40
AFTER THE STEEL-MAULING BATTLES OF NOVEMBER, BOTH FLEETS were left to improvise. The night of November 30–December 1 saw the first attempt by the Tokyo Express to deliver supplies using drums lashed together with ropes. Destroyers would steam in close to shore, then drop the drums overboard for small craft to retrieve for the troops. Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka was the architect of the new approach.
In the face of the daily distress calls from the supply-straitened Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal, the officers of Destroyer Squadron 2 were resigned to the new role forced upon them. Tanaka’s chief of staff, Commander Yasumi Toyama, lamented bitterly, “Ahhh, we are more a freighter convoy than a fighting squadron these days. The damn Yankees have dubbed us the Tokyo Express. We transport cargo to that cursed island, and our orders are to flee rather than fight. What a stupid thing!” For the crews of fighting ships, the life of the blockade runner was “a strenuous and unsatisfying routine.”
On November 27, Tanaka steamed south from the Shortlands on a high-speed convoy run. Their sortie was not long a secret. Quickly the American patrol planes spied them from above the clouds: eight destroyers, six serving as transports, laden with supplies, magazines at half capacity, carrying eight torpedoes instead of the usual sixteen, to save on weight.
Planning for its reception was well along. As Tanaka was leaving Rabaul, Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid was sitting down to apply the knowledge the surface fleet had purchased with the lives of more than four thousand men to date. He was rewriting Task Force 67’s operations plan. Op Plan 1–42 applied recent experience methodically. The confusions of early battles would be banished by forethought. Ship captains would know what to do automatically. Certain procedures would be established and used by default. The task force would be organized and deployed to reflect a best-practices approach to battle. Norman Scott’s improvised doctrine of night battle would be refined, encoded as doctrine, and circulated for general use.
Except for the use of the radar, whose virtues were now well recognized, the new doctrine sounded a lot like what the Japanese had been doing from the start. As the enemy was scouted by radar (the Japanese used ship-launched floatplanes to the same end), the destroyers would surge forward independently at first contact to make a surprise torpedo attack. Then, as the time of their impact came, the cruisers, till then standing off at more than twelve thousand yards, would open fire while their aircraft lazed overhead dropping flares. If targets were lost, star shells could be used, but searchlights were strictly forbidden. All that was needed to turn the plan to a victory were more good ships and another cast of sailors willing to risk their lives to put ordnance on target first.
As the ships most recently assigned to Task Force 67 licked their wounds and headed home for repair, as new steel plates replaced those shattered in battle, a new task force came together at Espiritu Santo. Its haphazard nature was, once again, a reflection of the perpetual emergency besetting Admiral Halsey. He would refer to its composition as “a compromise dictated by necessity.” Cruisers were borrowed from carrier task forces, destroyers from convoy assignment. They would be the same men who had lined the rails at Espiritu Santo and given the San Francisco a thunderous cheer. They came together at the end of November as a reconstituted Task Force 67 and made ready to fend off the Tokyo Express once again.
At Naval Base Guadalcanal, Lloyd Mustin and his operations team were working on the fly, too, trying to find a way to better use the daring but undisciplined PT boat force assigned to the area. The squadron now had fifteen boats, up from just four a few weeks earlier. But given the fluid and occasionally slipshod organization at Tulagi, Mustin found it hard to coordinate their sorties with the other naval forces in the area. Some destroyer commanders resisted involving their tin cans with the “hooligan Navy,” mainly out of fear that it would be difficult to keep from stepping on one another’s toes. “I thought we had better improve that,” Mustin said, “or somebody was going to get hurt.” Having seen the value of the intelligence that PT skippers acquired during their patrols in Savo Sound, Mustin chose, in the name of better cooperation, a PT boat man as his assistant operations officer. They figured out how many boats were available nightly, determined how frequently they could be used, set up patrol schedules, and began innovating new approaches to attacking the Japanese submarines and destroyers in the waters off Guadalcanal. Finding that Japanese destroyers could catch and run down PT boats on a clear night, he settled on a game of cat and mouse. The young PT boat officers learned to avoid being silhouetted in open water while avoiding flat water that would show their wakes, and to attack using diversions, with some boats working as decoys while boats closer to shore rushed in. As they changed their schemes, the Japanese did, too.
On the night of November 30, however, the PT boats were ordered to stay put at Tulagi. Something larger than they were cut out for was brewing that night. It was another run of the Tokyo Express, eight destroyers under Rear Admiral Tanaka. A large American force was gathering at Espiritu Santo to intercept him.
True to form, the Navy, on the eve of the mission, replaced Kinkaid with a new commander. Kinkaid balked at his reassignment from a carrier task force and wanted no further part of the South Pacific. And so, as Dan Callaghan had supplanted Norman Scott, as Cassin Young and Joe Hubbard had relieved Charles McMorris and Mark Crouter on the San Francisco, Rear Admiral Carleton Wright now became the officer in tactical command of Task Force 67. Long of service in the South Pacific but new to surface combat, Wright flew his flag in the newly arrived Minneapolis, leading a scratch team of four other cruisers—the New Orleans, Pensacola, Honolulu, and Northampton.
These newcomers to the Ironbottom Sound surface striking force, most of them reassigned from carrier escort duty, were a bit like replacement troops going forward to the front lines from rear-area antiaircraft battalions. They wore the same uniforms and wielded the same weapons, but they weren’t wise in the bitter discipline of close combat. None of the four cruisers had had any part in the four surface actions fought in Savo Sound to this point. It could not be said, either, that they were commanded by the officer best equipped to prepare them for that new type of fight. The only surface-force flag officer alive who had fought and beaten the Japanese Navy, Willis Lee, was back in port with his squadron, tending to the Washington at Nouméa. Though both were veteran cruiser commanders, neither Kinkaid nor Wright had fought a night action before, nor executed a tactical plan such as they were now designing.
They departed Espiritu Santo’s Segond Channel anchorage at 11:30 p.m. on November 29, following a van composed of the destroyers Fletcher, Drayton, Maury, and Perkins. When they reached the eastern entrance to Lengo Channel at nine forty the next night, Wright’s task force encountered some friendly transports. Augmenting his tag team, Halsey ordered two of their escorts, the Lamson and Lardner, to fall in astern the Northampton. And so another pickup squad with fresh leadership and big ideas headed north toward its destiny.
The Fletcher, with its modern SG radar, rode at the head of the line. If this was an improvement over Callaghan’s approach two weeks before, the urge to hesitate would once again rise as a plague. According to the Fletcher’s executive officer, Lieutenant Joseph C. Wylie, “About the last visual dispatch we got before dusk settled in were instructions stating not to commence firing without permission.”
Wylie was on the radar when strange contacts began to register. The first one appeared to the radar officer in the Minneapolis like “a small wart on Cape Esperance which grew larger and finally detached itself from the outline of the land mass.” As Tanaka’s force steamed within range of the American microwaves, Wylie reported their bearing, course, and speed to the other destroyers. With torpedoes ready, he radioed Wright, “REQUEST PERMISSION TO FIRE TORPEDOES.” Wylie would call the task force commander’s response “the most stupid thing that I have ever heard of.” It was a single word: “NO.” Wright deemed the range too long.
For four critical minutes Wright mulled the black night from the bridge of the Minneapolis. When he finally granted permission to the destroyers to fire their torpedoes, the radar showed that their targets had already passed them abeam, leaving the American missiles to pursue them from astern, a fruitless waste of fighting power. When Wright ordered the cruisers to open fire less than a minute after the destroyers had let fly, surprise became a casualty of impulsiveness, and what ensued was another confused free-for-all. As cruiser gunfire obliterated the senses, Wright lost sight of his targets behind the walls of water raised in front of them by American guns.
The spectacle was familiar to men observing from the beach. Lloyd Mustin and the others at Captain Greenman’s headquarters saw great flashes of light that were too large to be mere gun discharges. They didn’t know whose ships were out there bursting into flames, and there would be no knowing till morning. Suddenly and anticlimactically, Mustin’s radio went silent. The sober messages that trickled in to Radio Guadalcanal over the next couple of hours told the story. From the Minneapolis came a dispatch before dawn that she had been torpedoed and was under way for Lunga at half a knot. The Pensacola weighed in with a similar report. Then Admiral Wright raised Greenman, asking: “CAN YOU SEND BOATS TOWARD SAVO?” The implications of the request were clear enough. Mustin instructed the Bobolink and four PT boats to sweep the sound, while Wright’s second in command, Rear Admiral Mahlon S. Tisdale, ordered the destroyers to assist damaged cruisers northwest of Lunga Point. Wright then passed along a fuller report of the shattering damage inflicted on his task force and asked him to send it to Halsey.
The news of the rout was shocking to anyone who believed the fleet was at last on the path to victory. Wanting a clearer picture, Captain Greenman ordered Mustin to go up as an airborne observer to survey the sound. Racing to Henderson Field at dawn, the Atlanta survivor climbed into the rear seat of a Dauntless. The Marine pilot checked him out on the dive-bomber’s twin-mounted Brownings, and they took to the skies.
Gaining altitude over Ironbottom Sound, Mustin could see no ships anywhere. He raised the PT boat headquarters at Tulagi, but the mosquito fleet didn’t know much, either. Several long turns over the waters south of Savo yielded no clues until the morning sun reached the proper angle to the water, and then he saw it: a wide sprawling oil slick trailing away to the west with the friction of an eight-knot wind. It marked the resting place of yet another American ship in what some would call the Savo Navy Yard, or Ironbottom Sound. Her identity would be established soon enough. It was the Northampton, gutted by torpedoes fired by Tanaka’s surprised but quick-triggered destroyer commanders.
When Wright’s cruisers opened fire, they erred in concentrating on a single ship, the destroyer Takanami, riding ahead of Tanaka’s group as a picket. As American projectiles straddled her and she returned fire, the cruisers’ salvos, drawn to the light, converged in earnest. With memories still haunting the Japanese of what the Washington and South Dakota had wrought fifteen days before, it was easy for Tanaka to believe the American force included battleships.
Surprised but resilient, Tanaka ordered all commanders, “Belay supply schedule! All ships, prepare to fight!” The crews cast loose as many supply drums as they could when they brought their batteries to bear. Shielded by the flames of the Takanami, much as the Washington had been masked by the burning destroyers a few weeks before, Tanaka accelerated to full speed and ordered a course reversal that brought his column running parallel to his targets. His destroyers proceeded to let loose with one of the most lethal torpedo salvos of the war.
From on high in the rear seat of a Dauntless, Mustin could see the evidence of the swarm of fish that had beset Task Force 67. Washed up on Guadalcanal’s northern beaches and Savo Island, their long forms lay at angles on the sand. Many were shiny and new, recently run aground. A great many more, of both American and Japanese origin, had decayed to rust, long of residence ashore. Their numbers spoke to the great volume of underwater ordnance loosed in both directions in these waters over the past few months.
Amid the flotsam on the sea below, Mustin could make out the workaday paraphernalia of U.S. Navy shipboard life: powder cases, wooden shoring, life rafts, donut rings, and wreckage of varied kinds. There were a great many sailors in the water, too, and many more waved from the shores of Savo. The PT boats were soon among them. Tulagi’s “splinter fleet” puttered about, joining the Fletcher and Drayton in rescue duty.
Turning to pass over Tulagi, Mustin finally saw some large American ships. The Minneapolis and New Orleans were tied up close to shore, in the triage unit for wounded U.S. cruisers, mangled and nearly unrecognizable. The New Orleans had had her forecastle, about 150 feet of hull, removed clear back to her second turret by a single Long Lance. Its blast had triggered an adjoining magazine full of aircraft bombs and a large demolition charge, throwing a tower of flames and sparks twice as high as the foremast and turning the surrounding sea into a mass of flame. One hundred and eighty-two men, including the entire crew of turret two, died by shock. As the ship turned right, a fifty-yard length of the ship’s own bow and forecastle tore away to port. One end of this heavy wreckage subducted under the keel, and the other bounced along the port side of the hull, tearing holes and wrecking the port inboard propeller. Sailors stationed aft believed they were running over the sinking carcass of the Minneapolis ahead.
Confronted with this cataclysm, Captain Clifford H. Roper passed the order to abandon ship. However, the exec, Commander Whitaker F. Riggs, canceled the order from his station in the rear of the ship, and ordered the crew to “lighten ship” with an eye toward saving her. And that’s just what they did.
As the New Orleans nodded under by the bow, her broken nose plowing up a pile of foam, open to the sea, the damage-control officer, Lieutenant Commander Hubert M. Hayter, and two subordinates, Lieutenant Richard A. Haines and Ensign Andrew L. Forman, remained at their post deep below in Central Station as it filled with toxic gas. When the air became unbreathable, Hayter gave his gas mask to an enlisted man who was suffering, then ordered all hands to evacuate. Two avenues of escape were available. One, a trunk that led from Central Station to the main deck, was blocked by flooding above, and Commander Hayter knew this. The other was a narrow, three-foot-diameter steel tube that led upward to the wardroom. The plotting room crew scurried up through it, but when Hayter’s turn came, he found that his shoulders were too broad to fit through the opening to the tube, which was reinforced with a thick steel collar. Ordering “Small men first,” he returned to his desk and resumed his damage-control duties. Haines and Forman remained with him in their increasingly untenable station until all three were asphyxiated. “I wondered what he thought about in those final minutes,” the ship’s chaplain, Howell M. Forgy, would write, “but I knew one thing: he was not afraid.”
Forward, at the site of the magazine explosion, a sailor named Gust Swenning, shipfitter second class, dove beneath the rising waters to locate and wrestle closed an open watertight hatch that was causing the ship’s sickbay compartment to flood. Badly injured in the initial explosion, and struggling against heavy fumes, Swenning plunged into the dark, dangerous void at least five times, groping around until he finally closed the hatch. He remained on duty through most of the next day until, lungs poisoned by noxious elements, he died of pulmonary edema.
Tied up to Tulagi’s shore, the shattered hull of the New Orleans, truncated like a barge, lay draped in vegetation and cargo nets to hide it from enemy planes. It was an inglorious state for the ship whose chaplain, Commander Forgy, had coined the immortal phrase “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” while exhorting his ship’s antiaircraft gunners under attack at Pearl Harbor. The Minneapolis was alongside her, too, similarly coiffed, the tug Bobolink serving as a pump house to keep her leaks from pulling her under. The crews of the broken ships hauled logs out of Tulagi’s jungle to use as shoring for the forward compartments, and arranged with the Marine chaplain ashore to bury the dead.
The Pensacola was lucky to survive a battering by Long Lances. One of them shattered a full oil tank forward of turret three, tore the deck open above it, and splashed a fiery wave of oil all over the after part of the ship, topside and belowdecks. With the after fire main destroyed, her crew fought severe oil fires through the night, spreading carbon dioxide and foam compounds by hand as the ship was concussed by the deep cadence of eight-inch rounds detonating, one by one, all 150 of them, in the after magazine.
Wright might have expected better of his task force, given that he had surprised Tanaka by radar at long range. Three of his cruisers (all but the Pensacola and Northampton) enjoyed the superb sight picture provided by the advanced SG radar. But Wright understood little of the combat capability of his enemy. In his December 9 after-action report, he concluded that the torpedoings of the Pensacola and Northampton had been lucky shots from submarines. “The observed positions of the enemy surface vessels before and during the gun action makes it seem improbable that torpedoes with speed–distance characteristics similar to our own could have reached the cruisers.” Of course, Wright’s torpedoes were nothing like those of the Japanese.
Nearly a year into the war, and four months into a bitter campaign against Japanese surface forces, it seems incomprehensible that an American cruiser commander could be unaware of the enemy advantage in torpedo warfare. Norman Scott had called it specifically to Admiral Halsey’s attention in October. The reports were there to be read. Before he rode to his death in the naval campaign for Java, the captain of the heavy cruiser Houston, Captain Albert H. Rooks, turned over to a colleague in Darwin an analysis he had written three weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. It discussed at length Japan’s prowess in torpedo combat and described their aggressively realistic night battle training. Their mastery of this specialty had been recommended to them by their experience in the Russo-Japanese War. When their diplomats agreed to constrain the size of their big-gun fleet at the Washington Conference, the Japanese, like other navies, emphasized construction of their light forces. Rooks’s prewar report, which was based substantially on existing work of the Office of Naval Intelligence, never found its way into the battle plans. Not even Halsey grasped the superiority of Japanese surface-ship torpedoes. After Tassafaronga he endorsed Wright’s view that the outcome had to have been the result of submarines. Norman Scott’s October victory over a surprised Japanese force that failed to get its torpedoes into the water might have led the Americans to underestimate the weapon and place undue importance on gunnery.
The reward for this ignorance was to see four proud ships, two of them fitted with the new radar that had proven decisive in more capable hands, “picked off like mechanical ducks in a carnival shooting gallery,” as Samuel Eliot Morison would put it. Only the Honolulu, a sister ship to the Helena, had been able to avoid the burning wrecks ahead and zigzag clear of the torpedo water. The Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Pensacola were put out of action for almost a year.
Generous in defeat, Wright recommended all five of his cruiser captains for the Navy Cross, writing speciously that each had “contributed greatly to the destruction of all enemy vessels within range.” He made the wildly inaccurate claim that Task Force 67 had sunk two light cruisers and seven destroyers and praised the Northampton’s captain for the speed with which his crew abandoned ship. The award to Captain Roper of the New Orleans would puzzle survivors of that ship—“He did nothing heroic in any sense,” one would write. Having crushed Wright’s force, Tanaka faced a predicament comparable to the one his countryman Mikawa had faced in August. As he regrouped fifty miles from Guadalcanal’s beach, he found that his ships were low on torpedoes. With only two destroyers fully loaded, he decided he was no longer in shape to risk another fight. He gave the order to return to Rabaul. Though his reputation was high among Americans, Tanaka would take lumps at home for declining to exploit his victory by delivering his supplies to the island. Here as in August, the Americans, for all their failings, could interpret a ghastly result as a win.
Order of Battle—Battle of Tassafaronga
(November 30, 1942)
U.S.
TASK FORCE 67
Rear Adm. Carleton H. Wright
Minneapolis (CA) (flagship)
New Orleans (CA)
Pensacola (CA)
Northampton (CA)
Honolulu (CL)
Fletcher (DD)
Drayton (DD)
Maury (DD)
Perkins (DD)
Lamson (DD)
Lardner (DD)
Japan
REINFORCEMENT UNIT
Rear Adm. Raizo Tanaka
Naganami (flagship)
Takanami (DD)
Oyashio (DD)
Kuroshio (DD)
Kagero (DD)
Makinami (DD)
Kawakaze (DD)
Suzukaze (DD)
(Photo Credit: 40.1)
* * *
WITH THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE Army’s transport force decimated, and attrition to his destroyers reaching critical levels, Yamamoto was hard-pressed to provision the Imperial Army on Guadalcanal. The Japanese soldiers ashore were nourished by a withering vine. Of the thirty thousand men serving there at the end of November, it was estimated that just forty-two hundred were fit to fight. One three-thousand-man regiment reportedly had just sixty to seventy men capable of service. Admiral Ugaki called the cargo load of supplies landed in the last week of November “just chicken feed for thirty thousand men.” On December 3, fifteen hundred drums were delivered without heavy opposition from the American fleet, but only about a third of the drums were recovered by the troops. On December 7, the Tokyo Express ran again, eleven destroyers under Captain Torajiro Sato. Planes from Henderson harassed them, and eight PT boats roared in after them, too. It was an inconsequential skirmish, but the unexpected presence of enemy combat forces compelled the Japanese to withdraw.
As new American naval forces steamed toward the South Pacific, a decisive victory was no longer within Yamamoto’s grasp. Only after it had slipped from his fingers would he recognize the opportunity he had had within his reach in September and October. The time for the battle had passed. It had been preempted, if not won, by Scott, Callaghan, Lee, and, in his way, Wright. The U.S. Navy’s narrow victories of November allowed it to absorb a catastrophe like Tassafaronga. This defeat resembled the first one, the Battle of Savo Island, in that it shored up, at fearful cost, the position of the men on the island and allowed them to build up strength to fight in their own defense.
Tanaka’s final “drum runs” in December provoked no further large naval battles. No significant American formations were mustered to meet him, but he met fierce resistance from Henderson Field’s aviators and the PT boats from Tulagi, which inflicted incremental losses on the Tokyo Express and forced Yamamoto to begin diverting submarines from hunting ships to running the blockade. On the night of the ninth, a pair of PT boats caught a Japanese sub on the surface three miles off Kamimbo Bay, towing a barge full of ammunition, food, and medicine. They opened their throttles, rushed in, and sank the I-3 with torpedoes. Credit for the kill went to the PT-59, captained by John M. Searles. “This was quite a feather in the cap of those PT boat boys,” said Lloyd Mustin.
On December 11, Tanaka led what would be the final run of the Tokyo Express. The mosquito fleet intercepted his force of nine destroyers between Cape Esperance and Savo Island. Tanaka’s flagship, the Teruzuki, took a torpedo that detonated her depth charge stowage, sinking her. Fewer than one in five of the twelve hundred drums thrown overboard reached the beach.
Victory did not come by way of a shattering decisive battle. It came through attrition, exacted relentlessly, night after night. Victory, when it came, did not march on parade. It announced itself more subtly, through a return to normalcy and a reemergence of human behaviors that tended to disappear in periods of emergency, when the urgent struggle for survival concentrated minds. At the ice plant within the Marine perimeter, some enterprising leathernecks made a robust black market selling a slushy grog made from papayas, limes, fruit juice, and a surplus of torpedo fuel. When the fresh and generously supplied men of the Americal Division arrived, veteran riflemen suckered them mercilessly, selling to credulous souvenir seekers counterfeit Japanese battle flags manufactured at the parachute loft. On Red Beach that December, discipline among the beachmaster’s boat crews teetered on the brink of breakdown. Cargo ships carrying shipments of beer quickly found themselves swarmed by lighters jockeying to unload them. Nets swung from the booms of ammunition ships full of bombs and howitzer projectiles and machine-gun ammunition and canned pineapple, but few boats volunteered to take them. Beer received higher priority. Delighted to find a Liberty ship carrying thirty thousand cases, thieves loaded up their boats and spirited the suds up the beach to a secret depot that was quite secure from discovery owing to its location several miles behind Japanese lines—“a fiasco which would be rather deplorable if it weren’t so humorous,” Lloyd Mustin said. “The boat crews knew it too, but by George, they were going to land some beer in a private cache known only to them.”
The new commanding officer of American ground forces on Guadalcanal, General Patch, let the whole thing slide. He reportedly allowed fantastic quantities of surplus to pile up for off-the-books requisition. Just one in six cases of beer ferried ashore reached the quartermaster dump. Much as the Army supply clerks might have protested, no complaints ever came from Patch, who seemed to regard the theft as a generous toast to his brothers in arms who had served so well since August.
Under Patch, Guadalcanal would begin its transformation to a rear-area base, a place dense with storage depots, hospitals, baseball games, fire trucks, and ration dumps with beer stacked higher than two men could stand. There would be automotive maintenance shops, chapels, water carnivals and regattas with clowns on surfboards, forestry companies, performances by Bob Hope and Jerry Colonna, gardens tended by Japanese POWs, kennel shows, and visits by Eleanor Roosevelt. An armed forces radio affiliate known as The Mosquito Network would flourish there. Its program supervisor, hired out of Hollywood, would create a musical segment called the “Atabrine Cocktail Hour,” promoting faithful use of the anti-malaria medication. Troops coming ashore would do so now as rehearsals for landings farther north and westward.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had lost the ability to impose its will on the waters of Savo Sound. Ashore, the position of the 17th Army, desperately drawn in to hold small parts of the island’s tangled and mountainous twenty-five hundred square miles, was about as precarious as the initial U.S. position. “The whole color of the war ashore on Guadalcanal was changing, and we could see it,” said Lloyd Mustin.