Roosevelt’s urgent sense of events in the South Pacific developed not a moment too soon for King, Nimitz, and Halsey. On the very day he urged his Joint Chiefs to redirect their energies westward, and seven days into Halsey’s tenure in command of the theater, the Japanese turned loose what would be their most ferocious and concentrated attack yet on America’s island foothold.
22
“Strike—Repeat, Strike”
ON GUADALCANAL, “SOMETHING IS IN THE AIR,” HERBERT MERILLAT wrote. “I am not sure what it is but can make the obvious guess. All signs point to increased Jap activity, and soon. I expect it will be a pretty mighty blow—the climax of their efforts to retake this place. They have powerful naval forces to the northwest and have been building up a reserve of planes for more than two weeks. So look out for bombs and fourteen-inch naval shells and artillery. I’ll bet they open up with field artillery from the hills. In short, it looks like a very hot time for the next few days. Operations officers and the command have suddenly become very secretive. There is an undercurrent of excitement in the CP.”
The new theater commander did not long ponder how he would use the discretion Nimitz had allowed him. Just six days into his tenure as South Pacific commander, his desk covered with sighting reports of enemy ships in the waters northeast of the Solomons, Halsey ordered the Enterprise and Hornet to venture farther north than they had gone since August and seek battle. Doubling down on his aggressive willingness to take risks, he stood ready to send Rear Admiral Willis Lee’s force, the battleship Washington and his cruisers, all the way up the Slot to bombard Japanese harbors south of Bougainville.
Lee, commanding the surface striking force from the flagship Washington, with the cruisers San Francisco, Helena, Atlanta, and ten destroyers, operated separately from the two carrier groups. Cruising south of Guadalcanal and east of Rennell Island, he prepared to sortie at sunset and enter Ironbottom Sound from the west. His force would sweep the area off Cape Esperance and around Savo Island and—as the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin put it in his diary—“smash anything we find.… Maybe a close-range, shotguns-across-the-dinner-table sort of affair.” The convoys would get whatever ragtag escort Turner’s staff could manage. The fleet’s heavies had at last been unleashed to go hunting.
They didn’t catch any prey on their first run, but they made their presence felt hundreds of miles to the north. Word that an American battleship was in Savo Sound led the 8th Fleet’s planners to cancel the Tokyo Express bombardment run scheduled for the night of October 25–26.
The naval forces the Japanese were bringing down from Truk dwarfed anything the Americans had seen in the South Pacific to date. It was the full-scale seaborne counteroffensive that the 17th Army headquarters at Rabaul had been envisioning since the failures of September: an Advance Force under Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, including battleships and cruisers earmarked to support the Army’s triumphant capture of Henderson Field, and the aircraft carrier Junyo. (Another carrier, the Hiyo, should have been with Kondo, too, but she had suffered an accidental fire on October 22 that forced her return to Truk.) With them, steaming two hundred miles to their east, came Chuichi Nagumo’s Striking Force, comprising the carriers Shokaku, Zuikaku, and Zuiho. South of Nagumo plowed Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe’s Vanguard Force, including the battleships Hiei and Kirishima and three heavy cruisers.
Imperial plans were better coordinated than they had been two months ago leading into the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the campaign’s first clash of carriers. They called for a bold combined assault: the heavy combatants descending on the island while the Army mounted an assault on Henderson Field, and the carriers sweeping the seas of American naval power. The fleet would move south and engage as soon as the Army sent word that it had seized the airfield. Yamamoto and his staff relished the thought of avenging Midway and luring the elusive American carriers to their destruction.
The commander of the 17th Army, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, had planned to launch a multipronged assault on Henderson Field on the twenty-second. Personally commanding the Japanese forces there—consisting of the 2nd (Sendai) Division, two battalions of the 38th Division, some survivors of Ichiki’s and Kawaguchi’s forces, as well as a regiment and three batteries of heavy field artillery, two battalions and one battery of field antiaircraft artillery, one battalion and one battery of mountain artillery, a mortar battalion, a tank company, and three rapid-fire gun battalions—Hyakutake began assembling his units and preparing to send them into position as soon as they piled ashore from the transports.
The assault would begin with a diversionary artillery barrage from forces massing in the west, across the Matanikau River. The main assault, undertaken by the Sendai Division marshaled in the tangled jungle south of Henderson Field, would follow. Still underestimating U.S. troop strength on the island—an intelligence report in late September pegged Vandegrift’s garrison at seventy-five hundred men, well below half its actual number—Hyakutake apparently remained as cocksure of his success as he had been on the day he ordered Colonel Ichiki’s detachment to its slaughter.
From their positions on the west side of the Matanikau River, Japanese heavy artillery began firing on Henderson Field, and the diversionary infantry regiment tried to make its presence known to the Americans. With the preliminaries still under way, Hyakutake’s staff radioed a confident message to 17th Army headquarters at Rabaul: “The victory is already in our hands. Please rest your minds.” He instructed his aides to begin planning for an American surrender.
Words were words. The Japanese Navy wanted deeds. Frustrated by the Army’s delays, and with Yamamoto threatening to haul the fleet back to Truk to refuel if ground commanders didn’t get on with things, Kondo and Nagumo maintained course.
As the Imperial Japanese Army was stalking the jungles surrounding Henderson Field, torrential rains engulfed the island. And then it was over—or so claimed a dispatch that reached the Yamato, moored at Truk, that night. It was after 1:30 a.m. on the twenty-fourth when the telegram was given to Admiral Ugaki as he was meditating by moonlight on the weather deck. It was a dispatch from the 17th Army, proclaiming, “2300 BANZAI!—A LITTLE BEFORE 2300 THE RIGHT WING CAPTURED THE AIRFIELD.” “This settled everything,” Ugaki wrote. He exhorted to his diary, “March, all forces, to enlarge the result gained! Hesitation or indecision at this moment would leave a regret forever.”
And so the fleet pressed on. The announcement of the airfield’s conquest led Vice Admiral Mikawa to send in the light cruiser Yura and several destroyer divisions to blockade the shore and bombard in support of the advancing Imperial Army. Later that morning American planes from Henderson set upon the Yura, the 17th Army’s claim to have captured the airfield notwithstanding. The ship took a bomb from an SBD, as did a destroyer. Later that afternoon another flight of dive-bombers, joined by half a dozen B-17s, let fly against the wounded ship, which had to be scuttled.
Though the Americans had little sense of where the Japanese ground forces were located—the mustering of the Sendai Division had gone undetected by U.S. ground patrols and search planes in the thick jungle south of Lunga Plain—American units were well positioned, with a perimeter divided into five regimental sectors.
General Vandegrift would not be present for the coming assault on his perimeter. Urged by General Thomas Holcomb, the commandant of the Marine Corps—who had picked an inopportune time to inspect Cactus—Vandegrift had traveled to Nouméa to confer with Halsey. General Geiger, Vandegrift’s aviation deputy, took temporary command of U.S. forces on the island.
On the night of October 23–24, the Japanese offensive began with a diversionary attack from the west, across the Matanikau River. American artillery smashed up the leading wedge of tanks. The next night, south of the high ground recently named Edson’s Ridge, just half a mile from the airstrip, elements of the Sendai Division sent two powerful forces at Henderson Field. Each consisted of three rifle battalions, and with three more in reserve, the Japa
nese plan envisioned a powerful two-pronged surge toward the airfield. Owing to fatigue, confusion, and poor communications, the attack was launched piecemeal. Conceived in general contempt for their enemy, the Japanese attack followed the same routes of the disastrous September assault. On toward Edson’s Ridge the Japanese charged now, poorly coordinated and straight into a murderous enfilade of artillery and rifle fire. Colonel Chesty Puller’s seven-hundred-man battalion from the well-seasoned 7th Marines, joined with a battalion of the newly arrived 164th Infantry under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall, put up a stout defense despite their lack of advance warning on enemy preparations. When the pup-pup-pup of small-arms fire finally faltered and died in the predawn hours of October 25, the first assault had failed.
The 17th Army’s announcement that it captured the airfield might have been a deep misapprehension. It might even have been a lie. But on came the Japanese fleet. Encouraged by false reports of the Army’s progress, Kondo and Nagumo kept their prows aimed south, searching for Halsey’s fleet while standing by to hit Henderson Field, too. Their carrier planes were reporting nothing but empty expanses of ocean. The land-based planes of the 11th Air Fleet, flying from Buin and Rabaul, made several sightings of Admiral Lee’s Washington task force near Rennell Island, but the American heavy was too far away for Japanese aircraft to reach her. A superior Japanese force was advancing on bad intelligence. What result would flow from it was an imponderable that only another deadly trial by fire would solve.
CHESTER NIMITZ HAD developed a general approach for confronting a superior enemy. “Having inferior forces,” he wrote early in the campaign, “we must count heavily on attrition, but losing no chance to come to grips with the enemy under the principle of calculated risk.” Still, the principle’s requirements were far from clear. How does one calculate, and what does one risk?
A doctrine so subjective offered little decision guidance at all. Its spirit was not prescriptive; it was merely advisory. But this seemed to be the American way of war. Commanders since the Revolution had enjoyed the freedom to act on their best personal initiative. This flexibility and discretion was the gift—and the burden—that Nimitz always bestowed upon his commanders. Admiral Halsey was free to act on his instinct now.
While Japanese scout pilots were revealing to their astonished command that Henderson Field, contrary to dispatches, had not been seized, Willis Lee’s surface striking force, including the Washington and the heavy cruiser San Francisco, marked time about thirty miles east of Rennell Island, ready to run north for a sweep of Savo Sound. On the twenty-fourth, Rear Admiral Norman Scott was transferred from the San Francisco to the antiaircraft cruiser Atlanta. His new flagship would soon be detached from Lee’s Task Force 64 and, leading a striking force of destroyers, be thrown directly into the fight for Guadalcanal.
Meanwhile, Halsey’s two carrier groups—Task Force 16, with the Enterprise and South Dakota, and Task Force 17, with the Hornet and a quartet of cruisers—under the overall command of Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid (who flew his flag in the Enterprise), moved toward the suspected location of the Japanese carrier fleet as if by the attraction of gravity.
LATE IN THE NIGHT of October 24, in his cabin in the Argonne in Nouméa harbor, Halsey prepared to adjourn his conference with General Vandegrift, Kelly Turner, and senior Army and Marine officers. The ground commanders articulated the woes of the long-suffering garrison on Guadalcanal. They said morale was deteriorating under constant attacks and a sure, intuitive sense that more enemy forces were massing at Rabaul and Truk. According to Halsey, “They began to echo the question that the public had asked in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, ‘Where is the Navy?’ ”
It was late by the time the litany of the riflemen ended. Halsey asked Vandegrift and Major General Millard F. Harmon, the senior U.S. Army officer in the South Pacific, “Are we going to evacuate or hold?”
Vandegrift responded, “I can hold, but I’ve got to have more active support than I’ve been getting.” To this, Kelly Turner reacted defensively, pointing to difficulties of defending shoal-cluttered waterways with a fleet that was attriting as surely as the garrison was. Knowing no choice remained but to hold fast, Halsey took Vandegrift’s statement differently. According to the historian Richard B. Frank, “If Vandegrift had fired an arrow into Halsey’s chest he probably could not have wounded him more. It was simply unacceptable to Halsey for the Navy to be viewed by the Marines as not carrying its end.” He told Vandegrift, “All right. Go on back. I’ll promise you everything I’ve got.”
For starters, Halsey reconsidered a plan, long on the boards, to use Army troops to occupy Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands. Ghormley had authorized the operation even though General Harmon, the Army’s SOPAC chief, considered it a wasteful diversion. So Halsey canceled it, redirecting the soldiers earmarked for it to Guadalcanal.
Halsey’s more immediate task was deciding what to do about the threat from the Combined Fleet. Surveying intelligence and reconnaissance reports suggesting the approach of a Japanese carrier force, he concluded that “action was obviously a matter of hours.” He took stock of the needs of the Marines and the capabilities of his naval force. He liked his chances a great deal better now that two carriers were on hand. “Carrier power varies as the square,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Two carriers are four times as powerful as one.” In a two-carrier task force, one carrier could be designated as the “duty” carrier, sending out air searches and providing combat air patrols and anti-submarine patrols, while the other carrier held a fully armed and fueled strike ready on deck. One carrier operating alone could do none of those things very effectively, and her crews were especially hard-pressed to switch between roles. “Until the Enterprise arrived, our plight had been almost hopeless. Now we had a fighting chance,” Halsey added.
Determined to intercept Nagumo, Halsey ordered Kinkaid to ring up twenty-two knots and take the Enterprise and Hornet task forces northwest from their patrol position east of Santa Cruz. A reprise of Midway, a curtain call for Coral Sea, the next collision of American and Japanese carrier airpower would go down as the last aerial engagement between the fleets until U.S. troops were on the beaches of Saipan and in the hedgerows of Normandy.
Ashore, the Japanese hammer had struck the American anvil. It was the hammer that would crack. The fleets, meanwhile, prepared for their own reckoning.
Just before midnight on October 24, as his marines ashore were battling the Japanese assault, Halsey radioed his principal naval commanders, Kinkaid and Lee, with a galvanizing message that would echo through the passageways and compartments of every ship in the South Pacific Force. The four syllables, bereft of any operational specificity or doctrinal nuance and apropos of no particular target, placed a clean vector through everyone’s mind that ordered and oriented their next moves.
“STRIKE—REPEAT, STRIKE.”
23
Santa Cruz
EVEN WITH KNOWLEDGE THAT AN ENEMY FLEET WAS NEAR, LOCATING and attacking it effectively was no small challenge for a carrier commander. Aircraft fuel was dear, range limited, weather variable, and intentions of opposing commanders ever unknowable. The doctrines that governed the mechanics of carrier operations—how many planes to send out searching, how many to retain in reserve for a strike, and how many to keep aloft nearby as a defensive umbrella for the fleet—were in a state of constant experiment and evolution. Then there was nature to contend with: Given that strikes had to be launched into the wind to get heavy airplanes aloft, which compass heading did one need to pursue, and was the day too far gone to retrieve the aircraft during daylight?
The Americans had a considerable advantage in Admiral Fitch’s land-based PBY Catalina patrol bombers and B-17 Flying Fortresses operating out of Espiritu Santo and other area island groups. They had the ability to fly at night and their range, at up to eight hundred miles, was peerless. On the morning of October 25, a flurry of sighting reports reached American commanders. At nine thirty, a B-17 spied the Jun
yo northeast of Malaita. Mere minutes later, a PBY spotted the battleships and cruisers of Abe’s vanguard. This was followed by a third sighting ten minutes later, reporting three Japanese carriers. At the time of these sightings, the Japanese were about three hundred miles northwest of the Santa Cruz Islands. Kinkaid’s and Murray’s task forces were about an equal distance east of the islands.
Realizing he had been discovered, Admiral Nagumo, furious that his scouts hadn’t yet found the U.S. carriers, decided to reverse course to the north, taking his three valuable carriers out of range of potential attack. It was a wise and fortuitous move. A flight of B-17s was summoned from Espiritu at first contact, and the Enterprise, too, launched a strike. Nagumo knew all too well that the first carrier to be seen was usually the first to be sunk as well. The fact that the American strikes missed him was testimony to the value of caution. The pilots from the Enterprise, meanwhile, encountered the terror that beset even the most experienced pilots returning to their ship after dark. Attemping to land on the small flight deck at night, eight aircraft were lost, either forced to ditch or suffer damage on hard landings. Two pilots were killed.
Through the night, Fitch’s snoopers kept up a determined effort to relocate the Japanese carriers on the night patrol. On Guadalcanal that night, the Japanese Army renewed its assault on Henderson Field, using the same general approach for a similarly grim result. General Hyakutake’s infantry, blistered by machine-gun, mortar, and canister fire, was forced to retreat. Japanese deaths were as many as thirty-five hundred. American fatalities in what would be known as the Battle for Henderson Field numbered around ninety.
As Vandegrift’s men held again, the first report from the PBYs reached Kinkaid around midnight and passed to Halsey. Dispatched shortly after 3 a.m. on the twenty-sixth (by a courageous Catalina pilot who doubled down on his luck by trying to bomb the Zuikaku), the report did not reach Kinkaid for two hours. When it finally did, the vintage of the news persuaded him to hesitate. He would not launch his attack until fresher information came.