39

 

On the Spot

ON BOARD THE SAN FRANCISCO, HALSEY DECORATED MANY OF THE crew who had distinguished themselves, Jack Bennett among them. As the lieutenant junior grade’s name was called, Halsey said into the standing mike, “Step closer, son.” The words reverberated through the public-address system. When Halsey fixed the Navy Cross onto his shirt, its sharp pin stuck into Bennett’s flesh, and Bennett was keenly aware of the microphone inches from his mouth. “I knew that any sound of pain I uttered would also boom out over the speakers,” Bennett wrote. “I was already scared and now I had to grit my teeth and remain silent as the admiral continued trying to close the clasp, finally giving up when he saw the blood seeping through my shirt.”

The repair supervisors at Nouméa, determining that the Sterett needed structural work, made plans to send her back to Pearl. “No sooner had the repair team left,” Cal Calhoun wrote, “than we were told that Admiral Halsey himself was coming aboard to inspect our damage.” No one could have failed to recognize the bushy eyebrows, the strong chin, or the direct gaze that bespoke confidence and strength. “He shook hands with each of us,” Calhoun wrote, “and asked to be shown all of our battle damage.” Halsey listened intently as Captain Coward cataloged the cost, human and material, extracted by each hit. “From time to time he simply shook his head as we described events,” Lieutenant Calhoun wrote. By the end of the briefing, Halsey had tears in his eyes. In a low voice, he told Coward and his senior officers how proud he was of them.

“I wish I could recall his exact words,” Calhoun wrote, “but I do remember some of his thoughts—he regretted that he had to send destroyers against battleships but was sure that the small ships would do their utmost; he was amazed that any destroyer could absorb eleven shell hits (three of which were fourteen-inch projectiles) and still steam away from the action under her own power; he was profoundly moved by the many stories of heroism, and by the mute but eloquent evidence of punishment and sacrifice that was apparent at every turn as he toured the ship. Finally he thanked us, with a sincerity that added a special quality to his words, and said, ‘God bless you!’ We stood there filled with admiration, respect, and pride and watched him climb into a waiting jeep and drive off. It was an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime occasion. To those of us who witnessed it, Admiral Halsey’s name will always lead the list of inspirational combat leaders of World War II.”

ON NOVEMBER 22, Admiral Halsey shared his thinking with Nimitz concerning his decision to relieve Gil Hoover:

After analysis of the situation presented, I consider that the commanding officer, Helena, senior officer present in the task group, committed a serious and costly error in the action which he took; specifically:

a) He should have made radio report of the torpedoing at once. Radio silence, as a measure of concealment, had ceased to be effective since the enemy was in contact. Only positive action to keep him submerged could be expected to delay his report.

b) He should have instituted offensive action, together with, or closely followed by, rescue operations, utilizing at least one of his destroyers.

His failure to take prompt action on the above lines was further aggravated by lack of any follow-up to insure that senior commands were informed of the Juneau’s loss. Commander South Pacific was first apprised of this fact as a result of his own inquiry into Juneau’s status when she was not included in the arrival report of the group.

…

In view of the above circumstances, I have this date relieved Captain G. C. Hoover of his command of the USS Helena, and ordered him by dispatch to proceed by the first available government air transportation and report to Commander-in-Chief for reassignment.

Canny, cautious, and discerning, Admiral Spruance picked up on an assumption that underlay Halsey’s censure—that Hoover had had the means at hand to attack the enemy submarine. He asked Hoover for comment, asking specifically whether his two destroyers had functioning sonar systems. Hoover conceded that both the Fletcher and Sterett had working sound gear, though the latter was badly damaged. He added that he felt the need to bring damaged ships safely home outweighed the uncertain gain of searching for survivors of a vessel that had exploded so violently. Hoover emphasized the dangerous nature of the waters he was transiting, pointing to the dispatch the Juneau sent him that morning, notifying him of the threat of enemy aircraft and urging him to ask for prompt support from the Enterprise task force. He mentioned that neither the Helena nor the San Francisco had planes on board to hunt submarines.

But the merits of arguments no longer mattered. The fix was in. According to Bin Cochran of the Helena, the brawling and ill-tempered Captain Miles Browning, Halsey’s chief of staff, had argued fiercely for Hoover’s relief and later bragged about having Hoover sacked. Cochran, like most of his shipmates, held Hoover in high esteem for the coolheaded manner in which he had led the ship through two ferocious actions. Browning impressed people less.

Even Chester Nimitz’s moderating voice couldn’t overcome the damning effect of Halsey’s memo. As reports and memoranda proceed up the Navy’s chain of command, commanders are given the chance to add their own comments, or “endorsements,” for the benefit of higher-ups. In his December 4 endorsement to Admiral King’s copy of the memo, Nimitz acknowledged the difficult trial Hoover faced, confronted with a hard decision in perilous waters. He stated that the failure of the B-17 to report the loss of the Juneau in time was not Hoover’s fault. Referring to sighting reports Hoover had received of enemy carriers, surface ships, and submarines nearby, he wrote, “Under these conditions the situation confronting Captain Hoover was one in which the necessity for getting his damaged ships back to a base was balanced against the natural instinct of every naval officer to go to the rescue of officers and men in distress and danger. Whatever may be the opinion of Captain Hoover’s decision in this matter, he was the responsible officer on the spot and, from his war record, which includes two important night engagements, his courage may not be questioned.” Breaking with Halsey, Nimitz recommended that King give Hoover “a suitable command at sea” after some time to rest.

It didn’t matter. In the competitive, political world of the admiralty, written criticism from an area commander was inerasable, a terminal act. Halsey’s impulsive disgust could not be unwritten, not by the Pacific Ocean Area commander in chief, and not even by Halsey himself after he later admitted that he had acted unjustly and in haste. The variances in Halsey’s written accounts of his evaluation of Hoover’s performance are curious. In his memoirs he offered “a confession of a grievous mistake.… I concluded that I had been guilty of an injustice.” The draft manuscript of his memoirs offers a fuller discussion of these events than appears in the published version.

CinCPac was in disagreement with me on my judgment, wondering if I had done an injustice to a man who had had a magnificent combat record. I was finally convinced that this man at the time in question was suffering from an aggravated case of combat fatigue and that his guts alone had kept him going. In modern warfare guts are not always enough—a man’s brain must be clear. I wrote an official letter stating my belief that this officer had been suffering from combat fatigue at that time and that I had possibly committed an error of judgment in detaching him under such drastic circumstances. I requested that he be given a combatant command and stated that I should be delighted to have him in such a position under my command. I am afraid that my late action in attempting to clear this officer of the stigma that resulted from my detaching him had not been successful although it most certainly alleviated his feelings. I am deeply regretful of the whole incident. I have already acknowledged my mistake to him and to the Navy Department, and here I acknowledge it publicly. It is a tribute to the caliber of this officer that our personal relations are excellent.

In the published version, Halsey added that “Hoover’s decision was in the best interests of victory,” even as he removed the mea culpa about the tardiness of his change of heart and recast his role, in his account of how the original judgment was reached, from skeptical lead inquisitor to reluctant rubber-stamper of a staff recommendation.

In Nimitz’s careful handling of the Hoover question, Halsey must have eventually seen the virtue of restraint in second-guessing combat commanders.¹ Still, the Navy felt the need to arbitrate questions of culpability for defeat, even during wartime. Just as the Guadalcanal campaign was turning its way, it was preparing to launch an investigation into the causes of the fiasco that was the Battle of Savo Island.

DAN CALLAGHAN AND Norman Scott, in death, had shown an aggressive style that would carry the Navy’s surface forces to victory. Willis Lee continued in that spirit, refining the state of the art with his battleships. They and their fighting sailors had stopped the Tokyo Express cold in November. Still, there was plenty of fodder for recrimination, for the surface fleet’s first victories were won despite many avoidable errors.

Admiral Pye, from his billet as president of the Naval War College, criticized Callaghan’s preparations and dispositions. “Orders such as ‘Give them hell’ and ‘We want the big ones’ make better newspaper headlines than they do battle plans.… A study of the naval actions so far in this war gives the impression that such successes as we have had have been largely due to the individual excellence of our ships and their crews, and not to exceptionally good use made of them by the commanders.” Sharp words flew about what commanders did and should have done, but in death Scott and Callaghan were spared the indignity of inquiry. Concerning Callaghan’s performance, Pye finally concluded, “There is no telling ‘what might have been.’ In this case we seem to have got some of the breaks of luck that the enemy got in the Battle of Savo Island. On the other hand, we seem to have repeated some of the errors—even exaggerated them—made a month earlier in the Battle of Cape Esperance.”

The victories of November added new complexity to the arguments in Washington about where America’s principal worldwide axis of effort should lie and opened up new avenues of possibility to take the offensive against the Japanese. Nimitz and MacArthur would long argue how best to exploit these. On October 24, as the Battle of Santa Cruz was looming, President Roosevelt had said a diversion of resources to hold Guadalcanal was needed to “take advantage of our success.” Pressured by both Admiral King and General Marshall not to neglect the Pacific—“We cannot permit the present critical situation in the Southwest Pacific to develop into a second Bataan,” they wrote—Roosevelt agreed to a cutback of forces flowing to England. As Major General Thomas T. Handy of the U.S. Army General Staff confided to General Marshall, “our main amphibious operations in 1943 are likely to be in the Pacific” and called the argument about Germany-first or Japan-first “largely academic.”

Now one of the Army’s foremost strategists, Lieutenant General Stanley Embick, provided a forceful rationale for abandoning the worldwide strategy long held to, at least in name, by the American and British commands. He pointed out on November 20 that under the prewar ABC-1 agreement, Britain was supposed to take first responsibility for the Far East theater while the U.S. fleet diverted Japan by threatening its flank. In reality, of course, those two roles were inverted. In line with the realities of geography and heavy industry, the Americans had taken the lead in their western ocean. And the fact of that leadership, Embick believed, changed everything. “Having assumed this commitment the U.S. must therefore maintain their position as a first charge,” he wrote.

With even Army leaders advocating a Pacific-first strategy, the state of joint strategic planning was tenuous at best. Far from solving any problems, the diverse opinion within the Army allowed the old arguments among the services, and among the Allies, to gain new fervor. The lack of a consensus within American ranks effectively left Germany-first to exist only in the minds of politicians. The numbers spoke for themselves: At the end of 1942, the United States would field nearly 25 percent more combat troops in the Pacific than it did in England and North Africa, 464,000 to 378,000. The gap between Roosevelt’s words and his military’s work caused Britain’s service chiefs to lament the very idea of combined planning with their Atlantic cousins. Their best insurance against America pursuing a full-on Pacific-first strategy was Churchill’s friendship with Roosevelt. If Japan was traumatized by the bulldog savagery of the American defense of Guadalcanal, the British didn’t care much for its implications, either.

ON THE MORNING OF November 23, Halsey wrote to his commanders to describe the array of new naval forces flowing into the South Pacific. The Saratoga was coming back. With the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan and a squadron of destroyers, she would re-form the nucleus of Task Force 11. The Enterprise, with the antiaircraft cruiser San Diego and Hoover’s old Desron 2, would continue to comprise Task Force 16. Lee, shorn of the South Dakota now but soon to be given two more fast battleships, the repaired North Carolinaand the brand-new Indiana, flew Task Force 64’s flag in the Washington. With the fuel oil bottleneck finally easing, two older battleships, the Maryland and Colorado, would come south as Task Force 65 under Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill.

Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, whom Halsey relieved of command of Task Force 16 because a better-qualified aviation man, Rear Admiral Frederick C. Sherman, was available, would take the cruiser striking force, Task Force 67, with the heavies Northampton, Pensacola, New Orleans,the light cruisers Honolulu and Helena, and six destroyers. Task Force 66 came into being as well, with eight destroyers.

Five days later, Halsey announced their new strategic objective, Rabaul. He wrote MacArthur saying that New Guinea couldn’t be secured until the Japanese strongpoint in the Bismarcks was under American control. He also staked the Navy’s claim to the job, arguing that the attack against Rabaul “must be amphibious along the Solomons with New Guinea land position basically a supporting one only. I am currently reinforcing Cactus position and expediting means of operating heavy air from there. It is my belief that the sound procedure at this time is to maintain as strong a land and air pressure against the Japanese Buna position as your lines of communication permit, and continue to extract a constant toll of Japanese shipping, an attrition which if continued at the present rate he can not long sustain.” The attrition wasn’t easy on the Americans, either. Even with the new naval units on hand, Halsey’s plan to surge toward Rabaul, much like MacArthur’s similar concept earlier that year, seemed ambitious with the limited amphibious resources he had immediately at hand.

In late November Halsey received his fourth star, elevating him from vice admiral to admiral. When it was discovered that Nouméa was short of four-star pins for his epaulets, the Navy obtained a pair of two-star pins from a Marine major general and had them reconfigured by a repair ship’s welding shop. After Vice Admiral William L. Calhoun presented Halsey with the makeshift four-star insignia, Halsey turned in his three-star pins and said, “Send one of these to Mrs. Scott and the other to Mrs. Callaghan. Tell them it was their husbands’ bravery that got me my new ones.”

Whatever else could be said of William F. Halsey, no one would complain that he didn’t lead from the front. He had felt the concussion of Japanese gunfire. And as November came to an end, the Japanese would demonstrate that they had a few good salvos left in them. They had not yet given up on Jack London’s least favorite island.