal from naval attack.
At the survivor camp on Guadalcanal that night, Bill McKinney, the Atlanta electrician, was resting underneath a tent he had been given by the marines. He was too exhausted to celebrate with the victorious pilots, too exhausted even to set up his tent. So he used it as a blanket. He was awakened once when the heavy rains leaked underneath the canvas, turning the ground to mud. Around 2 a.m. he was awakened again, this time by a rain of fire. Two heavy cruisers, the Suzuya and Maya, arrived offshore that night to shoot up the airfield.
Men were shouting, running everywhere, as heavy explosions rolled in from the sound. Those who had endured the shelling by battleships a month earlier would say this one paled in comparison, but a bombardment from the sea was always terrifying. A sailor who had survived the sinkings of the Wasp and the Barton came sprinting into a bunker during the bombardment, mute with terror. McKinney took the assault by the two Japanese cruisers personally. “I had the feeling that they knew where we were and planned to finish us off,” he said. He could see the “little winking pinpoints of blue light as their salvos thundered toward us. It was a fearful experience.”
The closest large U.S. warship at hand in Savo Sound that night was Captain DuBose’s Portland, tied up and concealed near Tulagi’s shore across the sound as her crew worked on repairs. DuBose spotted the two enemy ships as their searchlights explored the anchorage off Lunga. Every faithful hand in the Portland prayed the lights would not find them. DuBose knew there was no way he could tackle two fully primed opponents with his ship barely navigable. So he watched the searchlights and instructed Commander Shanklin to fire only if they fixed in his direction. In due course Calvert’s PT boats threw their weight at the Japanese cruisers, making several torpedo runs to no effect.
Firing five hundred shells apiece in an unmolested half hour, the Maya and Suzuya destroyed eighteen planes and damaged thirty-two more on Henderson Field. Frightful though it was, this bombardment paled with what the Hiei and Kirishima might have wreaked, and underscored the significance of Callaghan’s sacrifice.
WHEN THE MORNING ROSE on Savo Sound on November 14, it was still Friday the thirteenth in Washington. The first dispatches of the events off Guadalcanal the previous night traveled quickly by radio from Nouméa to Pearl Harbor to the Navy Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The tension I felt at that time was matched only by the tension that pervaded Washington the night before the landing in Normandy,” James Forrestal would write. Later, when a Japanese invasion force was reported in the Slot, President Roosevelt began to think the island was lost. But from Washington the president did not have contemporaneous knowledge of what the Cactus Air Force was doing. Japan’s most important effort to send troops to the island was under way and now, thanks to the success of Callaghan and the failure of Abe, was exposed to daylight air attack. The most important day in the illustrious history of the Cactus Air Force was at hand.
At first light on Henderson Field, the ground crews of the 1st Marine Air Wing began a long day of work fueling and arming planes to strike at enemy targets in the Slot. The pace was so desperate that all hands from the mess tents were pressed into service. There would be time aplenty to eat after more pressing appetites had been sated. Soon the pilots were scouring the waters within two hundred miles of the island. The Enterprise, steaming two hundred miles south-southwest of Guadalcanal, was delayed in launching her dawn search, thanks to squalls. But most of the Enterprise’s sixty-two planes, including twenty-three Dauntlesses and nine Avengers, got in on the attack.
Winging north and west with varied responsibilities for search and strike, they found the ships that had hit them the previous night southwest of Rendova Island, New Georgia. The Suzuya and Maya, which had rendezvoused with the heavy cruisers Chokai and Kinugasa, were set upon violently. A flight of Dauntlesses led by Marine major Joseph Sailer fell on the Kinugasa, which was trailing oil from torpedoes hits landed by Marine Avenger pilots shortly after first light. The Enterprise Dauntlesses hit her hard, damaging her grievously with a heavy bomb. Two Enterprisepilots, Ensign Richard M. Buchanan and Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert D. Gibson, delivered the coup de grâce, leaving the Kinugasa to capsize and sink later that morning, taking down fifty-one men. Ensign Paul M. Halloran of the Enterprise’s Bombing Squadron 10 dove on the Maya but missed with his bomb. As he pulled out, the wing of his Dauntless struck the cruiser’s mainmast, spilling gasoline into the superstructure. The resulting fires killed thirty-seven sailors. Halloran was never seen again.
But the pilots’ principal objective was Tanaka’s lightly defended transport force. Slugging south on Saturday morning, passing between New Georgia and Santa Isabel, the troop carriers were set upon by Cactus Air Force and Enterprise planes around the same time the Japanese cruisers were coming under attack. Tanaka’s transports scattered, turning in slow circles to avoid the fall of bombs and torpedoes. By midafternoon, seven of the eleven transports had been sunk, along with all of their cargoes and a great many of their men.
Amid the catastrophe of these terrible losses to their amphibious capability, Admiral Tanaka salvaged what he could. In a remarkable feat of improvisational seamanship, he brought his destroyers alongside the foundering transports and transferred thousands of soldiers on the fly.
As they did so, Rear Admiral Kondo, riding in the light cruiser Nagara, took command of a makeshift but powerful bombardment force—the Kirishima, joined by the heavy cruisers Atago and Takeo, the light cruisers Nagara and Sendai, and nine destroyers. They moved south again to lay their guns on Henderson Field, quickly overtaking Tanaka’s four surviving transports and taking station ahead of them. Owing to the intensity of the air attacks directed at the Japanese cruisers and transports that day, the Kirishima and her consorts avoided detection from the air.
THE SURVIVING SHIPS OF Task Force 67 arrived at Espiritu Santo on the afternoon of November 14. Entering the channel, the San Francisco followed the Helena closely. A monument to the danger of haphazard navigation stood for all to see: the wreck of the luxury-liner-turned-troop-transport President Coolidge, which several weeks earlier had blundered out of the safety of the channel into the harbor’s defensive minefield.
As the San Francisco came into the harbor, she passed, port-side-to-port-side, four other cruisers anchored in a line, the Minneapolis, New Orleans, Pensacola, and Northampton. “It was pretty awe-inspiring,” Jack Bennett said. The crews of the anchored ships manned the rail and offered three rousing cheers to the battle-scarred counterpart. “Hip, hip hooray—three times, that was something emotional,” Bennett said. “The greatest accolade you can get is from your comrades in arms.”
In the harbor, the Helena went alongside a tanker to refuel. A sailor on the oiler surveyed the shrapnel-pocked light cruiser and hollered over the rail, “What happened?” A wag on the Helena replied, “Termites.” Schonland refused an instruction to go alongside a tanker to refuel and requested an anchorage instead. With the flag lowered to half-mast, the San Francisco was assigned a berth, and as she eased in, the ships nearby gave her a hero’s welcome. Ship whistles blew loud and long. Schonland arranged with Hoover for the Helena’s band to come aboard, and for her chaplain to conduct a funeral service on the San Francisco.
The mobile base hospital at Espiritu Santo was crowded. Ship’s doctors, seeing the facilities available ashore, lamented the butchery they had been forced to perpetrate in the battle area: amputations, crushing tourniquets, dressings soaked through and dried into open wounds. In combat, you did your best with what you had. With his legs shot through with more than 130 shrapnel wounds, the San Francisco’s Cliff Spencer was taken to a wardroom full of wounded sailors and marines. “I wasn’t near anyone I knew and at that moment I had never felt so sad and alone,” he wrote. “Next to me on the opposite tier bunk lay a muscular young sailor. He was crying. I tried to strike up a conversation with him and asked, ‘What ship are you off of?’ He said the Atlanta.… As we talked the corpsman came to dress his wounds. He threw back the blankets and lifted about an eight-inch stub of his right leg. It had been amputated above the knee and had not been surgically closed, just a raw cut covered with a large bandage. He shocked me by almost screaming, ‘The sons of bitches on the San Francisco did this! How can I ever work the farm with this bloody stump?’
“Needless to say I didn’t volunteer the name of my ship.”
The tribalisms of a naval force were still producing raw feelings. “There were some real hard feelings between the Helena and San Francisco when they got into port,” a sailor recalled. It seems there were Helena sailors who thought the flagship had turned and run at the height of the engagement, and that “the Helena had to stay there and do the job—or whatever.”
As the San Francisco underwent temporary repairs, Schonland was relieved as acting commander by Captain Albert F. France, from Halsey’s staff. The personal effects taken from the dead were turned over with an inventory to the supply officer for shipment home to the relatives whose photos had adorned stateroom bulkheads, sat framed on small metal desks, and become shattered and scattered by the many impacts of the fight. The good order of the flagship was returning.
Turner sent a message to the ships of Task Force 67 that amply reflected his feelings toward the battered ships of his command.
Task Force 67 is hereby dissolved. In dissolving this temporary force I express the will that the number 67 be in the future reserved for groups of ships as ready for high patriotic endeavor as you have been. I thank you for your magnificent support of the project of reinforcing our brave troops in Guadalcanal and for your eagerness to be the keen edge of the sword that is cutting the throat of the enemy.
I was well aware of the odds which might be against you in your night attack on November 12 but felt that this was the time when fine ships and brave men should be called upon for their utmost. You have more than justified my expectations in taking from the enemy a toll of strength far greater than the strength you have expended.
With you I grieve for long cherished comrades who will be with us no more, and for our lost ships whose names will be enshrined in history. No medals however high can possibly give you the reward you deserve. With all my heart I say God bless the courageous men, dead and alive, of Task Force 67.
The Cactus Air Force’s devastating attacks against the transports on the morning of the fourteenth would never have happened without their sacrifice. The deaths of Callaghan and his staff were the final blow to Ghormley’s original SOPAC command. With their passing, and that of Norman Scott, the Navy simultaneously cashiered the folly of the old and some of the promise of the new. The winding course between victory and defeat off Guadalcanal offered a series of object lessons that future leaders would study and profit by. The tuition in that brutal school was steep.
But one more collision of giants remained to decide who would control Savo Sound. The next costly lesson would follow the very next night with another collision of the exhausted fleets.
At Pearl Harbor, monitoring the reports of more major Japanese naval units approaching Guadalcanal, Admiral Nimitz sent a broadcast to all task force commanders, bracingly stating the obvious: “LOOKS LIKE ALL OUT ATTEMPT NOW UNDERWAY TO RECAPTURE GUADALCANAL REGARDLESS LOSSES.”