‘... Nailed the Colors to the Mast’

From 27 September through October 1942, as the Guadalcanal campaign careened into its supreme crisis, a series of newspaper articles by Hanson Baldwin appeared in The New York Times. Based upon his tour of the South Pacific and interviews with many of the principals, Baldwin wrote the first candid and comprehensive account of the campaign that marked the first U.S. offensive in World War II. We had “nailed the colors to the mast” over Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, he wrote, and the stakes were high, “perhaps eventual victory” in the war. But Baldwin’s accounts drove home the fact that defeat loomed as a real possibility, if not probability. In assessing the situation, he identified the greatest single obstacle to U.S. success: leadership.¹

If leadership was a problem, it did not reflect on the Marine Corps. No student of the campaign can fail to recognize that Major General Archer Vandegrift provided brilliant direction, not only to his own 1st Marine Division, but also to the small army and air force that ultimately came under his command, comprised of Marine, Army, Navy, Army Air Forces, and Coast Guard personnel. Vandegrift depended upon a superb command team led by his chief confidant and eventual chief of staff, Colonel Gerald C. Thomas, and Lieutenant Colonel Merrill B. Twining, who replaced Thomas as the operations officer of the 1st Marine Division. The original order for the campaign designated the target as merely “Tulagi and adjacent positions,” but Vandegrift’s command team immediately shifted the operation’s center of gravity to the airfield on Guadalcanal. Thereafter, Vandegrift’s defenders always kept one step ahead of the Imperial Japanese Army in repelling three major counterattacks, while withstanding a diet long on bombing and ship bombardments and short on rations and supplies.

For the Americans, the leadership problem of which Baldwin wrote sported Navy blue, and it began at the top in the South Pacific. In March 1942, Admiral Ernest J. King, General George C. Marshall, and Lieutenant General Henry H. Arnold agreed on an essentially Navy scheme to partition the Pacific into two major commands: the Southwest Pacific Area under General Douglas MacArthur and the Pacific Ocean Areas under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Nimitz’s command was subdivided further into North, Central, and South Pacific areas. He retained jurisdiction over the first two; King informed him that the South Pacific required a separate commander. Nimitz nominated his Commander, Battle Force Pacific Fleet, Vice Admiral William S. Pye, for the South Pacific post, and asked for Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, a rising star then stationed in London, as Pye’s replacement. Pye was one of King’s few intimate friends, but Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox vetoed the elevation of officers tainted in any way by Pearl Harbor. Nimitz offered an alternative; he would accept Ghormley as the theater commander. King promptly recalled Ghormley to take the South Pacific helm as a vice admiral.²

Ghormley’s intellect matched his substantial physical presence. During a destroyer and battleship career punctuated by many important staff positions, he revealed a flair for strategy. During his tenure in the South Pacific, he displayed impressive diplomacy. From the start, however, he manifested an uncertainty of leadership and a pessimism that ultimately led to his relief. The record shows evidence that Nimitz either lacked confidence from the start in the 59-year-old Ghormley for independent command, or that he viewed the whole campaign as an ill- judged gamble and sought to reduce the odds by entrusting effective command to combat-tested leaders.

The question of confidence emerges in this passage from Ghormley’s war diary, recording his understanding of the extraordinarily circumscribed role projected for him by Nimitz in May 1942:

The Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet would order Task Force Commanders to report to the Commander South Pacific Force for duty. The Commander South Pacific Force would direct the Task Force Commander to carry out his mission (as given by the Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet). The Commander South Pacific Force would not interfere in the Task Force Commander’s mission unless circumstances, presumably not known to the Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet, indicated that specific measures were required to be performed by the Task Force Commander. The Commander South Pacific Force would then direct the Task Force Commanders to take such measures.³

July 1942 message traffic suggests that Ghormley may have sought to command the Guadalcanal Expeditionary Force himself, but Nimitz denied him that role. The reason for this may well be connected to the pessimism shading into defeatism that surfaced immediately after Ghormley received the order to launch the campaign. Following a meeting in Melbourne, Ghormley and General Douglas MacArthur enjoined the Joint Chiefs of Staff to postpone Operation Watchtower, the code name for the seizure of “Tulagi and adjacent positions,” and to restudy the entire campaign plan. This plea raised the ire of Army and Navy planners in Washington and sowed the seeds of doubt about Ghormley’s own morale. Moreover, as Commander South Pacific, Ghormley displayed two instances of egre- giously poor judgment. The first was his refusal to attend the sole preinvasion conference of the Expeditionary Force flag officers at Koro Island on 26 July. This denied him both critical information and the opportunity to intervene to address the question of air support for the invasion.

The second conspicuous judgment error was Ghormley’s failure to fly from Noumea on New Caledonia to Guadalcanal to view the situation himself— and be seen by the Marines. That Nimitz journeyed from Pearl Harbor all the way to Guadalcanal for precisely that reason underscores Ghormley’s mistake.

Ghormley, however, was not incompetent, nor should his tenure be viewed without considerable sympathy. He was initially awarded responsibility for a theater without commensurate authority and almost immediately thrust into a desperate campaign (dubbed “Operation Shoestring” in the lexicon of the day) for which resources were scarce and uncertain and preparations in logistics and air power were shockingly inadequate. In his devotion to duty he virtually locked himself into a small sweatbox of an office and worked hours on end, albeit in part because his staff did not serve him well. He denied himself exercise, and he suffered from painful abscessed teeth; Nimitz astutely viewed both of these factors as contributing materially to Ghormley’s low morale.⁴

By a timely promotion and prudent mission assignments, Nimitz placed effective command of the Guadalcanal Expeditionary Force in the hands of his most combat-experienced subordinate, 57-year-old Vice Admiral Frank J. Fletcher, whose leadership John B. Lundstrom recently examined in these pages.⁵ Fletcher’s performance as a carrier commander since the start of the war, including the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, had been superior. But at the Koro conference he was visibly exhausted and flatly skeptical of the prospects for the campaign. In a controversial move, after air attacks on 7 and 8 August, Fletcher asked for and received permission from Ghormley to withdraw the carriers from the vicinity of Guadalcanal. Whether Ghormley believed he had authority to deny Fletcher’s request is an interesting but unanswerable question. Thereafter, Fletcher kept his carriers generally in a position too far distant to cover the skies over Guadalcanal, and for quite sound reasons refused to detach cruisers and destroyers from his carrier screens to carry out surface sweeps off Guadalcanal to prevent the landing of Japanese reinforcements and the incessant ship bombardments of Marine positions. Shortly after he won the carrier action at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, he was wounded slightly when his flagship, the Saratoga (CV-3), was torpedoed by the submarine 1-26 on 31 August. With this pretext, Fletcher was returned to the United States, never to exercise seagoing command again.

Unlike Ghormley or Fletcher, 57-year-old Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner figured in the entire campaign. A lean, bushy-browed intellectual bully, Turner’s ambition and indestructible determination were equal in measure. He commanded the Amphibious Force South Pacific throughout the six-month ordeal, and was seriously considered as the replacement for Ghormley. Turner’s repeated and ill-advised efforts to meddle in Vandegrift’s direction of the land struggle— some of which (such as his infatuation with scattering Marine units all along the coast) could be fairly labeled as idiocy—and the cloud over his head from the Battle of Savo Island denied his selection as theater commander. For a man of Turner’s ilk, it must have been galling to know that he would be forever linked to the humiliating defeat at Savo Island, though an examination of his role in that affair dispels the notion that where there was great defeat, there must have been great folly.

Turner deserves enormous credit for refusing to succumb to the defeatism emanating from Ghormley’s headquarters. Further, Turner made at least two courageous and vital decisions during the campaign. First, he boldly gambled and delivered the 7th Marines to Guadalcanal, after covering forces left his vulnerable transports following the loss of the Wasp (CV-7) to torpedoes from the submarine 1-19 on 15 September and with powerful Japanese forces in the vicinity. The occasion for the second arose on 12 November. Turner assessed bits of intelligence information and correctly deduced that Japanese capabilities included either a battleship bombardment of Henderson Field or an attempt to intercept and sink the valuable transports with which Turner had delivered reinforcements to Guadalcanal. Either effort posed a potentially mortal danger to the U.S. foothold. Without prompting from superiors, and conspicuously without warning from radio intelligence as to this aspect of Japanese plans, Turner concluded that the Japanese aimed at bombardment. He therefore stripped his transports of all but a tiny screen of destroyer-type ships and sent the rest of his combatant vessels against the Japanese task force. This produced the wild and critical night action of 13 November.⁶

Rear Admiral Norman Scott left us few words by which to measure him, but his deeds will do. Fifty-three in 1942, Scott commanded from the flagship San Juan (CL-53) the third but unengaged group of Allied cruisers at the Battle of Savo Island. On 7 September Ghormley appointed Scott commander of Task Force 64, ultimately composed of six cruisers and about seven destroyers. The official mission of Task Force 64 was to conduct screening and attack missions; Scott’s unofficial mission was to take revenge for Savo Island. He faced two major handicaps. First, the composition of his task force shuffled constantly. The single most important reason for this is an often overlooked but key factor in assessing the performance of the U.S. Navy off Guadalcanal. The absence of fixed cargo-handling facilities at Guadalcanal compelled the use of assault shipping to deliver supplies. But the Marines could unload by hand only two or three ships at a time. This in turn dictated that relays of small groups of supply ships be used, and the provision of escorts in these circumstances sundered the integrity of cruiser and destroyer divisions and seriously compromised their tactical function. Scott’s second major handicap was the absence of a prewar doctrine for joint operations of cruiser- destroyer groups.

Scott’s pragmatic solution to these problems was to aim for simplicity and the attainable rather than the desirable. He selected a single-column formation with destroyers ahead and astern of the cruisers. This became U.S. doctrine for nearly a year, with decidedly mixed results. Scott saw his tactical arrangements, however, as only a first step. As he commented:

A division of forces and dispositions other than column were considered, but it is believed that the column formation is most practical for night action. Without doubt the dispositions and maneuvering could be improved with training.

Thus, Scott’s analysis was that, while columns were the most practical night formation, a close-packed single column was not the ultimate solution.

Scott labored under one other handicap that he shared with almost all his peers: a misjudgment of the capabilities and limitations of radar. It is keenly important in evaluating the Guadalcanal flag officers to keep firmly in mind the fact that radar was then extremely new. Following prototype development, the U.S. Navy first fitted six experimental sets on board vessels in July and August 1940. By fall 1941 limited-scale deployment was in progress, but only after Pearl Harbor did equipping the fleet gain rapid momentum. Like many other flag officer contemporaries, Scott held shore billets for a substantial portion of this period, and this further pared down his opportunity to gain practical experience with radar.

Even for those with experience, the effectiveness of radar both technically and tactically during the Guadalcanal campaign presents a very erratic record. The most commonly fitted surface-search set during 1942 was the metric-wave SC radar. It had limited range, further reduced by the proximity of land, and was notorious for spurious or ghost returns—a problem exacerbated by the difficulties of interpreting its presentation of data. The newer and vastly more effective centimetric SG radar was much more rare. Both sets were prone to performance degradation of up to 50% from a loss of harmonious frequency tuning between transmitters and receivers or complete failure because of the concussion from gunfire. Furthermore, because of waveguide problems, placement of SG antennas was often less than optimal, leading to blind spots in search coverage. Tactically, in two out of the five surface battles around Guadalcanal, Imperial Navy lookouts detected Allied ships before radar warned of vessels wearing the Rising Sun. At Savo Island, all participating Allied ships, save the Australian Canberra, were fitted with SC radar, but Japanese eyes proved better than electronic ones in every instance. During the battleship action the night of 14-15 November, Japanese lookouts again detected hostile ships earlier, beating the SG radars on the battleships Washington (BB-56) and the South Dakota (BB-57).

In three other actions off Guadalcanal, SG radars provided the first warning of enemy presence. Only at Cape Esperance, however, where Scott commanded, did this figure in a clear-cut victory. Scott’s task group comprised two heavy and two light cruisers and five destroyers. Apparently owing to his lack of understanding of the capabilities of SG radar, or perhaps the belief that he could glean essential information by radio relay from ships so fitted, Scott rode in the heavy cruiser San Francisco (CA- 38) rather than one of his SG-equipped light cruisers, the Helena (CL-50) or the Boise (CL-47). Thanks to their SG radars, the two light ships received early warning of Admiral Aritomo Goto’s task force of three heavy cruisers and two destroyers approaching. It is illuminating to note, however, that the other U.S. heavy cruiser, the Salt Lake City (CA-25), also made an early contact with her SC radar (even before the Boise), but her skipper. Captain Ernest Small, had such faint faith in his set that he did not even report this to Scott, whose ship was thus the only U.S. cruiser without a radar contact on the approaching Japanese formation.

Scott’s grasp of the situation was further confused by the presence of a Japanese reinforcement unit and by the inadvertent fracture of the U.S. column in a prebattle turn that placed its destroyers out of formation on the bearing of the approaching Japanese. Through good fortune Scott was in a position to “cross the T” of Goto’s command, but hesitated almost too long for fear of firing on friendly ships. Accordingly, a good deal of credit for the U.S. success goes to Captain Gilbert Hoover of the Helena, who ultimately initiated the action by opening fire. Scott managed this confused battle well, and his concern about friendly fire was amply borne out by the damage inflicted on the destroyers Farenholt (DD-491) and Duncan (DD- 485) by U.S. projectiles. This damage further highlighted another point and confirms Scott’s judgment: In October 1942, the combination of technology and training for nocturnal action was still too rudimentary to permit sophisticated tactics.⁷

The triumph at Cape Esperance made Scott a hero, and by any rational standard, should have secured his command at the next and still more desperate night surface action on 13 November. Why it did not stems from command changes in the South Pacific and a decision made by Admiral Turner. On 15 October, Ghormley sent a message to Nimitz containing a cry of resignation: “My forces [are] totally inadequate to meet [the] situation.” Nimitz had already exhausted the material resources available to bolster forces in the South Pacific. Thus, he could employ only one other tool to influence the situation: a command change. As he faced his staff that evening, Nimitz asked whether Ghormley was tough enough to face the coming challenges and, more important, could he inspire men to feats beyond their known capabilities? The staff answered unanimously: No. After rejecting Turner for reasons noted, Nimitz ordered Vice Admiral William F. Halsey to take command.

Halsey was 60 years old, with his distinguished early and mid-career linked to destroyers and battleships. A latecomer to carrier aviation, he had led the Enterprise (CV-6) on raids early in the war—including the Doolittle strike on Japan—but illness barred him from command at Midway. Now, just off the sick list, he projected a strong, but not gruff, presence. Noted a correspondent, Halsey’s “wide mouth held tight and turned down at the corners, and exceedingly bushy eyebrows gave his face, in a grizzled sea dog way, an appearance of good humor.”⁸

While Halsey’s effect on morale was electric, his touch on operations was not always so benign. If Ghormley wanted for aggressiveness, Halsey manifested a surfeit. A little more than a week after taking command, he thrust his only two carriers, the Hornet (CV-8) and the Enterprise, into the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands against four Japanese flattops and at the most marked disparity of aircraft strengths in any of the 1942 carrier battles. The result was a tactical defeat that cost the loss of the Hornet and serious damage to the Enterprise, although it did inflict severe losses on all the Japanese air groups. Very little sustains the view that this battle was necessary; Halsey’s recklessness, however, yielded an unearned but major benefit: Japanese calculations for the critical next phase were skewed, because they grossly overestimated U.S. losses. The Hornet was the only one of four U.S. carriers the Combined Fleet believed sunk.

When Halsey returned from his first inspection of Guadalcanal on 9 November, his staff handed him radio intelligence exposing new Japanese plans to run a large convoy covered by carriers to land reinforcements on Guadalcanal. Although his material strength was inferior, this information put Halsey at a vital advantage for the series of actions that became known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal between 12 and 15 November. Halsey’s exploitation of this bonanza, however, was less than flawless. Admiral Nimitz, for one, would find serious fault with Halsey’s orders and his management of the Enterprise—which effectively kept the carrier out of the battle before 14 November—and of the fast battleships in the South Pacific.⁹

This brings us back to the story of Admiral Scott. During the afternoon of 12 November, Turner made his courageous gamble that a powerful Japanese task force with at least two battleships was bent on bombarding the U.S. airfield on Guadalcanal, not on destroying Turner’s transports. Turner ruthlessly stripped his transports to a thin screen and sent the rest of his combatant ships, two heavy and three light cruisers and eight destroyers, off to stop the Japanese.

Turner had two flag officers available to command this desperate expedition: the experienced and victorious Scott, or Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan who, as a flag officer, had performed only lackluster desk duty in the role of Ghormley’s chief of staff. Callaghan received the nod for the command, for the sole apparent reason that, for seniority purposes, his date of rank was 15 days earlier than Admiral Scott’s.

Callaghan was 52 years old with a career in battleships and cruisers and the distinction of having served as a naval aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He flew his flag on his old command, the San Francisco, which still sported an SC radar; Scott was embarked in the SC-fitted light antiaircraft cruiser Atlanta (CL-51). Callaghan adopted the single-column formation used by Scott at Cape Esperance in the order of four destroyers, five cruisers, and four destroyers. None of the five SG-fitted vessels— the O ’Ban- non (DD-450), the Fletcher (DD-445), the Portland (CA- 33), the Helena, or the Juneau (CL-52)—was placed advantageously in the formation. Although no one can be sure, evidence suggests that the austere and deeply religious Callaghan intended to “cross the T” of the Japanese formation with his cruisers after it cleared Savo Island and approached a position from which to conduct a bombardment. Callaghan may also have intended to release his van and rear destroyers to make torpedo attacks from the flanks. What we do know from communications logs is that Callaghan forfeited the advantage of surprise that he could have seized from detection of the enemy by the Helena's SG radar during increasingly harried attempts to obtain a clear picture of the situation over the voice- radio net. It is difficult to imagine that Scott, with his experience at Cape Esperance, would have hesitated so long.

Callaghan’s efforts begat a collision rather than a crossing. The two formations crashed into each other in the most desperate close-range melee of the war. Despite the Helena's ample warning, the Japanese fired first. Early in the action Scott was killed when the San Francisco inadvertently perforated the Atlanta with two main-battery salvoes. The San Francisco then found herself in close action with the flagship of the Japanese task force, the battleship Hiei, and Callaghan was killed by a round from the battleship’s secondary armament. The battle and its aftermath, including the sinking of the Juneau—with the loss of the five Sullivan brothers—cost the U.S. Navy four destroyers, two cruisers, and 1,439 seamen and Marines. The Japanese ultimately lost two destroyers and the battleship Hiei, with a total of at least 552 dead and missing. More important, their mission to bombard Henderson Field on Guadalcanal was thwarted.¹⁰

Japanese cruisers bombarded Henderson Field on the night of 13 to 14 November, uninterrupted by any surface challenge, because of a fumbling Halsey and his staff. Embarrassed, Halsey more than redeemed himself the next day. Anticipating the arrival of the remnants of the reinforcement convoy savaged by U.S. planes and a battleship-spearheaded covering and bombardment force, Halsey rejected counsels of timidity from his staff and committed his last surface unit, the battleships Washington and South Dakota and four destroyers, to confront the Japanese in the confined waters off Savo Island. The employment of fast battleships in optimal circumstances for the deadly Japanese “Long Lance” torpedoes violated the Holy Writ of the Naval War College, but Halsey reasoned a failure of the Navy to intervene at this juncture would shatter U.S. morale. This was perhaps the boldest and best decision Halsey made in the war.

Fortunately, command of this task force, upon which the fate of Guadalcanal hung, rested with cool, incisive, 54-year-old Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee. He not only rode in an SG radar-equipped flagship, the Washington, but also appreciated the capabilities of this set. Lee’s task group was even more hastily formed than Scott’s, with the battleships operating in company only for three days prior to the action and the destroyers representing four different divisions. Although he ordered a single column formation, Lee spread his disposition so that the four destroyers steamed 5,000 yards ahead of the battleships. He also carefully coordinated his maneuvers to meet the covering force and then the convoy.

Incredibly sharp-eyed Japanese lookouts spied Lee’s unit almost an hour before the first warning of Admiral Nobutake Kondo’s approaching 14-ship task force appeared on the Washington's SG radar. A probable reason for this was that the flagship’s SG radar was mounted on the forward side of her tower mast, thus creating a blind spot on after bearings, the direction of the initial Japanese approach. Japanese dispersion tactics reached their zenith, with Kondo’s 14 ships divided four ways within a square 12 miles on a side they shared with Lee and Savo Island. The battle passed through four phases. First was Lee’s indecisive clash with one Japanese cruiser and two destroyers. Second, a vicious fight off the south end of Savo Island cost Lee his destroyer screen and the Japanese one destroyer. Third, an engagement with Kondo’s bombardment force knocked out the South Dakota, but saw the Washington inflict terminal damage on the battleship Kirishima. Fourth, the flagship Washington was alone against the remainder of Kondo’s force. From these clashes, Lee and the Washington emerged the clear winners in an action that clinched victory in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.¹¹

The campaign did not end until February 1943, and the U.S. Navy hit two more sour notes in its concluding chords. On the night of 30 November to 1 December, Rear Admiral Carlton H. Wright led a formidable task force of five cruisers and six destroyers into a battle off Tassa- faronga Point on Guadalcanal against Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka’s Reinforcement Unit of eight destroyers. Wright’s appointment as commander of this task force occurred less than 72 hours before the action, but he had ostensibly adopted a fine plan crafted by Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid that reads like a lessons-leamed summary from prior battles: SG-equipped ships to lead each of two cruiser and one destroyer units, with other destroyers scouting 10,000 yards in the van to permit surprise torpedo attacks against the enemy.

In the event, Wright failed to employ the destroyer scouts, then fatally hesitated and thus squandered the advantage of surprise gained from early detection of Tanaka by SG radars. Gunfire from U.S. ships sank the destroyer Takanami, but Japanese Long Lance torpedoes sank the heavy cruiser Northampton (CA-26) and heavily damaged her peers, the Minneapolis (CA-36), the New Orleans (CA-32) and the Pensacola (CA-24). A major contributing factor to this fiasco was that the fire control systems and characteristics of the 8-inch guns on board the U.S. heavy cruisers were particularly ill-suited to engaging destroyers at night against a land background.

Admiral Nimitz properly assessed the Battle of Tassa- faronga as much more the product of institutional defects rather than simply the shortcomings of Admiral Wright’s leadership.¹² The same cannot be said for the last action of the campaign, known as the Battle of Rennell Island. This clash between Japanese aircraft and an American cruiser-destroyer unit on 30 to 31 January 1943 resulted in the loss of the heavy cruiser Chicago (CA-29). Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen exhibited a certain rigidity of mental processes in his disdain against Halsey’s orders for open-necked shirts and garrison caps, and he refused to appear so attired on his flagship. More significant, within the space of less than 24 hours, Giffen combined a rare degree of mismanagement of fighter direction, formations, maneuvers, and employment of escort carriers that amounted to tactical ineptitude of the first degree. It provoked a rare outburst of anger from Nimitz, who threatened to shoot anyone on his staff who leaked word of the loss of the Chicago.¹³

No one should suppose from this account that Imperial Navy leadership during the Guadalcanal campaign was superior overall. Quite the opposite was the case, for victory was within Japanese grasp repeatedly from August to November, only to be squandered. It was a time of trial, testing, and often painful learning. If Ghormley, Callaghan, and Giffen were found wanting, and Fletcher exhausted, the names of Scott, Lee, and Halsey deserved every bit of credit and honor they received, and more. They provided the key to victory.