41

 

Future Rising

IN THIS SEA OF DESTINY, A SPANISH PRIEST HAD ONCE SEEN BOTH THE scale and the pattern of the coming days. Men now living, the survivors of the inferno of 1942, could begin to see the shape of the future, too. It was a wide, islanded oceanic vista cut through now with markers for a trail that would become a path that would become a road. Extended and improved by other ships and other crews, it would lead all the way to Tokyo.

Some would say the victory at Guadalcanal led nowhere. After all, instead of setting sights on conquering Rabaul, the Navy and the Marines would bypass it, jumping north to Tarawa and pouring through the Central Pacific. MacArthur would carry the fight on a line to the west, following a parallel route along New Guinea’s northern coast toward the Philippines. But the rights of way for all these roads were laid by the ships and men of the South Pacific Forces. If they had faltered, Australia and New Zealand would have stood alone and America’s confidence to undertake a serious offensive anywhere at all might have been broken entirely. For the American veterans of the struggle in the South Pacific, another road lay before them, a road home for a brief respite, and then a return to the war that gave no permanent reprieves except to the dead.

For several days after the Atlanta went down, Robert Graff drifted in and out of consciousness in a Lunga Point foxhole. Effectively checked out of the campaign, he was unaware of the final dramas that raged in Savo Sound. The pillars of the earth shook beneath him, but he remained in his own world, bruised body and mind rallying to their own defense.

One night Graff was placed in a small boat and sent to a waiting cargo ship, and along with many other stretcher cases was taken to Espiritu Santo. There, in a series of operations in a medical hut, doctors removed chunks of shrapnel that had riddled him that night. That’s where he first heard the whole story of the loss of his ship, and of the deaths of Admiral Scott and the others on the Atlanta’s bridge under heavy fire from friend and foe. It felt like a story told by a stranger from another world. He walled himself off from the experience, even as he couldn’t quite shake his wonderment that he had survived it. He would reflect on the arbitrary randomness of his luck for the rest of his life. “People were killed all around me. It put me in a very, very deep emotional funk for years.”

Graff was taken to Efate to recover. Most of the other medical evacuees were taken to Nouméa, where they were transferred to the “receiving ship,” which was not a vessel but a transfer facility consisting of a large tent city on a scenic hillside, well populated with survivors of the Hornet,the Atlanta, the Northampton, and various sunken destroyers. In time they were gathered and transferred to the holds of a transport, the President Monroe, which ferried them to Auckland. Graff ended up in Auckland, too.

On arrival in the harbor, Graff heard strains of a military band playing its bouncing repertoire. Recent history started to catch up with him then. “I just cried my heart out,” he said. “I could not get ahold of myself, whatever there was to hold onto.” A nurse came into his hospital room once or twice and lulled, “Shhh, there’s nothing to cry about, old man.” But she couldn’t know and he didn’t tell her. “I just continued to cry.” In time, and with struggle, he was able to rise and lift himself out of bed.

The Atlanta survivors got four days of “free gangway” in New Zealand’s largest city. “This was a privilege seldom afford in the USN. It means ‘beat it and don’t come back until we sail,’ ” Bill McKinney wrote. Strolling the city streets by evening, the sailors were, he recalled, “literally engulfed by girls. It would have taken a leper to have wound up with less than a girl on each arm. They were quite frank and got to the point quickly. Many of them seemed to live alone and we were invited to move in during our stay in Auckland. They were so blunt that many a usually self-assured sailor was left open-mouthed.”

The Helena, now under a new captain, Charles P. Cecil, was ordered from Nouméa to Sydney for some R&R. Entering the harbor, the light cruiser was saluted by the deep groans of tugboat whistles and cheering well-wishers waving from sailboats and pleasure craft. The city’s iconic Harbour Bridge, silhouetted in a rosy red at twilight, was the backdrop for a celebration that spilled ashore into the oyster bars and Red Cross–sponsored dances and cocktail parties.

Such pleasures were a superficial salve. Graff’s shipmate Jim Shaw wrote to his wife, Jane, of the new perspective on life the experience of battle had given them. “We hate the petty bickering of politics.… We hate the disunity between labor and capital. We look with a sort of contemptuous tolerance on such organizations as the USO. We eye askance and critically the opinions aired by the press. As for the ‘military commentators’ who learn their strategy out of books, we writhe in disgust at their positive statements as to how the actual combat should be carried on.… After the war is over the fighting man is going to demand a kind of peace and a kind of government that will be some slight remuneration for the blood and toil and anguish of the war.”

For Leonard A. Joslin, a survivor of the Quincy, nighttime was forevermore a haunted place. “Years later I’d have nightmares, and dreams at night, and I would see the ship coming into port. I’d see men waving. I could see the signal bridge. I knew that I was supposed to be up there. But the ship would fade away. And I’d try to catch it at another port, and the same thing. I could see the men waving, the signal bridge; I knew I was supposed to be up there. But the ship would leave me, and the dream would fade. Many times, years later even, I would dream of this ship, and the men. And they’re waving at me.”

On the eleventh of December, Joslin’s vision unfolded in real time for the survivors of Dan Callaghan’s old flagship arriving in her namesake city. As the crew manned the rail, thousands of Bay Area residents greeted them, jamming the hillsides and promenades to have a look at the battered San Francisco entering the harbor. Eugene Tarrant remembers the cool weather that welcomed their homecoming, and the fog that held the Golden Gate Bridge like a midnight pall off Savo. It was a publicist’s dream: the veterans of a hero ship, returning to the city where she had been built (Vallejo), right next door to the hometown (Oakland) of the admiral who had died in battle on her bridge.

When the ambulatory survivors were flushed out of the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital and bused downtown for a ticker-tape parade six days later, “They gave this city a strange feeling of humility and sadness, and at the same time its greatest thrill in many a year,” a San Francisco Chroniclereporter wrote. The procession of survivors stretched out for more than a mile, attended by a crowd of seventy-five thousand lining the street. However, the mood of the celebration was peculiar. “It was the quietest parade this city has ever seen. There was some cheering and applauding, but it didn’t stick. For the most part, the thousands on the streets stared as they would at a sacred procession.” Some of the marchers proceeded with canes and crutches, wearing hospital robes. None of them stayed thirsty for long on Market Street that week.

Admirals Nimitz and King were on hand to give medals. They decorated Bruce McCandless with the Medal of Honor in front of an audience that included his parents and his wife. The father of Dan Callaghan drove over from Oakland, but the late admiral’s mother and widow stayed home. “They didn’t think they could face it. They didn’t think they could stand it,” Dan Callaghan, Sr., told a reporter. In Washington, President Roosevelt himself had just given the same award to family representatives of Callaghan and Norman Scott. Herbert Schonland and the San Francisco’s heroic firefighter, Reinhardt J. Keppler, received the Medal of Honor as well.

For the rest of the San Francisco’s crew, there was acclaim to go around, though many of them understood it was excessive. “In the press we were lauded beyond all reason,” Clifford Spencer wrote. Almost everyone knew that other ships, including the Sterett, Monssen, Barton, Juneau,and Atlanta, had suffered far heavier proportions of casualties but weren’t able to return for ticker tape and free beer. Whenever he heard the San Francisco referred to as the Navy’s “fightin’est ship,” McCandless would insist that “polishing off a battleship is a community job.”

The homecoming of damaged warships was a rare thing for the public. The lack of a fair perspective on their accomplishments was inevitable. The way Mike Moran’s Boise was feted in Philadelphia would forever irk many Helena sailors, who had thrown at least as much ordnance the enemy’s way and were now rewarded with obscurity for having taken less in return.¹ The New York Times reported as fact that the Boise “sank six Japanese warships in twenty-seven minutes.” To the lasting chagrin of the Washington’s men, the South Dakota was immortalized in the press as “Battleship X,” used out of concern for security. When the mask was finally lifted, the ship’s name was cast in lights that her dubious battle performance did not seem to merit. Nevertheless, Captain Gatch announced that his ship “sank three Jap cruisers and demonstrated there’s no match for a battleship, except equally good battleships.” When the San Francisco entered harbor, she was in the company of a fellow veteran of Ironbottom Sound, the Sterett. As the cruiser prepared for a public reception at Pier 16, the humble tin can went, unheralded as those expendable ships often are, to the yard at Mare Island.

None of these small injustices matched what Eugene Tarrant and his fellow steward’s mates and cooks suffered when they went ashore. Cameramen from the Fox Movietone News Agency dwelled on the San Francisco’s crew until Tarrant’s turn came. When he and his S Division shipmates began filing past, the motion-picture crews turned their cameras on other subjects.

AS THE SAN FRANCISCO was approaching the West Coast for her grand reception, an Imperial Army colonel returned to Tokyo from Rabaul after a fact-finding mission to the Southern Area front. Across all services at Japan’s forward-most base, he told high command, there was a wholesale lack of confidence. With the destruction of their reinforcement convoys in November and their faltering hold on New Guinea, both naval and Army high command saw that the end of the struggle was near. The colonel’s report urged the unthinkable: abandonment of Guadalcanal, and the evacuation of its garrison. In the discussion that followed, the concern arose that if word of an evacuation reached the island, the soldiers might take their own lives.

The Americans had their own setbacks to explore, and their own fact-finding missions to launch. Though victory was within its grasp, the Navy was looking back on the disaster that had nearly derailed it in the beginning with the losses of the Vincennes, Quincy,and Astoria. An old saying later popularized by a veteran of the Solomons naval campaign, John F. Kennedy, went, “Victory has a hundred fathers. Defeat is an orphan.” What then of the parentage a defeat suffered within the context of a larger victory? The Navy seemed bent on isolating it like a cancer.

On December 20, Ernest King ordered an “informal inquiry into the circumstances attending the loss of these vessels.” Its purpose, he would write, was “to find out exactly what caused the defeat, and second, to determine whether or not any responsible officers involved in the planning and execution of the operations were culpably inefficient.” Three days later, the man who would conduct the investigation reported to King’s headquarters in Washington. His name was Arthur J. Hepburn. The chairman of the Navy’s General Board, a panel of senior admirals that advised the secretary of the Navy, Hepburn was the U.S. admiralty’s most senior man. He had served as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and had a deep expertise in the mysteries of the world’s largest ocean. As an ensign, after the Spanish-American War, he had participated in the U.S. Exploring Expedition, an oceanographic survey of the entire vast Pacific. He was serious, dignified, and reserved. As Hanson Baldwin wrote in a 1936 New York Times profile, “He is not a colorful personality; there are no legends about him on his flagships, no mass of Hepburn anecdota in the fleet. His record speaks for him; he is respected and trusted.” Hepburn served in another role, too, one that is seldom mentioned in the shadow of his other accomplishments: He was the Navy’s director of public relations, the sea service’s principal public affairs man. After reporting to King, Hepburn sat down with Vice Admiral Ghormley in Washington and interrogated him. Ghormley had been puzzled and perturbed since his relief that any specific fault might attach to him for the August 9 disaster off Savo Island. His interrogation by his former superior—Ghormley had been Hepburn’s staff operations officer after his tour in command of the Nevada—opened that wound again. On January 2, 1943, Hepburn reported to CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii. When illness forced Hepburn to the hospital for three weeks, his aide, Commander Donald J. Ramsey, began reviewing documents at the headquarters of CINCPAC.

WHILE HEPBURN WAS CONVALESCING in Hawaii, American intelligence analysts were starting to divine from movements of troops, aircraft, and ships that the Japanese might be shifting to the strategic defensive. But something in the radio traffic suggested otherwise. Stymied by a change in Japanese ciphers, they took what they could from the radio traffic. Again and again they heard references to something known as “Operation KE,” evidently planned to take place somewhere in New Guinea or the Solomons.

Nimitz believed Yamamoto might still have plans to strike at and reinforce Guadalcanal. When Halsey’s intelligence staff saw signs in the third week of January that at least three carriers, the Zuikaku, Zuiho, and Junyo, were at Truk, along with the super battleships Yamato and Musashi,there was good reason for vigilance. Confronted with the possibility of another major naval assault, Halsey resolved to finish the replacement of the war-weary Marine units on Guadalcanal while things were still relatively quiet. He ordered transports to bring in the last of the Army’s 25th Division and take off the marines. A powerful element of the South Pacific Area naval force was ordered to support them and cover the withdrawal.

In desperation, the Imperial General Headquarters had drawn up an even more ambitious plan. As forces gathered at the great naval base in the Carolines, Japan’s service branches were regrouping to defend the central and northern Solomons—and preparing to throw their fullest effort into Operation KE. After five months of attrition, Halsey and his staff were blameless in thinking it was another reinforcement effort.

Emperor Hirohito was sensitive about the public’s opinion of a campaign that had emerged as a showcase of the Japanese will to fight. In public he held to the view that an opportunity for victory lay for the taking in the Solomons. In an Imperial Rescript broadcast to the nation on December 26, the very same day that the Imperial General Headquarters decided to withdraw, the emperor declared that “dawn is about to break in the Eastern Sky” and announced that forces then gathering would head toward the Solomons for the decisive battle.

In a meeting with his high commanders a few days later, however, the Emperor decided to do what until then was unthinkable. The Imperial Army would not reinforce. It would withdraw. Compelling testimony of the morbid state of Japanese soldiers on the island came from diaries taken from the dead. In late December, when deaths by starvation were tolling at a rate of more than a hundred a day, a Japanese Army lieutenant estimated the life expectancy of his comrades as follows: “Those who can stand—30 days. Those who can sit up—3 weeks. Those who cannot sit up—1 week. Those who urinate lying down—3 days. Those who have stopped speaking—2 days. Those who have stopped blinking—tomorrow.” The Japanese were finished throwing good men and machines into the grinder.

Yamamoto would borrow a page from a seldom-studied playbook: that of the Royal Navy at Dunkirk. Operation KE was an evacuation mission, and it would take place right under the noses of the pilots and ships and PT boats of the South Pacific Forces. Reluctantly approving the plans, Hirohito said, “It is unacceptable to just give up on capturing Guadalcanal. We must launch an offensive elsewhere.” But what was acceptable—and possible—was no longer up to the divine prince. The U.S. Navy had a great deal more to say about it. In the Solomons and in New Guinea, as elsewhere, momentum was swinging its way.

Secrecy was Operation KE’s byword. Its true purpose was concealed not only from the Americans, but also from the Japanese infantrymen who were its principal beneficiaries. It began the last week of January with the coordinated movement of troops to the coast near Cape Esperance. Avoiding pursuit and encirclement from General Patch’s army, which now numbered more than fifty thousand men, they hauled the last of their starving selves toward the shore on Savo Sound, sparing the dignity of potential mutineers with the cover story that they were gathering for a final offensive.

American planes were ranging well up the Slot now, hammering targets from the air base at Munda to Rabaul itself. Japanese aircraft, meanwhile, were newly recommitted en masse to their months-old drill: to make the long flight down to Guadalcanal, suppress the Cactus Air Force, block the sea approaches to the island, and cover the evacuation. In this final spasm of violence in the southern Solomons, a group of U.S. warships was set upon by Japanese torpedo bombers.

They came in at twilight on the evening of January 30, a flight of thirty-one torpedo-armed Betty bombers, bearing down from the starboard hand of Task Force 18 as it slugged a northwesterly course at twenty-four knots. Under the command of a rookie to the Pacific theater, Rear AdmiralRobert C. Giffen, steamed the heavy cruisers Wichita, Chicago, and Louisville, the light cruisers Montpelier, Cleveland, and Columbia, and six destroyers. The escort carriers Chenango and Suwannee slugged along to provide air cover.

Giffen had orders to rendezvous with four destroyers southwest of Guadalcanal and then patrol Savo Sound. To keep the rendezvous, and to escape a significant threat from submarines, he chose in favor of better speed and ordered the slow carriers to lag behind. At twilight on January 30, this force was fifty miles north of Rennell Island when air-search radars lit up with bogeys. Submarines had indeed been hunting him, not with their torpedoes, but with their snooping periscopes and radios. Though he had been sighted, Giffen, like Gilbert Hoover, was loath to break radio silence. He thus declined to transmit interception coordinates to the combat air patrol provided by the Chenango and Suwannee, standing off to the south.

Except for the fact that they arrived after sunset, it was a reprise of the November 12 air attack on Turner and Callaghan, with a twist. From the sky at dim twilight fell a kaleidoscope of burning colors, flares, expertly dropped to show the direction of the American force and color-coded to indicate its composition. The Japanese air forces were as much students of night warfare as their Navy, and the Americans were no less bewildered by this innovation than by the others the Japanese had employed. Still, shipboard antiaircraft gunnery was, as ever, very effective, aided by a technological wrinkle kept strictly secret: the use of “proximity fuzes” that used a radar transmitter in the shell to tell it when to explode. One of the burning Bettys fell through the night sky and passed ahead of the Chicago, crashing into the sea off her port bow.

The last group to bear the designation Task Force 18 had been the star-crossed unit containing the Wasp, Vincennes, and Quincy, all of them now lost. The Chicago was a blooded veteran of these waters, too, having served, on the night it all began, as the interim flagship of Rear Admiral Crutchley’s southwestern cruiser screen. Her captain at the time, Howard D. Bode, had assumed temporary command when his British superior left station on August 9 to confer with Turner and Vandegrift about the sightings of Japanese ships and the imminent withdrawal of Fletcher’s carriers. Making contact with a mysterious squadron, then taken under fire and torpedoed in the bow, Bode’s ship had steamed away from the action, searching for phantoms as Gunichi Mikawa made his lethal run.

Now, under a new captain, the Chicago stood in harm’s way again. The flames on the water from the fuel of the crashed Betty cast her as a lucrative silhouette for other pilots. They lined up on her and dropped. Two of their torpedoes struck the cruiser on the starboard side, collapsing compartments and stilling three of her four screws. The ship’s crew labored to flood port side tanks to bring her back from a starboard list. The Louisville took her in tow.

The following morning, Task Force 18 huddled around the Chicago as relays of Wildcats from the two escort carriers, and the Enterprise, too, tried to shield her from follow-up attacks. But there was no denying the Japanese this prize. After an early-afternoon chess match between search planes from Rabaul and the American combat air patrol, Japanese strike aircraft found the Chicago again around 4 p.m. It was unfortunate that most of the other ships of the group had been ordered to withdraw to Efate. The Chicagoneeded help against the planes. The Japanese bombers put four more torpedoes into the stricken cruiser. She rolled over and sank within twenty minutes, taking sixty-two officers and men to their graves.

THE REMOVAL OF GIFFEN’S cruiser group from the order of battle on February 1 was a boon to Operation KE. That day a force of twenty destroyers under Rear Admiral Hashimoto, who had succeeded Raizo Tanaka as commander of the Reinforcement Unit and who had fought Willis Lee the night of November 14, departed from Shortland Island for the first run at evacuating Guadalcanal’s garrison. Labeled by long habit, the Reinforcement Unit had a mission now that was quite the opposite of what its name suggested.

As Hashimoto plunged south, aircraft from Henderson Field spied him north of Vella Lavella in the early afternoon. Soon swarms of Cactus Air Force planes were slashing at his ships, ninety-two planes in two waves. A near miss smote the destroyer Makinami,forcing the detachment of two more destroyers to stand by her. A second destroyer was hit and forced to turn back as well. After nightfall, Tulagi’s PT boats piled in. The remaining Japanese destroyers contended with eleven of them attacking in pairs and trios. Lieutenant John Clagett’s PT-111 was taken under fire by the destroyer Kawakaze. One shell struck home, and the boat exploded into flames that claimed two men. The PT-37, hit three times and set afire, went down with her entire crew save one. The PT-123 was attacked by a Pete reconnaissance floatplane, which deftly planted a bomb on her fantail, sinking her in flames.

Despite the opposition, Hashimoto got six destroyers through to Cape Esperance, and six more to Kamimbo Bay. Small boats from the destroyers motored to shore to begin gathering the men of the 17th Army. This first evacuation run would recover 4,935 men, most of them emaciated and disease-ridden. On February 4, a second run extracted 3,921 more, including the three-star generals Harukichi Hyakutake and Masao Maruyama, the commanders of the 17th Army and the 2nd (Sendai) Division, respectively.

General Patch was thoroughly fooled by the deception. On the seventh, he announced that the two recent runs of the Tokyo Express had landed more troops—an additional regiment with supplies, he said. That same day Hashimoto got under way on a third evacuation run, this time with eighteen destroyers. The persistence of the Japanese destroyermen in withdrawal and retreat was as gallant as anything they had done in battle. This last effort yielded a diminishing but significant return, 1,796 men. The rescue of 10,652 souls from Starvation Island was a boost to morale and a gift of grace that no member of that ferociously Spartan Army had any reason to expect. Hitler gave his 6th Army no such reprieve, insisting they hold their position on the Volga River until, drained of fuel, food, and fighting will, they had no choice but to surrender, which they did on January 31.

Operation KE cost the IJN one destroyer sunk and three more badly damaged, as well as fifty-six aircraft. Weighing this with the American losses of the Chicago, the destroyer DeHaven, three PT boats, and fifty-three planes, the equivalent of two divisions of Japanese troops, it could be said, departed Guadalcanal with their dignity intact.

The Americans on Guadalcanal had long known their enemy was withering away. Now he seemed to vanish before their weary eyes. General Patch was deprived of the pleasure of a final rout of his foe. But on February 9, 1943, he had the satisfaction of sending a dispatch to the headquarters of the commander, South Pacific Forces, and Admiral Halsey had the equivalent satisfaction of reading it.

TOTAL AND COMPLETE DEFEAT OF JAPANESE FORCES ON GUADALCANAL EFFECTED 1625 TODAY.… AM HAPPY TO REPORT THIS KIND OF COMPLIANCE WITH YOUR ORDERS.… ‘TOKYO EXPRESS’ NO LONGER HAS TERMINUS ON GUADALCANAL.