The Conquering Tide (5 page)

King . . . is a shrewd and somewhat swollen headed individual. His vision is mainly limited to the Pacific, and any operation calculated to distract from the force available in the Pacific does not meet with his support or approval. He does not approach the problem with a worldwide war point of view, but instead with one biased entirely in favor of the Pacific. Although he pays lip service to the fundamental policy that we must first defeat Germany and then turn on Japan, he fails to apply it in any problems connected with the war.
¹⁵

The truth was more nuanced. King never questioned the strategic wisdom of “Europe-first,” the Allies' plan (agreed to in early 1941, reaffirmed after the attack on Pearl Harbor) to direct the lion's share of their collective
effort against Germany. The German
Wehrmacht
was engaged on the eastern front, in the most cataclysmic ground war ever waged. Should it prevail, forcing a Russian surrender or collapse, Hitler could redeploy a hundred divisions or more to western Europe. Conversely, if Germany could be overpowered, the defeat of Japan and Italy must inevitably follow.

But the “Europe-first” (or “Germany-first”) policy, stated in the abstract, left a host of subsidiary questions unresolved. If the Pacific theater was to receive a lesser share of Allied strength, what exactly should that proportion be? Ten percent? Or something closer to 30 percent? What did it mean to “hold” against an enemy that could attack anywhere across a vast ocean front? There were no foxholes at sea, no trenches or defensive fortifications. Even after its reverse at Midway, Japan posed a threat to Allied territories throughout the South Pacific, and until the theater could be stabilized, there was no prospect of the hypothetical holding action pictured in Allied planning documents. The danger was imminent, and the need to counter it imperative.

In the spring of 1942, King had pressed his colleagues to reinforce the sea route between North America and Australia. Acknowledging the scarcity of Allied troops, as well as shipping and military assets of every kind, with the unavoidable upshot that his plans might hinder the campaign against Germany, King told the other joint chiefs that the South Pacific emergency was “certainly the more urgent—it must be faced now. Quite apart from any idea of future advance in this theater, we must see to it that we are actually able to maintain our present positions.”
¹⁶
He repeatedly steered discussions back to the need for “strong points,” particularly in Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, and Tonga.
¹⁷
Those islands could be held only with concentrated reinforcements of garrison troops, aircraft, and labor and equipment for airfield construction. On May 12, King asked Marshall to transfer at least three army bomber groups—with ground crews, spare parts, fuel, and ammunition—from Australia and Hawaii to New Caledonia, Efate, and Fiji.
¹⁸

As always, however, King would not be satisfied with a purely static defense. When enough force was concentrated into this network of South Pacific strong points, the Allies should launch a more ambitious program—a northwest counteroffensive, staged from bases in the New Hebrides, into the Solomons and the Bismarck Archipelago, “after the same fashion of step-by-step advances that the Japanese used in the
South China Sea.”
¹⁹
On June 24, he cabled an early warning of his contemplated offensive to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC). Nimitz should muster naval and air forces for “the seizure and initial occupation of Tulagi and adjacent islands.”
²⁰
The following day King added that the offensive would begin “about August 1.”
²¹

Five weeks to launch the biggest amphibious assault since Gallipoli? In one of the most primitive and inaccessible theaters of the war? For the past several months, King had been lobbying the Joint Chiefs and the White House for a Solomons offensive, but he had never intimated that it could be launched as early as August. The timetable seemed implausibly premature.

Command responsibility would fall to Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, the newly appointed Commander of South Pacific Forces (COMSOPAC). But Ghormley had arrived in the theater only five weeks earlier, and his was an entirely new command. He was camped for the moment in Auckland, New Zealand, but he had not yet pulled together a staff or established a permanent headquarters. Immersed in the complexities of logistics, the COMSOPAC was not yet even receiving timely communications because of “inexperienced radio and coding personnel.”
²²

Uppermost in Ghormley's mind was the problem of fuel. Chartered tankers had been dispatched from North America with half a million barrels of oil, and he would have three fleet oilers assigned for underway replenishment. He had small dry docks at Auckland and Wellington on New Zealand's North Island, but any major damage to larger ships would have to be handled in Pearl Harbor or North America. He had no facilities for bulk fuel storage north of New Zealand. Ammunition of every category and caliber was in dangerously short supply. The South Pacific air commander, Rear Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain (COMAIRSOPAC), was engaged in the Sisyphean tribulations of building airstrips on remote tropical islands offering nothing in the way of raw materials but coconuts and native timber. The troops that would actually land in the Solomons—the 1st Marine Division, under Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift—had left their training base at New River, North Carolina, less than a month earlier. Two-thirds of those forces were still at sea, en route to New Zealand. They had been promised an additional six months' training before being deployed in active operations, and had not yet set in motion the colossal logistical preparations an amphibious landing would require.
²³

Operation
PESTILENCE
, the code name assigned to this first attempt to wrest territory from the Japanese, would quickly fall to pieces unless supported by well-appointed sea and air bases in the island groups immediately east of the Solomons. With King's deadline just five weeks away, those bases did not yet exist. Noumea, capital of the Free French colony of New Caledonia, offered a serviceable airfield and a capacious harbor with rudimentary port facilities. But it was 986 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, far too distant to provide direct air support. Farther north, in the southern New Hebrides, the island of Efate had been occupied by a marine battalion, and construction was underway on a fighter airstrip. But Efate was 800 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, still too far to serve the purpose. A sea base and airstrip were needed in the remote northern reaches of the New Hebrides, within a 650-mile flight radius of Guadalcanal. Scouting the area from the air, Admiral McCain peered down at the island of Espiritu Santo, the largest in the group, and spotted a heavily forested plain nestled amid hilly jungle terrain. It was just inland of Segond Channel, a fine natural harbor. It would have to do.

Captain M. B. Gardner, McCain's chief of staff, later told a panel of officers in Washington, “Robinson Crusoe should be required reading for anyone who is setting up an advanced base in the South Pacific islands. There is nothing to start with, except the jungle.”
²⁴
The frenetic month-long race to hack a 6,000-foot bomber strip out of the jungle at
BUTTON
(the code name for Espiritu Santo) exposed the scale of the challenges encountered by the construction battalions (“Seabees”) in the South Pacific. All necessary equipment and supplies were brought into Segond Channel by ship, but there were no wharves, warehouses, or cranes in the harbor, and all heavy equipment had to be hauled onto the beach from pontoon lighters. Fuel drums were pushed off the decks and “swum” into the beaches, then lifted manually onto trucks to be dispersed to more than two dozen concealed fuel dumps. Marston mats, the pierced steel planking used to surface runways, came in monstrous two-and-a-half-ton bundles that had to be run up the beaches in tank lighters. When the destroyer USS
Dale
arrived at Santo on July 28, her crew had expected a proper naval base, but for several hours they could not even find the anchorage: “We couldn't figure out where to go, so we just cruised slowly around the island. Finally the lookout spotted some mastheads sticking up above some palm trees and we rounded a point to find an entrance to a little bay.”
²⁵

The primeval conditions required manpower, and plenty of it—but manpower, in turn, created its own logistical problems. All provisions, clothing, and medical supplies had to be brought in directly from the United States, and the prevalence of malaria called for Quonset huts or at least screened tent cabins.

For a month, thirty-five Seabee equipment operators and a company of African American labor troops did battle with the jungle. They worked around the clock, under floodlights at night. The Seabees ran the tractors, bulldozers, and rollers, and the infantrymen wielded axes and shovels. Trucks and earthmoving equipment were often idled for lack of a single minor part, and a seaplane had to be dispatched to Efate or Noumea to obtain it. With a desperate spasm of effort the work was completed on July 28, the deadline McCain had ordered. The first squadron of B-17s flew in the next day, but they had to be fueled manually, and each of the big four-engine bombers drank 50 drums of fuel. (Almost a year would pass before the base could be equipped with bulk aviation gasoline storage tanks and a pipeline to the harbor.) Seaplanes could operate out of Segond Channel, but there was no seaplane tender available until the end of July. The harbor was unprotected by either mines or torpedo nets. The construction teams had worked themselves to exhaustion; they were “full of malaria and need rest.”
²⁶

T
HE
W
AKEFIELD
,
A ONCE-SUMPTUOUS LUXURY LINER
now doing service as a squalid and overcrowded troop transport, passed through the heads of Wellington Harbour, New Zealand, on June 14. She carried General Vandegrift, most of his staff, and the first echelon of the 1st Marine Division. The voyage had been grueling. The
Wakefield
was under-provisioned, requiring the men to manage on short rations. Many had lost fifteen to twenty pounds at sea.

Vandegrift had counted on a period of rest and recuperation, followed by an additional six months' training in New Zealand. But on June 26, at a conference with Admiral Ghormley in Auckland, the admiral wordlessly handed him King's June 24 dispatch to Nimitz warning of pending orders for an amphibious attack in the Solomons, with D-Day set for August 1. Vandegrift was dumbfounded. “I could not believe it,” he recalled. “I read the typewritten words again. There was no mistaking their content.”
²⁷

Most of the marines of the 1st Division had enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor. They had received little or nothing in the way of amphibious training. Two-thirds of the division was in Samoa or still at sea. Operation
WATCHTOWER
(code name for the first stage of
PESTILENCE
—the capture of Tulagi and Guadalcanal) would throw those new marines into an assault on enemy-held islands in just five weeks' time. Insofar as Vandegrift knew, the beaches would be fortified and defended by the same battle-tested veterans who had routed the British in Malaya and the Dutch in the East Indies. His equipment, weaponry, and supplies were crated in the holds of seven transports. All had to be unloaded, reclassified, and combat-loaded onto smaller assault transports, a colossal logistics problem that alone might require a month or more to solve.
²⁸
Vandegrift did not believe the operation was feasible, certainly not by August 1. Ghormley was even more pessimistic: “I don't see how we can land at all, and I am going to take it up with MacArthur.”
²⁹

King's dispatch had not come in the form of an affirmative order. Rather, the COMINCH had written that “the following arrangements are contemplated” and Nimitz should “prepare” accordingly.
³⁰
King was maneuvering to force the operation through the Joint Chiefs over the objections of MacArthur, who wanted to command it himself. After several rounds of heated argument, followed by some hard bargaining, Marshall agreed to a three-phase offensive through the Solomons and New Guinea, concluding with the capture of Rabaul. The orders were distributed on July 2. Task One, the “seizure and occupation of Santa Cruz Islands, Tulagi and adjacent positions,” would remain under the command authority of Nimitz and his sub-theater commander, Admiral Ghormley.
³¹
(King subsequently altered “adjacent positions” to specify the island of Guadalcanal.) Tasks Two and Three, involving the capture of Japanese airfields on the northeast coast of New Guinea, followed by the seizure and occupation of Rabaul, would be General MacArthur's show. In order to keep Task One entirely within Ghormley's domain, the line of demarcation dividing the SOPAC (South Pacific) and SOUWESTPAC (Southwest Pacific) areas was moved one degree westward, to latitude 159° east, skirting the western end of Guadalcanal.