The Conquering Tide (13 page)

In his dispatch to Ghormley on the evening of August 8, Fletcher had offered two reasons for his proposed withdrawal: the low-fuel state of his task force, and heavy losses of F4F fighters on August 7 and 8. In preparing his volume on the Guadalcanal landing (volume 5,
The Struggle for Guadalcanal
) Morison obtained the navy's records of the actual fuel state of each of the ships in Fletcher's task force, and showed that Fletcher's fuel situation was far from critical. All the cruisers were at least half full. The destroyers' fuel condition varied, but none had less than 40,000 gallons of fuel, and their daily fuel expenditure ranged from 12,000 to 24,000 gallons. Morison's biting conclusion: “Thus it is idle to pretend that there was any urgent fuel shortage in this force. . . . Fletcher's reasons for withdrawal were flimsy. . . . [H]is force could have remained in the area with no more severe consequences than sunburn.”
¹¹
John B. Lundstrom provides evidence that Fletcher may have received incomplete or inaccurate information about the fuel state of his screening vessels.
¹²
The admiral could act only on the basis of what he knew. On the other hand, it is a task force commander's responsibility to obtain proper reports from ships under his command.

The second issue, heavy fighter losses in air combat on August 7 and 8, cannot be idly dismissed. On Dog-Day, half of the American fighters that engaged the enemy in air combat were sent down in flames. Overall fighter losses in the two days had come to twenty-one, leaving reserves of seventy-eight Wildcats on the three carriers. Fighters, by a wide margin, were the most valuable weapon in Fletcher's arsenal. They were the only aircraft that could properly defend Turner's ships against air raids, but they were equally needed to fly cover over the carrier task forces throughout the daylight hours. Fletcher's air operations during the first two days of
WATCHTOWER
had been the busiest in the history of carrier warfare. Wear and tear to equipment, and the simple exhaustion of the aircrews, were considerations that no responsible task force commander could afford to ignore.

The heart of the controversy was the value of the carriers themselves. Their best protection was constant movement and finding concealment in thick weather whenever possible. Operating for several days “chained to a post,” in a fixed location south of Guadalcanal, invited devastating counterattack by air or submarine. Japanese twin-engine medium bombers, armed with torpedoes, had the range to reach Fletcher's task force from Rabaul. The submarine menace grew inexorably the longer his ships remained corralled in a finite geographic zone. Three months earlier, in these very same waters, Fletcher had lost the
Lexington
to air attack at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The
Yorktown
, his former flagship, had been shot out from under him at Midway. The
Saratoga
, his current flagship, had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in January and knocked out of action for four months. Though Fletcher did not yet know it, the
Saratoga
would catch another torpedo on August 31, and the
Wasp
, the newest carrier to arrive in the theater, would be destroyed by submarine attack in mid-September. The
Hornet
would succumb to air attack in October (at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands), leaving just one American flattop (the
Enterprise
) in the Pacific.

This much is incontrovertible: the risk that one or more American carriers would be lost during the
WATCHTOWER
expedition was not negligible. But how should that risk be balanced against Turner's need for continued air protection? The carriers had provided most of the navy's offensive striking power since escaping destruction on December 7, 1941. For the time being (until the new
Essex
-class carriers could be commissioned and brought into the fleet) they were scarce and valuable assets. Fletcher correctly assumed that the Japanese aircraft carriers would sooner or later come down into
the lower Solomons. In that case it would be his overriding duty to fight another carrier slugging match like those of Coral Sea or Midway. It was in that context that Fletcher's withdrawal must be judged.

The proper use of the carriers during
WATCHTOWER
was a first-order strategic question, and it should have been resolved in advance. That it was not is unsurprising, given how hastily
WATCHTOWER
had been planned and executed. Turner had hoped for a full five days to unload the division's cargo, but plans for the operation had specified that the transport fleet would withdraw in three days, and neither Turner nor the marines had ever been promised longer than “two or three” days of carrier air cover. Neither King, Nimitz, nor Ghormley had provided clear instructions to resolve the discrepancy. The decision therefore fell to Fletcher, whom Ghormley designated the overall commander of the expedition. Many officers who took part in the July 26 command conference on the
Saratoga
were taken aback by the evident rancor between Fletcher and Turner and came away with the impression that Fletcher lacked confidence in the operation. Ghormley's presence had been urgently needed at that conference—had he been at the table, he could have adjudicated the question and resolved any doubt. A reasonable share of culpability must be attributed to
WATCHTOWER'S
cumbersome and ambiguous command arrangements, and thus to King himself.

S
UNRISE ON
A
UGUST 10
found Task Force 62 zigzagging generally east, at about the midpoint between Guadalcanal and Noumea, with the damaged
Chicago
and
Ralph Talbot
struggling to remain in company. Turner's ships were loaded with hundreds of wounded marines and sailors, 831 hospitalization cases in all. Four submarine contacts were reported between dawn and dusk, and a torpedo wake was once observed to pass by the bow of the
McCawley
. The destroyers hunted the surrounding waters with depth-charge barrages, and the task force executed a series of radical turns. The stricken
Chicago
, falling behind, was ordered into Efate with a destroyer screen. No ship suffered a torpedo hit, and on August 15, the bulk of Task Force 62 arrived safely at Noumea Harbor. The wounded were removed to hospital ships by stretcher. All would be sent to Australia or the States.
¹³

The 1st Division's hopes now depended on constant and generous supply by sea. On August 15, four old flush-deck “four-piper” transports dropped anchor at Lunga Roads and began unloading supplies—aviation gasoline
(400 drums), aerial bombs (300), .50-caliber ammunition, lubricating oil—and ground personnel for Marine Aircraft Group 21, which would fly in as soon as the airstrip was in a condition to receive planes. On the following afternoon, the
Fomalhaut
, loaded with heavy construction equipment for Guadalcanal and Tulagi, stood out of Noumea accompanied by three destroyers. On that same date, Turner asked McCain to “load all APDs [high-speed transports] to capacity with food and send one division to Guadalcanal and the other to Tulagi.”
¹⁴

With 16,000 mouths to feed, Vandegrift grew concerned about his food reserves. According to Turner's records, entered into his war diary on August 9, “Sufficient food was landed at the Tulagi area for about eleven days and at the Guadalcanal area for about thirty-six days.”
¹⁵
The marines did not agree with those figures, however—Vandegrift radioed this on August 15: “From rations on hand and consumed to date estimate about twelve days' rations landed Guadalcanal. Further loss due to weather and handling reduced this to ten days. No opportunity should be lost to forward rations to this command.”
¹⁶
In the 1st Division's final report, submitted in 1943, the figures recorded for August 15 were seventeen days of regular field rations, three days of Type C Rations, and another ten days' supply of captured Japanese food. The discrepancies are likely explained by the spoilage of rations packed in cardboard boxes, which tended to disintegrate in the rain, and by the uncertain amount of captured enemy food. At any rate, there is no doubt that the marines went hungry during those early weeks in the Solomons. Vandegrift ordered reduced rations on August 12, and most men subsisted on two meager meals per day. Private William Rogal, manning a foxhole on Tulagi, was issued one C ration per day “and sometimes not even that.” He and his fellow marines scavenged for Japanese provisions in warehouses along the Tulagi waterfront and found a few sacks of barley. They made a kind of barley soup, an awful mush, but ate it avidly. On the transports, Rogal recalled, sex had been the habitual topic of conversation among bored marines. Now it was food, because “the single overriding emotion during the weeks we existed in that jungle retreat was hunger!”
¹⁷

Turner continued to pressure Fletcher to shield his cargo ships, but Fletcher was keen to keep his task force together and on the move. He anticipated a major Japanese counterstrike, and with good reason. The intelligence picture remained clouded, but air reconnaissance, coast-watcher
reports, and bits and pieces of “Ultra” (decrypted enemy radio intercepts) seemed to portend a major Japanese fleet movement into the lower Solomons. Overflights of northern Bougainville confirmed that the Japanese were building new landing strips south of Buka Airfield.
¹⁸
MacArthur's B-17s flew over Rabaul and Kavieng almost every day and snapped aerial photographs. Between August 12 and August 16, these photos revealed a significant buildup of naval force, and the airfields at Rabaul appeared to have been reinforced with fighters and bombers. The Japanese were apparently constructing another airfield at Buin on southern Bougainville, about 400 miles northwest of Guadalcanal, which would give them a much closer springboard for air attacks. Considerable enemy air activity was reported at Lae, on the northern coast of New Guinea. On August 15, Japanese aircraft dropped six loads of ammunition and food to Japanese troops scattered on the western end of Guadalcanal (four fell within or near the marine lines and were captured). The Americans still had not pinpointed the location of Japanese carrier forces, but they could be at sea and on their way to the Solomons. On August 21, Fletcher told Ghormley that he considered it “inadvisable to send cruisers and destroyers into
CACTUS
[Guadalcanal] nightly,” because of their exposure to submarine attack.
¹⁹
Better to keep them at sea, on the move, and prepared to repel the expected enemy naval offensive.

The struggle for Guadalcanal now settled into a repetitive daily pattern. Each day, shortly after noon, Japanese bombers appeared overhead and pounded the island, concentrating their bombs on marine installations, defenses, and the airstrip. A single battery of four 90mm antiaircraft guns, set up on the edge of the airfield, usually discouraged the pilots from descending lower than 20,000 feet. Still, the bombing arrested construction work and forced the units positioned around the airfield to spend hours each day in hastily dug slit trenches and foxholes. Occasionally Zero fighters made low-altitude strafing runs. The twin-engine bombers flew lazy circles above the island even after having released their payloads. Vandegrift's officers correctly deduced that they were snapping aerial photographs of the airfield and the various installations and weaponry in the marine perimeter.

Air attacks did not claim heavy casualties, but the absence of any friendly planes overhead ate away at morale. If the Japanese could send their Zeros all the way from Rabaul, why couldn't the American fighters come up from Espiritu Santo, which was slightly closer? The answer, as an aviator
could explain, was that the heavier Wildcats did not have the range to make such a flight. Guadalcanal needed its own air force—it was urgently necessary to complete “Henderson Field,” the name now given to Guadalcanal's not-quite-finished airstrip in honor of Major Lofton R. Henderson, who had perished while leading a squadron of marine bombers against the enemy fleet at Midway.

At 11:00 a.m. on August 18, eight G4M “Betty” bombers appeared suddenly over Henderson at well under 5,000 feet. Radar had failed to pick them up. Men standing along the side of the field scattered and ducked into foxholes and trenches. A tightly concentrated pattern of 500-pound bombs fell around the antiaircraft batteries and down the length of the strip, leaving seventeen craters that would have to be filled in by the engineers. In flying so low, the G4Ms exposed themselves to antiaircraft fire, and several were observed to trail smoke as they turned northwest for home.

The near-daily midday raids were followed by harrowing nighttime bombardments—at first by submarines and then (on August 16) by destroyers that snuck into Ironbottom Sound after dark. Often these ships disgorged Japanese troop reinforcements and supplies onto Guadalcanal's northwestern beaches. Lacking heavy shore guns or air cover, the marines could do nothing to interfere with Japanese ships even in broad daylight. On the afternoon of the sixteenth, several dozen marines on a hill near Kukum watched as a Japanese destroyer disembarked about 200 troops on the beach to the west.

Almost every night, a floatplane circled over the marine perimeter, dropping occasional bombs here or there. Collectively known to the Americans as “Washing Machine Charley” or “Louie the Louse,” these nocturnal visitors usually did little damage. But they kept the marines awake, and that may have been their purpose. The marines spoke of “shoes on” and “shoes off” nights.
²⁰
Most of the division was sleeping on the ground, curled up on ponchos against the wet earth. Some attempted to rig crude hammocks, but every sleeper had to be positioned near his foxhole so that he could execute the half-awake rolling maneuver called the “Guadalcanal twitch.” The marines, almost none of whom had experienced combat before setting foot on this miserable island, were on edge. Any noise in the jungle beyond their lines might signal the beginning of an enemy attack. Men on the perimeter threw away a lot of ammunition in that first week. On the fourth night, marine units dug in on opposite sides of the airfield held an “intramural”
(friendly) firefight, exchanging a large volume of fire before their officers put a stop to it. Mercifully, none was injured.