The Conquering Tide (24 page)

On October 11, as Yamamoto and Ugaki watched from the
Yamato
's weather deck, an enormous fleet steamed out of Truk's north channel—four carriers, four battleships, ten cruisers, and thirty destroyers. The carriers would sweep north of the Solomons, hanging back until the airfield was overrun, and then race south or east to hunt down and destroy enemy fleet units. Ugaki confided in his diary that the coming offensive would commit “most of the Combined Fleet.” Failure was therefore unthinkable: “Whatever happens, we must succeed in the coming operation of recapturing Guadalcanal at any cost.”
²¹

C
HESTER
N
IMITZ, THE FIFTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), was a gentleman of the old school. Unlike Ernest King, who stood above him in the chain of command, Nimitz never yelled
at a subordinate, drank to excess, chased women, or let a word of profanity fall from his lips. He had inherited a shattered, demoralized command after December 7, 1941, and very swiftly restored confidence and morale. He was the most respected naval officer of his generation; today he is fittingly revered as the greatest leader in American naval history. He was of medium height and had a ruddy complexion and pale blue eyes, set in striking contrast to a pair of white eyebrows and an equally white head of hair. Born and raised in a landlocked corner of Texas, Nimitz came from a humble family of German American innkeepers. As a boy he had spoken as much German as English. Long hikes, swims, and bouts of tennis kept him fit. For relaxation, he shot at targets with his pistol, tossed horseshoes, played cribbage, and listened to classical music on a phonograph.

Within the constraints of his lofty rank, Nimitz was a genuinely warm and outgoing man. He was compulsively social and always used a personal touch. He let it be known that the commanding officers of all ships that put in to Pearl Harbor were expected to pay him a visit, and his office established an “open house” each day at 11:00 a.m. for the purpose. His command was vast—two and a half million men and more than a thousand ships—so these daily meetings were a tax on his time, but they kept him in direct touch with every level of the fleet. Nimitz was a natural-born warrior, one who always insisted on carrying the war to the enemy. He had the inborn military bearing of his Teutonic ancestors; his family had once held a title of nobility and coat of arms in rural Saxony. His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance, later attested that Nimitz was the only man he ever knew who seemed to be completely fearless, and added, “The one big thing about him was that he was always ready to fight. . . . And he wanted officers who would push the fight with the Japanese. If they would not do so, they were sent elsewhere.”
²²

When Admiral King had first devised his ambitious and risky
WATCHTOWER
operation, Nimitz had kept his cards close to his vest. There is little in the historical record to indicate whether he agreed with King's reasoning. When Ghormley and MacArthur recommended a deferral of the offensive, Nimitz again remained conspicuously silent, neither supporting nor disputing their arguments. But when King overruled their objections and reaffirmed
WATCHTOWER
, the CINCPAC threw everything he could into the operation. He knew that the position on Guadalcanal was precarious, but he thought Ghormley's dispatches too pessimistic. Having lived through
the menacing weeks after Pearl Harbor, and the knife's-edge vicissitudes of Coral Sea and Midway, Nimitz was not easily shaken by the recurring setbacks in the South Pacific. The sinking of four Allied cruisers at the Battle of Savo Island was a heavy blow, as was the destruction of the
Wasp
. But even if Guadalcanal could not be held, the Japanese were frittering away their strength, little by little. In the long run they would stagger under the weight of America's growing military power. “Remember this,” he had told his staff after learning of
Lexington
's loss in the Coral Sea; “we don't know anything about the enemy—how badly he's hurt. You can bet your boots he's hurt too. His situation is no bed of roses either.”
²³
He could have made the same point about the struggle for Guadalcanal.

On September 24, Nimitz left Pearl Harbor for an extended inspection tour with half-a-dozen members of his staff. A big four-engine PB2Y Coronado flying boat roared down the East Loch and staggered into the sky, then banked south and set a heading for tiny Palmyra, 960 miles distant. Palmyra was one of several remote mid-Pacific atolls on the daisy chain of refueling stops and emergency airstrips that formed the air route to the South Pacific. The pilots flew a compass heading over eternally monotonous blue seascapes, aiming for a tiny horseshoe-shaped tendril of sand and scrub that was easily missed when cloud cover was thick. They flew through thunderheads that tossed the aircraft sickeningly. The navigator might hope to pick up a radio beacon, but when there was none, it was a matter of dead reckoning—watching the compass, keeping track of course and speed, and applying estimated corrections for cross winds, which might be guessed by watching the play of the wind on the waves. Nothing provided a more visceral sense of the immensity of the Pacific than flying across it in a World War II–era aircraft.

The Coronado was a very large snub-nosed airplane with a single high wing and a cockpit positioned high and forward of the fuselage. Its range was only about 1,000 miles, but it was strongly armed and therefore better prepared than the Catalina PBY to ward off unfriendly advances by enemy fighters. Less than 200 miles from Palmyra, one of the engines on Nimitz's aircraft conked out. The plane landed safely, but a replacement had to be summoned from Pearl, requiring a long delay. The next leg down to Canton Island, 800 miles southwest of Palmyra, passed without incident, and there Nimitz rendezvoused with Admiral McCain, who had been relieved as COMAIRSOPAC and was on his way north. McCain gave the CINCPAC
his views about the air fight for Guadalcanal. He was more upbeat than Ghormley but urged that reserve planes be sent into Espiritu Santo and readied to reinforce the contested island. McCain also stressed the critical problems of aviation fuel supply and pilot fatigue.

The next day brought another long hop to Fiji for refueling. The party arrived at Noumea on the afternoon of September 28 and went straight into a conference on Ghormley's flagship, the transport
Argonne
, at 4:30 p.m.

Ghormley did not look well. Nimitz had seen symptoms of fatigue in leaders before.
^*
It was typically manifested in weight loss and a slightly manic gleam in the eyes. Ghormley appeared gaunt and hunted. His surroundings could not have helped. Unable to obtain suitable quarters and a staff headquarters from the French colonialists on the island, Ghormley had chosen to run his command from his overcrowded and sweltering flagship, berthed at a pier in Dumbea Bay. Nimitz learned that Ghormley had not left the ship in a month. When a staff officer handed Ghormley an urgent dispatch, he appeared shaken by whatever he read and was heard to murmur, “My God, what are we going to do about this?”
²⁴
The COMSOPAC's nerves were brittle; he was not looking after his physical or mental health.

The September 28 conference in the
Argonne
's wardroom was one of the largest concentrations of senior Pacific commanders ever to sit around one table. General MacArthur had declined to travel outside his command area (as was his normal practice throughout the war, until he was ordered to meet the president in Hawaii in July 1944), but he sent his chief of staff, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, and his air commander, Lieutenant General George C. Kenney. SOPAC was represented by Ghormley, Turner, and Major General Millard F. Harmon, commanding general of U.S. Army Forces in the theater. General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the ranking officer of the USAAF and one of the four members of the Joint Chiefs, was passing through on an inspection tour.

Admiral Nimitz opened the meeting with cursory pleasantries and then turned to Ghormley and asked for a briefing on the state of play. The chief problem with Guadalcanal, said Ghormley, was the difficulty in providing logistical support to the marines. Only two fast transports were left; aviation gasoline reserves were down to 5,000 gallons; and the ships bringing
additional supplies and material from the United States had been loaded carelessly, so that the ships' manifests did not provide an accurate record of what cargoes they carried or where they were stowed. A lack of advanced port facilities in Noumea and everywhere else north of New Zealand made it nearly impossible to reload the attack transports for runs into Guadalcanal. Nimitz sympathized, observing that “cargo handling, living arrangements, and gas storage are terrible everywhere we go.”
²⁵
Turner predicted the Japanese could take Guadalcanal at “any time with a good landing force, three or four carriers, and proper ships.” If the Japanese forces on the island had been quiet since the battle on the ridge, it was only “a lull in their efforts.”
²⁶

The three-hour conference exposed all of the cross-service and cross-theater tensions in the South Pacific, and indeed in the entire global conflict. General Sutherland, speaking for MacArthur, said that the fight for Guadalcanal was not nearly as critical as the defense of Port Moresby and Milne Bay on New Guinea, where the Allies had 55,000 vulnerable troops. Ghormley's naval forces should operate farther west, he said, to counter Japanese moves toward those positions. Excerpts from CINCPAC staff notes summarized the exchange that followed:

Nimitz: Doubts that Jap will “come around the corner for Moresby.” Easier to stop us at Guadalcanal.

Sutherland: Gen. MacArthur wants Ghormley to cover the whole area. . . . Fleet shouldn't be restricted to a line. Should base more ships on Australia, including TF-1 [the battleships] which would be better located strategically than at Pearl.

Nimitz: TF-1 must remain in Hawaii.

Kenney: The Japs have lots of bauxite; can increase plane production.

Nimitz: The Jap is not happy. Shipping losses 1,000,000 tons. . . . Avgas shipped from Japan.

Kenney: With bauxite Japan has, they can increase production to 2,000 planes per month.

Nimitz: I don't believe the Japs can build 2,000 planes per month.

Kenney: We should take Rabaul.

Turner: We can't take Rabaul now. We must continue to eat away at the edges. Can do nothing but attrition until we have local air and naval superiority . . . covering air and naval forces.

Sutherland: We want to establish a school of amphibious warfare.

Turner: We have no amphibious training going on. Our school is
CACTUS
.

Nimitz: On question of Ghormley covering MacArthur, we must counter Jap air with our carriers, which cannot operate in restricted areas. We now have only one,
Hornet
;
Enterprise
will be ready 6 Oct.

Sutherland: Once on north coast Papua we will put our fighters there, bombers at Moresby.

Kenney: If Japs take Milne they can get at Moresby easily.

Nimitz: I still say he isn't comin' round the corner.

Kenney: If they do they'll stop our supply line, and starve out our 55,000 at Moresby.

Nimitz: Tell MacArthur we have sent him everything we have.
²⁷

The problems in both theaters were plain to see, but Hap Arnold had come from Washington with an entirely different agenda, and a message that must have galled all of the men around that green baize–covered table. The future five-star general believed that the South Pacific was “oversaturated” with army air units. He reminded the Pacific commanders that the Allies' global strategy called for defeating Germany first. They could not afford to let American airpower be sucked into the vortex of the Pacific War when the more dangerous enemy was still rampaging across Europe. Between MacArthur's and Nimitz's commands, he counted some 1,314 airplanes, and another 302 on the way, for a total of 1,616. That was against his best estimates of Japan's airpower in the theater: 554 airplanes. The only way the navy's request for more air could be met was by drawing them away from Europe. Arnold was against it. Air reinforcement of the Pacific should be halted and even reversed—the Allies should be moving planes from the Pacific to Europe. These arguments, he knew full well, did not “make a hit with either the high ranking officers of the navy, or, probably, with General MacArthur.”
²⁸

More than any other member of the Joint Chiefs, Arnold backed rigid adherence to the “Germany-first” principle. By prior agreement with the British, the Army Air Forces were to concentrate a tremendous force of bombers and fighters at airfields in southern England, where they would operate with the Royal Air Force in the bombing campaign against Germany. The planned buildup had been substantially delayed by deployments to support
WATCHTOWER
and
TORCH
. In July 1942, nine heavy air groups
were on their way to the Pacific and another eleven to Africa. In a strongly worded private memorandum to Harry Hopkins on September 3, 1942, Arnold expressed “growing apprehension” over the dispersal of American airpower to peripheral theaters and reminded Hopkins that the war was to be fought according to the “Germany-first” strategy. He could rely on neither Marshall nor King to back the strategy reliably: “At this writing, the major effort of the Navy is from the Southwestern Pacific to the Northwest against Japan. . . . The Army, for one reason or another, has changed its primary objective from time to time as circumstances, policies, and politics dictated.” The cost of these “piecemeal dispersals and petty diversions all over the world,” he wrote, was to cripple the air campaign against the industrial heartland of Germany:
²⁹

[The navy's] main objective is in the South Pacific. Little by little, bit by bit, the Navy is increasing its strength down there, calling for large air and ground support. Every increase in strength that the Navy gets for its operations in the Pacific necessitates taking something away from some other theater. These reinforcements may save our Navy or prevent the recapture of South Pacific islands occupied by us, but there is a strong possibility that the Navy could withdraw entirely from that theater and we would not lose the war. Furthermore, if we capture all the islands up to and including New Britain, we still would not necessarily win the war. On the other hand, if we beat the Germans we know that we will win the war.
^†
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