Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (23 page)

“Very well,” said Karpov. “Secure the
152mm gun systems, Samsonov. I won’t waste any more missiles on this ship for
the moment either. The cupboard is starting to look rather empty.”

“We’ll run full out for the Torres
Strait, but when we get there we’ll have to slow down considerably to navigate
those shoals and reefs properly. We may be in action again sooner than you
think.”

It was more than an obvious conclusion,
for the unknown history ahead was to send many more surprises their way before
night would fall.

Part VI

Vendetta

“If
you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?”

-
William Shakespeare

Chapter
16

Admiral King
had been the one to start it all.
First King, then Marshall. The feisty admiral had been so distraught over
proceedings in the Pacific that he had become all but unbearable. A surly man
by nature, King was also never one to be unimpressed by his own intelligence,
and seldom believed any other man was his equal, particularly when it came to
the complexities of naval strategy. King’s steely eyed look was enough to back
down most anyone, but when it came to convincing President Roosevelt, he needed
the more reasoned approach of Marshall to help his cause.

What he wanted was
action
in
the Pacific. Not the slow logistical buildup, the slow steady turn of the
coiled spring that had been underway since the outbreak of the war. When ‘War
Plan Orange’ had been canceled, King brooded that the loss of the Philippines
was an insult the navy would have to atone for one day. Yet, in his heart of
hearts, he knew the plan itself was drafted in a bygone era when the old
battleships formed the backbone of the fleet. Had they sallied forth from Pearl
as the plan expected, the Japanese would have had a field day with their
carrier fleet.

King was wise enough to realize the
day of the battleship was fading. He knew the carriers were already carrying
the ball when it came to operations in the Pacific, the problem was, there was
all too little forward movement. The U.S. had been on the defensive for a long
year now, with little to show beyond Doolittle’s daring raid on Tokyo. The
string of Japanese victories had gone unbroken, challenged only once by two
American carriers in the Coral Sea when the Japanese pushed for Port Moresby.
They had lost his old lady, ‘Lady
Lex
,’ when she went
down in that battle, and it galled him to no end.

The code breakers had been able to
penetrate the JN-25 naval code, and warned that a big enemy operation was
imminent. It did not take them long to determine that Fiji and Soma were the
strategic end points of this planned attack. The Japanese had already put
troops into the southern Solomons at Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and had both a
seaplane base and an airfield under construction in those islands, though they
were not yet strongly held. Now the attack would be aimed at either Espiritu
Santo or Noumea, and if either one fell it would put Jap bombers in range of
both Fiji and Samoa. Australia would be virtually cut off, and King would have
none of it.

The fiery admiral vigorously argued
that sitting back on defense and trying to parry the Japanese thrusts would
simply not do. “We have to hit the bastards somewhere,” he said hotly. “Stick a
boot right where it hurts.” And he fingered Guadalcanal as the perfect place to
start. To make sure it happened he pushed on Nimitz to replace the equivocating
and fretful Admiral Ghormley and appointed a new commander in theater, Admiral
Bull Halsey.

Halsey was a strong proponent of the
fleet air arm’s ability to project decisive power through fast, mobile aircraft
carriers. The time honored maxim of getting
there
first with the most men had been applied to army maneuvers since Confederate
Cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest first explained his tactics during the
Civil War. Halsey applied this same principle to carrier warfare when he said:
“get to the other fellow with everything you have as fast as you can and to
dump it on him.” In any encounter at sea he was prone to immediately let his
planes do the talking with a shoot first attitude.

The few feathers the Navy had at this
point in the war were already in Halsey’s cap. He was involved in the Doolittle
Raid, and pointed attacks on the Marshalls and Wake Island. The burden of
driving these operations soon found him in ill health, and he had been
hospitalized for several months before asked to take command of the American
counterattack again, arriving in Noumea August 15, 1942, a full sixty days
before his arrival date there in the history Fedorov knew.

When outgoing Admiral Ghormley conveyed
his misgivings over the planned operation against Guadalcanal, saying it was
likely to create another Bataan all over again, Halsey waved it away
dismissively. He was a fighting Admiral, and the operation was just what he
wanted. He had three carriers in hand now, and he would use them to support a
lightning swift attack, right into the heart of the enemy’s forward position in
the Solomons.

 When cryptanalysts winnowed down
the planned attack date for the new Japanese operation as August 25, King argued
that the U.S. should be ready, with troops at sea, and hit the Japanese where
they might least expect it, at Guadalcanal.

“They’ll expect us to be sitting on
our duffs waiting for them at New Caledonia or Vanuatu,” King argued. “Let’s
kick them right in the nuts with the 1st Marines!” Halsey agreed
wholeheartedly.

 It had been a long, uphill
fight. Many said that putting Marines in transports with the Japanese carriers
at large was sheer madness. It would force the US carriers to shepherd them to
their planned invasion beaches, anchor them there for days and yield complete
freedom of movement to the enemy as they swept south.

Halsey argued that if the attack were
launched at least two days in advance of the Japanese invasion date, it could
unhinge the entire enemy operation just as it was getting underway. “It will
attract Jap carriers like flies, I know it,” he said, “but we’ll have a fist
full of flat tops as well, and we can hit them as they come at us. It’s either
that or we just sit at Noumea and wait for them. And what good is that? Let’s
hit Guadalcanal and take that god dammed airfield there and put Wildcats and
Dauntless dive bombers on the ground. That will give us one more carrier that
they can lob shells at all they want and never sink.”

In the end Marshall was convinced to
side with King and win approval of the President and authorization for the
pre-emptive counterattack, which they called ‘Operation Watchtower.’ The 1st
Marine Division went to sea on August 20th, escorted by everything the U.S.
had, including the carriers
Enterprise, Hornet
and
Saratoga
,
twelve cruisers, twenty-one destroyers, and two new additions to the fleet, the
superb fast battleships
Washington
and
North Carolina.
Notably
absent was the carrier
Yorktown
, which had been transferred to the
Atlantic Fleet after the loss of CV
Wasp
to provide much need air cover
over the seas around Iceland. Even as Japanese task forces were forming at both
Truk and Rabaul, the Americans were at sea.

In-theater reserves were also
substantial for the Americans. They had moved three old battleships to Suva
Bay, Fiji: the
California, New Mexico,
and
West Virginia.
Too
slow to operate with carriers, they nonetheless provided a strong deterrent
that could discourage any Japanese surface action group from making a run at
the vital US bases in the region. Two light cruisers and ten reserve destroyers
were also part of this force, and they were actually using extra fuel bunkered
in the big battleships to sustain local operations by the destroyers.

Yamamoto had planned to come at his
first target, Espiritu Santo, in a wide pincer attack, like the twin horns of a
bull. He was going to take the big fleet carriers
Kaga
and
Akagi
,
with light carrier
Ryujo
from the great Japanese naval base at Truk and
then make a run for the Island of
Naru
, which would
be taken quickly by an SNLF battalion, being largely undefended. In the wake of
the fast carriers would come his powerful battleships,
Yamato,
Hiei
, Fuso
as the heart of the bombardment group. Six
heavy cruisers, four light cruisers and two dozen destroyers would be assigned
to this pincer, which intended to deliver elements of the Nagoya 3rd Division
to their landing sites on Vanuatu, Espiritu Santo.

The other horn of the bull would
originate from the forward base of Rabaul where fleet carriers
Hiryu
,
Soryu
light carrier
Ryuho
would lead the attack, down through the Solomon Sea,
escorted by four cruisers and seven destroyers with the second wave troops of
3rd Division. This force was to dip well down into the Coral Sea, then swing up
again to come at Vanuatu from the Southwest while Yamamoto’s main group
appeared from the northeast. It would also serve as a screen for anything the
Americans might sortie out of Noumea. The two moves were to be timed to
converge in unison and bring over fifty warships, including six carriers,
together near Vanuatu in a massive mailed fist.

The American counterthrust at
Guadalcanal would be King’s well placed kick just as the enemy closed these two
powerful arms on their intended target, and it worked as planned.

Both Japanese task forces were well
out to sea when the Marines set sail, yet too far away to threaten them. By the
time the convoy was eventually spotted by a seaplane out of Tulagi, the two
prongs of Yamamoto’s navy were widely dispersed, hundreds of miles from one
another. He had to make a decision—should the operation go forward as planned,
or should one or both pincers be re-directed to blunt the American thrust at
Guadalcanal? The outcome of the entire battle would rest on that choice, but
the United States 1st Marine Division had much to do with forcing the reluctant
Admiral’s hand in the matter. They stormed ashore at both Tulagi and
Guadalcanal with such élan, that within a day they had overrun Japanese
positions at Lunga on August 25th, where they captured the airfield and were
working feverishly to make it ready to receive planes from nearby U.S,
airfields and carriers. The “Cactus Air force” as it would come to be called,
was about to be born.

The news shook the staff at Combined
Fleet headquarters at Truk, and the consensus was that the operation against
Espiritu Santo would do nothing more than to create an isolated outpost, over
950 kilometers behind an active battle front at Guadalcanal, and one within
range of two other strong American bases at Noumea and Suva Bay, Fiji. If the
Americans were allowed to secure and establish a strong base at Guadalcanal,
the whole operation would come unhinged. It was therefore decided that the bold
attack would have to be crushed, and Japanese control of the Solomons made
undisputed. Only then could the next move against Espiritu Santo be
contemplated with any hope of success.

Yamamoto considered how to proceed,
first thinking to send Admiral Yamaguchi’s smaller Western force to engage and
repel the operation, or proceed directly to Guadalcanal on his own. Many
officers argued that both horns of the bull should be used in one crushing
blow, and Yamamoto was about to make that very decision when he suddenly
received some rather startling news from Admiral Hara’s Operations force
against Darwin.

Like all dispatches, it began with
glowing returns of the successful air raid and surface bombardment of Darwin,
and Yamashita’s easy invasion, claiming to control the port and airfield within
24 hours. Then details of a rather unexpected “incident” were related that
described the presence of an enemy capital ship that presumably had sortied
from Darwin with some very unusual weaponry. The description was terse, with
few details, but related intense anti-aircraft capabilities and noted that
Hara’s attempts to engage and sink this solitary ship had met with less than
satisfactory results. Yamamoto was wise enough to read between those lines, and
he immediately sent a signal to Hara asking him to state the present condition
of his air strike arm, wondering whether it would be needed in the Coral Sea
now, given the American counter thrust.

He received a most disheartening
reply. Hara’s 5th Carrier Division had started the campaign with fifty-four D3A
dive bombers. They had seven left, and six more in reserve flying in from
Kendari. He had all of forty-eight B5N1 torpedo bombers, and only twenty of
those remained. Only in his fighter element was there any real strength left.
He reported fifty operational A6M2s out of an initial allotment of sixty-six.
The losses to the strike planes were staggering! Seventy-three percent! And all
this against a single enemy ship that was still reported at large, poised to
enter the Coral Sea at that very moment, and being pursued by Captain Sanji
Iwabuchi leading a small task force aboard the battleship
Kirishima
.