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.
4
Nothing Worthy of
Your Majesty’s Attention
WHEN WORD OF THE AMERICAN LANDINGS ON GUADALCANAL reached Japan, Emperor Hirohito, vacationing at the imperial villa north of Tokyo, told his advisers he would return to the palace immediately to consider the implications. Admiral Osami Nagano, the chief of the Naval General Staff, went to him first. “It is nothing worthy of Your Majesty’s attention,” he said. An intelligence report from the Japanese military attaché in Moscow reported that only two thousand American troops were on Guadalcanal. The number suggested that American ambitions were modest: merely to raid the installation, destroy the airfield, and withdraw. Imperial intelligence was expecting a major Allied attack elsewhere, on Papua, where Japanese troops were advancing through a treacherous mountain jungle toward Port Moresby. The attack on Guadalcanal was thought a diversion.
Other officers were less blasé. Admiral Matome Ugaki, the Combined Fleet’s chief of staff, fumed at the totality of the surprise. He saw the landings as a threat to Japanese operations in New Guinea, and even to Rabaul. At the very least, Ugaki surmised, this was good reason to postpone pending operations in less critical areas such as the Indian Ocean, much as the June defeat at the Battle of Midway had forced the cancellation of Japanese plans to attack New Caledonia and Samoa.
Ugaki’s superior, Admiral Yamamoto, felt that Guadalcanal had little strategic value. Though the Americans saw it as a threat, the Japanese had no plans to develop it as one. Its seizure had been dilatory, the construction of an airstrip a halfhearted half measure. He had no planes ready to base there in any event. Its real importance, Yamamoto would come to see, was America’s interest in it. Imperial Navy planners had long espoused the “decisive battle” that would allow them to break the U.S. fleet after a prolonged campaign of attrition. Perhaps the enemy could be lured to the South Seas. If so, it would be a chance to concentrate Japan’s naval forces and redeem the disaster of June.
At the end of July, senior Japanese commanders had held a conference at Truk, the great naval base that served as headquarters for the Southest Area Force. This meeting, like the American gathering on the Saratoga, brought to light important divergences of interest among the services. The Southeast Area Force consisted of the 8th Fleet, headquartered closer to the front, at Rabaul, the 17th Army, and a flotilla from the Navy’s 11th Air Fleet. Throughout the critical early weeks of the Guadalcanal campaign, the commanders of the 17th Army were mostly concerned with the fight for Port Moresby and had, according to a high-ranking Japanese naval officer, “absolutely no concern with the Solomons.”
An agreement between the services had made the defense of the Solomons the IJN’s responsibility. But the gravity of that task was not fully appreciated. When the commander of the 8th Fleet, Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, later expressed concern that the U.S. landings at Guadalcanal might represent a major operation, he was dismissed by headquarters staff as an anxious arriviste. Even after Midway, American forces were lightly regarded by naval commanders. Army commanders were confident they could recapture Guadalcanal at their leisure and disdained cooperation with the Navy.
Japanese failures of intelligence would become a pandemic. The Army’s unbridled optimism—it had urged war against the United States on the assumption that a German defeat of Russia and a Japanese defeat of China would free up forces to use against America—was matched only by its paranoia concerning the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Army did not share its advanced codebreaking techniques with the Navy and, worse, neglected to reveal to the Navy the fact that American codebreakers had succeeded in decrypting the Navy’s operational code prior to Midway. If the Japanese military was deficient in interservice cooperation, the schism was equally bad within each of the Army’s and Navy’s operations and intelligence sections. Operations staffers fancied themselves the best and the brightest and seldom consulted with intelligence specialists, whom they regarded as politically minded. Japan had no central, cabinet-level intelligence organization.
Operating in that vacuum of knowledge and understanding, Japan’s combat commanders relied on their warrior instincts. Even on that score, senior officers lamented what they found in the Southern Area. Admiral Mikawa was surprised by the complacent spirit that had prevailed among his peers. He was a sea dog of the old school, the most experienced combat commander in the IJN, and widely recognized for his judgment and courage. Third in his class of 149 at the naval academy at Eta Jima, he was known for a quick mind and a gentle spirit. Eight months into a war that had given them no reversals, the Japanese were showing symptoms of a contagion soon to be given a mordant diagnosis, “victory disease.”
Mikawa was taking nothing for granted. He decided to use his forces for a counterattack, and quickly. At noon on August 7, the 8th Fleet commander sent a dispatch to his cruiser captains outlining his plan to run south and strike the U.S. invasion fleet by night. He would make do with what he had: his flagship, the heavy cruiser Chokai, plus four other cruisers, the Kinugasa, Kako, Aoba, and Furutaka, based in the rear area at Kavieng, beyond range of air attack. Admiral Nagano considered the plan reckless and ordered it stopped immediately. After consultation with his staff, however, he decided to approve Mikawa’s plan and turn the cruisers loose.
Japanese forces at Rabaul would respond by air, too. Mere hours after the first word of the landings arrived from Tulagi, fifty-four Japanese planes of the 11th Air Fleet were aloft, including twenty-four twin-engine Betty bombers. Early in the afternoon of the seventh, Mikawa took the Chokai out of Rabaul’s Simpson Harbor, joined by the light cruisers Tenryu and Yubari and the destroyer Yunagi. The next morning, he ordered the four other cruisers to sortie from Kavieng and rendezvous with him by sundown. American radio intelligence intercepted his plan, but would not decode it for more than two weeks.
ON TULAGI, JAPANESE TROOPS put up a determined fight. On the smaller island of Tanambogo, several Marine Corps tanks were stalled at the water’s edge. As Ghormley saw it, though, the greatest risk to the success of the landings in their early phases was not ground resistance, but the threat of air attack. Cloud cover had protected his task force during the approach. On August 5–6, gray weather had suspended Japanese air searches from Rabaul and given the amphibious force the advantage of surprise. It was during the landings that the enemy fliers found their first opening to attack.
The aviators of the 11th Air Fleet arrived shortly after 1 p.m., sweeping in low from the east. The raid, numbering twenty-four twin-engine Mitsubishi G4M Betty medium bombers and sixteen Aichi Val dive-bombers, escorted by seventeen Zeros, came buzzing over Florida Island then dropped down low to the sea, the planes holding a tight formation with their shadows bounding over the wave tops. A timely warning from a coastwatcher had enabled Turner’s amphibious force to get under way before the planes arrived. The cruisers and the destroyers were fanned out in an antiaircraft disposition that placed the cargomen at the center of
a great circle of warships. Overhead, eight Wildcats from the Saratoga piled in, joined by ten more from the Enterprise. Their combined fire was too much for the attackers. Just one Allied ship was damaged, the destroyer Mugford, hit in the after deck house with a bomb that took nineteen lives.
At noon the next day, the Japanese naval air corps staged an encore. Once again, given advance warning from an alert coastwatcher, the transports and their screen were maneuvering at battle speed when the air strike arrived. Approaching from the northwest in a loose, diamond formation, skimming over Florida Island and Tulagi, they hedge-hopped over the transports and broke up into smaller groups, looking for targets. Their orders were to strike the American carriers, suspected to be operating east of Tulagi. Their secondary target was the landing force. The latter was all they could find, and more than they could handle.
Kelly Turner’s fleet, maneuvering in four columns abreast, led by his own flagship, the McCawley, offered its assailants few opportunities except to die. Admiral Crutchley marveled at how the “magnificent curtain of bursting high explosive was put up and enemy aircraft were everywhere crashing in flames.” Rear Admiral Norman Scott’s flagship, the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan, a sister of the Atlanta, was built for the job, with a battery of sixteen five-inch guns arrayed in eight twin turrets. Her officers got good solutions and had plenty of time to train and aim. The heavy cruisers, including the Astoria, worked over the incoming planes with their older batteries. Planes with red meatball insignia plummeted to the sea, pancaked in single forward flips, caught wing to wave and cartwheeled into pieces, or struggled on by, drawing black contrails in steepening downward arcs.
While under attack, the Astoria’s gunnery officer, Commander William H. Truesdell, found some time to explain the fine points of antiaircraft fire control to the journalist Joe James Custer during this live demonstration of the state of the working art. Technology was part of it, but the unpredictable way of the human heart was part of the system. Hearing one of his gunner’s mates wheezing into a harmonica as the bullets flew—Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home—Truesdell chuckled and asked, “How can you beat those kids?”
The impact of the ship’s defensive gunfire was terrific. When Custer returned to his stateroom, he found it a wreck: the telephone torn from the bulkhead, lightbulbs popped, personal effects scattered across the deck, including his chief weapon, his typewriter. The performance of the gunners was redeemed by the fact that most of the Japanese bombers ended their missions rather worse off than the journalist’s cabin. Only five Bettys returned to base. It was a far cry from their devastating turn against the Royal Navy’s heavies, the Prince of Wales and Repulse, eight months before.
Even with reliable warning, it was still a considerable trick to launch and vector fighter planes from aircraft carriers to intercept at the right place and time. As a result of the difficulties of communication and coordination among the carrier groups, the combat air patrol was paltry on the second day. A dozen and a half Wildcats, ten from the Enterprise and eight from the Saratoga, belatedly intercepted the Japanese and harassed them halfway back to their base in New Georgia. For the Japanese, the returns of their second air attack were meager: The destroyer Jarvis was hit by a torpedo and the transport George F. Elliott crash-dived by a damaged bomber, scuttled and left burning in the shallows off Tulagi.
The first two collisions of the Watchtower fleet with Japan’s world-beating naval airpower punctured the impression of invincibility the latter had earned over the past year. A number of Japanese bombers were seen to break off their attack and fly away to the north. “Either these are Army pilots, or the Japs are down to their second team in the Navy,” scoffed an Astoria officer. “I’ve never seen them that bad before. Those crack Jap Navy pilots—the ones we tangled with in the Coral Sea, and at Midway—they don’t let up. Never. They come right at you, and they keep on coming until you get them or they get you. These punks—running away …”
Joe Custer got a close look at their kind when he found himself appraising five enemy aviators in the water near the ship. Through a telescope he could see their husky forms, heads shaven, wearing ribbed inflatable life jackets. As the Astoria’s sailors jeered them—“How do you like that, you Jap bastard!”—the skipper, Captain William G. Greenman, refused a request to turn the ship’s twenty-millimeter guns on them. When a U.S. destroyer moved in to attempt rescue, the Japanese aviators pulled their sidearms and did it themselves.
At sunset, with the excitement of D-Day-plus-one waning, Task Force 62 reconfigured itself to confront the night. The carriers withdrew to their night patrol area south of Guadalcanal, out of range of enemy aircraft. At six thirty, Admiral Crutchley directed his heavy cruisers to take station guarding the two avenues into Savo Sound, on either side of Savo Island. The heavy cruisers Vincennes, Quincy, and Astoria, escorted by three destroyers, patrolled the entrance east of Savo Island, under command of the Vincennes skipper, Captain Frederick Riefkohl. The Chicago, joined by the HMAS Australia and the HMAS Canberra, watched the approach southwest of the island. The route into the sound from the east, through Sealark and Lengo channels, was defended by the San Juan, Australian light cruiser Hobart, and two destroyers. Closer to the transport anchorage, destroyers and destroyer-minesweepers guarded against incursions by submarines and torpedo boats. The destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot were ordered to patrol north of Savo Island as early-warning radar pickets.
It was in the anticlimax of Saturday, August 8, less than forty-eight hours after the first contact of American boots with enemy-occupied Oceania, that the most potent Japanese threat would become manifest. Even as Admiral Fletcher prepared to execute the most controversial decision he would make as commander of the Operation Watchtower expeditionary force, a flashing Imperial Japanese Navy sword was sliding out of a scabbard just over the horizon.
5
Fly the Carriers
KELLY TURNER, THE COMMANDER OF TASK FORCE 62, THE AMPHIBIOUS force, was forged from the same hard brass as his mentor, Ernest J. King, whom he had served as director of war plans in the war’s first months. Turner was hard on subordinates, and carried himself with an edgy intensity. “Whenever he became disgusted,” a sailor who knew him wrote, “he would emit a small spitting sound, stamp his foot lightly and say ‘Balls!’ ”
But he could show warmth when he needed to. “I have seen him ‘blow up’ a junior officer and I was taken in,” a magazine reporter said, “till I saw the look in his eye and the smile that finally came.… He is aware of men’s sensitivities and he recognizes their abilities even when they occasionally annoy him. His men admit he is tough—he admits it himself—but they love to work for him.”
Given the problems that plagued the supply effort at the beach, Turner was fortunate that ground resistance was so light. His cargo ships did not have enough men embarked to haul crates and equipment for forty-eight hours straight. Without the benefit of docks, cranes, or other cargo-handling facilities on the virgin beach, it was impossible to unload directly to shore. Small boats had to ferry the cargo in, and when they reached the beach, hundreds of them gunwale-to-gunwale, human hands did the heavy lifting. Beyond the backbreaking nature of the work itself was the problem of organization and triage. According to the commander of the transport Hunter Liggett, “After dark, conditions reached a complete impasse.” It took waiting boats up to six hours for a chance to land.
The tremors of the interservice argument that would define the first two weeks of the operation arrived quickly. “No small share of the blame for this delay,” the commander continued, “which prolonged by nearly twenty-four hours the period when the ships lay in these dangerous waters, would seem to rest with the Marine Corps personnel and organization. The Marine Corps Pioneers, whose function it was to unload the boats and keep the beach clear, were far too few in numbers.” An officer from the transport Barnett described men “lounging around under the palm trees eating coconuts, lying down shooting coconuts from
the trees; also playing around and paddling about in rubber boats. All of these men were Marines that should have been unloading boats.” Even Kelly Turner, whose fondness for his seagoing infantrymen was peerless, pointed to “a failure on the part of the First [Marine] Division to provide adequate and well organized unloading details on the beach. The Marine officers on my staff feel very strongly on these matters—as strongly as I do.”
Time was of the essence, but speed faced many obstacles. Many of the small craft used to bring in supplies were loaded so deeply by the head that they couldn’t make it all the way up the beach. When their ramps were lowered, they filled with water and their straining engines drowned. Compounding the trouble was the way the big transports offshore had been loaded in Wellington: for commerce, efficiently and in volume, not for combat, enabling quick access to food and ammunition. In the Chesapeake Bay area and on the West Coast, the Navy was still establishing specialty schools to teach these skills to their beachmasters. At Guadalcanal, on-the-job training would have to suffice.
Early in the evening of August 8, in his flagship McCawley, Turner was wrestling with these frustrations, minding the possibility of further attacks, when Frank Jack Fletcher did what Turner had been dreading for two weeks. In a message to Admiral Ghormley, Fletcher was requesting permission to withdraw his three aircraft carriers, now serving as Task Force 62’s umbrella and shield, from their supporting positions near Guadalcanal.