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ON JULY 22, MAJOR ELEMENTS OF THE OPERATION WATCHTOWER expeditionary force sortied from New Zealand. Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, whom King had promoted from his own staff, commanded the Watchtower amphibious force from his flagship, the transport McCawley. Out of Wellington’s Port Nicholson hove the invasion armada in a long single column, twenty-two transports and their destroyer screen, joined by an escort of cruisers, headed north toward the fleet rendezvous in the Fiji Islands. The combined task force’s Marine Corps accompaniment under Vandegrift was the largest modern amphibious force yet assembled.
Slugging along at eleven knots, the invasion force needed most of a day to steam beyond reach of the umbrella of friendly aircraft operating from New Zealand. An order went around to all personnel to destroy their diaries. Small things like that tended to work on a man’s mind. The frightful possibilities of the experience ahead were beyond what most unblooded marines and sailors could imagine.
From over the horizon came more muscle: two carrier task forces, bringing the Saratoga and Wasp into the game. The heavy cruisers Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes, and Chicago joined their Australian counterparts Canberra and Australia. The Enterprise task force was a day late for the rendezvous because Rear Admiral Kinkaid’s charts did not accurately show the International Date Line. It was not an inconsequential error. Things like that could keep an admiral from receiving additional stars. “We kept very quiet about it,” Kinkaid wrote, “and I doubt if Nimitz or Fletcher know it to this day.” To make up time and keep pace with the other task forces, Kinkaid’s Task Force 16 had one less day in port than it would have had, forcing the North Carolina to continue without refueling.
The merger of the far-flung task force in the Coral Sea swelled the order of battle for Operation Watchtower to fifty major ships. It would in the end number more than eighty. By comparison, the carrier groups that had raided Japanese positions on Wake and Marcus islands early in the war each had just ten ships. The Doolittle raid in April sailed with two dozen, as did the Midway flotilla. From horizon to horizon now the Watchtower armada stretched, silhouettes long, gray, cold, and sleek. “We were conscious of the fact that this was one of the largest and strongest groups of war vessels ever gathered, certainly the largest and strongest of this war to date,” Richard Tregaskis, a war correspondent, wrote. “The thought that we were going into our adventure with weight and power behind us was cheering. And our adventure-to-come seemed nearer than ever, as the new group of ships and ours merged and we became one huge force.”
Experience in wartime Britain made Ghormley wary about the threat of espionage. No doubt mindful of the role that spies played in the surprise attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Ghormley wrote his staff, “Loose talk is a stupid habit.… Some would risk the lives of their friends by a silly effort to impress others in public places.” There was good reason to fear leaks about ship movements, especially in places like Auckland, where peacetime protocols controlled the movements of merchant vessels into and out of port. The setup was so haphazard that it seemed a miracle operational secrecy was maintained at all. The act of gathering intelligence always came with a risk to the security of planning. Navy intelligence teams were seeking out planters and others who had been evacuated from Guadalcanal to interview for information about the island. Some of those former residents would travel with the invasion force to help identify landmarks.
In Wellington, Vandegrift’s intelligence staff had strewn tables in a hotel conference room with sensitive maps, documents, and aerial photographs. One night a drunken civilian reportedly wandered through the lobby and down a hall, passed two MPs at an open door, and blundered straight into Watchtower’s intelligence nerve center. “I have smiled many times at reports that only the general knew where we were going,” a photographer assigned to the intelligence section, Thayer Soule, wrote. “All headquarters knew. Why the word didn’t leak to the enemy, I will never know.”
After Midway, when the Japanese began changing their high-level operational code groups, U.S. cryptanalysts were left to deduce enemy movements from the patterns of radio traffic, instead of by deciphering their actual content. On July 30, New Zealand’s prime minister, Peter Fraser, was quoted in the Auckland newspaper as saying that an Allied offensive was imminent. Ghormley wrote, “I informed him of how this matter had perturbed me, as I feared it would put the Japs on their guard.”
Most of the sailors assigned to Watchtower needed no imagination to envision the destructive handiwork of their enemy. The men of the cruiser Astoria, at sea when Pearl Harbor was hit, had come home on December 13 to behold the Pacific battle line laid to waste and the docks of Ford Island lined with caskets. Ruined ships still burned, wreathed in a flotsam of shattered wood and human remains. Men from the battleships, many of them now without stations, were shuffled like spare parts. The Astoria filled out her increased wartime complement with these castoffs. Most of them were eager for a lick at the enemy. Some felt they had had enough. “I had experienced what the Japanese could do,” said a sailor who transferred to the Astoria from one of the stricken battleships, “and I wasn’t keen to go out and tangle with them again.”
The Astoria’s captain at the time took Pearl Harbor’s ruin especially hard. When the reality registered with Preston B. Haines about the battle fleet—and about his son, killed on board a destroyer—he was no longer fit for command. Detached for treatment at the naval hospital, Haines was relieved by Captain Francis W. Scanland, recently displaced from command of the battleship Nevada, hit in the attack. Another cruiser assigned to Watchtower, the Chicago, was commanded by an orphaned battleship skipper. Howard D. Bode was ashore when the end came for the USS Oklahoma. His life may have been spared, but the effects of this and coming traumas would weigh heavily on his mind, too.
Captains were fortunate to find help for their troubles. They were given command of a multitude and saddled with fault for their failings. The bargain they made for their privileged place was the right to be last off the ship if the worst came to pass. Burdens grew heavier the higher one ascended in rank. Captains concerned themselves with ships and crews, commodores with squadrons, task force commanders with objectives, and theater commanders with campaigns. The burdens of sailors weighed mostly on the muscles. The weight of leadership was subtler and heavier. It could test the conscience.
The men on the Astoria were thrilled, defiant, and unnerved that the Japanese propaganda ministry had expressly marked their ship as a priority target. In April 1939, their ship had traveled to Japan to bring home the ashes of the recently deceased Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Overhauled and freshly painted at Norfolk, with the urn holding the remains of Hiroshi Saito mounted on a special platform in the band room, the Astoria spent 158 days crossing the world, more as a gesture of the government’s respect to Saito individually than a sign of international rapprochement. Tensions were high from the sinking of the U.S. gunboat Panay just seventeen months earlier in the Yangtze River near Nanking. The captain of the Astoria on that visit was the man who would command the entire Guadalcanal amphibious force: Richmond Kelly Turner.
Ever since the triumphant visit of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet to Japan in 1908, almost as soon as Admiral Sperry’s squadron departed, attitudes between the Pacific naval powers had hardened. From then on, Japanese naval exercises were predicated on the idea of fighting the U.S. Navy. Soon after the Washington Treaty was concluded in 1922, limiting construction of heavy combatant vessels, the Imperial Japanese Navy began organizing its cruisers and destroyers into special squadrons trained in night combat with an eye toward waging and winning a war of attrition. The Japanese fleet, it was said, adopted a seven-day workweek for training—“Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday.”
Despite the unpleasantness over the Panay incident and the perking suspicions that would be the fuse to war, the diplomatic touches on that 1939 visit were extravagant. The Astoria entered Yokohama flying a Japanese naval ensign from her truck. Like the Great White Fleet before her, she traded salvos of greeting with Japanese warships. Though her photographer’s mates took furtive shots of naval installations along the way, espionage was not the order of the day. Intimidation always was. From the Astoria’s largest men, Captain Turner selected a two-hundred-man landing party. Dressed in shore blues and flat hats—including, to their dismay, some proud members of the shipboard Marine detachment—they provided the escort and funeral party for Ambassador Saito’s cortege. At a tea party hosted by the Foreign Ministry, Turner was photographed sitting next to a two-star named Isoroku Yamamoto.
The last U.S. warship to visit Japan before the outbreak of war, the Astoria made as strong an impression on the Japanese as the Rising Sun made on her crew. As one of the Astoria’s chief petty officers put it, “I never could figure out how one country could produce such nice women and such sons-of-bitches for men.” Those men (or their propagandists) would well remember the Astoria.
Turner cultivated the Astoria’s pride as a fighting ship during his two years as a captain in “the Pineapple Fleet,” as the Hawaiian Detachment was known. In peacetime, there were no battles to fight. His crew became connoisseurs of the varied pleasures of international ports of call: In Manila, girls. In Honolulu, girls—and ninety-nine enlisted competitors for every one, or so it seemed. The odds were far better in Hawaii’s “happy houses,” where the hosts, like their seafaring customers, were known to be safe because every week, until a controversy broke in the papers, it was the Navy’s own doctors who examined them.
A ship’s history was like a fine wine that gained character with age. The fact that the Great White Fleet had nearly stranded itself at sea for lack of fuel was long forgotten by the time its journey became the emblem of romantic naval adventure. The present was paint-scraping gray drudgery, the future an unguessable puzzle. Captain Turner was a distant memory by the time William G. Greenman took command of the Astoria and led her during the Guadalcanal operation.
At sunset, the sailors of the Astoria, like every other ship in Admiral Fletcher’s expeditionary force, found their gazes drawn high to the starscape that emerged like a field of diamonds on velvet. Enjoyment of such a spectacle required a topside perch, now that all portholes had been welded over in favor of hull integrity. On watch under the stars or secure in their welded-down hulls of steel, sailors had time to indulge in the endless superstitions of the seagoing warrior caste.
The wisdom of higher rank did little to dispel either anticipation or foreboding. On Oahu on a summer evening, where the sunset cast the naval base in red and bronze hues, Chester Nimitz had a direct view of Pearl Harbor’s largely vacant dry docks where the cruisers—which belonged to the anachronistically named Scouting Force, once subservient to the battleships of the Battle Force but now powerfully unleashed on their own—had till recently been moored. In the months after the attack, the impression all around the harbor had been of a blooded fleet resurgent: battleships being righted and taken away for repair; carriers, cruisers, destroyers, subs, and auxiliaries coming and going. With the East Loch largely empty now, the fleet under way, Nimitz chafed about the future. He awaited word of the rendezvous in Fiji, and from King the latest news of what reinforcements could be marshaled to support the operation. From MacArthur, no doubt, the next shoe would soon drop in the maverick Southwest Pacific boss’s ongoing campaign to claim leadership of the war against Japan.
Two months ago, as his forces approached Midway, Nimitz had told his commanders, “You will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you will interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting … greater damage on the enemy.” As the day of the invasion came closer, he calculated and recalculated his exposure. What balance needed to be struck between prudent defense and aggressive offense? With three carrier task forces in the South Pacific and just one to protect Hawaiian waters, was he now exposed to another Japanese raid on Hawaii? What were the opportunities, and what were the risks?
With the departure of the Operation Watchtower task forces, Nimitz no longer had enough fighter planes at Pearl Harbor to resist a concentrated air attack. His submarine force was scattered to three horizons. Several more Marine Corps regiments were scheduled to reach the Pacific before year’s end, but they hadn’t even begun their amphibious training. Given inadequate fuel and a threadbare destroyer force, the battleships would not be sent to the combat theater. At the end of the day Watchtower was all a very big gamble.
Nimitz pondered these and other questions while shooting targets at the pistol range, a diversion recommended by his doctor as a way to channel the mounting stress. He was sociable enough with his staff, always game to swim or run with younger officers who were willing to be outperformed by an old man. Nimitz’s competitive instincts ran mostly in another direction. As he diverted his tired mind through the iron sights of a target pistol, he was really only concerned with being outperformed by the Japanese.
ON JULY 26, twelve days out from D-Day on Guadalcanal, the Watchtower amphibious task force arrived in the Fiji Islands for rehearsals. Three years before, in 1939, a similar scene had unfolded off a small Puerto Rican island leased by the Marine Corps. The cast of characters then included several of the principal players now, and they had seen firsthand the possibilities and pitfalls of an amphibious war. President Roosevelt, joined by his naval aide Captain Daniel J. Callaghan, observed from the polished teak deck of the heavy cruiser Houston.
Three years later now, at Fiji, it was a misfire. As the landing craft approached their objective, Koro Island, everyone could see that the shoreline was nothing like what was expected. The tide was lower than forecast, and thus the reefs higher. “I saw that its shore was ringed with a coral reef, black and sharp,” wrote a transport officer, “like shark’s teeth that would have chewed our boats to pieces.” The Marines abandoned the exercise. Cruisers practiced their shore bombardment patterns, planes strafed targets. Other than that, the rehearsal in the Fijis bore no resemblance to what had been drawn up on paper. In this respect it may have been the best possible preparation for invasions to come.
While the transports were rehearsing, the senior commanders of Operation Watchtower held a conference on board the carrier Saratoga. Later, people would say it was impossible to exaggerate the importance of this meeting, even if one thing that stands out about it was the absence of the theater commander, Vice Admiral Ghormley, who was still preparing to move his headquarters from Auckland to Nouméa in New Caledonia. Chaired by Vice Admiral Fletcher, the expeditionary force commander, the conference included Kelly Turner (commander of the amphibious force), General Vandegrift (the commander of the landing force), Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes (Fletcher’s subordinate in the carrier force), Rear Admiral Kinkaid (commander of the Enterprise task force), and Rear Admiral John (Slew) McCain (commander of land-based Navy aircraft in the area). Ghormley was represented by his chief of staff, Captain Daniel Callaghan.
Among the challenges the commanders faced was how to get the operation through the blind alley they had entered through haste. “From an intelligence point of view,” a Marine Corps historian would write, “the Guadalcanal-Tulagi landings can hardly be described as more than a stab in the dark.” When navigators found their charts of the Solomons and spread them across their dead-reckoning tables, they found that the documents had last been updated more than a generation ago, and were drafted on such a large scale as to be useless in operational planning. The direction of magnetic north indicated on them varied from present readings. Nor did they show topography. Sketches hastily produced from recent aerial photographs had large blank areas where clouds had covered the ground on the day the photos were shot.
It was at this meeting, for the first time, that the commanders saw their operation orders. Admiral Kinkaid wrote, “Some of us were until then unaware of the procedure to be followed. Plans had been made hurriedly and many details remained to be worked out.” Ghormley hadn’t yet seen the orders, either. Owing to the strict radio silence, the area commander would not actually receive Fletcher’s detailed operations plan until the campaign was about a month under way, leaving him in the dark about the specifics of the invasion even as he pulled up stakes and relocated to Nouméa.
The hostility that boiled over between Frank Jack Fletcher and Kelly Turner shocked the other participants. They spoke to each other like enemies. It was well known that Admiral King didn’t trust Fletcher’s competence. A junior member of Fletcher’s own staff had spread unflattering rumors of his intellectual ability. In this assessment, he was “neither sharp nor perspicacious,” “uninformed and to a certain extent uninformable,” and “antiquated to the extent that he was approaching senility.” Seeing as Turner was freshly detached from King’s staff, no doubt he shared these doubts about his competence. Fletcher had at least two things going for him that pushed him through the ranks and ensured his place in command: a track record of victory and Chester Nimitz’s favor. Nimitz stood against King on the question of Fletcher’s role, recommending him for promotion to vice admiral and appointment to task force commander.
The most contentious issue at the conference was the duration of the carrier air support Fletcher would provide the landing force. Nimitz’s directive indicated that the Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp would provide badly needed air cover over Guadalcanal for “about three days.” A fist-banging argument developed from that lack of specificity. Turner and Vandegrift had said they needed five days of protection to unload their transports and cargo ships at the beach, even though the operations plan called for the supply train to withdraw after three. King and Nimitz reportedly instructed Fletcher not to keep the carrier task force, under the tactical control of Admiral Leigh Noyes, in the area for “longer than two or three days at the most.” Forrest Sherman, the captain of the Wasp,said after the war, “I am sure that [Noyes] returned with the understanding that carrier air support would be required only two days. That this was unrealistic is now quite apparent, but we had never conducted such an operation before and had much to learn.”
Though Turner did believe he could unload his transports in the time offered by Fletcher, he worried about the cargo ships. In New Zealand, there had been no time to reconfigure their loads for combat deployment. They had arrived in Wellington loaded to fill every hold as efficiently as possible. Combat loading was a different art that required the most urgently needed items—ammunition and food—to be loaded last so that they could be unloaded first.
The Marine commanders at the meeting, General Vandegrift and his assistant chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Merrill B. Twining, were aghast as Fletcher explained his intention to pull out the carriers after August 9. Vandegrift didn’t think Fletcher was well briefed on the landing plan. That plan promised to leave the Marines unprotected against air attack, except for what they themselves could muster from the island. “My Dutch blood was beginning to boil,” Vandegrift would write, “but I forced myself to remain calm while explaining to Fletcher that the days of landing a small force and leaving were over. Although Turner heatedly backed me, Fletcher curtly announced that he would stay until the third day. With that he dismissed the conference.”
The argument was a product, too, of the unwieldy table of organization. Fletcher, the commander of the whole expeditionary force, was also the commander of the Saratoga carrier task force, one of three such groups in the larger force. He was, in effect, conducting a symphony from the second chair in the violin section. His conflicting responsibilities created at least one perverse incentive, and an errant expectation. The expectation was that Fletcher would place priority on what was best for the overall operation. The perverse incentive was that he was and always would be a carrier man whose first thoughts were given to the well-being of his flattops. Thus a certain tension arose whenever Fletcher sought to apply Nimitz’s principle of calculated risk. What risks deserved his highest concern: the risks to the expeditionary force (and by extension the landing force, which was the whole outfit’s reason for being), or the risks to his carriers, the ships that the Navy valued most?
The Navy had been cautious with its carriers since hostilities began. During planning for the Wake Island relief expedition, which was launched and then abandoned, Admiral Pye decided that the carriers were more important than Wake itself. With that decision, the Navy had won the resentment of every marine in the fleet. Was Guadalcanal any more important than Wake? Presumably it was, for many reasons. But these questions, never addressed authoritatively, were left to surface unbidden at the Saratoga conference on July 26.
Fuel was another concern that urged limited exposure in the theater. The heavy ships had fuel to operate for three days at cruising speed, or fifteen knots, and four more days at battle speed, or twenty-five knots. With three days left to travel at the time the estimate was made, the fleet would have just enough fuel for four days of combat operations. For a cautious commander such as Fletcher, whose concern over refueling was well known and had already earned him the wrath of Admiral King, those were numbers worth paying attention to. Turner and Vandegrift would take all the protection Fletcher would give them. Every twenty-four-hour interval was critical. That he insisted on withdrawing after D day plus two was a continuing frustration to them.
In a March 26 memo to King titled “Strategic Deployment in the Pacific Against Japan,” Turner had written that any offensive would have to be directed by a local commander “who is closely acquainted with local conditions, and in a position to make decisions on the spot,” and supported by enough airpower “to ensure continuous local naval and air superiority” (emphasis in original). Fletcher’s withdrawal violated Turner’s notion of maintaining proper strength—and leadership—at the point of contact.
After the conference, Turner reportedly confronted Fletcher over the withdrawal of the carriers, hissing: “You son of a bitch, if you do that you are yellow.” The acrimony would only grow worse. Ghormley wrote Nimitz on July 29 with an update: “I sent Dan Callaghan and LeHardy up to confer with Fletcher. I am enclosing a copy of Callaghan’s notes which show some of our problems. The big one right now is fuel. We are working on that as hard as we can.… Some tankers are arriving behind schedule so it is going to be difficult. I fear any chance of advancing dog day is not possible.”
At the Saratoga conference, Fletcher called aside Captain Callaghan at one point and expressed his thanks that Ghormley had placed him in tactical command of the operation. Fletcher said he had thought Ghormley would exercise that function himself. What Ghormley expected of Fletcher’s carriers was unclear. An indication of SOPAC’s view of the plan to withdraw might have been a note Callaghan wrote in the margin next to his record of Fletcher’s announcement about his plan to leave after three days: a single exclamation point. As Ghormley’s representative, he did nothing to challenge this timetable at the meeting.
It was time for the fleet to move again. On July 27, south of Fiji, Turner’s amphibians rendezvoused at sea with the battle fleet for the run to Guadalcanal. “At first there was a mast astern of us—then another—and then several,” an officer on the destroyer Sterettwrote. “Soon superstructures came into view, and we became aware that we were joining a whole fleet of ships: transports, destroyers, tankers, minesweepers, cruisers, a new battleship, and two big carriers.”
The scale of the operation was now obvious to all. As various types of major combat ships hove into view with their escorts, captains gathered their crews and informed them of their destination. When skies cleared, the fleet’s aircraft resumed flying. Planes from the carriers and cruiser scout planes alike scoured the horizons. When the pilots returned to their ships, they were agog at the extent of the naval power that had been mustered.
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VICE ADMIRAL GHORMLEY arrived in Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, on August 1. The French island colony had never been envisioned as a springboard for major military operations. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, France’s last monarch, wanted it as a penal colony. Even U.S. naval planners didn’t foresee its importance until Japan’s rise as a power encouraged the development of a secondary path to Asia, across the South Pacific, as an alternative to the newly threatened primary Pacific route passing through Guam.
Named Port-de-France on its annexation by France in 1854, Nouméa featured a spacious inner harbor in Dumbea Bay. It was slow to develop. Nearly a century later, it had but a single large pier, and the marine railway serving it could handle only small vessels. Its yard could not repair damage such as Japanese battleships were likely to inflict. Arriving ships sometimes found no harbor pilots to guide them in, which was unfortunate seeing as the channels into Great Roads, the outer harbor, passed through a treacherous barrier reef ten miles to seaward and old French mines were known to be about. The progress of the world seemed to leave Nouméa behind. The energies of even the most vigorous empires seemed to fade in the fronded South Pacific.
American logisticians came to see that their cargoes would have reached Guadalcanal faster if they were routed through the more capacious facilities in Auckland, more than a thousand miles farther south. Nouméa’s principal value lay in its potential. Its location would be the foundation of everything that would follow. If it was located too far south to serve as a staging and support area for operations in the Central Pacific, but not far enough to the rear to be an arsenal secure against all enemy threats, American military surveyors found it was the best place in Oceania from which to manage Operations Pestilence and Watchtower. Reasonably close to both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, it was a natural way station for flights originating in the eastern Pacific. The island was large enough for several armies to garrison there. Great Roads, well sheltered by reefs, could accommodate almost every U.S. warship in the Pacific.
On arrival, Ghormley found himself in the midst of a near insurrection. The unrest in the French colony was the product of a power struggle between a popular local governor and the man Charles de Gaulle had appointed as his high commissioner in the Pacific. The commander of the U.S. Army garrison nearly had to declare martial law to end their quarrel over imperial administration. The political tension in Nouméa reflected the brittle state of organization in a region that America badly needed to be stable. Without stability, it would be hard to grow a network of self-supporting advance bases from which to generate an offensive. But things could have been far worse than they were: Had the French administration in New Caledonia cast its lot with the Axis, as their counterparts in French Indochina had, America’s sea-lanes to Australia would have been closed with or without a Japanese airfield on Guadalcanal.
The Americans made their military headquarters in the optimistically named Grand Hotel, a two-story wooden structure on the waterfront, unpainted and weather-beaten. Next to the fleet landing was the small Hotel du Pacifique, which was soon to become one of the most bustling officers’ clubs south of Pearl Harbor. Behind its double wrought-iron gate was a tree-shaded courtyard with a bar said to be the longest in the Pacific. The appeal of the place—beer for fifteen cents, shots for a quarter—would be evident from the condition of the courtyard in time: “pounded flat into baked mud by the dusty shoes of thousands of officers,” as a late-coming destroyer officer put it.
When U.S. servicemen first arrived on Nouméa in March, it became clear that the affection of Frenchmen for Americans was inversely proportional to the proximity of an Axis power. In negotiating for use of the island, Ghormley found the colonial administration fearful for its sovereignty. Well seasoned in the sensitivities of European diplomacy, Ghormley assured De Gaulle’s man that the United States had no permanent imperial ambitions in New Caledonia. America’s intention, Ghormley said, was solely to defeat Japan. When pressed, he pointed to the likely treatment the French would receive after a Japanese conquest. He found the people of the islands considerably more appreciative than their government, if for reasons that hardly seemed helpful in the middle of a total war against world fascism. According to the Navy’s official history of the South Pacific Area, “Almost every French civilian hopes America will stay in the area to curb the British; and the British civilians hope we will stay to discipline the French.”
For Ghormley and American officers straight down the line, curbing the Japanese with an unprecedented amphibious offensive was the more urgent challenge. It would require innovation across the board. “The war in our area must be considered a warfare under a new name—‘Island Warfare,’ ” Ghormley wrote Slew McCain. “Young U.S. officers and men have many ideas as to warfare.… Encourage new ideas and use the good ones.” Ghormley’s communications up the chain of command, however, reflected a less hopeful tone. In a secret letter to Nimitz, he wrote, “I think our actual deficiencies are greater than are realized in Washington.… I am worried about our deficiencies in port organization at the Bases. These organizations are provided for on paper, but the actual shortage of officers and men to carry out war time port necessities, with nothing to fall back on in the Island bases, is tremendous.”
The leading navies of the world were situated in a challenging period between the age of fighting sail and the age of nuclear propulsion when fuel was consumable and therefore a critical limit on their reach. Once the term steaming replaced sailing in the naval lexicon, the concept of an operating radius took root. “If an enemy lay beyond that radius, the fleet might as well be chained to a post,” a maritime historian wrote.
BY DUSK ON AUGUST 5, with a heavy haze saddling the sea and some unlikely escorts, flying fish arcing and splashing amid rainbows in the bow spray, the ships of the Watchtower task force shaped a northward course. By skirting the radius of enemy air reconnaissance, Fletcher aimed to keep the fleet hidden from Japanese snoopers on the final run in.
Shortly after midnight on Friday, August 7, Fletcher’s expeditionary force approached Guadalcanal from the west. “God was with us during the approach,” the captain of the destroyer Monssen said, “because we had a complete overcast of clouds just about five hundred feet above us, complete dense white overcast of clouds, a perfectly calm night, not a ripple on the ocean.” To the hundreds of lookouts standing watch, the island revealed itself as a dark-against-dark silhouette, “vague, black and shapeless off our starboard bow,” Joe Custer wrote; “like a purple lump in a pool of oil,” according to George Kittredge, a turret officer in the Chicago. The moon was just rising, a waning crescent only five days to new, but its faint light was enough to make visible the plantation island’s interior mountains, and the round mound in the sound, Savo Island, ahead and just to port. The Chicago’s bow wave, curling back in a surge of salt spray every time it pressed into a swell, produced a great phosophorescent arrow that receded for miles off either quarter. Kittredge feared it would reveal them to the enemy. But the operation was going like clockwork. After everything—the sonar soundings of fish, the endless refueling, the tense waiting, the failed rehearsals, the massive ocean rendezvous six thousand miles from home—Fletcher’s task forces were just fifteen minutes behind the schedule that had been set weeks before.
Two powerful forces indigenous to the island competed to make the first impression on the newcomers: the scent of tropical flora and the stench of a rotted harvest. The abandoned Lever Brothers plantation’s fermenting fruits and the tropical vegetation everywhere else made a vivid blend, almost visual in its impact on the senses. En route to this place, the Navy had done well to avoid surprises. The diverse mélange of aromas was the first of many, small and large, that would find them at Guadalcanal.
Because submarine attack was among the worst surprises of all, fighting captains understood the importance of the blackout restriction: lights out, no smoking, exterior bulkhead doors and hatches tightly shut, no exceptions. The Astoria’s searchlights were turned in to keep their lenses from reflecting the moon. Turner’s transports were exhibiting less discipline. Lazing along off the Astoria’s port quarter, they were seen blinking signal lamps at one another. “What the hell do they think this is, Broadway?” someone asked. All nerves were atwitch. A Japanese naval patrol was widely expected to greet their arrival. As the amphibious force approached within three miles of Lunga Point, a strongpoint said by the coastwatchers to house antiaircraft gun emplacements, the commander of the landing force’s cruiser screen, Rear Admiral Victor A. C. Crutchley, Royal Navy, ordered his ships to draw a bead while the transports drew past. Shortly after 3 a.m., on all vessels, came the call to general quarters. Bugles blared through intercoms. Synthetic alarm bells summoned the heavy clambering of soles on steel decks and ladders. Then: “All hands man your battle stations! Set Condition One!”
As dawn broke, it was almost possible, from the high perspective of a cruiser’s foremast, to comprehend the work of the entire amphibious and bombardment force as one concerted effort, projected by a once-divided nation resolved to fight. In the Astoria, Joe James Custer, the war correspondent, lit a match, touched it to his cigarette, and looked down from the director platform at the showers of sparks shooting from the cowling of a scout plane throttling up on an amidships catapult. With a muffled blast the canvas-winged biplane was shot wobbling into the sky. It turned and headed for the island to serve as eyes for the guns. No sooner had the journalist stuffed a wad of cotton into each ear and slackened his jaw against the thunder he expected than he was lifted by a great concussion and thrown against a splinter shield that was draped with charts and posters showing Japanese aircraft silhouettes. A cruiser’s broadside did things like that. His helmet knocked askew, Custer was swallowed by a cloud of gray-white smoke from the Astoria’s nine main guns. Ahead, the Vincennes, Quincy, and Chicago were salvoing, too, tongues of yellow-green flame lashing out sudden and staccato from their eight-inch batteries. Seen from a distance, their projectiles lofted slowly, like lazy red flares, through the lightening predawn sky. When the red lines descended into the dark island, they split into shallow V’s, ricocheting through the hillsides and jungles, tearing up tree trunks, and repulverizing sand.
Distance was a cleansing agent for everything. “The pervasive mud, and jungle gloom and tropical sun, when they are not all around you smothering you, can have a haunting beauty at a far remove,” wrote an infantryman who would arrive at Guadalcanal later, James Jones. “When you are not straining and gasping to save your life, the act of doing so can seem adventurous and exciting from a distance. The greater the distance, the greater the adventure. But, God help me, it was beautiful.”
No one found the sunrise of August 7 more beautiful than the stranded British-colonial-agent-turned-spy, Martin Clemens, hiding out in Guadalcanal’s eastern hills. He was napping, having spent the previous night reporting to Townsville on the locations of Japanese troops and facilities, and making plans for his own escape. The deep concussion of the naval bombardment awakened him. Looking out to sea, he made out the dark forms of American cruisers low on the water. Overhead, gray-blue aircraft streaked by.
As Clemens’s heart surged, he tuned his teleradio to a frequency that was full of urgent chatter: aviator lingo, cast in a distinctive American twang. When one of his operatives, a Melanesian sergeant major named Jacob Vouza, found him, Clemens was in rapt bliss listening to the pilots’ voices. Off the beach near Lunga Point flowered a sight he had dreamed of: a friendly fleet drawing near, and landing craft churning toward his liberation. An “amazing panorama laid out as far as the eye can see, from Savo to Rua Sura, from Lunga to Tulagi—ships everywhere.” He made out fourteen troopships and half a dozen cruisers. He found the scene so surreal that he was moved to invoke the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock. “Calloo, callay, oh what a day!!!” he wrote. Flash. Salvo. Thrump. The guns of a friendly squadron were trained in anger on his miserable island.
As the American cruisers moved in closer, from ten thousand yards to four, and the destroyers closer still, the pilots Clemens had heard on the radio droned into view. The carrier planes split into elements and dove on their targets. Bob Ghormley did seem to appreciate the critical role the planes would play in the first days of the landings. On August 2, having debriefed Dan Callaghan after the Saratoga conference and learning of the argument between Fletcher and the others over the withdrawal of the carriers, Ghormley sent Fletcher a dispatch that read: “UNDER INFORMATION YOU PLAN TO WITHDRAW CARRIER SUPPORT FROM TULAGI AREA PRIOR TO DOG PLUS 3 DAYS. NECESSITY EXISTS OF PROVIDING CONTINUOUS FIGHTER COVERAGE FOR AREA.” General Vandegrift, for one, might have wondered why Dan Callaghan hadn’t emphasized this on Ghormley’s behalf at the conference.
If Ghormley’s message itself was unemphatic and less than specific, he offered some alternatives for accomplishing that goal, including ferrying squadrons of planes from the departing carriers to Guadalcanal, or stocking rear-area bases with external fuel tanks so that their fighters could grow longer legs and fulfill the mission. Fletcher was still weighing his options as the landing boats reached the line of departure off Guadalcanal, bound for the beach whose boundaries were marked off by colored smoke pots.
Across Savo Sound, the four transports assigned to Landing Group “Yoke” were already disgorging their marines for the assaults on Tulagi and Gavutu. Resistance there would be sharp. The delicate crack and stutter of small-arms fire was soon audible in the sound. The Chicago, joined by the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan and the destroyers Monssen and Buchanan, roamed offshore, main batteries flashing. Eight Japanese flying boats, caught at anchor in a bay south of Tulagi, went up like matchsticks under concentrated naval fire and air attack. Ashore, the last dispatch that the Japanese headquarters managed to send to Rabaul—“Enemy strength is overwhelming”—barely preceded the salvo from the San Juan that wrecked the station. So completely did these ships, under Rear Admiral Norman Scott, toss up the Gavutu waterfront that an element of the first wave had to be diverted from its original landing site, a seaplane ramp that was shattered by the fury of five-inch thirty-eights. A Lever Brothers’ dock nearby, somehow still intact, was used in its stead.
It was 9:10 a.m. when the marines of Landing Group “X-Ray”—assigned to seize Guadalcanal—prepared to embark in their landing boats. As the morning wind rose there came from the transports the slow grind of chains on davits as the landing craft settled into the sea. Streaming over the gunwales and crabbing down the nets draped overboard went the marines. The novel sights and sounds of amphibious war would become common: the throaty hum of aircraft streaking through the morning sky; diesel motors gurgling and swelling as the boats readied to make the run to shore; munitions depots and assorted flammable stores on shore blossoming bright within churning plumes of smoke; and then that smoke, dissolving and dispersing, becoming a gray haze that covered the area like dirty gauze.
Despite the ill omens of the rehearsals in Fiji, the actual landings on Guadalcanal were an anticlimax. When the marines hit Red Beach, five miles east of Lunga Point, they found an almost complete lack of opposition. Near the airfield, they gathered the spoils that the enemy workers left behind: meals still on the table, personal gear tossed in all directions, valuable equipment intact. They found ammunition, guns and artillery, fuel, radio equipment, trucks, road graders, refrigerators, and electrical generators. To keep watch over the area, they erected bamboo platforms on either side of the Lunga River, with views commanding Savo Sound as far west as Cape Esperance, and out to Koli Point in the east. Phone wires were unspooled from the platforms to General Vandegrift’s command post, and another line went to an Australian intelligence officer who monitored the network of coastwatchers in the Solomons chain.
The first wave made quick work of Guadalcanal’s beachhead, penetrating a mile and a half inland to the most prominent overwatch in the sector, the rocky fifteen-hundred-foot summit of Mount Austen, six miles south of the airfield site. On August 8 Vandegrift’s men would set up a defensive perimeter around the gravel-and-clay airstrip that was the objective of the whole operation. Seeing no enemy fire meeting the marines, Kelly Turner elected to anchor his cargo ships close in, just two thousand yards offshore, the better to unload them quickly.
Then on that morning, harbinger of things to come, the colors flew. The first American flag to be raised over conquered Japanese territory in this war was a scrap of bunting, six inches by eight, purchased by Lieutenant Evard J. Snell, USMC, in Vineland, New Jersey, on Memorial Day 1934. Faded and frayed by eight years of travel, it was run to the top of a captured Japanese flagpole at Kukum, eight months to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A detachment of leathernecks pushing inland paused briefly to give it a cheer. It was a modest display, but it made its point.