The Conquering Tide (6 page)

Ghormley's instinct was to scuttle
PESTILENCE
, or at least to have it postponed. In this view he found a provisional ally in MacArthur. One month earlier, the imperious general had proposed to mount a direct assault on Rabaul itself, asking that two carrier task forces be transferred from the
Pacific Fleet into his command. (King had shot that proposal down.) Now, a month later, Ghormley found the general willing to join in opposition to the more indirect line of attack envisioned in
PESTILENCE
.

Following a hasty conference in Melbourne, MacArthur and Ghormley sent a long joint dispatch to Washington, proposing that the operation be “deferred.” They cited a lack of trained amphibious troops, a shortage of adequate shipping, and a dearth of sufficient land-based bomber or fighter strength. Japanese air reconnaissance flights would likely discover the incoming invasion forces, and therefore “surprise is now improbable.” The fleet and supporting carrier groups would be obligated to linger in the area for one to four days, during which time they would be “exposed to continued hostile air, surface, and submarine attack,” posing a “danger of destruction by overwhelming force.” It was their joint recommendation that
PESTILENCE
be postponed pending a buildup of sea, air, and ground forces in the region.
³²

King was disappointed with Ghormley and incensed with MacArthur. “I take note,” he complained to Marshall, “that about three weeks ago MacArthur stated that . . . he could push right through to Rabaul. Confronted with the concrete aspects of the task, he now feels that he not only cannot undertake this extended operation but not even the Tulagi operation.”
³³

King refused to entertain any deferral of
PESTILENCE
, but he offered a fig leaf in the form of additional naval and logistical forces to support the operation, including carrier task forces built around the carriers
Enterprise
,
Wasp
, and
Saratoga
, and logistical vessels including tankers and troop transports. “With these and other considerations in mind, [the Joint Chiefs] do not desire to countermand operations already underway for the execution of Task One.”
³⁴

G
ENERAL
V
ANDEGRIFT AND HIS STAFF
moved into the Hotel Cecil in downtown Wellington—a once-elegant, now-shabby institution that had been reserved for their exclusive use—and faced the daunting task of writing a plan. More than any other military organization in the world, the Marine Corps had studied and planned for amphibious warfare, and they were keenly aware of its risks. To land on a hostile shore was the most perilous of all major military operations. To be confident of victory, the attacker must possess overwhelming advantages—control of the surrounding
sea and of the air above; and heavy bombardment of enemy positions to precede the landing, followed by rapid delivery of ground forces and heavy weaponry to the beaches. If he could achieve surprise, that would greatly mitigate the initial risks. But even if the first attack was successful, he would have to receive constant resupply by sea and reliable air protection overhead. Ghormley and MacArthur doubted those conditions could be guaranteed, and had placed their doubts on the record. King, half a world removed from the scene of action, had locked the operation into a seemingly impossible schedule.

The grave problems confronting the marines could easily give way to dark pessimism. Vandegrift, aware that morale was brittle, would tolerate no negative chatter. He was a native Virginian of medium height, with thinning hair and gathering jowls—a genial and gentle man, known for his steady and unflappable demeanor, even when under great stress. That trait had earned him a nickname among his Marine Corps colleagues: “Sunny Jim.” Once it was clear that
WATCHTOWER
was inevitable, a staff officer recalled, Vandegrift “refused to engage in any chitchat concerning its merits. Those who questioned it were immediately rebuffed. . . . Vandegrift rejected all doubts and cavils about what we were ordered to do and regarded those who offered them with condign and unforgiving contempt.”
³⁵

Next to nothing was known about the Solomons. Aerial photos of the area, forwarded from MacArthur's headquarters in Melbourne, were misdirected and lost in a file at Ghormley's headquarters. What few maps and charts they obtained were spread out on a table, but these were too old or drafted on too large a scale to be useful. One identified Guadalcanal incorrectly as “Guadalcanar.”
³⁶
Rivers were misidentified or inaccurately located. The sea charts forwarded by the navy were decades old and provided little detail about coral heads.

The marines put out word that they would like to interview anyone who had personal knowledge of the islands, and the New Zealanders managed to collect some of the refugees who had lived and worked in the Solomons before the Japanese invasion. Charles Widdy, a former Lever Brothers plantation director, made a crude hand-drawn sketch identifying from memory the position of ditches, swamps, hills, barbwire fences, grass plains, coconut palms, and rivers. But Widdy, like most Europeans, had stuck mainly to the coasts and knew little of the island's interior. Even when his memory was reliable, the distances and scales were not much more than guesswork.

An aerial reconnaissance mission was plainly needed, and Colonel Merrill B. Twining arranged to fly over Savo Sound in an army B-17. Looking down from 3,000 feet, Twining noted and photographed an extensive network of coral reefs in the azure waters south of Tulagi. When the aircraft banked south to reconnoiter the north coast of Guadalcanal, Twining was relieved to see that the situation there was much better—deep blue water reached almost to the shoreline, and no Japanese defensive fortifications were visible along the beach. Dogged by three floatplane Zeros, the sturdy bomber escaped by dodging into a cloud bank, and returned safely to Port Moresby on New Guinea.

King's stringent deadline required around-the-clock logistical preparations. The 1st Division's supplies, ammunition, and heavy equipment had been embarked haphazardly in ships that had sailed from Norfolk, New Orleans, San Francisco, and San Diego. All had to be unloaded onto the Wellington quays, then sorted, repackaged, and reloaded for combat into smaller attack transports. The scale of the work was unprecedented.

Wellington, a graceful English city enclosed by green hills, offered the best port facilities in the SOPAC command area. Aotea Quay, the largest in the harbor, could accommodate five large vessels, and the waterfront was spacious enough to allow crates to be stacked and concealed under tarps. An early New Zealand winter brought cold rains and high winds. Cardboard boxes disintegrated under the driving rainstorms, reducing dry foodstuffs to an unsalvageable mush. Much of the division's fresh eggs, meat, and dairy products had spoiled for lack of refrigeration.

Wellington stevedores were organized into a semi-militant union and ruled by a port director who barely disguised his hostility to the Americans. The wharf workers (“wharfies”) were always on the verge of striking and often refused to work for reasons that seemed obscure. Turning a deaf ear to suggestions that they work at a wartime pace, they spurned any references to the danger posed by Japan. They broke for morning tea, afternoon tea, and cigarettes, and laughed at the idea of working past the customary quitting time. They walked off whenever it began to rain, sometimes explaining that they had not brought their “Macintoshes.” The stoppages were usually of short duration, often less than an hour, but they were maddeningly frequent. In one twenty-four-hour period the wharfies walked off the job fourteen times. Most of the stevedoring was done by the marines themselves, who worked around the clock, under floodlights at night, and kept at it
through driving rainstorms. One marine approvingly noted graffiti left on a Wellington wall: “All wharfies is bastards.”
³⁷

F
ROM THE START, PLANNING FOR
the forthcoming expedition was encumbered by an awkward and unwieldy chain of command. Admiral Ghormley, to whom King had assigned principal responsibility for
WATCHTOWER
, would remain shorebound at his embryonic headquarters in Noumea. Ghormley gave seagoing command of the entire expeditionary force to Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, the carrier task force commander who had come south with the carriers
Enterprise
and
Saratoga
. (The third carrier, the
Wasp
, was en route from the United States, but required several days' repairs in Tongatabu.)
³⁸
Fletcher's carrier groups (Task Force 61) would soften up the beaches with a heavy schedule of aerial bombing and strafing attacks, and provide fighter cover to intercept any incoming Japanese aircraft. The cruisers and destroyers of Task Group 62.6, commanded by Rear Admiral Victor A. C. Crutchley of the Royal Australian Navy, would bombard the beaches prior to the landings. MacArthur's air forces, operating from Port Moresby, would attack the Japanese airfield at Rabaul and the other satellite airfields in the region to suppress the inevitable enemy airstrikes on the invasion forces. Before the fleet set sail for the Solomons, it would rendezvous in the Fiji group and conduct a rehearsal landing on the island of Koro, in the southern Fijis. “Dog-Day” was set for August 7, approximately one week later than the original deadline established by King.

To command Operation
WATCHTOWER
's amphibious forces (Task Force 62), King tapped a member of his own staff—Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, who had headed the navy's War Plans Division since 1940. Turner was, like King, a brilliant but touchy character. A short, balding man with steel-rimmed glasses and heavy black eyebrows, Turner was habitually irritable and quick to raise his voice. “Balls!” was a favorite exclamation. Relentlessly driven, he expected colleagues and subordinates to match his pace. He had a keen analytical mind—even his critics acknowledged that much—but he did not take kindly to criticism even when it was offered in good faith. Rarely did Turner give fulsome praise for a job well done, and he was not slow to lay blame on others, especially when the culpability was arguably his own. He often lapsed into a hectoring, didactic style more suitable
to a courtroom lawyer than an admiral. These qualities had earned him the nickname “Terrible Turner.”

In preparing operational plans for
WATCHTOWER
, Turner would have liked to begin with a blank page, but he did not reach New Zealand until mid-July, only a week before the fleet must ship out to meet King's deadline. He was therefore obliged to work backward from the draft plan prepared by Vandegrift's staff.

The task force sortied from Wellington on July 22, a long column of transports and cargo vessels under the protection of cruisers and destroyers. A passage of four days through calm seas brought them to the appointed rendezvous, 367 miles south of Fiji. Each ship lay wallowing on the swell, engines throttled back. As the afternoon wore on, new masts and superstructures peaked over the horizon in every direction. Veteran sailors pointed and identified ships by type or name: cruisers, destroyers, transports, cargo ships, minesweepers, fleet oilers, and (most encouraging to the marines) the big boxlike profiles of aircraft carriers. Grumman fighter planes patrolled the skies above. Near the carrier
Enterprise
was an even rarer sight—a battleship, the
North Carolina
. “There will never be a feeling like the feeling we had when we first made out a task force coming up over the horizon with an aircraft carrier and supporting cruisers and destroyers,” recalled Major Justice Chambers of the 1st Raider Battalion. For the first time since leaving the United States, the marines “realized that whatever we were going to do we were going to have a lot of friends with us.”
³⁹

For the good of secrecy and stealth, no one who was not directly involved in planning
WATCHTOWER
had been permitted to know what was afoot. Scuttlebutt had held that the 1st Division would relieve a garrison of New Zealanders at Fiji.
⁴⁰
But here was a vast and majestic display of seapower—a fleet of eighty-two ships, the largest yet assembled in the Pacific War. It could only mean that a major combat operation was at hand. “All over the sea and as far out as eye could reach the armada mottled the water,” an
Enterprise
pilot recalled. “Everybody aboard became excited at the prospect of being part of what looked like the first big American offensive of the war.”
⁴¹

The fleet converged on the little island of Koro, where Turner had arranged for a dress rehearsal. The southern beaches of Koro were pounded by cruiser shells; Grumman F4F fighters roared overhead in a pantomime of engaging and shooting down Japanese Zeros; carrier dive-bombers hurtled down from high altitude and planted hundred-pound bombs on locations
designated as enemy positions. Koro, they soon discovered, was unlike Guadalcanal in one critical respect. At low tide, shallow coral heads blocked the approach of the Higgins landing boats. The first wave of boats, filled with fully equipped marines, ran aground and the propellers jammed. Because he did not have boats to spare, Turner cancelled the landings.

On the afternoon of July 27, Admiral Fletcher summoned the task force commanders to a conference on his flagship, the carrier
Saratoga
. Rough seas made for difficult and even dangerous ship-to-ship transitions by boat or breeches buoy. Turner, on the destroyer
Dewey
, came alongside the looming shape of the big carrier. Vandegrift, accompanied by several 1st Division officers, came on the destroyer
Hull
. Admiral McCain, while hauling himself up a heaving ladder, was drenched by a flood of spoiled milk and garbage spewing from a waste chute. The brass convened in Fletcher's wardroom. Notably, Ghormley did not attend the conference—the COMSOPAC was represented by his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan.