The Conquering Tide by Ian W. Toll | Audiobook Part 1 | The Pacific War Begins (WWII History)

Prologue.

When aiming uncertainly for a landfall, somewhere in the blue immensity of the South Pacific, navigators watched for floating leaves or coconuts. They steered to follow seabirds overhead. They noted distant columns of thunderheads which might be hovering over islands tucked beneath the horizon. They even lifted their noses and sniffed the breeze because every so often, especially at night or in thick weather, land could be smelled before it could be seen.

Nowhere was this more true than in the Solomons, an archipelago of feted jungle islands a few degrees south of the equator, flung diagonally along a 500-mile axis between the Coral Sea and Bugenville Island. The larger islands of the Solomons gave off an aroma of damp soil and rotting vegetation that could travel 10 to 20 miles out to sea. To sailors on a ship approaching the source of that peculiar scent, the shoulders of the mountains loomed gradually out of the mist, even if the peaks remained hidden within impenetrable cloud caps. Plains and valleys laid out in a patchwork of darker and lighter shades of green spread beneath the mountains. Palm groves and mangrove swamps emerged along the shore. Finally, they spied the beach, a white horizontal border between the island's verdant overgrowth and the warm cerulean sea.

The Solomons are dominated by a dozen large islands arranged in a double chain. Scattered among those mountainous land masses are hundreds of small and mostly uninhabited eyelets or atolls, some rising barely 10 ft above sea level. The natural history of the region, which lies astride the southern arc of the Pacific Ring of Fire, has been fantastically violent. Subduction zones, where one part of the planet's crust is shoved under another, and sea trenches plunge to depths of 20,000 ft or more, run parallel along the archipelago's northern and southern flanks. But the islands themselves, thrust up from the seabed by the same sorts of tectonic and volcanic forces, ascend to peaks of 5,000 to 7,000 ft. Mount Popo Manasu on Guadalcanal, 7,661 ft above sea level, stands just 7 mi as the crow flies from the island's southern shore. If that same crow flew 10 more miles out to sea, it would cross the edge of the South Solomon Trench, which plunges to a depth of 17,500 ft. Only on the ring of fire do such extremes of ocean deeps and high peaks occur in such proximity.

On the eve of the Second World War, the Solomons were home to about 100,000 dark-skinned Melanesians, the descendants of ancient nomadic peoples who had migrated from Asia across pleistocene land bridges or navigated across the sea in handcarved canoes. They lived much as they had in centuries or millennia past in small villages and isolated tribal and family units, wearing little or nothing, scratching out a Neolithic subsistence by hunting, fishing, foraging, raising pigs, and tending small plots of taro and yams. They spoke about a 100 different languages or dialects which were in many cases so divergent as to be unintelligible even between neighboring tribes. Their lingua franca was a rough and ready derivative of English called pidgin whose vocabulary ran to about 600 words. They did not share any sense of nationhood. They owed devotion only to their tribal kin, their ancestors, and their sacred places.

Savage wars were recorded in their oral traditions. In the span of a few generations, history became legend. In the span of a few more, legend became myth. Young men upon reaching a certain age took up arms to settle their legendary and mythic blood feuds, descending suddenly on rival tribes and villages. They killed, beheaded, and ate their enemies. Head hunting and cannibalism were rife throughout the 19th century, an era when the natives first came into regular contact with European seafarers. Unscrupulous whites practiced an illegal slave trade known as blackbirding, tricking or forcing natives aboard their ships to be transported to Australia, where they were put to work on cane plantations. The victim's tribesmen were inclined to retaliate against anyone who looked like the malefactors. A white man who went ashore thus risked being beheaded and roasted for a feast. Afterward, his severed head might be shrunken and kept by his killer as a souvenir.

Before the British took control of the Solomons in 1893, vowing to put an end to blackbirding, headhunting, and cannibalism alike, the archipelago had earned a reputation as one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Putting aside for a moment the issues of self-determination, economic exploitation and political legitimacy, history will show that half a century of colonial rule achieved a pax Britannica in the Solomons. London governed the islands as a protectorate rather than a crown colony, asserting a relatively narrow authority over the affairs of its indigenous people. The islanders lived much as they had in the past under the village authority of their tribal chiefs, headmen or big men, and according to their own inherited customs and laws. Rather than resorting to arms, the big men appealed to colonial officials to mediate their disputes and were generally willing to be bound by the judgments rendered. A tribe running short of food could petition for relief and would be fed or resettled in a place with arable land or fishing rights.

It is impossible to know at this remove what proportion of the natives genuinely welcomed the British government. But by the 1930s, very few hated it enough to oppose it outright. Even in the earlier years of the protectorate, organized revolts against British authority were scattered and short-lived. By 1941, there were none, and on most islands, no standing force was needed to maintain order. The Solomon's natives were simply overawed by the whites, by their weapons, their ships, their technology, and perhaps most of all, their airplanes. Such unfathomable power lay beyond their ken. To think of opposing it was absurd. Better to acquiesce and make the best of it. Many islanders were fervently loyal to the British and would have occasion to prove it in the impending Pacific War.

The seat of colonial government was the sambulant little island of Tulagi in the Ingela or Florida island group, 20 mi north of the much larger island of Guadalcanal. On Tulagi, 3 mi long and shaped like an hourglass, the British had assembled all the requisite trappings of colonial life. An officer's club, a barracks, a hotel, a stately official residence, a small golf course, a cricket pitch, a wireless station, and a waterfront with rudimentary seaport amenities. The larger outlying islands were divided into districts and each district was administered by a district officer (DO), generally a young unmarried man on the first rung of a career in the British colonial service. The district officer had to brave primitive living conditions, suffocating heat and recurring attacks of malaria. He lived alone in a modest house on the coast near the best natural harbor available. More often than not, his house doubled as the local government headquarters. His portfolio of responsibilities was very broad, but he had no staff other than the natives he recruited, trained, and employed. He was a governor, judge, police chief, coroner, tax collector, civil engineer, recordkeeper, harbor master, paymaster, and postmaster. All public funds were funneled through his hands, and he was expected to account for every penny in his official record books. He trudged from village to village on muddy jungle footpaths or sailed a small wooden schooner along the coast where most of the population was concentrated.

The district officer, like every other typical white islander, was absolutely sure of his innate authority over the natives, who were, after all, only just down from the trees. The repugnant phrase often heard in primitive outposts of the British Empire put the colonialist rationale in a nutshell. But the British were well practiced in the arts of colonial oppression and shrewd enough to rule through rather than over the existing social order. The seasoned district officer made a show of consulting respectfully with the village big men and he always deferred to local laws and customs when they did not collide with British authority. It was a minimalist government, but it was all that was needed.

In the great game of imperial empires, the Solomons had never amounted to much. They were remote and inaccessible, even by the standards of the Pacific. They offered little in the way of trade or natural wealth. Few Europeans visited, and fewer could be induced to stay. In 1941, there were between 500 and 600 whites living in the entire archipelago. Variously employed as plantation managers, shipping agents, traders, mining prospectors, storekeepers, doctors, colonial officers, and missionaries. Most looked forward to the day when their careers or economic fortunes would allow them to leave. The Solomons were a hardship post. The climate was sweltering and monsoonal. Rain-sodden jungles and mangrove swamps bred exotic fevers and skin disorders. Malaria, dengue fever, blackwater fever, dysentery, filariasis, chiggers, leprosy, elephantiasis, prickly heat and trench foot. Crocodiles and leeches lurked in the rivers and swamps. Aggressive sharks patrolled the fringing reefs. Scorpions, spiders, centipedes, and snakes stung and bit. Knife-edged kunai grasses sliced into the flesh of those who walked through them. Cat-sized rats scurried through the jungle underbrush. The best view of the islands, said the old hands, was from the stern of a departing ship.

Those were the Solomons in 1941. A marginal outpost of the British Empire, an economic and political backwater, a strategic non-entity, an afterthought. That was to change suddenly and violently in 1942.

War arrived 6 weeks after Pearl Harbor on the morning of January 22nd, 1942. When Japanese bombs first fell on Tulagi, the air attack was a bolt out of the blue. The British had not imagined that the Japanese would strike this far south and east into the heart of the lower Solomons, especially when Allied fleets and armies were still giving battle thousands of miles closer to Japan in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The following day, a Japanese amphibious force landed at Rabaul, an Australian-held seaport and advanced air base on the island of New Britain, 650 mi northwest of Tulagi, and swiftly overran the 1,500-man garrison stationed there. The British had precious little military presence of any kind in the Solomons, so it was instantly apparent that the Japanese could swallow up the entire archipelago any time they liked.

A similar pattern of conquest was unfolding throughout the Pacific. On December 7th, 1941, Japan had launched a sea-air-land blitzkrieg across a vast front and advanced everywhere against feeble and confused Allied resistance. In every case—in Hawaii, the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, Burma, New Britain—they delivered the initial blows from the air. Japanese carrier and land-based bombers struck suddenly and across unexpectedly long distances, pulverizing Allied airfields and naval bases and clearing the skies over landing beaches. Invasion forces followed in columns of troop ships. Japanese infantry units went ashore and advanced quickly against poorly defended Allied airfields, often seizing them intact and without firing a shot. Japanese air groups flew into the captured airfields and prepared to stage the next round of attacks on positions farther south or east. When pockets of Allied resistance held out behind fortified lines, notably the joint American-Filipino forces on Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island in the Philippines, they were cut off and bypassed by this rapid, tightly choreographed leapfrogging pattern. The Japanese won an immense Pacific Empire in little more than 4 months while sustaining only token losses.

Before December 1941, American and British aviation experts had arrogantly insisted that Japanese airplanes were poorly engineered knockoffs of Western technology and Japanese pilots were laughably inept crash test dummies. These delusions were upended in the opening weeks of the war when Allied air power throughout most of the theater was effectively wiped out. Only after the tide of conquest had washed over them did the Allies begin to understand that they had been duped. Playing cleverly on the hubris and racial chauvinism of their western rivals, the Japanese had disguised the formidable power of their air fleets and airmen. The Imperial Japanese Navy was equipped with two very fine twin-engine medium bombers: the G3M (Allied code name Nell) and the G4M (Betty). Each could be configured to carry torpedoes or bombs with a payload capacity exceeding 1,700 lb and a flying range of more than 2,000 nautical miles. They were often escorted by the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, Japan's superb single-seat fighter plane, which had been designed to outclimb, outturn, and outmaneuver any other fighter aircraft of its era. Allied pilots who survived their initial dogfighting or tail-chasing contests with the Zero were staggered by the machine's capacity to turn sharply and climb away at high speed. Though it had been placed in service more than a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and had run up a high tally of easy victories against Chiang Kai-shek's air force in the skies over China, the Zero had remained virtually unknown in the West. Allied aviators had received no forewarning of its capabilities and no tactical advice in countering it and therefore were forced to discover this strange, acrobatic warplane in the unforgiving school of air combat.

The British had staked their Asia-Pacific Empire on their great naval and air base at Singapore, the Gibraltar of the East. But from the first day of the war, when a Japanese invasion force landed on the northeast coast of the Malay Peninsula and Japanese bombers battered Royal Air Force (RAF) aerodromes throughout the region, the Malayan campaign brought a relentless succession of one-sided Japanese victories in the air, on the land, and at sea. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese warplanes sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse off the Malayan coast—the first time in naval history that capital ships at sea had been destroyed by air attack. British commanders pulled their surviving aircraft back to Singapore, yielding the skies over northern Malaya to the enemy. Japanese army forces drove south with remarkable speed, routing British Commonwealth troops from their positions and sending them into disorderly retreat. The invaders combined raging frontal charges with flanking movements and infiltration tactics in which small groups of lightly armed Japanese soldiers penetrated the jungles and mangrove swamps and attacked the British from behind. They leapfrogged down the coast by sea-lifts in small craft. In the face of such a shrewd and agile enemy, and with Japanese aircraft attacking with impunity from overhead, the British lines were quick to abandon their positions and flee. As they joined up with other units farther south or entered the island city of Singapore, they spread a terrifying new image of the enemy. The Japanese were super warriors, preternaturally endowed with superior fighting traits and an ability to live roughly off the land. They could not be defeated in the jungle or evidently in the air or at sea. They must be invincible, and they were coming.

Among many of the British and British Commonwealth troops, an attitude of despondency and resignation took hold. They were sullen and scornful of their officers who had failed utterly to prepare for a foe they had so recently insisted on holding in contempt. Morale caved in on itself. From the wharves of Singapore, civilians began a panicked exodus, clamoring for passage on any departing ship. Officers finagled orders to be transferred to Java or anywhere else. A week after Japanese forces crossed the Johor Strait and entered Singapore, General Arthur Percival surrendered about 80,000 troops to a Japanese army less than half that size. With Singapore gone, the fate of the Dutch East Indies was pre-ordained. An overmatched multinational Allied fleet was swiftly defeated in naval actions at the end of February, and remaining air and ground forces on Java were evacuated to Australia.

Now, in the Solomons, a stampede of panicked white refugees poured south and east, hoping to find a ship to Australia. Colonial officials faced a similarly unmanageable state of affairs, except that in the Solomons, unlike in Malaya, there were no more than a handful of British troops in place to put up any resistance whatsoever. Protectorate officials did not pretend there was any realistic hope of stopping the next stage of the Japanese advance. The enemy would take the Solomons and eject the British, and months or perhaps years would pass before the Allies could return in force. The civilians of Tulagi and the adjoining islands packed up their belongings and fled. The resident commissioner, Britain's senior official in the islands, moved to Malaita, a large island farther east. Small schooners and cutters, usually under sail, carried evacuees from the northwest on the prevailing winds. A dilapidated coal steamer, the Minda, made her last trip out of the Solomons in January. At the wharf on Gavutu, an island near Tulagi, a crowd of civilian refugees demanded to come aboard. After a near riot in which a doctor was injured, the captain took the terrified evacuees on board to be spirited away to Australia.

By March 1942, most of the whites were gone from the Solomons and civil order was crumbling, but the young district officers of the colonial service were told to remain and carry on with their jobs. The British government even arranged to have their applications for military service denied. Martin Clemens was one such man. He was a 26-year-old Scotsman, the son of an Aberdeen choir master who had won scholarships to prestigious schools and graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge. Clemens had entered the colonial service in 1937, had been posted to the Solomons in 1938, and had served on two of the big jungle islands in the Solomon's archipelago, San Cristobal and Malaita. He was a rugged man, mustachioed and square-jawed, but he was also a product of his era, his schooling, and the class-bound society in which he had been raised. His staunch companion was a little black dog of uncertain breed named Suino. Fiddly in his dress and personal grooming, disciplined in his habits and stoic in the face of danger, Clemens kept a meticulous and perceptive personal diary in which he quoted Shakespeare and punctuated his observations with modish exclamations such as "wizard" and "caloo cala." In the trying months of Japanese occupation, he would prove resourceful, courageous, and resilient.

As the colonial administration cleared out of Tulagi, Clemens was ordered to take over the job of district officer on Guadalcanal. The island's administrative seat was at Aola on the north shore, about 20 mi southeast of Tulagi across the body of water that would later take the name Iron Bottom Sound. Here, Clemens moved into a modest white house built on wooden piles and thatched with palm leaves. Outside, amid frangipani and hibiscus plants and a small garden plot of yams and taro, he set up an observation platform at the top of a large banyan tree. A native scout was posted there throughout the daylight hours, watching for enemy airplanes. Tulagi and the RAF installations on nearby Gavutu and Tanambogo were bombed every morning as regularly and predictably as a Tokyo train schedule. Big four-engine Kawanishi flying boats flew high overhead almost daily and often doubled back at treetop altitude for a hard, close look at Clemens's house.

One of Clemens's duties was to report these flights through a radio network known as the Coast Watching Service, an arm of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). The Coast Watchers were first conceived as an informal, all-volunteer organization to provide early warning of enemy shipping and air movements. The Watchers were to radio their sighting reports to a receiver station in Townsville on the northern coast of Australia. Each man was equipped with a Type 3B TEA radio, a device that could send voice transmissions to a range of about 400 m or tapped code Morse to a range of about 600 m. A specially cut crystal enabled the machines to transmit in the seldom-used 6-megahertz frequency, chosen in the vain hope that Japanese eavesdroppers might miss the transmissions. The greatest drawback to the apparatus was its size. It included more than a dozen separate elements, including a receiver, a transmitter, antenna, a loudspeaker, a set of aerials, and a large supply of spare parts. It was powered by a pair of heavy 6V automobile batteries that had to be recharged frequently, requiring a gasoline generator and a fuel supply.

Clemens made his transmissions each day. He also listened to the broadcasts of other coast watchers on islands up the Solomon's chain who recorded the relentless progress of Japanese forces as they swept down from the northwest. Positions fell, garrisons were routed, and coast watchers snuck into the jungle interior. The Japanese pushed into Buka Passage north of Bougainville, forcing the small RAF detachment there to scatter into the bush. On April 5th, a surprise landing at Kerepuna Beach on southern Bougainville forced coast watching station DMK at Buin off the air. In the following week, the Japanese expanded their grip on the area around Buin and seized nearby Shortland Island.

Clemens tried to maintain civil order on Guadalcanal, but he could not be everywhere at once, and the abandoned plantations were looted and vandalized by natives and white refugees. He arrested looters, took witness testimony, and removed abandoned supplies to secure government storehouses. Much of his time was consumed in arranging food, shelter, and ship passage for groups of refugees, or repatriating native workers from other islands, who had been idled by the abandonment of the plantations. That the white inhabitants of the islands were fleeing in panic could not be concealed from the natives, who told one another, "Altogether, Japan e come." The tribal big men traveled to Aola from villages all over the island and put their questions to Clemens. Why were most of the whites falling all over themselves to escape the island? What would become of their villages under Japanese occupation?

In his memoir, Clemens recounted his speech in pidgin to a delegation of chiefs in March 1942: "No matter altogether Japan come, me stop long you fella business belong you fella. Boil them all away by and by all together belong me fella come save them you. Me no savvy who me no savvy win, but by and by everything e all right. Even if the Japanese come in strength, I will stay here with you. Stick with me, and eventually the Allies will return and save us from the enemy. I don't know who will come or when, but we'll all be fine in the end." Clemens recalled that he had made the promise with a sinking heart, but the chiefs appeared to accept it.

In early April, Clemens sailed his schooner to the northwestern tip of Guadalcanal to pay a visit to a plantation manager named F. Ashton "Snowy" Roads. Roads, a hearty, stubbornly independent Australian, had watched the exodus of most of the island's other white residents with imperious disgust and refused to join it. He had nothing but contempt for the British colonial government, which, he wrote in his diary, had simply collapsed. From his house high on a cliff at Lavoro, he commanded a broad vista of the sea and sky to the west, the direction from which Japanese ships and planes must come. Clemens convinced Roads to join the coast watching network and set him up with a Teleradio radio.

On April 29th, Allied patrol aircraft spotted a Japanese fleet moving down from the upper Solomons. Two days later, Clemens watched the heaviest bombing raid yet on Tulagi. On May 2nd, coast watchers on Santa Isabel reported observing a Japanese seaplane carrier in a bay off the northwestern end of the island, just 150 mi from Tulagi. With that clear evidence of an impending invasion, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Detachment on Tanambogo, where there were just four seaplanes and a small garrison, announced their withdrawal in anticipation of an enemy landing. They navigated an old steamer across the sound to Aola, towing a damaged Catalina seaplane, which they placed in Clemens's care. Clemens recruited several hundred natives to haul the aircraft up the beach and hide it under palm leaves.

At dawn on May 3rd, a small Japanese fleet sailed into Tulagi Harbor. Troops went ashore to find the British government gone and the island largely deserted. Clemens immediately arranged to have the damaged Catalina towed out into the sound and scuttled. The morning of May 4th brought a stirring plot twist as a large formation of strange planes appeared overhead at 0800. They had not come from the northwest, the direction of enemy air bases at Rabaul and at Buka Island, but from the south. The strangers were carrier bombers and fighters of the US aircraft carrier Yorktown, and their surprise air strike on the Japanese ships anchored off Tulagi was the opening blow in the 4-day Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4th to 8th, 1942). Snowy Roads wrote that he was startled to hear a great droning overhead and saw, "to my amazement, 20 or 30 single-engine planes flying in a course direct to Tulagi. These planes were only a few hundred feet up, and I could plainly see stars on their wings." Clemens was thrilled by the magnificent spectacle of 12 dive bombers plunging down out of the clouds over Tulagi. "What a sight for sore eyes." Having expended their bombs and torpedoes, the intruders disappeared back to the south over the mountainous spine of Guadalcanal.

Clemens's position was precarious. The American planes had come and gone, and they had not dislodged the Japanese forces from Tulagi. His house was a stone's throw from the beach, and the Japanese might descend on him at any moment. On May 5th, Clemens was on the beach at Aola when three Kawanishis suddenly roared low over his head. A few days later, another Australian coast watcher on Bougainville reported that a large Japanese fleet was rendezvousing at Queen Carola Harbor off Buka. "For me, the issues now were clear," Clemens observed. "Here we were at Aola, and there were the Japs at Tulagi, less than 20 m away. The enemy was more likely to come to Aola than to any other part of the coast, as they would know from the natives they had interrogated that it was the British administrative headquarters for all of Guadalcanal." If captured, Clemens could look forward to being tortured and forced to reveal all he knew. Snowy Roads at Lavoro on the far northwestern tip of the island was in a similarly worrying fix. Japanese patrol planes flew low over his house nearly every day. Feeling himself as public as a goldfish, he hid in a hole covered by palm fronds whenever he heard the approaching engines. He noted in his diary, "I realized that the war had now come to us at last, and that I was nothing else but a civilian spy, and if caught, would be treated accordingly."

Like all the continental islands of the Solomons, Guadalcanal was large and almost entirely undeveloped. Roads were unknown except on the plantations. Inland travel was done on foot by muddy jungle trails or on stream beds. Beyond the coastal plains lay a vast, unmapped, undulating jungle landscape. The best traveled footpaths led up knife-edge mountain ridges separated by deep ravines. A man could hide almost anywhere, concealed in the lowering jungle, and a passing column of enemy soldiers would never detect his presence. There was much to do and little time to do it. Supplies, provisions, weapons, ammunition, and fuel cans had to be packed up and carried away to secret jungle caches. Nothing should be left behind that the enemy might find valuable. Everything had to be either taken or destroyed. "There was an awful lot to do and little time to think," said Clemens. "Things were happening very fast, and the position was very grim. I was pinned to the beach by the Teleradio. Yet I would have to get everything hidden away in the bush quick and lively, as a fast launch would take only 2 hours to come from Tulagi."

Clemens ran a native constabulary manned by trustworthy men. But he was also required to employ hundreds of others as laborers and carriers. And for every one native he employed, there were perhaps 10 more who knew where he was going and what he was doing. Could he trust them? Even if he was not directly betrayed to the Japanese, could the native carriers be trusted not to plunder the secret supply caches?

In late May, Clemens and Roads learned that a native named George Bogis, who had worked as a medical practitioner on Tsavo Island, was cooperating with the Japanese. The news sent a shudder up their spines because Bogis knew them personally and could give the enemy a great deal of information. On May 19th, feeling that he had already lingered too long, Clemens left Aola, leading a long cavalcade of heavily burdened carriers. Sixteen men were needed to carry the Teleradio and its many component parts, which altogether weighed almost 300 lb. Others carried vital government records, weapons, food, fuel, even his office safe with some 800 pounds in silver coinage. Their path led up through grassy plains to a region of steeply ascending red clay hills. At dusk, they stopped, exhausted, at a little village named Palapa. Clemens moved into a small leaf hut that would double as his office and residence and began at once to reassemble the Teleradio. He strung the aerial between two trees and arranged vines to conceal it from the air. Workers began building an observation platform on one of the highest trees in the village. A native sentry would stand watch through the daylight hours with orders to blow a note on a conch shell should the Japanese land on the beach several miles below.

Clemens's retreat was timely. The first small Japanese scouting parties arrived on Guadalcanal a week later. When questioned, the local natives pleaded ignorance of the whereabouts of any white men, replying, "Me no savvy or altogether go finish." On June 8th, a larger force of Japanese troops came ashore and set up a tent camp on the plains near the Lunga River. Ten days later, a Japanese destroyer anchored a few hundred feet off the mouth of the Lunga and began unloading supplies on the beach. Clemens noted in his diary entry of June 20th, "It looks as if the Nips are here to stay." Clemens had his trusted constables walk down to Lunga to gather information. The Japanese appeared to be building a wharf and were certainly burning fields on Lunga plantation, that suggested they might be laying the groundwork for an airstrip, and Clemens promptly reported the intelligence to Townsville, where it was relayed to the Navy office in Melbourne and from there to the Allied high command in Washington and London.

In the first week of July, a 12-ship convoy came down to Tsavo Sound and anchored off the new wharf. Heavy construction equipment and trucks came ashore with several hundred more troops and laborers. That removed all doubt. The Japanese were building an airstrip on Guadalcanal, and if they were permitted to finish it, they would extend their air search capabilities deep into the Coral Sea. Clemens also learned from his scouts that the Japanese had asked after him by name. They had evidently intercepted some of his transmissions. Might they pinpoint his position using radio direction-finding gear? The natives also reported that the Japanese were planning to track him with bloodhounds. That was cheerful news, Clemens dryly observed.

Pala Pao, remote as it was, was no longer safe. On July 4th, Clemens moved again, farther up and back into the hills to a tiny impoverished village called Vongana. The trail went up a muddy ridge with the land falling away steeply on either side. Clemens climbed the more treacherous sections with Suino, his little dog, clutched under one arm. He watched in trepidation as the barefoot carriers struggled under the weight of his equipment. "And I died a thousand deaths as I watched the battery carriers who had to give up pole and sling, holding a heavy battery on their shoulder with one hand while trying to stop themselves from falling with the other." Vongana amounted to a half-dozen thatched huts on a narrow spur of land, but it was so high in the foothills that it was probably safe from the Japanese, at least for the moment. From that altitude, more than 1,500 ft above sea level, Clemens commanded a magnificent view of the Lunga airfield and the entire sound and could closely observe the shipping movements between Tulagi and Guadalcanal.

Again, he set up his Teleradio, stringing the aerial between two large green bamboo trees. But the apparatus was becoming increasingly bulky. It was not designed for portability, and the humidity seemed to have eaten away at its internal circuitry. Clemens found it necessary to open the case and allow the mechanism to dry in the sun all afternoon before attempting to transmit in the early evening. July was the darkest period of the war for Clemens. The nights were cold at that altitude, and he could barely sleep. His reserves of food, money, fuel, and spare parts were running short. Even fresh water had to be carried up to the village from a stream several hundred feet below. His native scouts reported that Japanese troops were spreading out, searching along the coast and up the rivers, closely interrogating the missionaries who had remained behind.

On July 8th, Clemens radioed Townsville to report that 700 Japanese troops were bivouacked in tents on the plains below. The Scotsman added that he was not sure how much longer he could hold out. The radio's charging engine was increasingly difficult to start, and it seemed only a matter of time before the radio would fail for good. His native workers were hungry, and if he could not feed them, he could not expect them to stay.

On the morning of July 26th, Clemens was surprised by a sudden appearance of a Kawanishi over Vongana, just a few hundred feet above his head. He dived for cover and concealed himself just as the aircraft banked sharply and came back around for a closer look. He had to assume he had been spotted. Clemens gave serious consideration to attempting the grueling and dangerous overland trek to the southern weather coast of Guadalcanal in hopes of finding a hidden boat that could carry him to Australia. Cryptic radio messages from Townsville asked precise questions: What was the exact location of the Japanese wireless station? The type and number of troops, the placement and caliber of their artillery pieces, were any aircraft on the island? These queries fired Clemens's hopes because they seemed to presage an operation of some kind, possibly an air strike. Naturally, the men on the other side of the radio link could tell him nothing, but they hinted that deliverance was imminent. "It won't be long now." So he waited, agonized, and lost weight. "The more I looked, the more impossible the situation seemed to be. With my charging engine working only intermittently, it was a struggle just to get out the traffic, let alone consult others as to what should be done."

On August 6th, a scout returned from the coast to report that the airfield at Lunga had been rolled with gravel and dirt and appeared ready to receive aircraft. A hangar was under construction near the airstrip. Japanese troops on the island now numbered approximately 4,000. Clemens radioed the new intelligence and asked whether the Allies would attempt to destroy the airfield. No answer came. "All I could taste was the bitterness of defeat," he wrote. He went to bed early, his stomach empty, and descended into a deep slumber. Wrenched awake by the shock and rumble of artillery, Clemens checked his watch. It was 6:13 a.m. and still dark. Heavy naval guns were firing in Savo Sound. What ships? Whose ships? An excited scout reported that the entire Japanese Navy was anchored in Lunga. And for a moment, Clemens recalled, "My heart stood still."

In another few minutes, his ears pricked up at the drone of airplanes overhead. Tuning the radio, he tried different frequencies until he heard American-accented voices describing a panorama of destruction along the coast. He noted references to "Orange Base," "Black Base," and "Red Base." Three aircraft carriers. "Wizard," he wrote in his diary. "Caloo cala. Oh, what a day." As dawn broke, Clemens swept the sound with his binoculars. He counted more than 50 ships, including several heavy cruisers that were raining 8-inch projectiles down on Japanese installations around Lunga Point. Buildings and fuel dumps blazed fiercely and discharged huge columns of oily black smoke. Green-clad troops descended from transports into landing boats, which then motored in toward beaches west of Lunga. It was the largest amphibious landing that Clemens or anyone else had ever witnessed. His Teleradio was failing rapidly, the inevitable result of rough handling and humidity. But Martin Clemens did not need a radio to tell him the Yanks had come to stay.

From Umei Yukaba.

Across the sea, anthem of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Across the sea, water-drenched corpses.

Across the mountains, grass-covered corpses.

We shall die by the side of our Emperor.

We shall never look back.

From Psalm 23.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Chapter 1.

Henry L. Stimson, the veteran Republican statesman who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Secretary of War, left a well-aimed barb in his postwar memoir. Recounting the bitter rivalry between the Army and the Navy, a struggle for influence and resources that colored every phase of the Pacific War, Stimson thought the trouble grew mainly from the peculiar psychology of the Navy Department, which frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true church. A Navy partisan would not lack four ripostes. The messianic fantasies of General Douglas MacArthur come quickly to mind, but Stimson's characterization should not be too lightly dismissed. During past eras of peace, the Navy had tended to become insular, inward-looking, and parochial. Every flag officer, admiral, had passed through the same way stations: Annapolis, the Naval War College, a series of commands ashore and at sea. Whereas the Army's wartime chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, had attended Virginia Military Institute (VMI) rather than West Point. There was not an admiral in the Navy who had not graduated from the Naval Academy. Every senior naval commander had lived his entire adult life in the Navy, beginning at the tender age of 17 or 18. He had been steeped in the sea power doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the eminent naval historian and strategic theorist. He had been taught to revere the heritage and traditions of the institution, to owe it his fierce and undying allegiance. The Navy first, last, and always.

Inter-service enmity was not a specifically American predicament. Indeed, it was far more impassioned in Japan, where the generals and admirals regarded one another as virtual enemies, and a deadlock between them had been at the heart of that nation's reckless lurch into a calamitous war. But the American military leadership, thrust unexpectedly into war in 1941, was largely unprepared to function in an integrated high command. The Army and Navy had interacted very little in peacetime and had neglected the challenges of planning and executing joint operations. Until 1947, there was no such thing as a Department of Defense or a Secretary of Defense. The Navy and War Departments were independent and co-equal, each headed by a civilian cabinet secretary who reported directly to the president. Before December 1941, there was no such thing as a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). That body was convened as an ad hoc committee for the first wartime summit with the British. With no other mechanism on hand for inter-service cooperation, the JCS continued to meet regularly for the duration of the war. But it functioned without formal statutory authority and without an official chairman. Admiral Ernest J. King, the highest-ranking officer in the Navy, was not subordinate to Marshall, or vice versa. The military chiefs either muddled toward a consensus or were obliged to appeal their disputes to President Roosevelt.

The acrimony was found at every rank. Vicious brawls erupted nightly between sailors, marines, and soldiers on the streets of San Francisco and Honolulu. Sailors and soldiers taunted one another as "swabbies" and "dogfaces" and settled the issue with their fists. Infantrymen begrudged sailors their hot meals and clean bunks, amenities that seemed criminally lavish when compared to the squalor and privations of war on land. The bad feeling between sailors and marines had been notorious since the founding of both services during the American Revolution. Insults crept into the padding inserted at the beginning and end of encrypted radio messages. For example, "US Marine Corps seagoing bellhops. Yaha." On naval bases across the world, guard houses and gates were manned by scowling marines whose customary hail to all sailors was, "Where in the hell do you think you're going?" Senior Army officers regarded the entire Marine Corps as a plot hatched by the Navy to usurp their rightful function and did their best to asphyxiate it or at least limit its deployments to units no larger than a regiment. Naval aviators grumbled that the Army Air Forces (USAAF) handed out medals like after-dinner mints. Pilots of different services took satisfaction in buzzing a rival's airfields or aircraft or, when on the ground, holding down their brakes while gunning their engines in order to blow clouds of dirt or dust onto their adversaries.

Every major action early in the Pacific War involved a dimension of inter-service rancor. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Navy Secretary Frank Knox often stressed that the Army had been assigned primary responsibility for the air defense of Oahu. After the spirited and ultimately futile defense of Wake Island, Navy and Marine public relations offices vied for public acclaim. MacArthur declared that the fall of the Philippines was due fundamentally to a lack of sea power in the Pacific. The Doolittle Raid, an operation in which Army B-25 bombers were launched from an aircraft carrier to strike Japan in April 1942, was a rare successful example of cooperation between Army and naval air units. But Colonel James H. Doolittle's airmen later faulted Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. for ordering them to launch too early when the task force was still nearly 700 m from Japan. At the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 4th to 8th, 1942, MacArthur's Australian-based US planes were blamed for inaccurate sighting reports and for dropping bombs on units of the Allied fleet, having mistaken them for Japanese ships. All fell harmlessly into the sea. At the Battle of Midway, June 4th to 6th, 1942, Navy dive bombers flying from the Enterprise and Yorktown attacked and destroyed four of Japan's finest and largest aircraft carriers. But initial press reports mistakenly credited Army B-17s flying from airfields on Midway. "Big Bombers Won" was the front-page headline in the New York Times on June 12th, 1942. Brigadier General Willis H. Hale announced that the Battle of Midway was primarily won in the blasting by Flying Fortresses of a Japanese naval task force, including carriers, off the island on the morning of June 4th. History would eventually determine that no bomb dropped by any Army plane had struck any Japanese ship. But in the immediate aftermath of the victory, the B-17 crews returned first to Honolulu and regaled news correspondents with their claims of spectacular and numerous hits on the enemy fleet. Navy pilots who knew what had really happened were incensed. When aviators of the two services came face to face at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu a week after the battle, arguments escalated into fistfights. Ensign Fred Meers, a Hornet torpedo pilot, noted that "the Navy aviators had seen their friends risk and sometimes lose their lives going below 1,000 ft to dive bomb, torpedo, and sink warships while the army stayed at a safe 20,000 ft and not only missed but sometimes dropped on our own craft. That's why they got mad at the army."

Marine General Holland M. "Mad" Smith, in a score-settling postwar memoir, indicted the Navy for "mental arteriosclerosis." He cited a range of offenses. The Navy had failed to provide enough gunfire and aviation support in amphibious operations. It had forced the Marines to make do with second-rate, cast-off, obsolete equipment and weaponry. Admirals in offshore task forces had interfered with Marine commanders' authority on the beachheads. Smith's umbrage was shared by men down the ranks. Marine infantrymen carried to enemy beaches by Navy transports took offense at injustices large and small. Their memoirs and oral histories are rife with grievances, accounts of unequal mess privileges and birthing arrangements, of being denied the right to purchase candy or cigarettes at the ship store, of leaving their personal effects in care of the Navy and never seeing them again, of being barricaded in the lower decks and cut off from fresh air or sunshine, of being forced to abide by ridiculous rules for the safety of the ship. Marines left a sardonic note for the crew of a Navy transport that had brought them to Peleliu, site of one of the bloodiest amphibious assaults of the war. "It gives us great pleasure at this time to extend our sincere thanks to all members of the crew for their kind and considerate treatment of Marines during this cruise. We non-combatants realize that the brave and stalwart members of the crew are winning the war in the Pacific. You Navy people even go within 10 miles of a Japanese island, thereby risking your precious lives. Oh, how courageous you are."

More than any other type of military operation, amphibious warfare—striking an enemy on land by way of sea—exposed and aggravated the frictions between the services. The Pacific War was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative, and most logistically complex amphibious war in history. To roll back the tide of Japanese conquests, the Allies would be required to seize one island after another, advancing across thousands of miles of ocean in two huge parallel offensives on either side of the equator. The Army, Navy, and Marines were compelled to work together in sustained and intricate cooperation. They would make many mistakes and do their best to learn from them. But even when their operations were successful, the inter-service feuding left scars that even victory could not heal.

On June 13th, having learned of the American victory at the Battle of Midway, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill cabled Roosevelt: "This is the moment for me to send you my heartiest congratulations on the grand American victories in the Pacific, which have very decidedly altered the balance of the Naval War. All good wishes to you and friends." Even in a routine congratulatory telegram, Churchill chose his words carefully. The battle had altered the balance of the Pacific War. It had not turned the tide. The Imperial Japanese Navy had lost the carriers Hiryu, Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi with all of their aircraft, and more than 3,000 veteran officers, sailors, and airmen had been killed in action. Even so, Japan retained a numerical advantage in most categories of deployed naval and air strength. The combined fleet could still muster five aircraft carriers to the Americans' 4 and had several more under construction. Except for the cruiser Mikuma, destroyed in mopping-up operations 2 days after the sinking of the four carriers, Japan's surface naval forces were intact. Midway had claimed none of Japan's redoubtable battleships, submarines.

destroyers, troop ships, or flying boats, or any of its potent land-based medium bombers. All but about 110 of Japan's veteran carrier aviators survived the battle, even while losing their planes. Ample numbers of replacement aircraft were still coming off the assembly lines in Nagoya, Yokosuka, Musashino, and Kur.

Midway hardly diminished the violence or energy of the Japanese offensive in the South Pacific, where naval, ground, and air forces based at Rabaul on New Britain Island were pushing south and east and keeping local Allied forces on a tenuous offensive.

Two weeks after Midway, Admiral King traveled from Washington to Annapolis to address the 611 midshipmen of the Naval Academy's class of 1942. Theirs was the largest class in the academy's 97-year history. The class was being graduated a year early, their course of study having been cut to three years from four to feed the expanding fleet's demand for new officers.

Standing behind a rostrum in Dalghren Hall, the admiral warned the young men that they were to be thrown into the greatest war in history and that the effort would require unremitting labor and a multitude of heartaches and sacrifices such as this country has never before known.

King was the most powerful admiral in American history, the first to occupy simultaneously the two most powerful posts in the service: those of Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet (Kinch) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). A tall, dark-haired man with a narrow face and sharply cleft chin, he was unusual among his colleagues in having risen from working-class origins. He had been born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, where his father had worked as a foreman at a railroad machine shop.

King was more respected than liked by his colleagues. Disdaining the tradition of clubby collegiality that bound Annapolis graduates to one another, he had made it his personal business to rid the service of men he regarded as indolent or inept. The admiral, according to an aide, would tolerate almost anything in an officer except incompetence, laziness, or verbosity.

King was direct to the point of obnoxiousness, and he did not bother to conceal his contempt for those who opposed him. General Marshall remarked after the war, "I had trouble with King because he was always sore at everybody. He was perpetually mean." In his private wartime diary, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in the same vein, but less delicately: "One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He's the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he's a mental bully."

The British military chiefs tended to suspect King of conspiring to divert forces from Europe to the Pacific. General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, noted in his diary during the Casablanca Conference in early 1943: "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."

The truth was more nuanced. King never questioned the strategic wisdom of "Europe first," the Allies' plan agreed to in early 1941 and 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? 10%? Or something closer to 30%? 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."

He repeatedly steered discussions back to the need for strongpoints, particularly in Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, and Tonga. Those islands could be held only with concentrated reinforcements of garrison troops, aircraft, and labor and equipment for airfield construction.

On May 12th, 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, Eat, and Fiji. As always, however, King would not be satisfied with a purely static defense. When enough force was concentrated into this network of South Pacific strongpoints, 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.

On June 24th, he cabled an early warning of his contemplated offensive to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet (Sinkpac). Nimitz should muster naval and air forces for the seizure and initial occupation of Tulagi and adjacent islands. The following day, King added that the offensive would begin about August 1st—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. Gormley, the newly appointed commander of South Pacific forces (ComSoPac). But Gormley 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.

Uppermost in Gormley'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 First 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.

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.

Nouméa, 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 it 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 Segon 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."

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 (C.B.s) in the South Pacific. All necessary equipment and supplies were brought into Segon 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 swam 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 2½-ton bundles that had to be run up the beaches in tank lighters.

When the destroyer USS Dale arrived at Sto on July 28th, 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."

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, 35 C.B. 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 C.B.s 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 Nouméa to obtain it.

With a desperate spasm of effort, the work was completed on July 28th, 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 Segon 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 needed rest.

The Wakefield, a once sumptuous luxury liner now doing service as a squalid and overcrowded troop transport, passed through the heads of Wellington Harbor, New Zealand, on June 14th. She carried General Vandegrift, most of his staff, and the first echelon of the First Marine Division. The voyage had been grueling. The Wakefield was underprovisioned, requiring the men to manage on short rations. Many had lost 15 to 20 lbs 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 26th, at a conference with Admiral Gormley in Auckland, the admiral wordlessly handed him King's June 24th dispatch to Nimitz, warning of pending orders for an amphibious attack in the Solomons with D-Day set for August 1st.

Vandegrift was dumbfounded. "I could not believe it," he recalled. "I read the typewritten words again. There was no mistaking their content." Most of the Marines of the First 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.

In so far 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 created 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.

Vandegrift did not believe the operation was feasible, certainly not by August 1st. Gormley was even more pessimistic. "I don't see how we can land at all, and I am going to take it up with MacArthur."

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." 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 2nd. Task One, the seizure and occupation of the Santa Cruz Islands to Llogi and adjacent positions, would remain under the command authority of Nimitz and his sub-theater commander, Admiral Gormley. 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 Gormley's domain, the line of demarcation dividing the SoPac (South Pacific) and SWPac (Southwest Pacific) areas was moved one degree westward to latitude 159° East, skirting the western end of Guadalcanal.

Gormley'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, the general was willing to join in opposition to the more indirect line of attack envisioned in Pestilence.

Following a hasty conference in Melbourne, MacArthur and Gormley 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.

King was disappointed with Gormley 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."

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."

General Vandegrift 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.

Gormley 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 condescending and unforgiving contempt."

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 Gormley'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 Guadal Canar. 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 Witty, a former Lever Brothers plantation director, made a crude hand-drawn sketch identifying from memory the position of ditches, swamps, hills, barbed wire fences, grass plains, coconut palms, and rivers. But Witty, 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 a flyover of Tsavo 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 float plane Zeros, the sturdy bomber escaped by dodging into a cloudbank and returned safely to Port Moresby on New Guinea.

King's stringent deadline required around-the-clock logistical preparations. The First 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 assault 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. Outaki, 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 ("warfees") 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 24-hour period, the warfees walked off the job 14 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 warfees is bastards."

From the start, planning for the forthcoming expedition was encumbered by an awkward and unwieldy chain of command. Admiral Gormley, to whom King had assigned principal responsibility for Watchtower, would remain shorebound at his embryonic headquarters in Nouméa. Gormley 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 Tonga Tabu. 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 626, 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 air strikes 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 Fiji. D-Day was set for August 7th, 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 welcome 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 suited 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 22nd: 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 name or type: cruisers, destroyers, transports, cargo ships, minesweepers, fleet oilers, and, most encouraging to the Marines, the big box-like 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 First 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."

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 First Division would relieve a garrison of New Zealanders at Fiji. But here was a vast and majestic display of sea power—a fleet of 82 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 I could reach, the armada modeled 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."

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 hurdled down from high altitude and planted 100-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 canceled the landings.

On the afternoon of July 27th, 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. Buoy Turner on the destroyer Dewey came alongside the looming shape of the big carrier. Vandegrift, accompanied by several First Division officers, came on the destroyer's 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, Gormley did not attend the conference. The ComSoPac was represented by his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callahan.

According to several participants, Admiral Fletcher was in a foul temper and opened the meeting with a distinctly unconstructive tone. He cleared the room of all officers below the rank of admiral or general. Vandegrift judged Fletcher to be nervous and tired and ill-informed about the details of Watchtower. "The admiral seemed to think the entire operation was a misadventure and quickly let us know he did not think it would succeed." All could agree that the operation had been rushed and lamented the lack of time for careful and thorough preparation. There were not even sufficient copies of Fletcher's and Turner's operational orders and annexes, and many fleet staff officers and ship captains would have to work from notes.

Discussion ranged over details of logistics, refueling, schedules of air strikes on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, the occupation of the Santa Cruz Island Group, and the planned relief of the Marines by Army garrison troops. The discussions took an ugly turn when the subject changed to the controversial issue of air protection for the landing operations. Turner estimated that four or five days were needed to unload equipment, ammunition, and supplies onto the beachheads. Fletcher tersely replied that he intended to keep his aircraft carriers in the vicinity for only two. A tense debate brought from Fletcher a begrudging concession: the carriers would stay for three days. Beyond D-Day plus two, Turner's amphibious force would have to manage without air cover. With that, Fletcher dismissed the conference, and the commanders parted on edgy terms. As the Marines descended into the boat that would carry them back to their ship, a staff officer found Vandegrift deeply disturbed and in no mood to talk.

The passage to the Solomons was pleasingly uneventful. The combined task forces, zigzagging to thwart enemy submarines, shaped a westerly course north of New Caledonia and into the Coral Sea, leaving Guadalcanal well to starboard. The seas were calm, the breezes mild, and a low cloud ceiling sheltered the fleet from Japanese reconnaissance planes. "It didn't seem like war at all to me at first," said Roland Smoot, captain of the destroyer Monssen. "We cruised those beautiful southern waters just as casually and unconcerned as though we were going to a Sunday school picnic."

On the transports, Marines cleaned and oiled their rifles, machine guns, and cartridges. They belted ammunition, sighted along their rifles, sharpened their bayonets and knives. They scattered their gear over the decks, took inventory, and repacked. They secured their packs with bedrolls folded carefully on top and stood them in rows along the bulkheads. Their personal belongings went into sea bags to be entrusted to the crews of the ships. Each man was to carry six cans of C-rations, enough to feed him for two days; 100 rounds of ammunition in a cartridge belt, 100 more in a bandolier; two grenades; a pickaxe or shovel, one or the other as he chose; two canteens; a gas mask; a first aid kit; a bedroll; a poncho; a mosquito net; a mess kit. To pass the time, they sang, smoked, played cards, or wrote home. At night, they slept in hot, dirty holds, in bunks four or five tiers high. To escape the heat, some of the men curled up on deck or bedded down in a lifeboat.

On August 5th, with the three carrier groups leading the column, the fleet turned northward for the final leg of its approach. That afternoon, the weather cleared and the sun beat down for several hours, but their luck held. No Japanese snoopers appeared overhead, and in the mid-afternoon, they entered another frontal area and were blanketed by dense overcast and intermittent rain squalls.

On the following afternoon, D-Day minus one, Fletcher's three carrier groups turned away to take up their position south of the weather coast of Guadalcanal. Turner's amphibious force continued north toward "Cheetah Shoals" off the mountainous island's westernmost point. At 11:05 p.m., the northbound fleet divided into two double columns separated by 1,000 yards. The first transport group (X-ray) turned east to hug the north coast of Guadalcanal. The second transport group (Yoke) proceeded north of the stratovolcanic cone of Savo Island and then turned east toward Tulagi and the Florida Islands. The night was dark, the sea calm. Not even a lit cigarette was permitted on deck. A crescent moon rose above the horizon in the east. Lieutenant Herbert L. Marilat recalled tension in the air and complete silence, saved for the steady throbbing of engines, the gentle splash of ship's prows cutting through the water, and the hushed movements of men on the open decks. The cruisers and destroyers surged ahead at 27 knots, fast enough to throw salt spray over the rails. At that speed, the warships would show "bone in teeth"—a long white bow wave that could be seen even on dark nights. Would Japanese lookouts detect them and raise the alarm? No shore guns opened fire. Nothing stirred along the shore. "It was a most prosaic type of thing," said Captain Smoot. "We had achieved complete surprise."

From the rails of the transports, the Marines studied the looming shape of Guadalcanal. It was a high, black, jagged mass with contours barely distinguishable against the backdrop of a slightly lighter sky. They could see little in the pre-dawn darkness, but their nostrils took in the rich, fetid odor of damp vegetation. With the first flush of dawn, they gradually discerned the rugged bluish-green mountains, the heavily forested ridgelines, the light patches of open plain, and the serpentine columns of trees and foliage that followed the rivers down to the coast. Binoculars swept over the native villages just beyond the beaches: little clusters of fiber roofs and garden plots. Every few miles along the shore, a river delta protruded to form a point. One of these marked the mouth of the Lunga River, just west of Beach Red, where the Marines would put ashore. A few miles inland was their main objective: the nearly completed airfield.

The Marines had been warned to expect a bloody fight on Beach Red. Those who survived the initial assault would have to fight their way inland, storming across drainage ditches that might double as trenches, fording rivers under fire, and advancing through fields of razor-sharp kunai grass. At every stage, they would encounter thousands of well-armed and fanatical Japanese. A Marine lieutenant told the journalist Richard Tregaskis that he expected one in four men to die in the first wave. Even so, spirits were high. Private William Rogal felt "a knot in my stomach, but it was no greater or more intense than the knot associated with stage fright." More than death or injury, Rogal feared disgrace, or "showing the white feather." William Manchester, the Marine private who would earn literary fame as a memoirist and biographer, wrote that "vitality surged through you like a powerful drug. Even though the idea of death held no attraction to you, more than anything, he just wanted off the filthy, crowded transport that had been his universe for more than a month." A reserve captain who had been a grocery wholesaler in Boston said he felt "no more nervous than if I were being sent out to do a tough job in civilian life. You know, like trying to sell a big order when there's a lot of sales resistance."

At 6:13 a.m., as veins of gray light spread from east to west through the overcast, the heavy cruiser Quincy trained her main battery on Lunga Point and opened fire. The blast force of her 8-inch guns punched craters into the sea alongside the ship. Heavy concussions reverberated across Savo Sound and echoed back from the hills on the surrounding islands. To Colonel Twining, it was an unforgettable moment of history: the first Allied counterinvasion of the war, the first step on the long, bloody road to Tokyo. Four cruisers and six destroyers joined the Quincy. Their greenish-yellow muzzle flashes lighting up the sea and the ships and the hills and ridgelines of the surrounding islands. Red tracer lines arced toward the shore, and powerful explosions backlit the palms along the beach. One shell found a fuel dump in the village of Kukum, just west of Lunga Point. The result was a tremendous detonation, a sheet of flame 100 feet high and a tower of oily black smoke.

Lookouts on the light cruiser San Juan, in the northern fire support group, opened fire on Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo at a range of 2,000 yards. Within two minutes, the waterfronts were reduced to smoking wreckage. Five minutes after the first salvo, the ship's guns fell abruptly silent. That was the cue for the Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, launched from the carriers before dawn, to begin their initial strafing runs over the unfinished airstrip. Red tracer lines reached down from the .50-caliber guns and ricocheted back into the sky, forming a shallow, luminescent V pattern. Sixteen Grummans of the Wasp's Fighting Squadron 71 (VF-71) flew low over the bay south of the Florida Islands and riddled the seaplanes moored off Tulagi and Tanambogo with .50-caliber incendiary fire. Several of the enemy's Kawanishi flying boats and float plane fighters were transformed into floating infernos. Turning back for a second strafing run, VF-71 laid waste to landing craft, fuel barges, and machine gun emplacements. SBD Dauntless dive bombers planted 1,000-pound bombs on assigned targets along the Guadalcanal shoreline. As the bombers pulled out of their dives and turned west to return to the carriers, the cruisers and destroyers opened up again.

From the McCauley, General Vandegrift and Admiral Turner inspected the scene through binoculars. The landing beaches were marked by colored smoke pots that had been dropped by cruiser float planes. On Guadalcanal, plumes of smoke were uncoiling along a three-mile length of shoreline between the Lunga and Tenaru rivers. The naval guns and carrier planes had done their work. Japanese buildings, barracks, radio stations, wharves, camps, warehouses, and anti-aircraft batteries were burning brightly. There were no muzzle flashes ashore or any enemy troops to be seen. Cruiser planes scouting the island from overhead reported no enemy activity. Even the natives seemed to have fled into the bush. Vandegrift and his staff officers noted the imposing mass of Mount Austin a few miles behind Lunga Point. Their maps had identified it as a grassy knoll of uncertain elevation, but it evidently stood more than 1,000 feet above the surrounding plains. They would have to pull in their lines and exclude it from their perimeter.

Zero hour, the landing on Tulagi, had been set for 0800. Zero hour, the landing on Guadalcanal, was to be half an hour later. At 06:30, Turner passed the word to begin lowering boats. Each craft was lowered away to the harsh clank of chains running through davits. The coxswains circled cautiously, engines muffled at low RPM, exhaust clouds wafting across the sea, and awaited the signal flag that would summon them to return and embark troops. A few minutes before 7, the Marines began going down the cargo nets. They took care to grasp the vertical lines, not the horizontal ones, where fingers might be crushed under another man's boot. Heavy gear was rigged with quick-release straps, a precaution against drowning should they fall into the sea. Each Marine stepped into the flat bottom of a Higgins boat and took a seat. When a boat was full, the coxswain pulled away and began to circle. Conditions were near perfect. The sea was as calm as glass. Cargo nets were lowered on both sides of the transports, allowing for simultaneous port and starboard disembarkation. There were no overturned boats, no casualties, and no delays. After the comedy of errors at Koro, the smooth execution of the landing operations came as a welcome surprise. Major Donald Dixon called it "one of the slickest things I have ever seen."

At 7:41 a.m., the first wave of boats passed the line of departure, formed between two destroyers, and opened their throttles. The Marines crouched down, heads below the gunwales. Spray flew over the sides and into their faces. The small American flag at the stern of each craft snapped briskly in the wind. A sailor watching from the Vansen thought that it looked like "a Newport boat race with our flags flying from the sterns headed into the beach. It was thrilling to watch such an undertaking, and still there wasn't any artillery fire or anything of that sort, and we were beginning to get a little apprehensive because we knew it was bound to come sooner or later." The destroyers continued raking the shore with their 5-inch guns, then fell silent as the first boats scraped onto the sand. The Marines clamored over the sides and trudged through the surf. They met no resistance at all. From Kukum to the mouth of the Tenaru, the beaches and adjacent coconut groves were apparently deserted. A white star shell shot up into the sky, signaling an unopposed landing.

When the third and fourth waves arrived later that morning, the beachhead was weirdly serene. An occasional rifle shot was heard in the distance, but no concentrated and sustained bursts that would suggest a firefight. On the incoming boats, Marines lined up in leisurely fashion. One by one, they leapt from the bow over the surf to avoid soaking their boots. Men were relaxing in the shade, smoking cigarettes or trying to open coconuts with their knives or bayonets. A few had even stripped down to their underwear and plunged into the surf for a swim. Native huts with thatched roofs were being commandeered as shore party command posts, and signs nailed to palm trees indicated where cargo handlers should stack and sort incoming equipment and provisions. A medical tent had been set up under a Red Cross banner, but at 10:30 a.m., the only casualty was a young man who had cut his hand while trying to open a coconut with a machete. It all seemed too easy, even a bit ominous. Did the Japanese hope to draw them into an ambush?

Chapter 2.

Awakened by the naval barrage, the Japanese on Tulagi had been caught completely by surprise. Captain Shigetoshi Miyazaki, commander of the seaplane base, fired an initial radio warning to Rabaul. As the first landing boat scraped ashore on what the Marines had designated Beach Blue, he and his small force of Special Naval Landing Force troops withdrew into the island's hilly interior, but not before sending a final spirited broadcast: "We will defend to the last man. Pray for our success."

Rabaul, 650 miles to the northwest, was headquarters of the Eighth Fleet, commanded by the newly arrived Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, and of the 25th Air Flotilla, a land-based aviation command with about 90 operational aircraft, including bombers, reconnaissance planes, and Zero fighters. With two working airfields and two more in reserve, Rabaul was the nexus of Japanese air power in the region. The backstop to smaller satellite airfields at Kavieng, Lae, Salamaua, Buin, and Bukah. It offered a superb natural harbor, a flooded caldera more than a mile in diameter. But the Japanese conquerors had little affection for the place. It was a hot, dusty, primitive township disturbed by frequent earthquakes and choked with pumice and gray-black ash from the volcano Tavurvur, whose imposing black cone dominated the view to the south. Admiral Mikawa's headquarters was in a cramped, dilapidated colonial building. Enlisted men were quartered in crude barracks and fed mostly barley rice and miso soup, with open pit cesspools for toilets. The best thing about Rabaul, according to an officer stationed there, was a bathhouse erected by the Japanese over the hot springs at the base of Tavurvur. Nothing boosted Japanese spirits like a hot bath.

Upon receiving word of the American invasion in the Solomons, Rear Admiral Sadayoshi Yamada prepared to strike the American fleet. Twenty-seven twin-engine G4M bombers and 90 fighters had been fueled and armed for a scheduled attack on Rabaul, an Allied airfield in New Guinea. Yamada now ordered that the flights be diverted to the Tulagi-Guadalcanal area and launched immediately. He would not even allow the bombers to be rearmed with aerial torpedoes, which were far more effective against ships than land bombs, for fear that his planes might be caught on the ground and destroyed.

When the Zero pilots examined their charts, they whistled in disbelief. "650 miles down and then all the way back!" Their single-seat fighter had never flown a combat mission of that range. The flight leader told his men that conserving fuel must be their overriding concern. They would fly with belly tanks, which would diminish the Zero's performance in air combat, and they could afford only a brief visit to the enemy fleet. Under these conditions, they would fight at a severe disadvantage.

Shortly before 10:00 a.m. Guadalcanal time, the big G4Ms began roaring down the runways, followed a few minutes later by the Zeros. The 45 planes coalesced into an arrowhead configuration, with the bombers locked in three stepped-down V of V formations and the Zeros trailing closely on either flank. The long flight took them directly over the large island of Bougainville, which was home to two intrepid coast watchers who had pulled well back into the bush. W.J. "Jack" Reed was concealed at an advanced observation post in the northern jungle hills. Paul Mason was ensconced in a remote hideaway called Malabita Hill near the south end of the island. In preparation for Watchtower and to avoid coding delays, both men had been instructed to report hostile aircraft sightings immediately by voice transmissions in plain language.

Shortly before 11:00 a.m., Mason heard the drone of aircraft overhead. Looking up through the canopy of foliage, he saw an armada of Japanese bombers. He counted 24. Immediately he transmitted from Stow: "24 bombers headed yours." The report was copied in Port Moresby, relayed to Townsville, sent immediately to Pearl Harbor, and then broadcast to the Watchtower task forces. In spite of its circuitous route, Mason's message arrived on the Saratoga and the McCauley when it was just 30 minutes old. Flight time from South Bougainville to Guadalcanal was more than 2 hours, so Fletcher and Turner had plenty of time to react. Turner got his ships dispersed and underway for emergency evasive action, and the carriers launched fighters to intercept the incoming planes.

Even with ample warning, Fletcher faced daunting logistical problems. His Grummans had to protect two task forces separated by 60 to 75 miles, requiring about 30 minutes of flight time. Dogfights would burn fuel and oblige their early return to the flattops. And once the fighters returned, there was the problem of clearing the flight deck so that they could land and be refueled. The day's

The crowded flight operation schedule placed heavy demands on all three flight decks. It was essentially the same problem that had lost the Battle of Midway for the Japanese.

At 1:15 p.m., as the Japanese strike closed on Tsavo Sound, just eight Wildcats were in position to defend the amphibious fleet. They were at 12,000 ft below an opaque layer of overcast. The Japanese G4Ms approached at 16,000 ft above the cloud ceiling, thus invisible to the Wildcats. The fighter control circuits rang with radar warnings.

All at once, the bombers broke through the clouds in a shallow dive. Lieutenant James J. Sutherland, leader of a division of Saratoga F4Fs, radioed a tally-ho. "Horizontal bombers, three divisions, nine planes each, over Tsavo, headed for transports. Let's go get them, boys."

Sutherland dropped to his left and opened a few bursts on the nearest Japanese aircraft at a range of just 500 yd. He pressed this promising attack and sent one G4M down in flames. But seconds later, the Zeros descended through the clouds and found three of his wingmen in their sights. Two Wildcats went spinning into the sea, and the others were forced to dive for their lives.

Taking in the view from below the overcast, the Japanese airmen were astonished by the size of the American fleet. The bombers continued east, descending to 10,000 ft, and opened their payloads over the X-ray transports, maneuvering at high speed off Lunga Point. The sky was muddled with the dark smudges of anti-aircraft bursts. But the Japanese planes stayed in formation. As the sticks of bombs fell behind them in a glinting diagonal tail, the American helmsmen coolly steered to avoid them. Every bomb fell harmlessly into the sea near Lunga Point. The G4Ms banked west for the long run back to Rabaul.

A furious fighter melee continued over Tsavo Island and Western Guadalcanal. Among the Zero pilots were two of the most lethal fighter aces in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, who would eventually be credited with 87 kills, making him Japan's top-ranked ace, and Saburo Sakai, who would survive the war with about 60 claimed kills. Sakai authored a fascinating and credible postwar memoir, *Samurai*, which was translated into English in the 1950s.

Sutherland, after flaming one of the G4Ms, went into a spiraling dive to avoid two pursuing Zeros. Lieutenant Joseph R. Daly's aircraft, riddled with 7.7 mm machine gun fire, began to turn over and descend toward the sea. His fuel tank ignited and the flames spread into his cockpit. "My clothes were on fire, my pants and shirt burning. I could see nothing but red fire all around me." Daly wrenched open the canopy and leapt out. He dropped through the cloud cover at 7,000 ft and pulled his chute.

Saburo Sakai had never seen an F4F until this moment. Looking down about 1,500 ft below, he saw a lone Wildcat in a skirmish with three Zeros. Lieutenant Sutherland was flying a series of tight left spirals that denied his pursuers a clean shot at him. He repeatedly forced the Zeros to overtake him and peppered their wingtips with .50 caliber fire.

Sakai dived into the fight and was immediately taken aback by Sutherland's skill. "Never had I seen an enemy plane move so quickly or so gracefully before." In a dance of snap rolls and sudden throttle chops, Sakai and Sutherland maneuvered for advantage until both aircraft slipped into a vertical spiral with one wing pointed down at the sea and the other up at the sky. Intense G forces shoved both men into their seats and forced them to strain their necks to keep their heads erect. After the fifth spiral, Sutherland broke out into a loop and Sakai locked onto his tail. "I had him," Sakai wrote. "The Zero could outfly any fighter in the world in this kind of maneuver."

Sakai fired a long burst of 7.7 mm caliber rounds into Sutherland's cockpit, but the sturdy Grumman flew on, apparently unperturbed. The Japanese pilot then fed fuel to his engine and flew alongside the Wildcat. The two men made eye contact. Sakai saw that Sutherland was badly wounded with blood on his shoulder and chest. Sutherland lifted his hand and waved. Sakai shook his fist and shouted for the American to fight on instead of flying along like a clay pigeon.

But Sutherland's guns had jammed. His aircraft had been hit hundreds of times, and the aluminum skin of the fuselage and wings was shredded so badly that the frame was bared to Sakai's view. His instrument panel was completely destroyed. His canopy was shattered, his radio was dead, his flaps were not responding, and oil was coursing into the cockpit. He had 11 separate wounds. He had no choice but to bail out.

As Sakai fired several 20 mm cannon rounds into the Wildcat's wing root, setting the plane afire, Sutherland unbuckled and got free of the cockpit. He had just enough altitude to pull his chute before hitting the treetops. Though suffering severe wounds, including a 7.7 mm round that passed through his foot, Sutherland managed to make his way overland to the American lines.

Sakai then chased a formation of eight American dive bombers, elements of VB-6 and VS-5 of the *Enterprise*. The SBDs held formation and the rear gunners concentrated their fire into the engine and cockpit of the oncoming Zero. A .30 caliber round grazed Sakai's skull and blinded his right eye. Somehow he managed not only to survive this grievous wound, but to fly 650 mi back to Rabaul and land safely. Sakai would lose the eye, but returned to flight service in 1944.

A flight of nine Type Aichi D3A2 (Allied code name Val) dive bombers armed with 60 kg bombs dived on the X-ray transports off Lunga Point. One bomb hit the superstructure of the destroyer *Mugford*, killing 21 men but doing little damage to the ship. Wildcats chased the retreating dive bombers and peppered them with .50 caliber fire. All the Vals were destroyed either in air combat or by ditching at sea. 12 of 18 crewmen were also lost.

Off the weather coast of Guadalcanal, the mood in Task Force TF-61 was decidedly upbeat. A destroyer officer watched the first wave of planes as they returned to the *Wasp*. Jubilant pilots circled us, rocking their wings and waving as they passed overhead. As the planes recovered, the word spread quickly. The initial bombing and strafing attacks had put every Japanese plane in the area out of action before they could get into the air.

But the carrier's air operations were only beginning. Between first light and dusk, the three flattops completed an extraordinary 704 plane launches and 686 recoveries. Beginning long before dawn with a bleary-eyed breakfast followed by the call to general quarters at 0500, the crews had worked to the brink of exhaustion. Flights had been planned in painstaking detail and down to the minute. Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, commander of Task Force 16, compared the day's operations to a railroad schedule. Planes were landed, refueled, rearmed, replenished with oxygen, respotted, and sent back up at a record-breaking pace. In one case, the *Wasp* turned around an eight-plane squadron in 16 minutes.

Inevitably, there were mishaps. Planes spun into the sea or catapulted over the crash barrier and had to be jettisoned over the side. Some failed to find their carriers on the return and were forced to ditch at sea. The air groups had successfully protected Turner's fleet, but the day's fighter losses were worryingly high. 15 Grummans had been destroyed or forced to ditch and five more had been badly damaged. In the initial melee with the Zeros, which were piloted by some of the top aces in the Japanese Navy, the Wildcats had suffered 50% losses. The superior speed and maneuverability of the Zero remained a grave concern. Grummans were needed over the carriers to provide air protection. They were needed to protect Turner's fleet in Tsavo Sound. They would be needed to escort any outbound air strike should Japanese carriers appear on the scene. "18 fighter planes per carrier were nowhere near enough," Admiral Kinkaid concluded, and the fighter complement would be doubled by the end of 1942. For now, however, Fletcher had to do the best with what he had, and he had good reason to wonder whether he had enough fighters to cover the fleet on D-Day plus one.

Shortly before 3 that afternoon, General Vandegrift went ashore. A Higgins boat filled with senior officers of the First Division churned in toward Beach Red, picking its way through dozens of boats plying the waters between the anchored transports and cargo ships. As he set foot on Guadalcanal, the general noted that cargo was beginning to pile up on the beach. There were too few men available to handle it properly. The problem would have to wait, however. His first concern was the state of his defensive perimeter. Units were advancing inland and along the shore, but the enemy was nowhere to be seen. "I'm beginning to doubt whether there's a [Japanese soldier] on the whole damned island," he remarked.

To the west, forward elements of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, had halted on the bank of the Elu River. Vandegrift, coming up from the rear in a jeep, found them moving as if it were about to encounter the entire Imperial army. He ordered them across. Engineers were summoned to improvise a makeshift bridge. They laid spare lumber over the riverbed with the help of an amphibious tractor. It was not much to look at, but it bore the weight of jeeps and artillery.

Beyond the Elu, the natural terrain barriers of Guadalcanal began to work against them. Troops wielded machetes to hack a 4-ft wide path, wide enough for ammunition carts to follow, but soon became bogged down in a huge mangrove swamp. To the east, advanced parties pushed along the coconut-strewn beach through abandoned native villages to the Tenaru River. They hesitated to cross. The absence of enemy resistance seemed bizarre and even ominous. Major Dixon thought the men expected to bump into the Japs any minute and were wondering why they didn't. "They said, 'These damn Japs are setting a trap for us, and we are going to walk into this trap one of these minutes.' That wasn't a very pleasant feeling."

A wealth of first-rate assets had been left behind by the enemy. Two powerhouses supplied with new electrical generators and ample fuel. A radio receiver station stocked with equipment and spares. 50,000 to 60,000 gal of gasoline and diesel fuel. A fleet of trucks. Two working water pumps, nine road rollers, and several tons of cement. Weapons of various categories and calibers fell into the Americans' hands, including two working anti-aircraft batteries. A hospital tent stocked with excellent medical supply kits and water purification tablets was commandeered by Navy corpsmen.

In a laborer's camp across the Eloo River, Sergeant James Hurlbut found a hot iron left on a pair of officers' trousers. It had burned all the way through to the ironing board. Halal meals had been left on dining tables with chopsticks left propped on the edges of the dishes or dropped in haste on the floor mat. All around the camps was evidence of the terrific cannonading delivered earlier that morning: coconut palms torn to pieces and tents shredded by high-explosive fragments.

Major Dixon's unit was the first to reach the Japanese headquarters building near the airfield. Among the officers' possessions, they found a souvenir hunter's bonanza: swords, medals, capes, and starched white uniforms. In an adjoining quartermaster supply building was a large supply of rice, dried fish, canned crab, beer, sake, candy, and cigarettes. A guard was posted to prevent looting. The main Japanese wharf at Kukum was placed under the direction of a coast guard detachment and rear echelon units. Engineers, motor transport operators, and radiomen began claiming the huts and tents left by the Japanese. By nightfall on August 7th, the little village was beginning to look like a conventional ship-to-shore depot.

On Tulagi, across Tsavo Sound, the Marines had likewise gone ashore unopposed. The naval barrage had been superb. The cruiser *San Juan* had put some 800 rounds of 5-in shells into the high ground above Beach Blue prior to the landing and then lifted the onslaught precisely 3 minutes before the first boats touched the beach. Beach Blue had been left completely undefended by the Japanese, who apparently had concluded that the shallow coral heads offshore would discourage any landing attempt there.

The raiders crossed the narrow waist of the island without much difficulty, taking the little settlement known as Sasappi village, but when they turned east, resistance stiffened. Japanese snipers had concealed themselves in trees and the underbrush. The rattle of machine gun fire was heard offshore and even on Guadalcanal 20 mi away, where Colonel Twining recalled, "We felt left out." The remaining enemy troops bottled up in the southeast corner of the island went to ground in dugouts and caves. Demolition teams were brought up to destroy those positions, but many were connected by subterranean tunnels. The fight for Tulagi was savage and bloody. As Major Justice Chambers recalled, "When you would blast them out of one dugout, you would find that there was nobody in there, and you would find a hole through which they had crawled to another place." That night, Japanese soldiers were sniping, shouting at us, throwing grenades at us, whistling, and carrying out all the tricks of the trade we had read about in the pamphlets. But I suspect none of us ever believed it.

East of Tulagi lay the minuscule islands of Gavutu and Tanamogo, connected to one another by a wooden causeway. Some 500 Japanese naval infantrymen, sometimes called Japanese Marines, were on these islands, dug into trench lines and artillery emplacements, and they had put up an even more desperate fight than their comrades on Tulagi. A pre-landing naval bombardment leveled most of the trees and buildings, but the defenders emerged as soon as the Marines went ashore on Gavutu's northeast coast and pinned the invaders down in a mangrove swamp. The Marines put two tanks ashore on Tanambogo, but one was destroyed almost immediately. George Kitridge, a gunnery officer on the *Chicago*, watched through his turret's periscope as a platoon of Japanese troops swarmed over the tank, poured gasoline over it, and set it afire. The hatch opened, and a Marine emerged. He was knocked down immediately and beaten to death with rifle butts. A Japanese soldier dropped a grenade into the tank, killing the remaining occupant. Kitridge's 8-in gun fired. And in the next moment, the entire scene had vanished. No tank, no enemy soldiers, just a puff of white smoke and a very large hole in the ground. 70 Marines would give their lives in the conquest of these islands, which were not secured until midday on August 8th.

Guadalcanal remained largely peaceful that first night. Scattered gunfire along the perimeter kept the Marines on edge, but no counterattack developed. At dawn on the 8th, increasingly confident that the Japanese did not intend to make a stand at all, they advanced in force onto the Lunga plain and took possession of the unfinished air strip. They encountered no one but a few unarmed Korean workers who broke and ran at the first sight of the Marines. Those who surrendered told the same story. The Japanese troops had fled to the west. The airfield was nearly finished. Only a few hundred feet in the middle section remained to be filled in and graded. Another week of work would bring it to completion.

At sunrise, Task Force 61 cruised south of Guadalcanal at 8 knots. It looked to be another day of light easterly winds, requiring the task force to run at high speed to create sufficient wind over the decks for flight operations. The *Wasp* air group would fly search patterns to the north and west, while the *Saratoga*'s planes remained deck-bound in case an enemy carrier group should appear in striking range. After the previous day's losses, Fletcher would be operating with an acute shortage of fighters. Fuel limitations would require their frequent return to the carriers. The air protection scheme was beginning to fray and there was every reason to expect another round of air attacks from Rabaul.

From his hideout in the jungle hills of northern Bougainville Island, coast watcher Jack Reed watched over the Bougainville Passage, a narrow and strategically vital seaway between Bougainville and Buka Island. A dark, sinewy, thickly bearded lieutenant of the Australian Royal Navy, Reed had served for more than a decade in South Pacific postings as a patrol officer. His observation post lay directly in the flight path between Rabaul and Guadalcanal and that alone made him a critical node in the coasting network. Constant movement was a precaution against being caught by the Japanese, who were hunting him diligently.

On August 8th, Reed was preparing to move to a new post at a remote native village called Pora. After a regularly scheduled radio check-in with Station Vig, Port Moresby, he dialed in to a 7-mega frequency in hopes of picking up stray aviation communications. Immediately his ears were filled with radio chatter of the American carrier pilots. It did not take Reed long to put the pieces together. The Americans had descended in force on the southeastern Solomons.

As he was pondering the significance of this development, one of his native scouts heard the drone of aircraft engines overhead. Through a break in the jungle canopy, a large formation of torpedo-armed G4Ms came into direct view only a few hundred feet above their heads. Reed counted 24. He immediately got back on the teller radio, raised Vig, and blurted out in plain English, "Bombers now going southeast."

For the second consecutive day, a coast watcher had provided vital forewarning of an incoming air strike. It was a pattern that would continue throughout the Solomon's campaign. Every day, or nearly so, the Japanese sent air strikes down from Rabaul. And every day, Jack Reed or Paul Mason spotted the southbound formations overhead and relayed the warning. Reed was especially well situated for this purpose because his vantage point at Pora commanded a panoramic view of all of Bougainville Island to the north, the eastern sea channels leading down the slot, the body of water between the double file of islands that form the Solomon's archipelago, and the skies through which Japanese aircraft must pass. "The whole lay before you as a huge mosaic of detail and tropical splendor," he wrote in a 1943 report to the Australian Navy. Moreover, Reed's lookout camp at Pora was difficult to approach over land, and he had won the stalwart loyalty of the native tribesmen, who gave him advanced warning of any Japanese search parties. He was never caught.

Reed's transmission was picked up at Pearl Harbor and relayed to the American commanders, who received it 25 minutes after it was broadcast. That provided ample time for Turner's transports and screening ships to get underway for evasive action and for the carrier planes to gain altitude so as to be in proper attacking position when the enemy arrived. The twin-engine bombers, painted green with the rising sun disc on their fuselages, made a shrewd approach. The low-flying formation approached from the north over Indispensable Strait, concealing themselves in the radar shadow of the Engela Island group, then turned back over Sealark Channel to attack from the east. The American fighters were at 27,000 ft above Savo Island, far out of position to repel the attack.

At precisely noon, the intruders were spotted by gunners on the cruiser *Australia*. They were roaring in over the reefs just 20 to 30 ft above the sea. Richard Tregaskis, watching from Guadalcanal, saw "flat, sinister shapes prowling low over the water, darting among the transports." The fleet was wheeling and circling in anticipation of the attack. As the enemy planes came into close range, the heavy repeating concussions of the big anti-aircraft guns were joined by the higher rattle of the shorter-range weapons. All but five of the Japanese planes blew up, broke into pieces, cartwheeled, or dived into the sea. Only three managed to launch a torpedo, and only one of those struck home. The destroyer *Jarvis* was hit near the bow. She limped away and was later sunk by a second air attack, resulting in the loss of her entire crew. American Grummans, diving from high altitude, chased the survivors as they withdrew to the west.

A stricken G4M crashed into the upper deck of one of the transports, the *George F. Elliott*. The ship's Marines had disembarked, so casualties were limited, but she burned fiercely from stem to stern and trailed a plume of thick black smoke into the sky. Two hours later, as the remnants of the flight passed over northern Bougainville, Jack Reed counted only eight survivors.

Vast quantities of munitions, equipment, and supplies remained to be brought ashore. 1,000 drums of aviation gasoline for Gavutu. 1,500 drums for Guadalcanal. Small arms and machine gun ammunition, aviation lubricating oil, engine spares, radio equipment, water distillation equipment, and water cans. Semaphore flags, Aldis lamps, smoke signaling devices, binoculars, typewriters, pencils, message blanks. 60 days' rations for all troops. Crates and drums had been landed haphazardly on Beach Red, and the shoreline was so congested with unsorted supplies that General Vandegrift had to ask Turner to suspend landing operations. With no advanced port facilities available, everything had to be transferred into small craft, manhandled up to the beach, and sorted into supply dumps.

Two days of air attacks had left barely a scratch on the fleet, but the recurring threats had required Turner's ships to maneuver evasively for hours on end, during which time nothing could be unloaded. The danger of beach congestion had been anticipated, but in the rush to plan and execute Watchtower, the commanders had never faced it squarely. The landing craft were poor substitutes for proper cargo lighters. Navy beach masters had neither the training nor the experience to do the job properly, but even if they had, there were not enough laborers. Turner's operation plan specified that "shore party commanders will call upon troop commanders in their immediate vicinity for assistance in handling supplies from landing beaches to dumps. Prisoners and stragglers will be used to assist in this task." But no Marine unit had been detailed to the task in advance and the Navy boat crews were not numerous enough to do the work. More hands were needed on the beaches.

The chaos prompted mutual recriminations. Citing doctrine and precedent, the Marines insisted that the commander of troops ashore should be authorized to put a stop to unloading if the beachhead was not yet prepared to receive supplies. Turner blamed the Marines for bringing a vast amount of unnecessary impediments and for failing to provide labor for the unloading. "The Marines have got to do this," he wrote to a colonel commanding the Seventh Marines. "Ship's crews can't run boats and winches, operate the ship, man guns, furnish personnel to handle boat traffic, repairs and evacuation at the beach, and at the same time furnish unloading details." Navy landing boat crews offered some barbed comments to a number of Marines on Beach Red, who were neither fighting nor working. Vandegrift was unwilling to pull combat troops back off the perimeter, but Turner, who planned to land forces on Indeni in the Santa Cruz Islands, refused his request for a replacement battalion to provide beach labor. Not until the morning of August 9th was the problem addressed with the simple expedient of dropping supplies farther down the beach. Ammunition, crates, shells, and other materials were simply stacked among the palm trees left for the Marines to sort out in good time.

Admiral Mikawa, newly appointed commander of the Eighth Fleet, had arrived in Rabaul little more than a week before the invasion of Guadalcanal. Japanese command arrangements in the theater were fragmented and illogical. The Navy's Eighth Base Force had a responsibility for garrison defense of New Britain and adjoining territories, while the 25th Air Flotilla controlled all air operations. But a cold rivalry divided them and rendered any effective cooperation unlikely. The 17th Army staff, also headquartered at Rabaul, was heavily engaged in operations against Port Moresby on New Guinea. No one seemed to welcome the arrival of Mikawa's Eighth Fleet, as all of the suitable administrative buildings and barracks in Rabaul had already been occupied. Mikawa decided to station most of his cruisers at the rear base of Kavieng on New Ireland, where they would be less vulnerable to Allied air attack.

Mikawa, a cerebral and soft-spoken officer, had served as Chuichi Nagumo's second in command through the first 6 months of the war. He had commanded the battleships and cruisers of Kido Butai, the carrier striking force, and had witnessed firsthand the disaster at Midway, which would weigh heavily on his mind in the action to come. On July 30th, he broke out his flag above a tumbledown house in Rabaul Township. Lacking even a toilet, it was far beneath his station. But he had bigger problems.

On August 7th, immediately after receiving word of the American invasion in the lower Solomons, Mikawa mustered his surface naval forces for a counterstrike. The 17th Army was unwilling to provide reinforcements for Guadalcanal. The army staff took the view that the Americans could be ejected with ease and in good time. So Mikawa pulled together a pitifully small force of 315 riflemen and Japanese marines to be embarked on a transport. It was subsequently torpedoed by US submarine *S-38* off Cape St. George, New Ireland.

The *Chokai* put into Rabaul to embark the admiral and his staff and then put to sea at 2:30 p.m. in company with the light cruisers *Tenryu* and *Yubari* and the destroyer *Yunagi*. They rendezvoused with Cruiser Division 6 (Aoba, Kinugasa, Kako, and Furutaka) off Cape St. George. Shortly before nightfall, Mikawa intended a surprise nighttime raid into Tsavo Sound to destroy Turner's vulnerable transports and cargo ships. Though the eight vessels in his column had not previously operated together, each ship and its crew were superbly outfitted, armed, and trained for night surface combat.

Since the early 1920s, Japanese naval planners had envisioned a scenario for war with the United States that would require *Zen Sakusen*, attrition operations. Assuming that a naval war would be decided by a Mahanian clash of battleships in waters south of Japan, the planned attrition operations—submarine, air, and night torpedo attacks—were intended to sink American battleships as they advanced westward across the central Pacific. Night torpedo strikes by high-speed cruiser-destroyer forces, the *Sen Pai* or Advanced Force, were held to be the most essential component of *Zen Sakusen*. The Japanese had devoted intense [clears throat] efforts to developing the weaponry, doctrine, and training of *Sen Pai* for these all-important night torpedo attacks. The fruits of their labors included first-rate night optical rangefinders and spotting sites, the skillful use of night illumination tactics, including star shells, searchlights, and flares dropped by cruiser float planes, and the exceptional aptitude of Japanese lookouts chosen for their superior eyesight. In addition, the Type 93 "Long Lance" oxygen torpedo, which was 24 ft long and weighed more than a ton, carried a 1,100 lb high-explosive warhead and could travel at 50 knots to a range of 24,000 yd or at lesser speed to a range of 48,000 yd. The Long Lances would inflict appalling punishment on the Allied fleet in the night to come and in many more night actions in the ensuing campaign for Guadalcanal.

Reasoning that a simple formation would reduce the risk of collisions or confusion, Mikawa arrayed his seven cruisers and one destroyer into two columns. He placed his heavy cruisers, including his flagship, the *Chokai*, in the van and his destroyer in the rear. Having witnessed the annihilation of four carriers by air attack at Midway 2 months earlier, Mikawa knew his planned dash into the Tsavo-Guadalcanal area might prove disastrous. Two or more American carriers were known to be in the vicinity, and if their air groups found him in daylight, they might destroy his ships at their leisure. Mikawa would manage the odds by traversing the last 200 mi of the run under cover of darkness and then get away to the west before dawn. But he could not avoid being sighted farther up the slot. Allied reconnaissance flights, including a B-17 and two Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Hudson bombers, passed overhead on the morning of August 8th. Though Mikawa did not know it, his force had also been reconnoitered by an American submarine *S-38*.

Passing the island of Savo at 4:00 p.m., Mikawa signaled his squadron to increase speed to 24 knots for the final leg of the approach. He planned to pass south of Savo Island, shell and torpedo the transports lying off Lunga Point, turn north and attack the ships lying off Tulagi, and retreat to the north of Savo Island. He hoped to be at least 120 mi up the slot by first light.

At dusk, Admiral Crutchley's cruisers and destroyers maneuvered into their night deployment positions north and south of Savo Island in conformity to Turner's plan of operations. They divided into two groups, each built around three heavy cruisers to guard one of two possible western entrances to the sound. Two destroyers, the *Blue* and the *Ralph Talbot*, were positioned as radar pickets farther west. The main eastern entrance to Tsavo Sound, Sealark Channel, was deemed a less likely route of attack. It was left in the care of the light cruisers *Hobart* and *San Juan*.

At 8 that evening, Turner summoned all senior commanders afloat and ashore to his flagship, the transport *McCawley*, for a late-night conference. Though Admiral Crutchley could have traveled to the *McCawley* by whaleboat, he elected to take his flagship *Australia* out of the southern line. In departing, he left Captain Howard D. Bode of the *Chicago* in command of the southern group. The northern group of commanders were not informed of the admiral's absence.

On the *McCawley*, Turner shared unwelcome news. He had copied a radio signal from Fletcher to Gormley, asking permission to withdraw the aircraft carriers to the east. Gormley had assented. Having previously committed to stay for 2 days, less than half the time Turner thought necessary to unload, Fletcher was now pulling out 8 hours early. Turner was dismayed, and so was the normally mild-mannered Vandegrift. Without air protection, Turner's transports and cargo ships would be vulnerable to the inevitable Japanese air strikes on August 9th. He believed that he had no alternative but to move the rest of the fleet out at sunrise the next day. When Vandegrift insisted that he needed more supplies, Turner agreed to leave the cargo ships behind for another day of unloading. But the transports and warships must leave at dawn.

At no point in the conference did Turner refer to an approaching Japanese fleet. He had received spotty and contradictory sighting reports and apparently did not fit the pieces together. The two RAAF Hudson bombers flying from Milne Bay, southeastern New Guinea, had seen Mikawa's force that morning, but their reports had given different headings. One had identified two seaplane tenders in a column of ships on a course of 100°. That misidentification—two seaplane tenders—led Turner astray. The admiral assumed they would anchor in Rekata Bay off Santa Isabel Island about 200 mi northwest and launch seaplane torpedo attacks the following day. Turner had also assumed mistakenly that consolidated PBY Catalinas, flying boats based in Espiritu Santo, had searched up the slot that afternoon. Poor weather had scrubbed those flights, but Admiral McCain had failed to inform Turner that the searches had not been completed. For that reason, perhaps, Turner had not ordered Crutchley's cruiser planes to be dispatched to reconnoiter the same area. The various communication failures and conflicting and erroneous reports seemed to have left Turner with a wholly unwarranted sense of invulnerability, at least until daylight brought the renewed threat of air attack.

It was a dark and moonless night, warm and humid, with mists hanging low across the sea. Passing rain showers repeatedly shrouded the area north of Savo Island, so the northern and southern screening groups could rarely see one another. Among the Marines on Guadalcanal, rumors circulated that a major naval counterattack was impending. That impression multiplied at about 1:40 a.m. when the drone of a small aircraft engine was heard above the patchy cloud ceiling over Lunga Point. An air officer at the First Division command post correctly deduced that it was a cruiser float plane and not ours. Lieutenant Charles P. Clark, officer of the deck on the *Quincy*, warned the executive officer that the strange planes must be enemy, as Allied cruiser planes had been recovered earlier in the evening. But the executive disagreed and declined to awaken Captain Samuel N. Moore. Clark later wrote that the "brusk dismissal was such that I was made to feel as if I were a jittery schoolboy."

According to later reports by Navy lookouts, one cruiser plane was sighted with running lights on and therefore assumed friendly. Only one ship broadcast a warning, but it apparently did not get through to Turner. The scout dropped several parachute flares over Lunga Roads. They descended slowly through the overcast, emitting an intense greenish-yellow light that illuminated the entire transport fleet. A surge of false contact reports circulated through the Marine lines. Some believed that the enemy was actually landing on the beach, and intermittent small arms fire was directed at American patrol craft offshore. Then the engines faded as the planes headed west and the flares came to rest on the sea.

The screening group crews had been at readiness condition one for 48 hours, and collective exhaustion was taking its toll. Rumors and bogus contact reports had continued to circulate without respite, and the contradictory and phantom sightings gradually eroded readiness. The cruisers ran in a monotonous oval pattern, crisscrossing the passages north and south of Savo Island. At nightfall on August 8th, the alert level was downgraded to condition two, allowing half the watch to turn in and get some badly needed sleep in their bunks. The captain of one of the Allied cruisers wrote, "The enemy can reach this position at any time in the midwatch, then went to sleep." Physical and mental fatigue had exposed the fleet to precisely the sort of surprise attack that Mikawa was preparing to spring on them.

Between 1244 and 1254, Japanese lookouts first reported a visual fix on the destroyer *Blue* at a distance of about 5 mi. Mikawa ordered a slight northerly course change and cut his column speed in order to reduce its bow waves. A few minutes later, lookouts spotted the *Ralph Talbot*. Both ships, which were supposed to function as the eyes of the Allied fleet, had reached the far northern and southern ends of their patrol circuits, placing them at near maximum distance from the approaching enemy column. Their lookouts did not see Mikawa's ships, and their radar sets were apparently foiled by the radar shadow of Savo Island's volcanic cone. At least a dozen Japanese guns were trained on the *Blue*, and the little destroyer would have been blown out of the water had she shown any indication of having spotted the enemy. But the coolheaded Mikawa, in order to preserve the element of surprise, allowed her to continue on her way.

As the Japanese column passed into the channel between Savo and Guadalcanal, Mikawa ordered the speed resumed to 30 knots. The still-burning transport *George F. Elliott* lit up the southern horizon faintly, but enough to reveal the silhouettes of the two southern group cruisers, *Canberra* and *Chicago*. The *Chokai*'s lookouts were soon able to discern the northern and southern forces simultaneously. The Japanese ships remained undetected. Mikawa's bold tactics had been dramatically vindicated.

At 131, he signaled, "Every ship attack." The destroyer *Patterson* was the first to raise the alarm by TBS (talk between ships), a short-range voice radio used for tactical communications. She signaled, "Warning, warning. Strange ships entering harbor." But the Long Lances were already away, and the Japanese cruiser planes circling overhead dropped flares directly over the two cruisers, lighting them up for the gunners.

At 144, Mikawa's ships opened a devastating salvo of 8-in and 6-in armor-piercing shells. The *Canberra* and *Chicago*, on a course of 310° at a speed of 13 knots, were caught by surprise. Struck by at least 20 shells and two torpedoes, the *Canberra* blazed all along her length. Most of her senior officers, including Captain Frank Getting, were killed by direct hits on the bridge and superstructure. She lost all propulsion and electrical power, took on a 10° starboard list, and shuddered to a stop. The *Chicago*, just astern, steered to avoid her. Captain Bode ordered star shells fired in the direction of the enemy salvos, but they either failed to fire or were duds. Two torpedoes narrowly missed the *Chicago*, but a third hit and tore open her starboard bow. A gunnery officer recalled, "The deck beneath me came up under my feet, and the turret door to the officer's booth flew open. Through the open turret door, I could see two broad pencil streaks of phosphorescence in the water parallel to the hull of the ship. These were the wakes of two torpedoes that had missed."

*Chicago* could fight no more. She had no power. Her cruiser planes were spilling burning aviation fuel all along her upper works, and her forward compartments were flooding rapidly. Captain Bode apparently made no attempt to radio a warning to the other ships of the task force, a failure for which he would later be censured. The action south of Savo Island had consumed less than 10 minutes.

Mikawa's column, racing east at 30 knots, veered north. While executing the turn, the cruisers *Tenryu*, *Yubari*, and *Furutaka* diverged from the rest of the column and took a more westerly course. Though Mikawa had not intended it, this maneuver had the effect of dividing the Japanese force into two roughly parallel columns that enveloped the three American cruisers and two destroyers of the northern group, which were steaming at 10 knots on a heading of 315° in a column led by the *Vincennes*. The gunfire to the south had been heard, but officers in the northern cruiser group apparently assumed it must be friendly. The radio rooms on *Quincy*, *Astoria*, and *Vincennes* had each copied the *Patterson*'s warning, but on the *Vincennes*, it did not reach the captain, who remained fast asleep in his emergency cabin near the pilot house. Men went to battle stations, but the speeding attackers overtook their quarry quickly. Flares dropped by Japanese cruiser planes descended through the overcast and bathed the three American cruisers in brilliant greenish-yellow light. A few seconds later, the *Chokai*'s searchlight flashed over their sterns.

Once again, the Japanese launched torpedoes and then, before the fish reached their targets, opened a salvo of devastating and accurate shell fire. One of Mikawa's officers, Toshi Kazu Ome, observed that the *Chokai*'s searchlight served the double function of leading the column and spotting targets. "As if by an unspoken seaman's language," wrote Ome, "the flagship was fairly screaming to her colleagues: 'Here is the Chokai. Fire on that target. Now that target. This is the Chokai. Hit that target on the Astoria.'"

Captain William G. Greenman was shaken awake, but his first order upon reaching the bridge was to cease fire. The bleary-eyed skipper was sure the southern group had somehow blundered into the northern group and was firing on it in confusion. In these critical moments, *Astoria* was battered by five 8-in shells on both quarters and peppered along her length by 25 mm machine gun fire. One heavy projectile struck the barbette of turret number one, knocking the weapon out of action and killing all personnel in the area. Another slammed home in the number one fire room, and a third struck a kerosene tank on the starboard side amidships, spilling blazing fuel across the well deck. According to the damage report, the ship quickly became a raging inferno from the foremast to the afterbulkhead of the hangar. These fires eventually necessitated the abandoning of the fire rooms and engine rooms due to intense heat and dense smoke. Steering control was lost on the bridge, but that was moot as the ship soon lost all headway. All the forward fire main risers having ruptured, no water could be pumped to the hoses.

The *Quincy* was badly mauled on both quarters as her crew was rushing to stations. She was struck several times in the 1.1-in anti-aircraft mounts on the main deck aft. Firing back gamely, her main batteries delivered an 8-in shell into the *Chokai*'s operations room just abaft her bridge. *Chokai*'s turret number one was knocked out of action, and her float planes mounted on catapults burst into flame. The *Quincy*'s skipper, Captain Moore, ordered a starboard turn to avoid colliding with the *Vincennes*. But another devastating salvo severed the steering leads, jammed the rudder in place, and held the ship in her turn until she was struck by two torpedoes on the port side near her fire rooms, killing her propulsion. At 2:10 a.m., the *Quincy*'s bridge was wiped out by two direct shell hits, killing Moore and most of the senior officers. Upon reaching the scene, an assistant gunnery officer found it a shambles of dead bodies with only three or four people still standing. The *Quincy* listed heavily to port. As the sea poured into the shell holes in her hull, her upper decks were soon awash, and she rolled onto her beam ends. Survivors threw rafts and other floatable objects into the sea and then followed. Lieutenant Commander Bayion Berer, a supply officer, dived into the sea and swam 100 ft away. Treading water, he turned to watch the finale. "She went down by the bow and at a very sharp angle, her stern with propellers and rudder clearly outlined against the firelit sky."

Captain Frederick Lois Reef Cole of the *Vincennes*, shaken awake by a crewman, likewise hesitated to engage the searchlights for fear that they might be friendly. Before the ship's signalmen could send recognition signals, the ship was battered by too many projectiles to count. Perhaps as many as 74, fired by four or five different Japanese cruisers. The initial salvos struck the bridge, the carpenter shop, the hangar, and the antenna trunk. All the *Vincennes*'s gun turrets were disabled by direct or near shell hits. Fires sprang up throughout those areas. The float planes in the hangar lit up like tinder boxes, and the enemy fire did not let up for a moment. Direct shell hits were sustained on sky aft and sky forward. To add to her tally of grief, the *Vincennes* caught two torpedoes on her port side near the forward magazine. Fires raged out of control all along her length, and great rippling explosions threw sheets of flame into the sky. An analysis published by the Navy's Bureau of Ships later concluded, "It is not possible for any lightly protected vessel, i.e. a non-battleship, to absorb such punishment and survive." Reef Cole ordered the crew off the ship at 214, and the *Vincennes* went down 30 minutes later.

At 216, the Japanese ships, still steaming at 30 knots, cleared Savo Sound and headed up the slot. The *Ralph Talbot*, belatedly attempting to join the action, found herself directly in Mikawa's path. Lit up by searchlights and mauled by five shell hits, her radar, radio communications, and fire control equipment were all destroyed. The hull plating on her starboard quarter was torn open at about the waterline, and she took on a 20% starboard list. Had a timely rain shower not descended over her, shrouding her from the enemy's view, she would likely have been blown out of the water.

To the Marines on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and the crews of the X-ray and Yoke transports in Tsavo Sound, the terrific roar and reverberations of the big guns had been accompanied by distant flashes in the mist. A searchlight occasionally stabbed through the night, and red tracer lines spat out here and there, but it was impossible to draw any firm conclusions from what they could see and hear. "We could clearly hear the thunder of guns and see the sky light up from explosions," said a witness on Tulagi, "but knew only what the crews of the landing boats told us that there was a naval battle going on."

On the *McCawley*, Turner and Vandegrift came up on deck to watch the pyrotechnics. Sailors on the flagship cheered wildly, assuming that the American ships were letting the enemy have it. Very soon, silence returned, and all that could be seen were a few distant fires, apparently blazing ships. It was not yet known whether they were Allied or enemy. Richard Tregaskis watched the show from Lunga Point. He had known that a counterattack by sea was likely, but the tremendous cannonading brought home a terrible truth. The Marines on Guadalcanal were not in charge of their fate. "In that moment, I realized how much we must depend on ships, even in our land operation. The terror and power and magnificence of man-made thunder and lightning made that point real. One had the feeling of being at the mercy of great accumulated forces, far more powerful than anything human. We were only pawns in a battle of the gods then, and we knew it."

The sea was littered with debris and dead bodies. Hundreds of men who had abandoned the sinking ships clung to rafts or wreckage and struggled to remain afloat. Lieutenant Harry Vincent of the *Vincennes*, having leapt into the sea about 15 minutes after Reef Cole's order to abandon ship, found himself among a group of 16 sailors, all treading water. The stronger swimmers removed their life belts and gave them to the men who appeared most in need. Vincent recalls, "We discovered we could tread water without a belt for 30 minutes and then hang on to a sailor with a belt for 30 minutes and then do it again and again." The battle and the sinking ships had stirred up the phosphorus in the sea, and men could look down to a depth of 15 or 20 feet. Sharks occasionally patrolled beneath their feet, but none attacked. Fred Moody, also of the *Vincennes*, was similarly proud of his shipmates. "Even these boys that were wounded out there, I didn't hear anyone calling for help for himself. Everyone seemed to want to help the other guy. That was my impression. I know certainly it was that way for the rest of the night." They stayed afloat in this manner until daybreak when the destroyer *Chambers* came alongside and lowered a cargo net.

Mikawa elected to retire at high speed to the northwest rather than return to Tsavo Sound to engage the X-ray and Yoke transport groups. That was a fateful decision and, for the Americans, a very lucky one. If the admiral had taken the more aggressive course as some of his officers had urged, Turner's fleet might have been wiped out. In that case, the logistical underpinning of Watchtower might have collapsed with bleak consequences for Vandegrift's Marines. Mikawa's caution has been criticized, particularly by Western historians, but the admiral later offered a trenchant defense of the decision. He had been informed incorrectly that the Japanese air raids on August 7th and 8th had destroyed a large portion of the American transport fleet. So he did not expect to find a great wealth of targets. His column was traveling at high speed and...

Its formation had become disordered. Hering them back into a coherent formation and charging back into Savo Sound might have taken as long as two or three hours. Most importantly, he could not know that Fletcher's carriers had retired to the east and posed no danger. Mikawa had thus far wagered his ships and won.

To renew the attack, he believed, would expose his force to a carrier air attack while he lacked any defense except anti-aircraft guns. He would be inviting the same sort of catastrophe that he had recently witnessed at Midway. After the war, the admiral acknowledged that he might have scored a fantastic victory had he chosen differently, but he insisted that he could act only on the basis of what he knew at the time.

"Knowing now that the transports were vital to the American foothold on Guadalcanal. Knowing now that our army would be unable to drive American forces out of the Solomons, and knowing now that the carrier task force was not in position to attack my ships, it is easy to say that some other decision would have been wiser. But I believe today as then that my decision based on the information known to me was not a wrong one."

The Canberra, a flame enlisting heavily, drifted on the tide. The surviving crew worked valiantly to save the ship, but there was little they could do. The Patterson came alongside and its crew ran hoses across to assist in quelling the fires, but boxes of ready service ammunition exploded sporadically along the Canberra's deck and the destroyer had to shear off. The Canberra's fuel was dumped overboard. Her remaining torpedoes jettisoned and her magazines flooded. Her starboard list gradually increased and the fires worsened.

At 5:30 a.m., Turner sent word that the fleet was preparing to depart by Seark Channel, and if the Canberra could not be navigated safely, she must be destroyed. The ship was abandoned in orderly fashion with the crew leaping directly onto the decks of the destroyers or into the sea where they were lifted by cargo nets. The burning, listing Canberra did not succumb willingly to the destroyer's attempt to sink her. The Patterson and Elliot had to fire 263 rounds of five-inch shells and four torpedoes before she finally slipped beneath the waves.

There remains some hope of salvaging the Astoria. Shortly after 2:00 a.m., with her fires raging out of control throughout the upper decks amidships, Captain Greenman ordered survivors out of the bridge and fortop and sent them forward into the fo'c'sle. Though the skipper did not yet know it, his executive officer had organized another party of survivors aft on the fantail. Both groups formed bucket brigades and managed to keep the flames at bay. But between them on the well deck, hangar, and superstructure, a ferocious inferno consumed whatever fuel it found, including the float planes, the boats, the paint locker, the mattresses, and furniture in wardroom country, the clipping room ammunition, and shells on the five-inch and 1.1-inch hoists.

A welcome rain squall washed over the burning ship at 3:30 a.m., but it provided only momentary relief, and as it passed, the flames flared up more intensely than before. Shortly before dawn, the destroyer Bagley came alongside and began taking men off the bow. The fires advanced relentlessly until 11:30 a.m. when an explosion tore open the ship's port side at the waterline. The sea poured into the Astoria, and she rolled radically to port. Officers and sailors leapt clear and swam for their lives. The Astoria rolled all the way onto her beam ends, and her stern went under. By a quarter noon, she was gone.

The transport fleet, ignorant of its salvation, was left in an uproar. Enemy cruiser planes continued to circle overhead for about an hour after the Japanese fleet's departure, dropping flares off to Lunga and the adjoining islands. It stood to reason, or so it seemed, that the flares portended another round of attacks. Rain showers and shrouding mists made for poor visibility, and recognition signals were difficult to pick out. Landing boats and patrol craft raced this way and that, apparently in distress. Collisions were narrowly averted. Rumors and spurious sighting reports proliferated. Lookouts believing they had seen periscopes and torpedo wakes raised the alarm and destroyers laid down patterns of depth charges across the heart of Tsavo Sound, which now took the name Iron Bottom Sound. Although no friendly exchanges of major caliber naval gunfire were reported, sporadic intramural small-arms firefights persisted until dawn. Men who had been at Pearl Harbor the previous December 7th felt an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. Among the Marines, news spread that the Navy had suffered a terrible defeat.

As dawn broke and it finally became apparent that the enemy had left the scene, the American fleet was scrambling to get underway via Seal Channel. To the west were the drifting, burning hulks of the Canberra and Astoria. General Vandegrift, watching the disorderly scene from the beach on Guadalcanal, wondered aloud, "What's happened to the Navy?" A staff officer replied, "I don't believe the first team has taken the field, General." The Marines urgently needed more vital provisions and supplies delivered to the beaches, but Turner was determined to clear his ships out of the area. The admiral agreed to leave several cargo ships behind until that afternoon, but without air protection, the rest of the fleet must go. Beach Red remained congested with unsorted crates. The frenzied state of the fleet, false contact reports, air raid warnings requiring high-speed maneuvering, boats racing around in search of their ships, repeatedly interrupted unloading operations. An hour after dawn, there were no landing barges at work in Lunga Roads. Wounded sailors had to be collected from the stricken cruisers. Fierce Japanese resistance continued on the little island of Tanamogo and reinforcements had to be put ashore there.

The diary of the cargo ship *Beetlejuice* contained the following observation: "The major part of this time was used up in awaiting orders to land after a beachhead had been secured. Ceasing unloading due to orders from the beach, getting underway and coming to anchor. Underway at sea to avoid the enemy. Manning general quarters stations, scattering and recalling boats, diversion of ships' boats to assist in unloading of other ships."

Meanwhile, Vandegrift had to fortify his shoreline against an expected enemy counter-invasion. An intelligence alert had warned that a Japanese invasion force was gathering at Rabaul and was expected to arrive within four days. Preparation of defenses required manpower, diverting men from the unloading work. Turner refused Vandegrift's request to be reinforced with the 1,400 officers and men of the Second Marines, which the admiral continued to insist on holding in reserve for possible deployment to Indeny.

Throughout the morning, ships filed out of Seark Channel. Hundreds of Marines watched glumly as the battle-mauled Chicago, still smoking and with most of her bow blasted away, vanished beyond Tyvu Point. By sundown, none remained. A supply officer estimated that fewer than half of the crates packed into the transports in New Zealand had been landed. The Marines, now alone, were precariously short of such vital necessities as food, ammunition, heavy artillery, anti-aircraft guns, communications equipment, barbed wire, fuel, and spare parts. And still they wondered, "Where was the Japanese army? And when and where would it reveal itself?"

Chapter 3.

Admiral King, sound asleep on his docked flagship *Dauntless* at the Washington Navyyard, was shaken awake in the early morning hours of August 12th. "Admiral, you've got to see this," said his duty officer, who had never before interrupted the boss's sleep. "It isn't good." With disbelieving eyes, King read Turner's dispatch reporting the loss of four Allied cruisers with heavy loss of life and the hurried withdrawal of the transports and cargo ships from Iron Bottom Sound. He asked that the dispatch be decoded again in the vain hope that it was somehow mistaken. It was not.

The news kicked King in the teeth. Watchtower was his invention, his hobby horse, and his responsibility. He had insisted on the risky expedition with full knowledge that Allied shipping resources and air power were strained to the snapping point. He had ridden roughshod over the well-reasoned joint objections of the region's two theater commanders. "That, as far as I am concerned, was the blackest day of the war," he later said. "The whole future became unpredictable."

The next morning in his office on the second deck of Main Navy, the headquarters building on Constitution Avenue, he studied the track charts forwarded by Turner and tried to envision how the Japanese fleet could have stolen into Ironbottom Sound undetected. "I just can't understand it," he admitted to Admiral Harry W. Hill, who had dropped in to see him. The analogy to Pearl Harbor was impossible to ignore. The earlier surprise attack had inflicted greater casualties and material damage, but the beating at Tsavo had been meted out in wartime against ships operating in enemy-dominated seas when their commanders and crews ought to have been hypervigilant to every likely threat. The Navy's honor, reputation, and self-respect were on the block.

FDR received the news from his naval aide, Commander John L. McCrae, who drove the dispatch from Washington to Shangri-La, the president's rural presidential retreat in Maryland, later renamed Camp David. The president, McCrae recalled, "was heartsick about it. There wasn't anything he could do about it." King ordered that news of the defeat be concealed from the press. He dispatched two trusted officers, Admiral Arthur J. Hepburn and Captain Dwight C. Ramsay, to fly to Nouméa to investigate its causes.

Not for a moment did he consider scaling back the commitment to Watchtower. However, indeed he moved at once to reinforce Gormley. In a memorandum to the president on August 13th, King outlined his plan to send the battleships *South Dakota* and *Washington*, accompanied by a cruiser and six destroyers, through the Panama Canal and on to Nouméa. Two more cruisers would be transferred from Britain to the east coast and kept in readiness for possible transfer to the Pacific. On the same day, King asked General Marshall to provide more Army air units to the region regardless of commitments elsewhere. "In my opinion, the Army air forces in Hawaii and the South Pacific area must be reinforced immediately to a much greater extent than appears now to be in prospect." Marshall acquiesced without dissent, even though the USAAF chief Henry Hap Arnold was adamantly opposed to diverting any of his strength from Europe or the pending invasion of North Africa. Marshall was perfectly aware that King had FDR's ear and that the commander-in-chief wanted it done.

As Turner's ships limped back toward Nouméa, survivors of the sunken cruisers began the grim work of reconstructing the fatal events. The senior surviving officer of each ship was required to submit an action report, but the loss of records and the death or disablement of many key witnesses and participants required them to work largely from memory. All knew the action would receive intense scrutiny. Admiral Crutchley, to his credit, did not mince words. On the morning of August 10th, he wrote Turner, "The fact must be faced that we had an adequate force placed with the very purpose of repelling surface attack, and when that surface attack was made, it destroyed our force. How had it happened?"

Hepburn and Ramsay's investigation shone a harsh light on the failure of air and submarine reconnaissance to discover Mikawa's force and alert the task force to its approach. The division of the region into two theaters, one controlled by Gormley and the other by MacArthur, had posed a communications hitch right at the vital boundary that Mikawa crossed on the night of August 8th to 9th. Several Allied planes had spotted the Japanese ships farther up the Slot, but some of the sighting reports failed to get through to Turner in time, and others were inaccurate or incomplete. A report of seaplane tenders among the Japanese ships threw Turner off the scent. He assumed they must be headed for Rekata Bay on Santa Isabel and would launch a seaplane torpedo attack on August 9th. Admiral McCain's PBY had been foiled by bad weather, but McCain had failed to inform Turner that the patrol flights had not occurred. Turner might have used the cruiser planes in his task force to conduct his own air searches, but he did not.

A fateful convergence of errors and bad luck was behind the debacle, and no senior naval commander in the Watchtower expedition could count himself entirely blameless. Hepburn's report concluded that the defeat could not be attributed to a single root cause. Captain Bode of the *Chicago* was the only officer formally censured for failing to send an alert when his ship was attacked.

In his comments on the report submitted to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox five weeks after the battle, King stressed that this was the first battle experience for most of the ships participating in the operation and for most of the flag officers involved, and that consequently it was the first time that most of them had been in the position of "kill or be killed." They simply had not learned how and when to stay on the alert. The officers and men had been on Condition One alert with virtually the entire crew on watch for more than 48 hours. The men were human. They could not function indefinitely without rest. Collective physical and mental exhaustion had overcome the task forces, rendering them vulnerable to surprise attack.

A more contentious question was Fletcher's abrupt decision to withdraw the aircraft carriers on the afternoon of August 8th, which the Hepburn report called a "contributory cause of the disaster." Had he stayed until the morning of the 9th as previously planned, Fletcher could have done nothing to prevent the catastrophe off Savo Island. But it is possible that his air group(s) could have delivered retribution from the air on Mikawa's fleeing column. Fletcher's early withdrawal has remained one of the livelier controversies of the Pacific War. It drew pungent criticism from Turner and Vandegrift, both of whom seemed to have regarded it as a personal betrayal. In his memoir, the normally equable Vandegrift used the incendiary term "running away" with its blunt intimation of cowardice to describe Fletcher's departure. Fletcher's decision was pilloried by the influential Samuel Eliot Morrison in his quasi-official history of U.S. naval operations in the Second World War.

The subject has been parsed, scrutinized, and debated by generations of historians. Little more can be usefully said except to bring out some of the most salient points. Fletcher, in almost perfect contrast to Turner, seemed content to accept history's judgment of his conduct. He did not, like Turner, review and provide detailed notes on Morrison's draft manuscript covering the events of Watchtower. He published no memoir. Retiring in 1947 to a farm in rural Maryland, he largely removed himself from the cut and thrust of historical debate. He either forgot or falsely denied that he and Turner had clashed during the July 26th planning conference on the *Saratoga* over the question of how long the carriers would stay. "Turner and his staff were very pleased with the arrangements made at the conference," Fletcher told a *New York Times* reporter in 1947, and added, "At no time was there any friction between Turner and myself." That was plainly inaccurate, as several other witnesses have attested.

In his dispatch to Gormley on the evening of August 8th, 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 7th and 8th. In preparing his volume on the Guadalcanal landing, *Volume 5, The Struggle for Guadalcanal*, Morrison 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. Morrison'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. His force could have remained in the area with no more severe consequences than sunburn." John B. Lundstrom provides evidence that Fletcher may have received incomplete or inaccurate information about the fuel state of his screening vessels. The admiral can 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 7th and 8th, 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 air crews 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 31st, 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 7th, 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 Gormley had provided clear instructions to resolve the discrepancy. The decision therefore fell to Fletcher, whom Gormley designated the overall commander of the expedition. Many officers who took part in the July 26th 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. Gormley'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.

Sunrise on August 10th found Task Force 62 zigzagging generally east at about the midpoint between Guadalcanal and Nouméa, 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 *Macaulay*. The destroyers hunted the surrounding waters with depth charge barges, and the task force executed a series of radical turns. The stricken *Chicago*, falling behind, was ordered into a fate with a destroyer screen. No ship suffered a torpedo hit, and on August 15th, the bulk of Task Force 62 arrived safely at Nouméa Harbor. The wounded were removed to hospital ships by stretcher. All would be sent to Australia or the States.

The First Division's hopes now depended on constant and generous supply by sea. On August 15th, 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 *Falhot*, loaded with heavy construction equipment for Guadalcanal and Tulagi, stood out of Nouméa 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.

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 9th: "Sufficient food was landed at the Tulagi area for about 11 days and at the Guadalcanal area for about 36 days." The Marines did not agree with those figures, however. Vandegrift radioed this on August 15th: "From rations on hand and consumed to date, estimate about 12 days rations landed Guadalcanal. Further loss due to weather and handling reduced this to 10 days. No opportunity should be lost to forward rations to this command." In the First Division's final report submitted in 1943, the figures recorded for August 15th were 17 days of regular field rations, 3 days of Type C rations, and another 10 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 12th, and most men subsisted on two meager meals per day. Private William Rogal, manning a foxhole on Tulagi, was issued one sea 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 board marines. Now it was food because the single overriding emotion during the weeks we existed in that jungle retreat was hunger."

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. MacArthur's B-17s flew over Rabaul and Kavieng almost every day between August 12th and August 16th. 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 15th, 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 21st, Fletcher told Gormley that he considered it inadvisable to send cruisers and destroyers into Cactus (Guadalcanal) nightly because of their exposure to submarine attack. 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 anti-aircraft 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 18th, 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 anti-aircraft 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 anti-aircraft 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 16th by destroyers that snuck into Iron Bottom 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 16th, 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 float plane circled over the Marine perimeter, dropping occasional bombs here or there. Collectively known to the Americans as "Washing Machine Charlie" or "Louis the Laos," 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. 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. The stifling heat and humidity, oppressive swarms of insects, gnawing hunger, and sleepless nights wore the men down. The first two weeks felt like two months. Sickness soon began to take its inevitable toll. Most of the First Division Marines would suffer dysentery and malaria at some point during the campaign, often at the same time. When overtaken by a malarial fever, a Marine was taken off the lines to the hospital tent near Lunga Point, where he and 100 or so fellow sufferers lay bathed in sweat from head to toe, oscillating between blazing fevers and teeth-rattling chills. When the fever broke, usually after 24 to 48 hours, the man put his boots back on and went back to his foxhole. Chronic dysentery was so common as to be universal, but it did not normally require hospitalization. Rogal recalled, "It was so bad and so prevalent that a solid bowel movement was a cause for rejoicing."

The Marine perimeter was semi-circular in shape, bounded by Ironbottom Sound on the north and the jungle foothills to the south. It was about five miles wide, east to west, and about two miles deep, north to south. It covered most of what had been, before the war, the three largest and most prosperous Lever Brothers coconut plantations on Guadalcanal, named Kukum, Lunga, and Tinaru. For that reason, it was the most developed part of Guadalcanal, which is not to say it was well-developed, but it did have a network of reasonably passable dirt roads running between the beach, Lunga Point, and Henderson Field. Much of the land was covered with coconut palms planted in neat and orderly rows, offering some cover against daytime bombing and strafing attacks.

General Vandegrift had to consider many unpleasant possibilities. The greatest danger, he concluded, was a counter-landing in force on the same beach that the Marines had taken on August 7th. He drew up his beach-facing defenses behind Lunga Point, running from the Tenaru River to a hill about 1,000 yards southwest of Kukum. The Marines dug foxholes and trenches, swinging picks and turning dirt out with shovels in the sweltering heat. At first, they had no sandbags or barbed wire, as these items had not been unloaded from the cargo ships before their withdrawal on August 9th. Automatic machine guns were emplaced along these lines and positioned to sweep the beach. Units detailed men to start moving the piled-up supplies off the beach and back into secure supply dumps.

Vandegrift also had to consider the possibility of a concerted attack anywhere along his perimeter. The enemy might attack from the east and west simultaneously. That danger prompted Vandegrift to pull in the eastern flank from the Ilu River to the Tenaru. This shortened his perimeter and made it more defensible. A decision that would very soon be vindicated.

Company commanders gathered each morning at Vandegrift's command post. All were fatigued, worn down by the heat, the stress, and the difficulty in getting a decent night's sleep. In his memoir, the general left a portrait of his officers sitting on the wet ground, sipping cold coffee from tin cups, and listening to the sound of rain hissing on a pathetic fire. They were haggard, filthy, and unshaven. All wore brave faces, but Vandegrift sensed that morale was fragile. They wondered if they had been abandoned by the Navy. When a radio broadcast mentioned decorations awarded to Navy crews, a low growl of anger circulated through their ranks.

Vandegrift moved to fortify the division's spirits by issuing a series of upbeat announcements. Japanese resistance on Tulagi had been snuffed out. Patrols had not encountered any strong enemy force outside the lines. Work on the airfield was progressing rapidly, and Marine fighter squadrons would soon arrive. The general made a point of touring the lines at midday, timing his visits to precede the daily Japanese air strikes. He often posed for photographs with the troops, a morale device that worked because they thought, "If I went to the trouble of having the picture taken, then I obviously plan to enjoy it in future years."

Not least among the Marines' difficulties was a nearly complete lack of intelligence about enemy troops on the island. Except for a few minor skirmishes and patrols outside the perimeter, the enemy had not yet shown his hand. Vandegrift did not know how many Japanese troops were out there, or where they were bivouacked, or how well-armed or provisioned they were, or what they intended in the way of counterattack. The stillness of the jungle exerted subtle psychological pressure on men who had been trained for a quick, hard-fought amphibious assault. The few prisoners taken by patrols outside the lines seemed to be laborers rather than soldiers—"termites," as the Marines called them—and they could offer little information about the Japanese Army's presence on the island.

On August 12th, a Japanese naval warrant officer was taken prisoner near the Matanikau River. Interrogated by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge, the First Division intelligence officer, he revealed that there were several hundred Japanese stragglers encamped on the west bank of the river who might be willing to surrender. Another report referred to a white flag displayed near an enemy position. Goettge proposed to take a combat patrol down the coast in a Higgins boat, land near Point Cruz, and go up the river in search of these prospective prisoners. Vandegrift gave his reluctant assent. The party landed after nightfall on the 12th and was ambushed immediately. Goettge was the first man killed in an action that quickly developed into a massacre. Only three survivors managed to escape and make their way back into the Marine perimeter. A reinforced company was sent back out to look for the lost patrol, but no one and no bodies could be found. Lurid stories later appeared in the press suggesting that the Goettge patrol had been enticed by a sham surrender, but there is no evidence to suggest any such trickery on this occasion. And it is likely that the white flag spotted the previous day was a rising sun in which the red disc was concealed from view.

As if in answer to the Marines's urgent need for better local intelligence, the coast watcher and former colonial district officer Martin Clemens appeared on August 14th. Clemens had been invited down from his high mountain area by Charles Witty, the former Lever Brothers plantation manager who had landed with the Marines, by a handwritten note delivered by a native runner: "American Marines have landed successfully in force. Come in via Volola Navua and along the beach to Ilu during daylight. Repeat daylight. Ask outpost to direct you to me at first regimental C.P. at Lunga. Congratulations and regards."

Beginning at dawn, Clemens had packed up his radio gear and came down the hill, a cavalcade of native carriers in train. He took a circuitous route, taking care to avoid the enemy lurking in the jungle, and hailed the Marines from a position just east of Vulan Navua. The Marines raised their rifles but held fire, and then welcomed Clemens warmly with cigarettes and chocolate bars. It had been months since the Scotsman had spoken English, except over the radio. He was speechless with emotion.

Late that afternoon, after having cleaned himself up, Clemens was taken to division headquarters and introduced to Vandegrift. He perched on a ration box in the general's command post and told the entire story of his activity since the Japanese had landed on Tulagi more than three months earlier. The general described his visitor as "a remarkable chap of medium height, well-built and apparently suffering no ill effects from his self-imposed jungle exile. He wore shorts and black dress oxfords that had been polished to a high sheen." It was obvious that he knew a great deal of the island and its people, and he already had intact a native constabulary that would serve well as a patrolling force. Vandegrift placed him in charge of all matters of native administration and of intelligence outside the perimeter. The Scotsman would contribute invaluable intelligence through his native scouts, brave and steadfast fighters who could, when necessary, shed their uniforms and blend into the native population. Guadalcanal had been a campaign of extermination from the beginning, and the islanders understood that sort of fighting well. Traveling quickly and silently over secret paths through the jungle, they were to prove fearsome guerrilla fighters.

The Japanese Navy apparently believed it had crippled the invasion fleet in Iron Bottom Sound. According to Mikawa's Eighth Fleet war diary, Allied losses in naval and air action between August 7th and August 9th amounted to twelve cruisers (eight heavy, four light) and several destroyers. The Fifth Air Attack Force jacked these estimates up to twenty-some cruisers, destroyers, transports, and other types of ships. When the buoyant reports reached Tokyo, however, the Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) apparently deemed them too conservative. A press communiqué declared that at least twenty-eight Allied warships and thirty transports or freighters had been sent to the bottom. An unnamed source boasted that "American and British naval strength has been reduced to that of a third-rate power."

Gross inflation of claimed air and naval combat results was a pervasive syndrome in the Pacific War throughout the conflict. For example, American aviators and submariners consistently overestimated the number and tonnage of enemy ships sunk. Those discrepancies would cause embarrassment after the war when the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey published revised estimates based on Japanese records. But Japanese military leaders were often led astray by even the most improbable claims. If Japanese naval and air forces had slaughtered the invasion fleet, then the enemy troops on Guadalcanal must be underequipped and underprovisioned. They could be mopped up without much trouble.

Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of the Naval General Staff (NGS), hastened to the summer palace in Nikko to soothe the emperor's concerns. "The capture of Guadalcanal and Tulagi," he said, "was nothing worthy of Your Majesty's attention." The local army headquarters in Rabaul was largely unconcerned about the American move into the Solomons. Far more important, or so it seemed, was the campaign in eastern New Guinea, where the 25th Airflot was preoccupied with a buildup of Allied air strength in Rabaul, and the Japanese Army was determined to take the dusty colonial outpost of Port Moresby, marching troops over the soaring hump of the Owen Stanley Mountains. A Japanese pre-war assessment had emphasized the importance of Moresby as a stepping stone. Its airfields and naval base would guarantee Japan control of the air and sea in the southwest Pacific. The interior offensive against Moresby would eventually be defeated by the valor of Australian troops, assisted by an awful climate and grueling terrain. But for the time being, it remained the chief priority of Japanese ground forces in the region.

From the beginning, the Japanese badly underestimated the number of Marines in the lower Solomons. They were apparently misled by an intelligence report filed by a Japanese attaché in Moscow who had picked up rumors in conversation with unidentified Russians. "The Guadalcanal landing was a raid rather than a sustained invasion," the attaché reported, and "American troop strength on the island was only about 2,000." Vandegrift had five times that number on Guadalcanal and another 6,000 on the islands across Iron Bottom Sound. Aerial photo reconnaissance in mid-August failed to correct the misimpression. Perhaps the Americans would attempt to dynamite the airfield and supporting equipment and then withdraw. If so, it was no matter. Guadalcanal could be reoccupied and the airfield completed in good time.

Nevertheless, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet and the highest-ranking seagoing admiral of the Japanese Navy, committed the bulk of his available naval forces to a counteroffensive known as Kago. His paramount objective, unaltered since the debacle at Midway two months earlier, was to flush out and destroy the American aircraft carriers, which he knew to be operating in the waters south and east of Guadalcanal. Kago involved four main elements:

1. A landing force of Army and Special Naval Landing troops would be embarked in four troop ships. They would sail for Guadalcanal in a convoy under the command of Rear Admiral Riso Tanaka, who flew his flag on the light cruiser *Jintsu*. These forces were first dispatched from the Inland Sea in Japan to Truk, from which they departed on August 16th.

2. A carrier task force built around the *Zuikaku* and *Shokaku* with the baby flattop *Ryuho* and commanded by the veteran Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo would descend on the Solomons from the north. The two big carriers would hang back until the American carriers revealed themselves. Then they would strike. Nagumo's carriers would be heavily reinforced with surface ships, including the powerful battleships *Hiei* and *Kirishima*, and heavy cruisers *Tone* and *Chikuma*.

3. Two other forces, combined chiefly of surface ships, would backstop the carriers and invasion convoy: Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe's Vanguard Force with two battleships, three heavy cruisers, and one light cruiser; and Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo's Advance Force, including six cruisers, the seaplane tender *Chitose*, and sundry destroyers.

If Nagumo could find, engage, and destroy Fletcher's carriers, the entire Japanese fleet would advance into Iron Bottom Sound and wipe out whatever American naval resistance remained, and then land ground forces on the island to recapture the airstrip.

Vandegrift's First Engineer Battalion raced to complete Henderson Field using captured Japanese construction equipment and materials, including six road rollers, two tractors, and fifty hand carts. A gap of about 180 feet in the middle of the strip remained to be filled and graded. "Worked on the field just as Japs had with their equipment," read an early draft of the First Division report. "No bulldozer, power shovel, or dump truck. Seemed endless work."

On August 12th, the airfield was continuous to a length of 2,600 feet, and a Navy PBY amphibious patrol plane landed to the cheers of hundreds of Marines. Among the passengers was Lieutenant William Samson, who had been sent personally by Admiral McCain, the SOPAC air chief, to assess the field's condition. Samson thought it ready to handle fighters, but too short and soft for bombers. A number of tall trees obstructed the approach on the eastern end of the field and would have to be cut down. The muddy surface was not yet overlaid with steel matting, nor did it include taxiways or revetments—earthen walls to shield parked planes against explosions. Henderson was badly exposed to the south. Its western end was only about 300 yards from the perimeter and thus vulnerable to light artillery fire, sniper fire, and an attack in force. But McCain had made it his personal business to get as many planes into Guadalcanal as quickly as possible, even if it meant stripping the air bases at Espiritu Santo and Efate. "The best and proper solution, of course, is to get fighters and SPDs onto your field," he told Vandegrift in a handwritten letter delivered by Samson. He promised Marine fighter and dive-bombing units by August 18th or 19th.

Three days later, the first CB unit arrived with a carry-all, a machine that could scoop about twelve cubic yards of earth out of the ground at one stroke. The work accelerated rapidly, and Henderson was declared ready to receive any type of airplane on August 18th. The promised airplanes were those of Marine Aircraft Group 23 (MAG-23), which included two squadrons of F4F Wildcat fighters and two of Dauntless SBD dive bombers. They had been training since May at Ewa Field in Oahu. The skipper of Marine Fighter Squadron 223 was Captain John L. Smith, who had just recently transferred from a dive-bombing squadron. Most of his pilots were second lieutenants, recently out of flight training. A few were lucky survivors of the air defense of Midway the previous June. Their combat experience to date had given them little cause for confidence. Marine Bombing 232 was manned by aviators just out of flight school, many of whom had never dropped a live bomb from an SBD. The Marine squadrons were dangerously green, but circumstances did not allow for more training. They were needed on Guadalcanal immediately. As Nimitz's SYNCPAK headquarters war diary observed on August 13th: "Opinion here is that no squadron is ever sufficiently trained. At any event, they are well enough trained to go to work down south."

The Marine F4Fs and SBDs were launched by catapult off the escort carrier *Long Island*, which had ferried them down from Pearl Harbor on the afternoon of August 20th. The carrier lay about 190 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, about an hour's flight to Henderson Field. About fifteen minutes after takeoff, the island's green mountains loomed over the horizon. Lauren D. "Doc" Everton, one of the most experienced fighter pilots in the group, gazed down at the unfolding northern plains and was struck by how peaceful and beautiful the island appeared from the air. But as they arrived over Lunga, neither he nor his wingmen liked the look of Henderson Field. The approach had been cleared of tall coconut palms, leaving a meadow strewn with stumps and heaps of rotting foliage. At 3,600 feet, the field was long enough but very rough and uneven, with patches of mud amid the gravel. David Galvin, a Marine radioman-gunner on an SBD, recalled seeing "a very small pasture with a whole lot of holes in it. I mean, a narrow one, too. When you come into Guadalcanal, there was a grove of coconut trees, maybe three-quarters of a mile. Then you go into an opening, a little kind of meadow that extended from Tinaru River running east by southeast. On the opposite side was jungle, thick jungle, a solid mass of trees and brush."

About 4:00 that afternoon, men on Guadalcanal first caught the distant drone of aircraft engines. Many moved instinctively toward their trenches and foxholes, but these planes were approaching from the east rather than from the west as the enemy planes usually did. The anti-aircraft gunners tensed but held fire. Then the drone ascended to a roar, and thirty-one blue carrier planes flew low over the field and then circled back to line up their landing approaches. Shouts of joy rose up all throughout the perimeter, and men waved their helmets above their heads. "I just looked up and grinned till I felt the mud crack on my whiskers," a Marine remarked. "It looked so damn good to see something American circling."

In the sky over the airfield. It was like being all alone, and the lights come on, and you've got friends from home in the same room with you.

19 Wilds and 12 Dauntlesses lined up in an orderly pattern and touched down one by one. Most bounced once or twice before settling on the field. The 31 propellers threw gravel, pebbles, and kicked up clouds of dust that hovered in the air even after they cut their engines. As the planes taxied to a stop, men clamored onto the wings to greet the pilots with handshakes and backs slaps. Vandergrift, overcome with emotion, took the hand of Major Dick Mangram, commander of Marine Bombing 232, and said, "Thank God you have come."

No event of the Guadalcanal campaign lifted morale so much as the arrival of those first planes. The Cactus Air Force, as it was immediately dubbed, offered protection against attack by air, sea, and land. It gave Vandergrift eyes over the shipping approaches through the Northwest. Martin Clemens wrote that the plane's arrival was a gladsome sight and gave me a tingle right down the spine. Colonel Merrill Twining thought it one of the great turning points of the campaign.

Climbing from their planes, the Marine aviators were greeted by their new ground crews, sailors of Cub 1, a Navy mobile advanced base construction team. The unit had no special training to work on airplanes, but they were mechanically gifted and quickly learned what they needed to know. Their work was complicated by the primitive conditions at Henderson. All fueling was done by hand pumps fastened to gasoline drums. Bombs were transported on trucks to the airfield from ammunition caches hidden in the palm groves. They had to be muscled up to the underbellies of the SBDs by hand. It was backbreaking, exhausting work. Henderson had no taxiways, no revetments, and no drainage. Steel matting had not yet been laid, and the middle section of the field was soft and uneven. Carrier aircraft built to withstand hard impact on a flight deck would stand up to the abusive landings at Henderson. More delicate types were likely to suffer considerable wear and tear.

There were signs that afternoon of an impending attack on the eastern flank of the American lines. A night earlier, ships had been heard passing through the sound from west to east. Some minutes later, several large waves washed up on the beach. Three hours later, another set of waves washed up on the beach, and ships were heard to return to the west. It did not require clever deduction to conclude that Japanese troops had probably landed somewhere to the east of the Marine lines. A detachment of 916 troops under Colonel Kunao Ichiki had landed at 11:00 p.m. that night. Throughout the 20th, Japanese cruisers and destroyers operated in Ironbottom Sound with complete impunity, unchecked and unmolested.

Clemens had received native reports of a Japanese force of unknown size down the coast to the east. On the afternoon of August 19th, he sent a patrol under the native constable Jacob C. Vuza to creep across the American lines into the heavily forested ridge south of Henderson Field and then to turn east and back north to the coast in hopes of gaining information about Japanese movements in that area. Vandergrift strengthened his lines on the right bank of the Tenaru River by summoning reinforcements from Tulagi, where the fighting was finished.

As darkness fell, the Marines were on edge. Any sound in the jungle beyond their lines was liable to signal the beginning of an enemy attack. At midnight, the floatplane washing machine Charlie arrived on his normal schedule, dropped a single bomb, and then continued circling noisily overhead. At 2:00 a.m., the plane dropped a brilliant green parachute flare over the sandbar at the mouth of the Tenaru. Observers discerned shadows moving through the underbrush. Marine outposts on the far side of the river were withdrawn to the defensive lines on the right bank.

At 2:30 a.m. came the first banzai charge. Several hundred screaming Japanese hurdled across the sand spit and breached the Marine lines. A cacophony of machine gun, rifle, and mortar fire rose from the engaged front. That charge was bloodily repulsed with about 200 enemy soldiers hung up in barbed wire and cut down by enfilading machine gun fire. The Japanese tried again, this time north of the river's sand spit. This too was stopped dead with heavy losses to the attackers. Japanese positions east of the river concentrated light mortar and rifle fire on the point at which they had first attempted to break through, but the line held fast as reserves were brought up.

The screams of banzai intermingled with the rattle of machine gun fire and the repeating crescendos of mortar and artillery fire. The 50-caliber guns held down in long bursts made a sustained roar. The 30-caliber guns made a sharper staccato sound. The American mortars thumped deeply. The Japanese 25-mm bursts were shorter and higher pitched. To men who could recognize the different weapons by their sounds, one thing was agreeably obvious. The Americans were generating a much greater volume of fire.

Clemens watched from the intelligence division headquarters adjacent to the airfield. Half a mile away, tracers ricocheted up into the sky together with red and white flares as Japanese columns came into the attack. "We could see the coconut palms silhouetted in pink flashes and in that strange light, debris being thrown heavenward. Everything appeared to be going all right, but it all seemed dangerously near. And as the din increased, I had the eerie feeling that the battle was creeping closer."

For the newly arrived aviators, still settling into their new accommodations, the battle was an eye-opener. Doc Everton had moved into a Japanese tent and fashioned a bed with woven rice straw bags too deep. Though he knew he needed sleep, he sat up all night with his .45-caliber sidearm in one hand and his helmet in the other. He kept his shoes on.

Shortly before dawn, the first battalion, first Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel L.B. Kreswell, was ordered across the river to attack the enemy's left flank and rear. The battalion crossed the river about a mile above its mouth and enveloped the Japanese forces entirely, cutting off their retreat. The remaining enemy soldiers, about 500 men, were trapped in a coconut grove and slaughtered methodically throughout the morning of August 21st. At first light, F4F fighters took to the air and flew strafing runs over the enemy position. By late afternoon, it seemed that the few remaining Japanese troops could be overrun in a concerted counterattack across the river.

While this last act of the Battle of the Tenaru River was playing out, Jacob C. Vuza crawled back into the American lines. He was nearly dead for loss of blood. His patrol had run into an advanced scouting force of the Japanese invasion group. Vuza had been brutally interrogated, enduring prolonged torture while tied to a tree. He had been smashed repeatedly in the face by rifle butts, and his face was a swollen, bloody mass. He had been stabbed by bayonets and was bleeding freely from the throat and chest. Against the odds, his torturers had struck no vital artery, and he had managed to chew through the ropes and crawl back to the American lines. Taken to the field hospital, he was stitched up and fed blood intravenously. In 12 days, he recovered and returned to duty. His heroism was recognized by two nations. The United States awarded Vuza the Silver Star and Legion of Merit, and the British knighted him and named him a member of the Order of the British Empire.

In the aftermath of the battle, the Marines quickly learned that the enemy owed no allegiance to the norms of civilized war. Wounded Japanese soldiers would call for medical attention and then shoot the corpsman who came in response. Others would pretend to lie dead, clutching a grenade, hoping to take a Marine with them to the afterlife. "I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting," Vandergrift wrote the Commandant of the Marine Corps. "These people refuse to surrender. The wounded will wait until the men come up to examine them and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade. You can readily see the answer to that." A platoon of light tanks was deployed to finish off the remaining survivors. They fired canister shot into the fields of dead and wounded and ran over the bodies with their treads. Vandergrift, visiting the scene late that afternoon, remarked that the rear of the tanks looked like meat grinders. Another Marine officer had this recollection: "Japanese bodies lay piled together in stinking heaps, burned, crushed, and torn. A tide flowed and ebbed before all could be buried. And here an arm, there a head stuck up through the new-washed sand on the beach."

In losing 43 killed and 57 wounded, the Marines had annihilated Ichiki's entire attacking force of 800 men. The rest of the detachment, numbering about 120 men, had been left behind to the east as a rear guard. The psychological repercussions of the Tenaru action were far-reaching. That victory and the actions on Tulagi and Gavutu two weeks earlier had put an end to the myth of the Japanese soldier as an untouchable jungle warrior. The fanaticism of the Japanese was unnerving, but it prompted them again and again to fight in tactically idiotic ways.

Vandergrift lost no time in circulating word of the victory. "Attacked by a large force, the Marines on the Tenaru defended their position with such zeal and determination that the enemy was unable to effect a penetration of the position in spite of repeated efforts throughout the night. The First Marines counterattacking at daybreak with an envelopment which caught the enemy in the rear and on the flank, thus cutting off his withdrawal and pushing him from inland in the direction of the sea. Virtually annihilated his force and achieved a victory fully commensurate with the military traditions of our corps."

In two previous carrier duels, Frank Jack Fletcher had enjoyed timely intelligence about the enemy's plans. Now the picture was murkier. The Japanese had updated their naval code again on August 13th, setting the cryptanalysts back by several weeks. Radio traffic analysis had detected the southward movement of naval forces from Japan's home waters to Truk, which might presage a move into the lower Solomons. But the Americans lacked hard evidence of the whereabouts of the Japanese carriers. Commander Joseph Rochefort, chief of Pearl Harbor's code-breaking unit, who had set up the American victory at Midway, believed they were in Japan's inland sea. No data had emerged to challenge that theory, and if Nagumo's task force was practicing good radio discipline, it might have moved south to Truk or even into the Solomons.

Gormley radioed Fletcher on August 22nd. "Indications point strongly to enemy attack in force, Cactus area, 23rd to 26th August. Commac believed the enemy fleet might include one or two battleships, 15 cruisers, and many destroyers. Presence of carriers possible but not confirmed." Since his withdrawal on August 9th, Fletcher's mandate had been to fly cover over the sea lanes linking bases in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides to the Solomons and to assist in transferring aircraft to Henderson Field. He had taken care to keep his ships well fueled in case of any sudden contingency.

Receiving news of the Japanese ground attack on the Tenaru River, he turned north on the night of August 19th to 20th and advanced to an aggressively far northwest position just east of the island of Malaita. But radio intelligence continued to posit that the Japanese carriers remained at Truk, more than 1,000 mi northwest. And if that was so, the earliest they could be expected to give battle was August 25th. Fletcher, supposing he had a two-day refueling window, sent the Wasp and her escorts south to rendezvous with a fleet oiler. As it happened, she would not return in time to join the impending battle.

On August 22nd and 23rd, as each combatant probed for the other, the skies above the region were congested with reconnaissance planes. Admiral McCain's PBYs and B-17s flew long missions from Espíritu Santo. Marine dive bombers spread out from Henderson Field. Six more PBYs operated from a lagoon on Indeni in the Santa Cruz Islands. From Rabaul, big four-engine Kawanishi flying boats radiated out in 700-mile search vectors to the south and east.

On August 22nd, shortly before 11:00 a.m., the Enterprise's radar scope picked up a blip to the southwest. Four fighters were sent to investigate. They tracked a Kawanishi and quickly sent it down in flames. The next morning brought a confusing flood of contact reports. PBYs from Indeni reported a column of four transports escorted by four destroyers east of Bougainville Island, about 300 miles north of Guadalcanal. This was Tanaka's occupation force. Aware that he had been snooped and fearing a punishing air attack on his vulnerable transports, Tanaka turned north. Radioing from his flagship Yamato, Admiral Yamamoto ordered Nagumo to send the diversionary force—light carrier Ryūjō, heavy cruiser Tone, destroyers Amatsukaze and Tokitsukaze—to race south and attack Henderson Field the following morning. The scheduled date for Tanaka's troop landings was pushed back to August 25th.

With the PBY sighting report in hand, Fletcher launched a powerful strike from the Saratoga: 31 dive bombers and six TBF Avenger torpedo planes to attack Tanaka's column. Commander Harry D. Felt, the Saratoga Air Group commander, led the flight. They were joined en route by another nine SBDs, one TBF, and 13 fighters from Henderson Field. The formation ran into a wall of impenetrable, wet white haze. Felt arrayed his planes by sections in a line abreast, flying just 50 feet above the sea. "No one could see anything but the sea below and the planes on either side. We must have flown in this stuff for an hour," Felt remembered, "and all of a sudden broke through into an open area. And there was the whole damned group right there. Just magnificent discipline." Tanaka, having dodged north to avoid just this attack, Felt and his squadrons found no sign of the enemy fleet. The Saratoga planes followed the Marine planes back to Guadalcanal, where they managed to land on the muddy field in the failing light. The exhausted Saratoga pilots spent the night in their cockpits, ready to take off at dawn. The two carrier forces were mutually blind. They were only 300 miles apart, just beyond extreme air striking range, but neither had pinpointed the other's location.

Between 5:55 and 6:30 a.m. on August 24th, the Enterprise launched 23 SBDs. From the carrier's position 200 miles east of Malaita, they fanned out in a 120° arc to the north and west. The PBYs at Indeni were also in the air before first light. The Japanese fleet converging on Guadalcanal from the west was still just beyond the edges of the American morning search, and none of the Enterprise planes reported a contact. But one of McCain's PBYs spotted the Ryūjō force roaring south at 9:05 a.m., and another found the heavy surface warships of Kondo and Abe's force half an hour later.

Now Fletcher faced a dilemma. Should he pounce on the Ryūjō, or should he keep his powder dry, hoping for word of the big carriers? The PBYs' report had put the Ryūjō 275 miles north of Tulagi, a long flight of about 250 miles from the Saratoga. But if the target kept her southerly course, she would come closer. When Felt's planes returned from Guadalcanal, landing at 11:00 a.m., Felt told the admiral that his pilots were dog-tired and could use a rest. "You keep getting intelligence, and when those things are within our range, we'll go," he suggested. Fletcher assented.

At 11:38 a.m., another PBY reported the Ryūjō Force, this time farther south. Confronted with a mass of conflicting and uncertain data, and with so much at stake, Fletcher hesitated to make a precipitous decision. Shortly afternoon, he assigned the Enterprise Air Group to conduct a search to the northwest to a distance of 250 miles. Sixteen SBDs and seven TBFs departed the carrier at 1:15 p.m. In short order, Charlie Jet of VT-3 found the Ryūjō and radioed back a contact report. Jet and a wingman attempted a horizontal bombing attack at 12,000 feet. Dropping bombs from altitude on ships maneuvering at speed was usually futile, and this was no exception. They missed and turned back toward the American task force. Still having heard nothing about the enemy's big carriers, Fletcher elected to commit his reserve strike to finish the little Ryūjō. Twenty-eight SBDs and eight TBFs, led by Commander Felt, flew a heading of 320°.

By that time, Ryūjō had already launched six Nakajima B5N Kates and 15 Zeros against Henderson Field. Marine fighters defended the airfield in a pitched dogfight over the island, downing three Nakajimas and three Zeros, losing only three American aircraft in the melee. Bombers from Rabaul were supposed to have arrived over the target at about the same time, but thick weather had forced them back to base. Importantly, the Ryūjō planes did not do any significant damage to the Marine installations around Henderson or to the airfield itself.

At 3:36 p.m., the Saratoga strike closed in on the Ryūjō. She went into a tight starboard turn and continued to circle throughout the attack. One after another, the dive bombers rolled into their dives and released their bombs. Several missed close aboard, but Felt personally planted the first of three 500-lb bombs on the flight deck, and one of the TBFs sent a torpedo into her starboard side. "The attack," said Felt, "was carried out just like a training exercise." The Ryūjō was soon blazing out of control while still circling clockwise. From the air, Felt observed her pouring forth black smoke which would die down and then belch forth in great volume again. She was abandoned by her crew, most of whom simply leapt over the side. The skipper of the destroyer Amatsukaze watched the blazing wreck through his binoculars. "A heavy starboard list exposed her red belly," he recalled. "Waves washed her flight deck. It was a pathetic sight. Ryūjō, no longer resembling a ship, was a huge stove full of holes which belched eerie red flames." A total loss, she would be scuttled 4 hours later. Her returning planes were forced to ditch at sea.

Meanwhile, a cruiser scout from the Chikuma sighted the two American carriers at 2:30 p.m. The sluggish floatplane was shot down by Enterprise fighters, but not before the pilot managed to get a transmission off to Nagumo. Radio direction finding gear on the Shōkaku gave the Japanese an accurate bearing to the doomed plane and thus to the American task force. Nagumo now held the advantage. He had not yet been discovered, but he had pinpointed Fletcher's position, and it was well within striking range.

At 2:55 p.m., the first of two big strikes took off from the Shōkaku and Zuikaku: 27 Aichi D3A Vals escorted by 15 Zeros. As the planes left the decks, two Enterprise SBDs caught sight of the Japanese carriers and radioed a report to Fletcher. The American communications were very poor, however. The airwaves were clogged by heavy static and gratuitous pilot chatter, and the admiral received no word of the contact until more than an hour later. The two SBDs dived and bravely attacked the Shōkaku, but missed.

About an hour after the first wave, Nagumo launched a second wave of 27 Aichi and nine Zeros. Now Fletcher had two large waves of enemy dive bombers incoming and had not yet replied. When the contact report belatedly got through to him, he realized he may have repeated the error he had committed three and a half months earlier in the Battle of the Coral Sea: aiming his strike at a small carrier when the enemy's big carriers were still in the vicinity. He tried to redirect the outbound flight, but was again defeated by feeble radio communications. As one Enterprise dive bomber pilot ruefully observed, "We had been outsmarted strategically with the tactical battle still to be fought. It was Coral Sea all over again."

The Enterprise's radar plot detected the first wave of incoming planes at 4:32 p.m. when they were 88 miles to the northwest. F4F Wildcats roared off both flight decks and, dangling on their propellers, climbed at maximum speed, their 1,200 horsepower Pratt & Whitney radial engines straining mightily. The Japanese now enjoyed the tactical upper hand. A broken cloud ceiling gave them good visual cover. Knowing that the F4Fs were slow climbers, the attackers approached at abnormally high altitudes between 18,000 and 24,000 feet. After the initial radar return, the American scopes went dark for 17 minutes. And when they lit up again at 4:49 p.m., the leading edge of the enemy wave was only 44 miles away. American fighters were diverted by the escorting Zeros, allowing most of the dive bombers to slip through the screen unmolested. The Enterprise's fighter director officer (FDO) struggled to get through to his pilots while the radio circuit was congested with their chatter. "Look at that one go down. And Bill, where are you?" Captain Arthur C. Davis of the Enterprise later observed, "The air was so jammed with these unnecessary transmissions that in spite of numerous attempts to quiet the pilots, few directions reached our fighters, and little information was received by the fighter director officer."

Both carriers rang up maximum speed for evasive maneuvering and turned southeast in order to bring wind across their decks for flight operations. All strike planes spotted on deck were ordered to launch. The pilots were simply told to get away, to clear the area. It was not that important where they went, so long as they were not on deck when the enemy dive bombers hurtled down from overhead. If both flattops went down or were damaged and incapable of landing planes, they could fly to Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. Once aloft, the Enterprise and Saratoga strike planes were instructed by radio to head northwest in search of the big twins, Zuikaku and Shōkaku. With only 2 hours of daylight remaining, their odds of attacking the enemy and returning safely were very long.

At 5:09 p.m., the Enterprise's radar plot informed the captain that "the enemy planes are directly overhead now." The anti-aircraft gunners, with helmets pushed back on their heads and life vests drawn up tight around their necks, studied the sky. For a moment, nothing seemed amiss. The afternoon was absurdly peaceful. A few black specks moved above and between the high, thin wisps of cloud. Then a few of those specks stopped and seemed to fix in place. Gradually, the rising drone of aircraft engines could be heard. The larger specks began to take shape: a blurred disc bisected by wings with fixed landing gear underneath the wings, sun glinting off the cockpit canopies, and a second, smaller speck, the bomb, tucked under the fuselage. Witnesses who had never seen a dive bombing attack were surprised at how long the enemy planes took to come down. They dived at angles of 70° or even steeper, most on the port beam and quarter of the Enterprise. The attack, according to Captain Davis, was "well executed and absolutely determined."

With the Enterprise tearing through the sea at 27 knots, Davis ordered maximum rudder right, then maximum rudder left, and the ship heeled radically to port and then to starboard. Behind her stretched a long, foaming, serpentine wake. The gunners threw up a wall of 5-inch, 1.1-inch, and 20-mm anti-aircraft fire. Black, brown, and white bursts blemished the sky. "The South Dakota," said a witness, "was lit up like a Christmas tree, emitting so much fire and smoke that the battleship appeared to be herself ablaze." The sea all around was modeled by falling anti-aircraft shell fragments as if under a heavy rainstorm. Several dive bombers were blown to pieces. Ensign Fred Meers watched the burning remains of one Aichi flutter down like a butterfly and kiss the water. Several more flew through the 5-inch bursts and emerged with fire or smoke trailing behind, but it was a huge attack. Davis estimated one plane every 7 seconds for four consecutive minutes, and many got through unscathed.

The Aichi released their bombs about 1,000 feet above the ship. Each black cylindrical shape separated from the fuselage and took a steeper trajectory as the pilot pulled out of his dive. Some bombs flew straight and true like a missile. Others tumbled end over end. Nine fell close aboard to port and starboard and detonated upon striking the sea, throwing up columns of white water that crashed down over the flight deck. Men in the catwalks were thoroughly drenched.

At 5:14 p.m., the Enterprise took her first hit. A 1,000-lb armor-piercing, delayed-action bomb smashed through the flight deck just forward of the aft elevator and continued through four steel decks and two bulkheads before detonating deep in the ship. The blast claimed the lives of 35 men in an elevator pump room and the adjacent chief petty officer's quarters. Seventy more were injured. A chain of explosions blew down all the bulkheads in the area and tore a hole through the starboard side at the waterline. The force of the explosion caused the after part of the hangar deck to bulge upward, leaving a 2-foot hump. The aft number three elevator was jammed and out of action, but the Enterprise surged ahead, her speed undiminished. Three minutes later, after several more near misses, a second 1,000-lb bomb struck the aft starboard 5-inch gun gallery. Thirty-eight men were killed outright. The blast ignited the ready service ammunition casings, and fires raged throughout the area. The Enterprise plowed ahead, still making 27 knots, but she trailed a nasty column of oily black smoke. Hoses were put on the fires, wounded men were brought up on deck, and the ship was ventilated to release any flammable gases. Less than two minutes later, a third bomb struck just forward of the number two elevator. The explosion gouged a 10-foot hole in the flight deck and put the number two elevator out of commission. Photographer's Mate Marian Riley, stationed on the island veranda, pressed his shutter button at exactly the moment it detonated. The photograph, expanding spikes of flame and smoke rushing out from the midline of the Enterprise's flight deck, was to become one of the most famous of the war. At the Battle of Midway, four Japanese carriers had taken similar punishment and been destroyed by secondary explosions and uncontrollable fires. Aboard the Enterprise, damage control measures quickly brought the fires under control, and the ship continued to maneuver deftly and keep pace with the task force. Counterflooding corrected the starboard list. Wood planking was used to patch the holes torn in the flight deck. The rupture in the starboard side was plugged by whatever came first to hand, including mattresses, lumber, wire mesh, and wooden plugs.

Most of the Enterprise's dive bombers launched just before the Japanese attack flew into Henderson Field. Orphaned by the damage to their ship, they would operate as part of the Cactus Air Force for the next several weeks. Based on the reports of his returned dive bomber crews who believed they had destroyed an American fleet carrier, Nagumo celebrated a tactical victory. Losing the little Ryūjō was not a calamity. She was the smallest flattop in the combined fleet, and her sacrifice, as intended, had drawn most of the American carrier planes away from the Shōkaku and Zuikaku.

As more was learned about the fate of Tanaka's transport group, however, the picture darkened. His ships had suffered heavily under air attack. Marine dive bombers and fighters flying from Guadalcanal had planted a bomb on his flagship, the cruiser Jintsu, and sank a transport, the Kinryu Maru. Later that afternoon, B-17s operating from Espiritu Santo sank a destroyer, the Mutsuki. The Japanese were learning that they could not safely operate ships in the Slot without first suppressing the air power of Henderson Field. As in the earlier carrier battles at Coral Sea and Midway, the encounter ended with the Japanese forced to abort a planned invasion. On the following day, August 25th, Yamamoto canceled Operation Ka and recalled his forces. So concluded the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the third carrier duel of the Pacific War.

It had been a confused and scattershot encounter, in some respects analogous to the Battle of the Coral Sea 3 months earlier. Fletcher had been plagued by dreadful radio communications and spotty intelligence. Still, he had won a modest tactical victory by destroying the Ryūjō while saving the Enterprise and by losing only 25 aircraft while claiming 75 of the enemy's. In forcing back the Japanese troop convoy, the Americans had also earned a strategic victory. The temporary loss of the Enterprise, two major repairs at Pearl Harbor, was counterbalanced by the arrival in SOPAC of the Hornet. Most importantly, perhaps, the battle had bought time for Gormley. Time to expand the supporting bases, to bring in air reinforcements, to transfer more cargo ships from North America, and to improve Vandergrift's supply situation.

The Enterprise had suffered heavy casualties. Two officers and 72 men killed, six officers and 89 men wounded. The first bomb had detonated deep in the ship, and the carnage was appalling. Most of the dead had perished quickly, but their bodies had subsequently roasted in the fire, making individual identification impossible. On August 26th, as the Enterprise and her screening ships headed south toward Nouméa, the bodies were collected and prepared for burial at sea. Fred Meers left a visceral impression. "The majority of the bodies were in one piece. They were blackened, but not burned or withered, and they looked like iron statues of men, their limbs smooth and whole, their heads rounded with no hair. The faces were indistinguishable, but in almost every case, the lips were drawn back in a whisked grin, giving the men the expression of rodents. The postures seemed either strangely normal or frankly grotesque. One gunpointer was still in his seat, leaning on his sight with one arm. He looked as though a sculptor had created him. His body was nicely proportioned. The buttocks were rounded. There was no hair anywhere. Other iron men were lying outstretched, face up or down. Two or three lying face up were shielding themselves with their arms bent at the elbows and their hands before their faces. One who was not burned so badly had his chest thrown out, his head way back and his hands clenched."

Lack of time and manpower on the stricken ship ruled out committing each body individually to the deep. Under the supervision of the ship's chaplain, a single unidentified sailor was buried with the traditional honors. The remains were laid on a pantry board under an American flag. A bugler played taps. The Marine Guard presented arms. Four sailors lifted the board, and the remains slid into the ship's wake. Some 70 other dead, collected in canvas sacks and weighted with spare metal, were dropped from the fantail without ceremony.

Chapter 4. For a decade, FDR's critics had hammered away at his muddled and sporadically anarchic style of presidential leadership. He reversed major decisions without admitting or even seeming to know what he had done. He hated to fire a man, no matter how egregious his performance had been, and blindly piled one new government agency on top of another, without spelling out their relative spheres of authority. He seemed to agree with whatever adviser had most recently held his ear. Not even his most ardent loyalists would call him a talented administrator. "He was just not a routine executive," said Robert H. Jackson, who served as Roosevelt's attorney general and was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1941. "He certainly was not accomplished as an administrator. And in normal times, it is doubtful if he could have been a distinguished president." When FDR had not made up his mind about a given policy, Jackson observed, it was impossible to elicit a presidential decision. "The president would stall, procrastinate, filibuster, and refuse to act for months on end. At other times, he would render far-reaching decisions with an apparent nonchalance that sometimes took away the breath of his advisers." Harold Smith, the White House budget director, admitted that many of Roosevelt's domestic programs were poorly conceived, but defended the president as an "instinctual and intuitive visionary, a real artist in government." From the school of Jackson Pollock, the critics might have reposted, or the Marx brothers. Bold experimentation had been a New Deal lodestar. But could a nation at war afford to tinker with unproven methods? If not, would the price of failure be paid in American blood?

To defeat the Great Depression, the president and his men had brewed up an alphabet soup of new federal agencies. To beat back the Axis, they concocted another: OPA, OPM, DPC, WPB, OWI, WRB, SPAB, and too many more to cite here. By the way, that's the Office of Price Administration, Office of Production Management, Defense Plant Corporation, War Production Board, Office of War Information, War Resources Board, Supply Priorities and Allocations Board. The veteran newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, by no means a partisan critic of the Roosevelt administration, threw up his hands at the inveterate backbiting and turf skirmishing among the heads of these various outfits. "A great deal of the trouble arises from Mr. Roosevelt's inability to remove even the lamest of his lame ducks," he wrote in the Washington Post. "Since no one has to give up his titles and emoluments, no matter how inadequate he is or how badly he has failed, Mr. Roosevelt at the top of the government sets an example which destroys the discipline down the line. It is taken for granted that if an official is out of place, his functions may be removed, but that he will remain. This makes intrigue, indirection, and slickness a habit in getting things done, good things and bad things alike. If everything has to be done by beating around the bush, men lose the habit of going forward on a straight line. The amount of nervous energy that is burned up by the able men as they move in and out and around and across the immovable lame ducks, the fossil remains of Mr. Roosevelt's earlier political commitments and previous political mistakes would, if it were released, electrify the whole conduct of the war."

Though his party commanded towering majorities in both the House and the Senate, its prospects in the 1942 midterm elections were dismal. The Democrats' once unassailable New Deal coalition—the urban union, liberal, ethnic, Catholic vote in the North and upper Midwest, combined with the dependably solid South—had been fractured and diluted by the war's disruptions. Millions of servicemen and war workers had been uprooted from their homes and hereditary polling precincts. Voter turnout was expected to hit record lows, and the remaining electorate skewed toward older, rural, and affluent voters who leaned toward the Republicans. By the early summer of that year, the post-Pearl Harbor mood of bipartisan unity had taken an ugly turn, and the customary thrust and parry of political combat had returned with undiminished vehemence. All recited the shopworn mottos of patriotic unity, but criticism of the administration grew freer and more vigorous both in the anti-Axis on the floors of Congress, and Republicans angrily spurned any suggestion that politics be suspended for the war's duration. What were the allies fighting for, if not the right of democratic opposition? In April 1942, the Republican National Committee had pledged to work for a complete victory over the Axis powers, but added solemn protestations that the GOP would preserve the constitutional form of government and the two-party system. When the president proposed that the party organizations be reconstituted as civil defense associations, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio barked to reporters, "I'll be goddamned if I'll bow to Roosevelt and stand on the street corner as an air raid warden with a tin hat, flashlight, and a bucket of sand."

The newspaper tycoons whose broadsheets had fought the New Deal and carried the torch of pre-war isolationism, most prominently Robert McCormick, Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst, now purported to support the war, but they assailed the president for waging it ineptly. Roosevelt's enemies in Congress, among them the leading isolationists of 1940 and 1941, now agitated for a concentration of resources against Japan rather than Germany, and complained bitterly about American combat losses. More out of habit than real conviction, perhaps, they seemed determined to undermine the administration by any means at hand. Many observant pundits doubted that their hearts were really in the war. Marquee Childs, a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was unsparing. "No matter what they said for the record on December 8th, the blindest and the stubbornest would continue to believe that Pearl Harbor was no more than what America deserved for not having remained pure and isolated as such wise men had counseled."

The critics were of two minds. Even when lashing out at the administration, they declared that all Americans must cease bickering and unite to win the war. Democrats indignantly accused the president's wartime critics of doing the bidding of Axis propaganda. Orators in Congress grew venomous. On June 25th, Senator Harry Schwarz of Wyoming took the floor to deliver a long philippic aimed at the whisperers who inculcate class, racial, and religious hatreds. "They unwittingly are using Hitler's most effective weapons of propaganda. Following in the wake of this Nazi machine are camp followers blinded by private ambitions and secret hatreds, intent on gathering unto themselves personal advantage. They do not consciously seek the loss of this war or the defeat of democracy, but by their course they imperil both."

Conservatives of both parties wrung their hands over the war's inevitable expansion of federal and presidential powers. Washington's business was government, and business was booming, as it had never boomed, even at the zenith of the New Deal. There seemed every reason to fear that the war would yoke the country to an elephantine bureaucracy. The president's congressional foes acquiesced in providing the colossal sums needed to mobilize and equip the armed forces, but Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats moved to eliminate or defund several landmark New Deal programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Youth Administration. Roosevelt did not even bother trying to save them. The war itself would provide more than enough employment to offset the loss, and his core legislative achievements, notably Social Security, collective bargaining, and bank regulatory laws, would survive. Congress was determined not to act as a mere rubber stamp, but members of both parties were aware that a fine line lay between constructive oversight and deadly obstruction. The Republican Party was sharply divided between its historically isolationist leadership and its rising internationalist bloc headed by the party's defeated 1940 presidential nominee, Wendell Willkie. Total war could be waged only by a concerted and centralized executive power, and Congress was inevitably relegated to the policymaking sidelines. It was expected to fund military budgets fully, promptly, and without offering more than token dissent. Members could point to ample evidence of bungling, waste, overspending, corruption, internal feuding, and monopolistic practices. But no function of oversight could be permitted to slow the progress of mobilization.

By the sweltering summer of 1942, the federal government employed about a quarter of a million civilians in the District of Columbia. But it still lacked the scale and manpower needed to wage a global war. The population of Washington would nearly double between the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and V-J Day. About 10,000 new workers were arriving in the city each month, drawn by high wages and a seemingly bottomless demand for clerks, secretaries, stenographers, statisticians, and mid-level managers. The state-of-the-art information technologies at the time were the electric typewriter, the carbon copy, and the steel file cabinet. Washington's administrative command and control apparatus was the typewriter battalion deployed in falanges of wooden desks under fluorescent lights in long sweeping halls, with memoranda, requisitions, and requests typed in octuplicate and copies dispersed to cross-indexed files across the city. The OPA alone churned out more paper between 1940 and 1945 than the entire federal government had generated since 1789. More than half the new arrivals were young women responding to recruiting drives that promised a generous paycheck to any high school graduate who could type. They staffed the Tempos, temporary prefabricated cement-asbestos office buildings, so named because they were to be torn down at war's end, that crowded across almost every part of the Washington Mall. The dreary gray edifices lined both sides of the reflecting pool and were connected by pedestrian bridges spanning the pool. They walled in the Washington Monument. They abutted the entire length of Constitution Avenue to the foot of Capitol Hill. Dirt excavated from their foundations was simply bulldozed into tremendous mounds and left there. Before the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, 27 of the temporary monstrosities were thrown up. In one case, construction from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting took just 5 weeks. Together, these 27 buildings provided 3.3 million square feet of office space. They were pitilessly hot in the summer and glacial in the winter. Floors, walls, and ceilings clattered unnervingly. Plumbing and electrical systems were prone to chronic malfunction. Outside these buildings on any weekday morning, long lines stretched down the sidewalk and around the block as employees waited to show their credentials to an armed guard or visitors on official business pleaded for permission to enter. Each building was made to accommodate an average of 40,000 workers, the very limit allowed by health and safety. In many agencies, work was conducted around the clock in 8-hour shifts. With each shift taking over the desks as the previous departed, janitors strained to service the human avalanche, and the buildings grew filthy and even unsanitary.

The War Department sought a more permanent solution across the Potomac River in the Leviathan War Department building. The huge pentagonal structure, not yet called the Pentagon, was the largest in the world. It covered 42 acres and included more than 5 million square feet of floor space. In September 1942, it was not yet completed and seemed likely to overrun its original budget by about 100%, raising an outcry in Congress, but 17,000 workers were already at work in its completed sections.

In 1942, Washington remained a somnolent, mid-sized city, culturally Southern, devoid of private industry, and entirely unprepared to accommodate a population boom. As in other cities, landlords gouged tenants and made money hand over fist. Government recruiters warned married applicants that they could not relocate their families to the capital, as no housing was available. The young women of the typewriter battalions crammed together into small apartments with as many as four beds per room. Makeshift trailer parks were set up in vacant lots. Tract housing developments overran the farmland of suburban Virginia and Maryland. Dilapidated houseboats with laundry hanging from the rigging moored beam to beam along the Potomac riverfront. Owners of private homes were enjoined by authorities to rent out their vacant rooms. "If the war lasts much longer," observed Life magazine in January 1943, "Washington is going to bust right out of its pants."

Public services buckled under the strain. Trolleys and buses could accommodate perhaps a third of the daily commute. At peak transit hours, the cavernous terminal at Union Station was immobilized by crowds. Garbage piled up on the sidewalks. The telephone system was so overloaded that the telephone company ran newspaper advertisements, begging the public not to make calls except in case of emergency. Long lines stretched down the sidewalk from retail businesses of every category: restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, movie theaters, newspaper stands. Hospitals were so overcrowded that pregnant women scheduled induced deliveries when the occasional vacancies occurred. Public schools were oversubscribed. Churches offered standing room only on Sundays. Servicemen bribed doormen to be let into packed nightclubs. Crime, prostitution, and sexually transmitted diseases were rife. But the police were overwhelmed, and the prisons overflowed.

Though he had never worn a uniform, Roosevelt was entirely comfortable in the role of commander-in-chief, and not in the least bit overawed by stars or gold braid. When a larger consideration of politics or diplomacy intruded, the president never hesitated to overrule the Joint Chiefs. "I am a pigheaded Dutchman," he might say, "and I have made up my mind about this. We are going ahead with it, and you can't change my mind." Marshall and King quickly learned to limit opportunities for presidential mischief by presenting the White House with joint consensus recommendations. When they did so, the president almost always gave his categorical assent.

That the president was a Navy man at heart was obvious to all, including Marshall and Stimson, who regarded it as a manageable problem. But for the admirals, his affection was a mixed blessing. Roosevelt's habit of running the Navy dated back to 1913, when the newly elected President Woodrow Wilson had appointed the 31-year-old former New York State Senator to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Serving under the unobtrusive Secretary Josephus Daniels, the young FDR had overseen the daily operations of the service and had personally directed its mobilization in the First World War. He had been briefly acquainted with most of the up-and-coming mid-level naval officers of that period: King, Nimitz, Halsey, Stark, Leahy, Towers, Spruance, Fletcher, Turner—when they had been lieutenants and lieutenant commanders. By long-ingrained habit, President Roosevelt demanded information about individual ships and officers, information that would ordinarily fall far beneath the attention of a commander-in-chief. When he threw out impromptu ideas for new ship designs or weapons systems, the Navy Department was obliged to study these proposals and explain tactfully why they were impractical. The president nonchalantly short-circuited the chain of command, ordering a particular ship to a particular theater, for example, or dispatching officers on fact-finding missions with instructions to report back to him directly.

On the other side of the ledger, Roosevelt had a flair for placing the right admirals in the right jobs at the right moments. His record in this respect was not perfect, but in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he made two vital personnel decisions that were superbly vindicated. He recalled King to Washington to run the Navy and sent Nimitz to Hawaii to command the Pacific Fleet. When voices in the press and Congress suggested that the president confer supreme command on a properly qualified military authority such as Douglas MacArthur, Roosevelt gave the idea the back of his hand. "My crime is that I have read the Constitution and stand by it," he remarked to Ross T. McIntyre, his personal physician. "What is clearer than that the framers meant the president to be the chief executive in peace and in war the commander-in-chief."

Blurring the lines between labor and leisure, the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt did much of the substantive work of his presidency in the Oval Study in the White House residence or even his bedroom. Military leaders naturally and very properly preferred to maintain a professional distance when dealing with the president. To sit at the foot of the commander-in-chief's bed while he ate breakfast from a tray, for example, was asking too much of Ernest King or George Marshall. But when an issue required immediate presidential attention, decorum was a secondary consideration. Marshall and King were frequent visitors to the Oval Study, and each man grew accustomed to briefing the president while he peered absent-mindedly through a magnifying glass at his stamp collection. On summer weekends, the military chiefs often drove the 60-odd miles

To Shangrila and sat with Roosevelt on a screened porch overlooking a pastoral vista of the Katakan Valley. In receiving the president's written communications, the chiefs had no choice but to acquiesce in his warm and familiar tone, "Dear Ernie," and steadfastly reciprocated with the correct forms of address, memorandum for the president.

Much could be accomplished by working through Harry Hopkins, the president's principal adviser and alter ego. More than any other member of Roosevelt's official family, Harry the Hop, who lived in the White House in a bedroom down the hall from the president's, elicited rational presidential decisions when they were urgently needed. This was no small achievement, and all the chiefs came to respect Hopkins immensely. But Hopkins was spread thin and he lacked military training or experience.

In June 1942, Marshall proposed that a new man be inserted into the White House to act as a senior liaison to the Joint Chiefs. This military chief of staff ought to be a gray eminence of one of the services, a man who had worked with Roosevelt in the past and was acquainted with his eccentric ways. King's first instinct was to resist the idea, probably because he did not want another officer interposed between himself and the president and because he assumed Marshall would nominate a general. Marshall defused the second objection by proposing Admiral William D. Leahy, a retired chief of naval operations.

Leahy had known Roosevelt since 1915 when he commanded the Dolphin, the Secretary of the Navy's dispatch boat. He and his wife were close friends of the Roosevelts and had often been guests at Hyde Park. After Leahy's retirement from the Navy in 1939, the president had appointed him governor of Puerto Rico. In 1941, Leahy had been sent to France to serve as Roosevelt's ambassador to the Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain. On July 7th, 1942, Roosevelt lunched with Leahy in the oval study and offered him the job. Leahy took it.

Returning to active duty with four stars, Leahy was now the seniormost American officer of all the armed services by date of first commission. In deference to that seniority, he was recognized as the ad hoc chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a former chief of naval operations, he was sympathetic to the Navy's concerns in the Pacific. But his appointment in Vichy had fortified his commitment to the Europe first principle. It was hoped that Leahy, the mild-mannered diplomat, would provide a moderating effect on King's volcanic temper.

Most mornings, Leahy went straight up to the president's living chambers, where he found Roosevelt reclining in his four-poster bed, a monogrammed navy cape worn over his pajamas, the blankets pulled up over his wasted legs, reading the newspapers, and eating his breakfast from a tray. Or perhaps he was in the bathroom, shaving with a straight razor. The admiral took a seat in the corner and began summarizing the latest incoming dispatches from field commanders and outgoing orders from the Joint Chiefs. Or he summarized important studies published by the military planning staffs.

Having heard descriptions of Churchill's fine map room located in the prime minister's underground bunker in London, Roosevelt decided that the White House ought to have a similar command center. A large room on the ground floor was vacated for the purpose and a Navy Lieutenant Commander John L. McCrae was placed in charge. Large maps of Europe and the Pacific were mounted on opposite walls. Smaller maps of Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, and North Africa were mounted between them. All were positioned low enough that the president could scrutinize them without rising from his wheelchair. Flags and multicolored pins marked the known locations of Allied and Axis naval, ground and air forces. The current locations of the big three, Churchill, Stalin, and FDR himself were indicated by special pins. A cigar for Churchill, a briar pipe for Stalin, and a cigarette holder for FDR. Updates were relayed hourly from the Navy and War departments by secure dedicated telephone lines. The map room was staffed 24 hours a day, eventually by six Navy and six Army officers. An armed guard stood watch at all times, and only half a dozen members of the White House staff were cleared for access. After learning that her son's location was updated daily, Eleanor Roosevelt dropped in whenever she pleased. The guards did not have the courage to stop her. Roosevelt appeared each afternoon after his daily sinus treatment with Dr. McIntyre, whose office was next door. Leahy and Hopkins often accompanied the president. When he was in town, Churchill haunted the place at all hours. It became, for all purposes, the brain center of the Allied war effort. McCrae Ley said, "I think there is more information about the war concentrated in your map room than there is in any other one place in Washington."

Roosevelt had pledged to render no military decision for the sake of domestic politics. But he was beset on all sides by amateur typewriter strategists who aired their unsolicited advice in public, and he repeatedly warned that the war could not be waged by referendum. Even after the Battle of Midway, a vociferous segment of public opinion wanted to intensify the campaign against Japan. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers demanded a rebalancing of American military power from Europe to the Pacific. "Four. The war in the Pacific is the World War. The war of oriental races against occidental races for the domination of the world." The congressional delegations of Washington and Oregon were distressed by the presence of some 10,000 Japanese troops on two outer islands of the Aleutian Archipelago. "The Japanese must be driven off the islands at once," they warned, "lest they storm into Alaska and imperil the entire West Coast." Professional strategists knew the scenario was impossible given Japan's military and shipping limitations, but they could not say so in public without tipping off the enemy to their indifference.

Others looked toward Europe, especially to southern Russia, where the Red Army was fighting a desperate stand against the Wehrmacht on the outskirts of Stalingrad. The Allies had agreed to a Europe first policy, but the United States had not yet directly engaged the forces of the Third Reich. Wendell Willkie clamored for a second front against Hitler to relieve the pressure on Russia. In a single week, Willkie called for an urgent increase in military aid to Russia and China. Eyes rolled in the White House. Did Willkie suppose ships and armaments grew on trees? Nevertheless, the Russian apprehensions were well-founded. A collapse of the Red Army would be an unmitigated disaster. Stalin had demanded a second front in France, and the Allies had thus far failed to supply one. Twenty-five years earlier, the Bolsheviks had sued for peace with Germany. A similar armistice in 1942 would permit Hitler to redeploy more than 100 divisions to Western Europe. The biggest question mark in the latter half of 1942, Leahy wrote, was "can the Russians stop the Germans and when?"

In the White House map room, small black pins edged left to right across the huge wall-mounted map of the Atlantic. The pins, whose locations were updated hour by hour, marked the locations of the all-important Allied convoys to Murmansk as they ran the gauntlet of Germany's submarine wolf packs. Harry Hopkins often ducked into the room to observe their progress, and McCrae later recalled that the president's gaunt consiglieri always seemed to know exactly what armaments each ship carried in its hold. The hopes of the Red Army, and by association, the entire Allied cause seemed to depend on the convoys getting through to Murmansk.

With circumstances in Europe pressing so heavily on their minds, it is remarkable that Roosevelt and his advisers had not only agreed to Watchtower in the first place, but also continued to send reinforcements to the South Pacific in the critical months of August and September 1942. Since Pearl Harbor, the Allied High Command had found itself sharply divided over the question of how and when to come to grips with Germany. The Americans had committed to a massive buildup of ground and air forces in Britain, Operation Bolero. In negotiations that spring, the American chiefs had pressured Churchill to agree to a direct assault across the English Channel by mid-1943. Roundup. Marshall had further proposed an emergency contingency if the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of collapse: a landing of six divisions, mostly British, on the French coast in September 1942, codenamed Sledgehammer.

The British had first agreed to Roundup and paid lip service to Sledgehammer, but with no intention of supporting it. At successive Allied conferences, Washington in June, London in July, the British had stiffened in their opposition to Sledgehammer and voiced increasing skepticism about Roundup. General Sir Alan Brooke, the Assistant Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, left some choice observations in his diary on the subject. "Even if an Allied expeditionary force could get ashore safely," he had asked Marshall on April 15th, "what would they do? Whether we are to play Bakar or Shimandafair at Luk or possibly bathe at Paris Plage is not stipulated. I asked him this afternoon, do we go east, south, or west after landing? He had not begun to think of it." The expedition was almost certainly doomed to fail, and a failed invasion could do nothing to help the Russians. Why rush into a campaign that entailed such grave risks when the Wehrmacht was being bled white on the Eastern Front and the American war mobilization had not yet reached its high tide? "Marshall had a long time to go at that time before realizing what we were faced with," Brooke later commented.

On July 8th, Churchill cabled Roosevelt with definitive notice that the British would not consent to a landing in France that year. "No responsible British general, admiral, or air marshal is prepared to recommend Sledgehammer as a practicable operation in 1942." Sledgehammer was always a chimera and British arguments effectively demolished the American position on the merits. But Marshall, backed zealously by King and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, held out for the implausible operation, even to the point of threatening to abrogate the American commitment to Europe first.

In what must be reckoned as one of the most peculiar episodes of the war, Marshall and King sent a joint memorandum to Roosevelt on July 10th, 1942. "If the United States is to engage in any other operation than forceful, unswerving adherence to full Bolero plans, we are definitely of the opinion that we should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan. In other words, assume a defensive attitude against Germany except for air operations and use all available means in the Pacific. Such [snorts] action would not only be definite and decisive against one of our principal enemies, but would bring concrete aid to the Russians in case Japan attacked them. It is most important that the final decision in this matter be made at the earliest possible moment."

Roosevelt was not interested in reorienting the global war toward the Pacific, however, and slapped the suggestion down. "It is of utmost importance that we appreciate that defeat of Japan does not defeat Germany and that American concentration against Japan this year or in 1943 increases the chance of complete German domination of Europe and Africa."

In fumbling towards some sort of plan to attack German forces, the Americans had been pitted against the British, the Army Air Forces against the Army Ground Forces, and MacArthur against everyone who did not share his view that he should immediately receive more ships, troops, and planes regardless of what was happening elsewhere. Admiral King, while pressing his plans for Watchtower, had loyally backed Marshall's determination to invade Europe. Out of these astringent deliberations came Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa.

The proposal originated with Churchill, who was well aware that his American allies were determined to come to grips with Germany in 1942 and must have an option to do so. British fortunes in North Africa had been battered by General Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps throughout the spring and early summer, culminating with the surrender of 33,000 troops at Tobruk on June 21st. Churchill now argued that the Allies had much to lose in the theater unless the rampaging German armies could be stopped. Roosevelt listened. The president had decreed that his forces must clash with Germany somewhere in 1942. The British had ruled out a landing in France. North Africa was the only operation under discussion that fulfilled both conditions. After registering Marshall's opposition, Roosevelt agreed to it. The first landings would occur on November 8th. Plans proceeded in the strictest secrecy. While the president's domestic critics clamored for action, none could be told, even in a whisper, of the planned invasion. November 8th happened to fall 5 days after the midterm elections. The American people would not learn of this first major counter thrust against the Third Reich until they had already visited the polls and delivered a sweeping Republican victory.

For the moment in that political season of 1942, Guadalcanal was the only place in the world where major American ground forces were engaged against the Axis. The island and the First Marine Division inevitably loomed large in the American imagination. The campaign received wholesome press coverage thanks to the presence on the island of more than half a dozen gifted military and civilian correspondents. Dick Tregaskis, whose lucidly detailed stories were published by the International News Service, would win fame with the publication of his best-selling Guadalcanal Diary in 1943. Hanson Baldwin, a Navy correspondent, filed stories for the New York Times. Tom Yarro wrote for the Associated Press, Bob Miller for the United Press. John Hersey for Time and Life. Ira Wolfert for the North American Newspaper Alliance, Sergeant James Hurlbut for the Marine Corps, and M. Morris for Yank Magazine. Vandegrift published no communiqués, but he encouraged the reporters to go wherever they liked and write whatever they wished. Lieutenant Herbert L. Marilat, the First Division public relations officer, provided able service to that pack of willful news hounds while also submitting stories of his own, many of which appeared, unbeknownst to him, under banner headlines in newspapers across the United States.

"Solomon's Action Develops into Battle for South Pacific" was the front-page above-the-fold headline in the New York Times on September 27th, 1942. In a 5,000-word story, Baldwin reported that the toughened, sunburned Marines, veterans of innumerable jungle skirmishes, several large actions, and continuous bombing and shelling, still clung tenaciously to the beachhead on Guadalcanal that they seized 6 weeks ago. When hopes of holding the island seemed dubious, Baldwin asked General Vandegrift point blank, "Are you going to hold this beachhead?" Vandegrift replied, "Hell yes, why not?" The exchange, as reported by Baldwin, fired American spirits. The toughened, sunburned Marines would not know it until months later, but Guadalcanal was a household name across the United States, and the people at home were fervently wishing and praying for the survival and triumph of the beleaguered First Marine Division.

To be at Henderson Field in the fall of 1942 was to live life constantly under fire. Japanese infantry units were concealed in the hills and forests, some as close as 300 yd to the western end of the strip. Snipers crept in close to the perimeter and shot at men who stuck their heads up. Japanese artillery pieces lobbed 75 mm shells into the bivouac and aircraft parking areas. "Every now and then you hear a dull kaboom off in the distance," a torpedo plane pilot recalled. "And then would come a little screaming and ripping noise and a shell would explode in the field. It didn't make anybody very happy." Flights of G4M bombers arrived from Rabaul nearly every day at about noon and dropped their sticks of bombs across the heart of the Marine perimeter. Very often at night, Japanese destroyers or submarines lobbed shells into the field from Ironbottom Sound. No one got enough sleep. The enemy made sure of that.

The Japanese cruiser floatplane they called "Washing Machine Charlie" circled overhead most nights after midnight. The plane's single rattling engine awakened the Marines and kept them awake. Charlie usually dropped only one or two small bombs, which rarely took any lives or did any noteworthy damage, but he kept the Americans on edge and deprived them of rest. As soon as the engine was heard each night, each man awoke, took his rifle, and descended into his shelter or foxhole. "You never knew where Charlie would drop a bomb," said the soldier, Robert Valentine. "Sometimes you could hear the bomb bay door kind of click open. You sure could hear the bombs coming down. If it makes a kind of swishing, whirling noise, the bomb is by you and will miss. If it's hissing, it's going to be close and you might have to change your underwear."

The tedious daily cycles spun without respite. Long sleepless nights yielding to drowsy dawn. Heavy air strikes each midday. Firefights and artillery duels all day long. An endless lethal routine of sniping, strafing, bombing, and shelling. When it rained, it rained hard and long, and the foxholes and trenches flooded and made everyone miserable. When the rain let up, the ground dried, and clouds of dirty gray dust rose from the airfield and got into eyes and lungs, and made everyone miserable. The men ate two meals a day and were always hungry. The food was awful. Cold sea rations, stale biscuits, powdered eggs, dehydrated potatoes, soggy boiled fish, and canned Australian sheep's tongue. They drank green, bitter coffee brewed in a rinsed-out fuel drum. Everyone lost weight, often at an alarming pace.

Told to remain close to their planes, pilots tried slinging hammocks underneath the wings. In the middle hours of the day, the machines baked in the sun, and a man could burn himself by touching the aluminum surface. For lack of enough ground personnel, the pilots had to learn how to do some of their own maintenance. But as one squadron leader recalled, "most of them didn't even know how to gas their airplanes."

Long-range air strikes from Rabaul were a daily ordeal, but the Americans usually received two hours' warning from coast watchers on Bougainville. Jack Reed, from his fine vista at Pora, scrutinized the Japanese formations as they were still climbing to altitude overhead. He would radio directly to Hugh McKenzie's station, Ken, located in a bunker on the edge of Henderson Field. On August 29th at 8:25 a.m., for example, this message came through: "18 twin-engine bombers, 22 fighters now heading southeast." McKenzie relayed the contact by field telephone to air control located in the pagoda-style administrative building a few hundred feet north of the airfield and to G-2, Vandegrift's intelligence staff. A white flag went up, signaling Condition Yellow. The Wildcats usually took off about 50 minutes before the enemy's expected arrival, enough time to climb to 30,000 ft, an altitude from which the heavy fighters could make diving attacks on the intruders. Two hours after the Japanese had come and gone, Reed was back on the radio to report how many survivors had passed overhead on route back to Rabaul.

In the second week of September, the Marines finally installed an air search radar on Guadalcanal, but it was effective only to a distance of about 80 mi, and it did not provide ample warning to allow the F4Fs to claw to altitude. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Jack Reed's coast watching reports to the success of the air war over Guadalcanal. Most of the interception work was done by Marine Fighter Squadron 223, VMF-223, commanded by Captain John L. Smith. Smith's F4Fs took position at very high altitude a few miles northwest of Henderson. The big formations of G4M Betty bombers generally arrived at about 25,000 ft. The Wildcats attacked in two-plane sections, diving runs from overhead at an angle that kept them out of the G4M's machine gun turrets' line of fire. The G4M was not nearly as tough as the B-17 Flying Fortresses or other American heavy bombers. The pilots soon learned to aim their .50 caliber fire into the engines or the wing root, where a short burst normally sufficed to set the aircraft afire or even blow it apart. Zeros flew high cover over the G4Ms, but they were often positioned too far behind the bombers to interfere with the Wildcats' initial diving attacks. Day after day, the Zeros entered the fray only after the Americans had sent several bombers down in flames.

Joe Foss, a Marine fighter ace, scratched his head at the tactics employed by his Japanese counterparts. "Most were obviously highly skilled, but they failed to adapt to changing tactics and became predictable. They tried the same thing all the time." The Americans had long since learned to avoid chasing tails with the quick and maneuverable Zeros and did not hesitate to dive out of a dogfight if the enemy gained an advantage. Foss praised the sturdy construction of the F4F and noted that many Americans claimed aerial victories after their planes had been shot up. "We were hit with Japanese cannons as well as their machine guns," he said. "This was unable to knock us down unless it happened to hit the oil cooler or some oil line or gas line in the motor. On a head-on run at each other, we would usually blast the opponent out of the sky. And when he was on our tail, our armor plating kept the pilot from getting injured, and at no time did any Grumman blow up. The Zero, by contrast, was agreeably easy to destroy. At any time that you got a direct hit at the base of the wings, the plane exploded like a toy balloon."

For most of the six-month air campaign over Guadalcanal, the Japanese air strikes flew all the way from Rabaul and back, covering more than 600 mi each way in a single combat flight. It was too much time in the cockpit, too wearing on the Japanese pilots. "My God," exclaimed Alex Viau, a Navy fighter ace with Fighting Squadron 6, VF-6. "That's 1,000 mi total both ways, plus any air action over the target area. That's a lot of time. Fighter pilots don't like to sit on their seats for too long a stretch. 3 hours in a combat air patrol is enough."

Some of the Zero pilots behaved strangely and even seemed to avoid combat. They flew inexplicably acrobatic maneuvers almost as if they were trying to impress their foes. "Oh, they put on lots of acrobatics, flyovers, loops," Foss said. "The only reason that we could figure out for their doing all those stunts, they wanted to show us just how hot they were. So we showed them how hot we were and shot them down." One afternoon over Ironbottom Sound, Jack Conger of VMF-223 had a Zero riding his tail and thought he might be finished. But then he did the damnedest thing you ever saw. He came down from above and behind, and instead of riding it out on my tail and filling me full of bullets, he let himself go too fast so that he went by me. He should have dodged off to one side and got out of there. But instead of that, the fool rose right up under my nose and did a roll. What was he trying to do? Impress me with his gymnastics? I don't know. Apparently, those fellows have been told that they were the best flyers in the world, and so they were like little children with toys. They had to show their tricks when they had an audience. Or maybe he thought I couldn't hit him if he kept his plane tumbling like that. As a matter of fact, he was just making himself a bigger target. I used a 3-second burst, and he was dead before I stopped firing. He made a splash no bigger than a porpoise. Then he was just part of the soup."

Zeros sometimes flew surprise strafing runs at treetop altitude directly over Henderson Field. Men scattered and dived into the nearest foxhole. Some were inevitably cut down in their tracks. Strafing runs also damaged or destroyed parked aircraft. On August 23rd, eight Zeros suddenly strafed Henderson, sending men running for cover. Eventually, these runs were effectively countered by P-400s of the Army Air Force's 67th Fighter Squadron. The P-400s, a slightly modified version of the P-39 Airacobra, were practically useless at altitude, but they were fast and maneuverable close to the ground. Marine Clifford Fox was driven into his trench by a strafing Zero when a P-400 appeared suddenly over the trees and caught the plane with its cannon, and the Zero disintegrated in the air. "It floated right down into this ravine in the jungle in front of us. You could see the pilot and the engine of this Zero coming down together. They were the heaviest objects and going forward the fastest. The rest of the plane was sort of floating earthward, shot to smitherines. We were all cheering."

Vandegrift and his Marines had a friend in Admiral John S. McCain, commander of Aircraft South Pacific, ComAirSOPAC, who was determined to saturate Henderson Field with air reinforcements. A week after the First Division landed on Guadalcanal, he became the first high-ranking visitor to the island, dropping in for an overnight stay with a bottle of bourbon under his arm. That night, an enemy destroyer lobbed 5-inch shells into the perimeter from Ironbottom Sound, driving the general and the admiral, both dressed in skivvies, into Vandegrift's bomb shelter. "By God, Vandegrift, this is your war, and you sure are welcome to it," McCain said. "But when I go back tomorrow, I am going to try to get you what you need for your air force here." Before he left the next morning, McCain told Colonel Twining that the First Division's fight was not really about Guadalcanal. It was not, as Twining paraphrased, "a grudge fight between some raggedy-ass Marines and the Japanese." In the admiral's view, Guadalcanal was a rampart, not an outpost. Its successful defense could lead to the destruction of Japanese naval power in the Pacific. McCain wrote in the same vein to Nimitz and King shortly after returning to Espiritu Santo. "If adequately reinforced, Guadalcanal could become a sinkhole for enemy air power. So long as the Japanese arrogantly insisted on sending air strikes across 600 mi of sea, the long flights alone would whittle down their numbers. Guadalcanal could finish the process begun at Coral Sea and Midway, the gradual extinction of Japan's remaining cadre of irreplaceable veteran aviators."

In the following weeks, McCain lobbied persistently for air reinforcements. He asked for additional Army planes, particularly P-38s, which performed much better than the P-39/P-400 at higher altitudes. He summoned air reinforcements from throughout his ComAirSOPAC domain and asked Nimitz and MacArthur for more. Aviation gasoline, bombs, ammunition, spare parts, tools, and ground personnel were urgently needed. VMF-223 ran out of oxygen canisters 3 days after the squadron's arrival on the island. The transport William Ward Burrows would carry a large load of supplies and the Marine Air Group's ground personnel to Guadalcanal. In the interim, the Marine Wildcats were serviced by sailors attached to the Cub 1 base construction facility. Turner sent another battalion of Seabees to the island to upgrade and lengthen Henderson Field so that it could handle B-17s. Land immediately northeast of Henderson was cleared and graded for a shorter auxiliary grass airstrip to be called Fighter 1. When aviation gasoline stocks dipped dangerously low, fuel drums were loaded onto B-24s and flown into the island. The Hornet had come south with a squadron of unassembled fighters stored overhead in her hangar deck. They were assembled and flown into Henderson. From August through November, the Cactus Air Force would field a total of eight fighter, 12 dive bomber, and two torpedo squadrons from three branches of the armed services. Enterprise and Saratoga squadrons, orphaned by the maiming of their ships, were sent into Guadalcanal and told to operate from Henderson until further notice. Lieutenant Commander Harold H. "Swede" Larsen led his squadron of TBF Avengers, Torpedo Squadron 8, VT-8, into Henderson in mid-September. McCain urged that the bombers be sent on late afternoon and evening missions up the Slot to destroy Japanese ships before they could land troops and supplies on the island. "Your whole existence up there," he wrote Vandegrift and General Roy G. Geiger, commander of air forces on Guadalcanal, on September 14th, "depends on hitting those ships consistently before they get there, while they are there, or during departure. Four days later, he added, 'The planes must find those ships that come in and hit you at night and must strike them before dark. Should I die now, those words will be found engraved on my heart.'"

Each morning, Marine and Navy SBDs flew the "milk run," a long scouting patrol up the Slot. Every plane at Henderson typically scrambled aloft at midday, if only to avoid being caught on the ground during an air strike. In the late afternoon, a flight of 6 to 8 SBDs again left Guadalcanal to scout up the Slot for incoming Japanese shipping. These late-day flights were productive as they forced enemy ships to hang back in the northwest until dark and thus limited the amount of time they could spend in Ironbottom Sound. The Cactus Air Force also began flying night missions by the light of the moon. Dive bombing at night was still a fairly low-percentage game, however, and operational losses were high. Swede Larsen's torpedo planes flew scouting and attack missions, but they were rarely able to press home a coordinated attack with dive bombers, and the hit rate was frustratingly low throughout September. In a debriefing recorded at the Navy Department in January 1943, Larsen recommended "fighting a war that is a very aggressive war. If you can possibly attack and continue attacking, which means a continuous series of replacement supplies and aircraft and provisions, you certainly ought to do it. It was a black eye that we had to let a lot of those ships get away from there. But there really wasn't anything to do about it."

After the annihilation of Ichiki's force at the mouth of the Tenaru, General Vandegrift asked his brain trust, Colonel Twining and Colonel Gerald C. Thomas, to consider where the Japanese might attempt their next attack. The colonels had previously expressed concern about an amphibious landing on the beaches around Lunga Point, but the Japanese did not possess the amphibious equipment to make a hostile landing under fire, and any fleet large enough to mount such an attack would inevitably be discovered from the air. With good roads around Lunga Point, moreover, reinforcements could be moved into that area quickly. A more worrisome problem was the exposed ridge directly south of Henderson Field. In that direction, the jungle provided cover for an enemy approach by stealth. With a concerted attack, the Japanese might break through to the airfield, which lay only a few hundred yards north of the perimeter. The ridge, remembered later as Edson's Ridge, or alternately Bloody Ridge, ran from northwest to southeast for a distance of some 1,000 yards. It rose to a series of bumps or spurs just a few hundred yards from the jungle treeline. Vandegrift deployed Colonel Merritt Edson's battalion of raiders and parachutists to dig into defensive positions on one of the forward spurs. A battery of howitzers was brought up from Lunga Point to provide fire support. Two battalions were kept in reserve.

Admiral Tanaka's "Rat Express" continued to run supplies and troop reinforcements into the island almost every night. Costly experience had taught Tanaka that he must not attempt daylight operations in air striking range of Guadalcanal. To make matters worse, the Japanese Navy's command setup in the region was in evident disarray, and Tanaka was receiving contradictory orders from the combined fleet and the two rival subordinate naval commands at Rabaul, the 11th Air Fleet and the Eighth Fleet. On August 29th, a new invasion force under Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi arrived at Shortland Island in the transport Sado Maru. Two nights later, General Kawaguchi and most of his force, about 3,000 men, were landed successfully from eight destroyers on a beachhead east of the Marines near Tolo Point. The rest of his force attempted to reach the island in landing barges from Gizo Harbor, a tactic Tanaka had warned against to no avail. More than a dozen of these heavily loaded barges were caught in the open sea and sunk by 16 SBDs of Scouting Squadron 5, VS-5 of the Enterprise. But Tanaka's persistent destroyer operations gradually added to General Kawaguchi's force. By September 12th, it numbered more than 6,000 troops. They bivouacked around the villages of Kokumbona and Tasimoko, about 12 mi east of the American beachhead.

September 11th and 12th were as intense as any 2-day period the Marines had yet experienced. A large strike of G4Ms crossed overhead at noon and walked a pattern of bombs across the populated area just south of the field. Not enough fighters were lost to break up the attack. That afternoon, 24 Wildcats of VF-5, made homeless by the torpedoing of the Saratoga, set down on Henderson Field. Their arrival was welcome, but it also put pressure on the gasoline reserve, which was running dangerously low. That night, the Marines enjoyed especially heavy shelling by cruisers and destroyers in the Sound. September 12th was one long, unremitting series of Japanese air raids, and many Marines spent the entire day in bomb shelters. At 9 that night, the ships returned to give the Americans a 3-hour working over with the big naval guns. Harold Buell recalled a "monstrous shelling on a scale unlike any before. The shells were cutting trees off right over our heads, and the shrapnel was falling around us like hailstones. All of us in the trench survived, but the Marines of VMSB-232 nearby were not so fortunate. A shell hit on top of their shelter, killing Lieutenants Rose and Baldinus and wounding two others. The whole thing was a nightmare."

Kawaguchi's attack on the ridge began at 7:30 p.m. on the 13th. A red flare was fired from the treeline, and a wave of Japanese soldiers charged Edson's line. The fighting quickly degenerated into a series of vicious hand-to-hand encounters. One wave of attackers followed another, and the weight of these repeated attacks threw the Marines back to within a quarter-mile of the airfield. A counterattack on Kawaguchi's east flank by the reorganized parachute battalion forced the Japanese to pull back into the treeline. Constant artillery fire by a battery of 105 mm howitzers apparently claimed heavy casualties among the Japanese. "That night was hell," savagery on both sides, recalled David Galvin, a radioman gunner in one of the SBD squadrons. "That night, everything was firing. Nothing was held back. Shells went flying over our heads. We were very close to the battle and could hear the artillery, the gunfire, the screaming." At the height of the battle, small groups of Japanese soldiers broke through Edson's lines, and a few reached the edge of the airfield before they were cut down. Several SBDs were positioned so that their rear-facing .30 caliber machine guns could be trained toward the ridge. A Marine assigned to guard one of the SBDs killed an enemy soldier as he climbed onto the wing. "I knew that any got this far would try to destroy the plane by putting a hand grenade into the cockpit. So I just sat there waiting and sure enough here came this right up onto the wing. I put my automatic piece against his chest and gave him a short burst. Bastard never knew what hit him."

Vandegrift's command post, about 300 yd south of the ridge, came under direct attack at dawn, but the attackers, two soldiers and an officer wielding a samurai sword, were killed within direct sight of the general. Morning found the Japanese in retreat and Edson's battalion in possession of the ridge. General Geiger sent up several P-400s to strafe the remaining enemy units. Patrols went into the jungle and killed a few stragglers, but Kawaguchi was in headlong retreat. More than 800 Japanese dead were counted on the ridge and adjacent positions. The total number of Japanese casualties was about 1,200, most of whom were killed in action or later died of wounds. The Marines lost 143, killed and wounded combined.

The Japanese infantryman was fast losing whatever mystique he had earned in the early phase of the war. For more than 20 years, the Japanese army had emphasized fighting spirit over tactics or technology and adopted the banzai charge as its main offensive doctrine against disciplined troops dug into fortified lines and supported by artillery. Those tactics were ruinous. Twice in three weeks, a fanatical bayonet charge had been repelled with casualty loss ratios of about 10 to one. Among the Marines, spirits rose. They listened to Radio Tokyo's broadcasts with mortified good humor. At the village of Kukum, a big billboard was erected at a crossroads known as Times Square. On it was reported all of the news of the day, including the numbers of enemy aircraft claimed in air combat overhead and the latest baseball scores from home. Morale was further boosted on September 18th when an unexpectedly large transport fleet anchored off Lunga Point and began disembarking supplies and 4,000 Marine reinforcements, the Seventh Marines. These fresh troops were warmly welcomed, as were the lavish quantities of food, medical supplies, ammunition, and construction equipment unloaded onto Beach Red. Martin Clemens later recalled, "We were terribly excited and licked our chops at the prospect of a square meal."

The Enterprise, maimed at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, had been obliged to part ways with the Saratoga and withdraw to Pearl Harbor for extensive repairs. Fletcher's Task Force 61 was soon reinforced by the arrival in the Solomons of two more carrier groups, Task Forces 17 and 18, built around the Hornet and the Wasp, respectively. Gormley deployed this powerful task force between San Cristobal and the Santa Cruz Islands in a rectangular zone measuring approximately 60 mi east to west by 60 mi north to south. In this centrally located position, Fletcher could move quickly to counter any Japanese advance into the Solomons while also providing air cover to Turner's transport fleet as it ran supplies and reinforcements into Ironbottom Sound. But Gormley's orders had the perilous effect of tying Fletcher down in a specific area. The carriers, ringed by their accompanying cruisers and destroyers, continually traversed the same waters, heading southeast at night, then reversing course and steaming northwest in the early morning hours. Enemy air and submarine reconnaissance was bound to discover these patterns and react accordingly. Captain Davis of the Enterprise reported to Nimitz on the quandary after his arrival in Pearl Harbor. "During the past month, the strategic situation has required long continued presence of carrier task forces in limited areas within at least approximate range of the enemy. Such risks of course must be accepted. They should however be minimized in every possible way. The percentage should always be played. The widest possible variation should be made in general location from day to day while still meeting strategic requirements. Higher speeds even at some increase in fuel expenditures should be used. There should be no hovering during a given day in the same general vicinity. Occasional departure, whenever the strategic picture permits, entirely away from the area, should be undertaken, so as to leave the enemy guessing where we have gone and when and where we will appear next." Unhappily, these astute remarks were also prophetic.

Knowing full well that the Americans must run convoys between Nouméa, Espiritu Santo, and Guadalcanal, Admiral Yamamoto had deployed a scouting line of submarines 150 mi southeast of San Cristobal. The Allied sailors whose duty it was to navigate that submarine-infested corridor gave it a nickname, "Torpedo Junction." On the last day of August, at 7:48 in the morning, the Saratoga took a single torpedo in her starboard side just aft of the island. The explosion tore away her blister plating and destroyed the electrical controls for her propulsion system, bringing her to a dead stop. The blast injured a dozen men, including Fletcher, but killed none. Her destroyers scattered depth charges all around the task force, but the attacker, Japanese submarine I-26, dove deep and escaped. Saratoga's crew got the damage under control, and the carrier was able to limp away under her own power, but she would have to follow the Enterprise to Pearl Harbor for dry dock repairs and would not get back into the war until November.

The following two weeks brought almost daily submarine contacts either by sound gear or by aerial sightings. On September 6th, the pilot of a Hornet TBF Avenger flying anti-submarine patrol over Task Force 61 caught sight of a torpedo track pointed at the Hornet and dropped a depth charge on it. The torpedo broached, veered off course, and detonated harmlessly. Another torpedo exploded prematurely a few seconds later. A third narrowly missed the Hornet, continued on its course, and also narrowly missed the battleship North Carolina. Later that afternoon, one of the Hornet's long-range scouts saw an enemy submarine on the surface and dropped depth charges on it with uncertain results. The next day, as Nimitz reported to King, four different contacts, which may or may not have been false, kept the task force dodging most of the day.

In mid-September, Gormley deployed his two remaining carrier groups to provide distant cover for the transport convoy carrying the Seventh Marines to Guadalcanal. The reinforcements were landed successfully, but Task Force 61 again tested its luck in the treacherous waters of Torpedo Junction. And this time, its luck ran short. On the afternoon of September 14th, the Wasp, in company with the Hornet, the battleship North Carolina, and more than a dozen screening ships, was proceeding at 16 knots on the familiar northwesterly course. At 2:15 p.m., she turned into the wind to launch planes, then at 2:42 turned back toward her base course of 280 degrees. Before she had completed the turn, her lookout sang out and pointed to three incoming torpedo tracks close off the starboard bow. The fish were on target and nearly home. The Wasp had no chance of evading any of the three. The first struck home just forward of the island. The powerful blast lifted the entire ship and hurled her forward, flinging two F4F fighters into the sea and throwing hundreds of her crew from their feet. Ensign John Jenkins Mitchell, a 22-year-old Naval Academy graduate, was thrown 30 ft into the air and landed 60 ft away. He recalled the impact of the first torpedo as "a loud, unruly noise, something like a railroad train going up a flight of stairs. And the next thing I knew, it was 10 days later, and I wanted a cigarette." From his hospital bed in Nouméa, 2 weeks after his injury, Mitchell joked to a reporter, "I am thinking of putting in my chit to qualify for landings on the flight deck."

The second and third torpedoes struck in quick succession, each causing the entire length of the ship to leap again. On the hangar deck, planes were lifted and dropped with such force that their landing gear was crushed, and two fighters that were triced up overhead broke loose and fell on the planes below. The U.S. Navy could take justifiable pride in its damage control equipment and training, and with a little luck, the Wasp might have survived. Captain Forrest P. Sherman conned his stricken ship with San Fu, even while a maelstrom of secondary explosions blew debris around the bridge. He maneuvered the Wasp to put the wind on her starboard quarter, so that the flames were blown forward and to port. That allowed many hundreds of her crew to take refuge. Aft, Commander William C. Chambliss noted that the men reacted coolly and efficiently, cracking their usual gags with their usual vivacity. But the Wasp had been struck at the worst possible moment in the most vulnerable part of her hull, near the aviation gasoline storage tanks, which exploded into incandescent flames. Having just launched planes, the Wasp's fuel lines were full and the fires traveled through the hoses to the forward part of the hangar deck. The deadly predicament was similar to that of the Japanese aircraft carriers on the morning of June 4th at the Battle of Midway. Secondary explosions occurred quickly and with devastating effect. In the hangar, the inferno enveloped fueled-up planes. Their wing tanks exploded. Their bombs and torpedoes detonated and their .30 and .50 caliber guns began firing haphazardly. Lieutenant Chester M. Sterns, an engineering officer, made his way up to the hangar deck and noted that a torpedo was roasting under a burning TBF Avenger. He dived flat on deck in time to protect himself against the powerful explosion. When he looked up, neither plane nor torpedo nor deck were there. Several bombs left on racks near the bomb arming station had apparently detonated, leaving a vast hole through the elevator pit with a seething mass of flames. The Wasp listed 15° to starboard. Electrical lines and fire mains cut out throughout the forward part of the ship. Rivets popped out of the bulkheads and shot through the air like bullets. Most of the communication circuits were knocked out, so the bridge could not communicate with stations below decks. Ready service ammunition by the starboard forward anti-aircraft guns detonated and rained debris down along the Wasp's entire length.

The devastating attack had been launched by Japanese submarine I-19. She had fired six torpedoes. Five of these struck an American ship. Three hit the Wasp. One hit the destroyer O'Brien and another passed under the keel of the destroyer Dale. It narrowly missed the stern of the destroyer Mustin and struck home into the North Carolina, sending a column of water and fuel oil to the height of the battleship's masts. The O'Brien's bow was torn cleanly off forward of frame 10, but she limped away. She was lost en route to the American mainland. The North Carolina's starboard side was gouged open, but she likewise managed to steam away under her own power. Shortly thereafter, I-19 fired another spread of torpedoes at the Hornet from her stern tubes, and they missed narrowly. The screening ships began zigzagging prodigiously and dropped depth charges throughout the area, driving the enemy submarines away, but destroying none.

At 3:05 p.m., a tremendous gasoline vapor explosion ripped through the Wasp. Flames ascended to a height of 150 ft. A quadruple 1.1-inch anti-aircraft mount forward of the island was plucked from its foundation and ejected high into the air. The weapon's entire crew was killed. Admiral Lee, who had taken command of Task Force 61 2 weeks earlier, was thrown down on the deck of his signal bridge. He suffered third-degree burns on his face, scalp, and ears. The interior of the island was completely engulfed in smoke, requiring everyone to retreat aft. A steady rain of burning debris fell on the heads of men gathered on the flight deck. A pilot circling above said that the Wasp's whole island structure was white, as if the skin had been burned away from the flesh. Less than an hour after the attack, Sherman realized the game was up and ordered the crew off the ship. Men went down lines into the sea or simply leapt feet first. Spectacular explosions continued and debris rained down around the ship to a distance of

About 200 yd. Whaleboats from the cruisers and destroyers moved among the swimmers and picked them up. The Wasp burned fiercely through the afternoon, settling gradually by the bow. After sunset, when darkness began to descend over the scene, Chamblas recalled that the ship was completely enveloped in flames and presented a weirdly fascinating picture. Against the night tropical sky, she looked like some ship of neon fantasy. The steel plating around her upper works glowed bright orange. Her ruptured tanks spilled bunker oil and aviation gasoline into the sea, and the fires spread around her to a radius of several hundred ft.

Shortly after 8, destroyers fired several torpedoes into the burning hulk to be sure she went down. At 9, she rolled a bit to starboard and the bow went under. She slid into the sea very slowly until only her stern remained. Then she was gone.

The Hornet, now the last battleworthy carrier remaining in the South Pacific, recovered all of the Wasp's 26 planes that were aloft during the attack. 45 more went down with the ship. Remarkably, given the carnage, only 173 of the Wasp's officers and men were lost. A consolation owed to Sherman's fine seammanship and the quick work of the escorting destroyers.

The sudden and devastating loss of the Wasp at a time when the task forces were under omnipresent threat of submarine attack finally prompted Nimitz to lay down the law. For 3 weeks, Task Force 61 and its elements remained in the same waters adjacent to our supply route to the Solomons in an area known to be infested with submarines. The mission did not require that the task force be restricted to that area. Henceforth, wrote Sinkpack, the area of operations of our task forces should be changed radically at frequent intervals.

Chapter 5. Tokyo in Autumn.

The parks were painted with every shade of yellow, orange, and red, and the air was pleasantly cool and not too humid. On a clear morning from a hilltop, one might catch a distant view of Fuji. Nothing filled a Japanese heart like a glimpse of that regal snowcapped cone.

More than anywhere else in the country, Tokyo was a study in the contrast of old and new Japan. Throughout the sprawling city, the ancient and the modern coexisted side by side. Men in tailored three-piece suits and fedora hats strolled alongside women in brightly colored kimonos. Automobiles, street cars, and bicycles vied for the right of way with rickshaws and oxdrawn carts. Billboards and neon signs drew the eye away from hanging lanterns and banners fluttering on wooden poles. Power lines, construction cranes, and elevated railways rose above a sea of dark tile rooftops.

The metropolis had only recently begun to grow vertically. Large office and apartment buildings were a rarity outside the core finance, business, and government districts. Most urban Japanese lived in miniature wooden houses crammed into teeming neighborhoods linked by cobblestone streets barely larger than alleys. Steel-framed concrete buildings were going up all over town. But the workers who built them wore splittoed shoes and loin cloths and nothing else, just as they had in decades or centuries past.

Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, had been seldom seen by his people in peacetime. Now, as the spiritual leader and sovereign of a nation at war, he was allowed a higher profile. In October 1942, as the struggle for Guadalcanal approached its savage climax, the emperor's red Rolls-Royce twice carried him beyond the Greystone walls of his imperial compound. On the 15th, he presided over the ceremonial induction of the spirits of 15,021 war dead at Yasukuni Shrine. A crowd of 30,000 came to pay respects. A news photographer captured a sea of solemn, reverent faces under the shrine's huge torii. On the 29th, he appeared at the 13th Meiji Shrine National Athletic Games where one popular competition was a bayonet charging race.

That month also witnessed a wave of public veneration for the fallen crewmen of the submarine that had shelled Sydney, Australia the previous June. The cremated ashes of four seamen were transported aboard a truce ship from Sydney arriving in Japan on October 9th, 1942. Newspapers and magazines eulogized the men who had given their lives in a virtual suicide mission against the hated Australians, but none dared acclaim the enemy's chivalry in repatriating their remains.

Insofar as the public was permitted to know, Japanese forces were continuing to trounce the Allies on land, at sea, and in the air. The print and radio media under exacting state control rang with exultant declarations of victories and expressions of contempt for the enemy. The editors of Kokusai Shashin Joho, International Graphic Magazine, scoffed at the American slogan, "Remember Pearl Harbor." "Yes, Nippon will remember too," they remarked. "The same day and the same harbor."

Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, an army general who dominated the regime with Hirohito's support, declared in a publicized speech at the war ministry. "The British Americans want obstinately to continue their counterattack, but making use of our great material resources. We are ready to annihilate them at any moment, at any point on the globe."

Japan had brought a vast Pacific Empire under the flag of the rising sun. From north to south, they ruled from the western illusions to the East Indies. From east to west, the Solomons to the Burma-India frontier. Admiral Kichi Saburo Namura, a former ambassador to Washington, explained that the Allied position in the Pacific was hopeless, for Japan need only hold out in conquered positions. Perhaps peace would come if the two arch villains and warmongers, Roosevelt and Churchill, were driven from office by their own people. Only then would the Allies take a more constructive attitude and acknowledge Japan's Asian ascendancy.

So it was said. The Japanese came out to the rallies, mouthed the slogans, waved their hats, marched in the lantern parades, and bowed to the departed spirits at Yasukuni. To all appearances, they continued to support the war no less fervently than they had in the heady early months when spectacular victories came in rapid and uninterrupted succession.

Beneath the surface, however, were symptoms of discontent. The Japanese people had obediently submitted to harsh privations for the sake of the war. Stringent rations, labor drafts, censorship, repression of political parties, and civil defense regulations promulgated by the tonarumi or neighborhood associations. But living conditions were deteriorating and the austere regimentation of daily life was losing whatever charm it had once held. Restaurants closed for lack of food. Intercity train tickets were treasured commodities to be sold or scalped for more than their face value. In December, to arrest falling share prices, the stock market was placed under direct government control.

Japanese of that generation were accustomed to war as a quasi-permanent condition. The country had been waging war to a greater or lesser degree since the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. War with all enemies waged indefinitely had seemed natural enough in the past. But by the fall of 1942, the people began to grasp that this was a total war which must end either in total victory or in total defeat.

On street corners, women called out to other women to sew a crimson stitch into a 1,000-stitch belt. A traditional talisman believed to protect the wearer against enemy bullets. Millions of soldiers and sailors went off to war with these cotton bands concealed under their uniforms.

Japanese public opinion could barely envisage the enormous casualties their forces would suffer in 1944 and 1945. But the death toll was rising alarmingly in late 1942 and the military drafts had started to creep up and down the age scale for Japanese men. According to Hiroyo Arakawa, a Tokyo baker, everyone lived in dread of their impending call-up. Nothing inflamed the resentment of ordinary Japanese against the rich and well-connected as much as exemptions from military service. Parents with sons overseas were incensed by rumors that strings had been pulled to keep an upper-class lad out of uniform. Arakawa recalled that her husband's cousin, a man from an influential family employed at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Sumimi, had received several call-up notices, but each time arranged to be excused from service. "The big shots always get the best deal." She was likewise exasperated by military men and police officers who felt entitled to help themselves to food or other store items without paying.

As servicemen circulated back into the country, either wounded or on leave, they brought whispers of a war that was progressing much differently than the public reports let on. Saburo Sakai, the fighter ace wounded in combat over Guadalcanal on August 7th, returned to Tokyo on leave that autumn. He was appalled by the shrill, vain-glorious propaganda. The ubiquitous handbills, the martial orchestral music blaring through loudspeakers, the sham assurances that Japan was still running up a score of one-sided victories. "The nation was drunk on false victories," he wrote. "It was hard to believe that a destructive war was going on." But he soon realized that not everyone on the home front believed what they read in the papers or heard on the radio. His own mother asked him in a low, conspiratorial voice whether it was true that Japan was winning the war. "We must win," he told her. The alternative was too awful to contemplate.

Isoroku Yamamoto lived in a plush suite of air-conditioned cabins on the super battleship Yamato, which rested at her moorings wrapped in anti-torpedo nets in the huge cobalt lagoon of Truk Atoll in the Caroline Islands about 1,600 m south of Japan. As commander-in-chief of the combined fleet, he did not work particularly hard, and when he did work, his attention was not always on the problems of the war. He read and wrote letters to friends and strangers. He played shogi, Japanese chess, against staff officers, often for money. He wrote poetry quickly and, according to his Japanese biographer, not very well, but he had a good hand for calligraphy and provided samples to admirers who asked for them. He read often late into the night.

That Yamamoto did not work obsessively was no mark against him, at least in the view of his loyal chief of staff, Admiral Matome Ugaki. Ugaki reproved staff officers who burdened the commander-in-chief with minutiae. He preferred that the boss reserve his mental energy for decisions of the highest strategic order. Tradition demanded that Yamamoto live in sumptuous luxury, and he did. He dined in his wardroom at a polished teak table covered with a white tablecloth, and his meals easily rivaled those that one might find in an expensive Tokyo restaurant. The Navy had recruited professional chefs to man the galley. Luncheons were Western style, served with silver and finger bowls. Dinner was usually Japanese cuisine with such delicacies as broiled seabream, egg custard, and sushi. Yamamoto's particular favorites, such as urome iwashi, sardine, were brought from Japan by sea or air. The ship's bakery turned out fresh bread and other baked goods. Crewmen were sent to fish in the lagoon to provide the freshest sushi for his table. The admiral liked his food and ate with gusto. Finding little opportunity for exercise, he grew portly, as any man must who carries extra weight and stands just 5' 3" tall. But he had the sturdy build and bull-necked confidence of an athlete. His salute was famous in Japan, often captured in wartime newsreels. It was a casual gesture, almost laconic, his meaty right hand raised straight up at the elbow to the right edge of the visor on his uniform cap. His orderlies kept his uniforms in scrupulous condition. In the tropics he always appeared in whites, starched and pressed with gold buttons and chrysanthemum-crested epaulets reflecting the sun. He was not a dandy, but he had a part to play.

Yamamoto was a warm man, always kind and considerate to his officers. Yet, he maintained an Olympian distance from the crew of his flagship, who snapped to attention at his appearance and did not twitch until he was out of sight. Only occasionally did Yamamoto show himself on deck, usually to raise his cap for a departing ship or a flight of aircraft overhead.

In the West, Yamamoto is best remembered as the prime mover behind Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the disastrous attempt to seize Midway 6 months later. In Japan, his legacy is more multifaceted. It owes more to his pre-war career as a cabinet minister and diplomatic representative in the militarist regime of Japan's dark valley period (1930-45). There was no such thing as civilian control of the military; rather, the military directly controlled all domestic, economic, and international functions of government. Military leaders suppressed the political parties, stripped the Diet (parliament) of its power, placed the media under state supervision, and controlled the appointment of cabinet ministers. In both fact and effect, generals and admirals became politicians, civilian ministers, and foreign diplomats.

Western historians are predisposed to evaluate Yamamoto's career using the same standards, benchmarks, and gauges one would apply to any professional naval officer in such nations as the United States or Britain. To do so misses the point. Quite apart from his naval career, Isoroku Yamamoto was a major player in Japanese politics from the mid-1930s through the outset of the Pacific War and probably the nation's most revered public figure after the emperor himself. Disdainful of the army and the ultra-nationalist right, Yamamoto had consistently opposed the Japanese radicals who used revolutionary violence and assassinations to achieve their ends. He was a leading figure in the Navy's moderate treaty faction, known for its support of unpopular disarmament treaties. His rivals charged him with courting fame and celebrity, cultivating newsmen to ensure favorable press coverage, and maneuvering for his own advantage in politics. There is undoubtedly some truth in these charges. If Yamamoto had not been so politically adept, he could not have survived the repeated purges of like-minded officers in the turbulent 1930s. But it is also true that he put his life on the line to prevent the slide toward war with the United States and Britain.

Yamamoto had represented Japan at the 1935 London Naval Conference and advocated ratifying an extension of politically unpopular arms control limitations. These and other positions had placed his life in jeopardy, as right-wing zealots explicitly threatened to assassinate him and attempted to do so on at least one occasion. In August 1939, he was transferred from the Navy Ministry in Tokyo to command of the combined fleet. The move was intended, at least in part, to place him beyond the reach of his would-be murderers. From his flagship, often moored in Hiroshima Bay, Yamamoto continued to insert himself into national policy debates. He opposed signing the Tripartite Pact, allying Japan to Nazi Germany and Italy, and had called for a withdrawal of Japanese troops from China.

Yamamoto was one of the few Japanese of that era who found the courage to oppose war with the United States. As a younger man, he had twice been posted to America, once as an English student at Harvard, once as a naval attaché in Washington, and he had made a close study of the country's vast economic resources and industrial base. "Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas," he would later remark, "knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America." He foresaw that the Pacific War was likely to become a long, drawn-out conflict in which titanic American production would overwhelm Japan's much smaller and less advanced war industries. Under no circumstances could Japan hope to inflict a total defeat on the United States. A war against the United States could be won only by a negotiated settlement favorable to Japanese interests.

Against such odds, Yamamoto could see little hope of success in any ordinary strategy. When it became clear that war was coming, whether he liked it or not, he groped for a way to force it to a quick conclusion. His proposed raid on Pearl Harbor, he admitted, was conceived in desperation. The raid was an all-or-nothing gambit, a throw of the dice designed to prompt a political calculation in Washington that war with Japan was not worth the cost. "We should do our best to decide the fate of the war."

On the very first day, the raid was a spectacular tactical success. All eight battleships of the Pacific Fleet were knocked out of action and more than 180 American planes were destroyed, mostly on the ground. The Japanese carriers escaped with the loss of just 29 planes. That success and the rapid conquest of Pacific and Southeast Asian territories in the early months of the war lifted Yamamoto to new heights of popularity and prestige. With the power to dictate his wishes to the Naval General Staff (NGS), he forced through a plan to hurl the entire force of the Japanese Navy against Midway Atoll in June 1942. The Midway operation, like the raid on Pearl Harbor, was an attempt to force the war to a premature conclusion by inflicting a knockout blow on the US Navy. Instead, the gambit ended with the loss of four Japanese aircraft carriers and all of their aircraft. One of the most cataclysmic defeats in the history of war at sea.

Though the debacle was carefully hidden from the Japanese people, Yamamoto lost his leverage over the NGS; the Tokyo admirals recovered their primacy in strategic policymaking. The debacle at Midway left a mark on Yamamoto. His outlook grew gloomy, detached, and fatalistic. Japan was now engaged in precisely the war of attrition he had often warned against, without any means of escaping it short of abject surrender. Although he could never say so, Yamamoto must have known by mid-1942 that his country was careening toward an apocalyptic defeat. In a sense, he would be vindicated by that defeat, but that could come as no comfort. He could no longer make his influence felt in Tokyo. He could do nothing but revert to his proper place as the Navy's top seagoing commander. It was his duty to wage war against the enemies of Japan. He would do so until the bitter end, whatever that might be and whenever it might come. He did not expect to survive it. "Within a hundred days," he predicted in September 1942, "I will wear out my life entirely."

In the ranks of the fighting navy, there was a good deal of irritated chatter about the Yamato's long sojourns in port. She and her sister, the equally enormous Musashi, were the two largest warships in the world. Each weighed more than 70,000 tons when fully loaded. Each carried a complement of 2,700 men and each was armed with nine mammoth 18.1-inch guns. They had been constructed at grand expense by battleship admirals who believed that they would be the key to destroying the American battleships in a traditional naval gun duel and thus winning the naval war. But neither of the Leviathans had engaged in combat, and neither would until 1944. They had spent most of the war at anchor, first in Hashima Anchorage in the Inland Sea and now at the great southern fleet base of Truk. Yamato was derided as the "Hotel Yamato." An officer of a freighter later observed, "We were always being sent to the very front lines and those battleships never even went into battle. People like us were shipped off to the most forward positions while those bastards from the Imperial Naval Academy sat around on their asses in the Yamato and Musashi hotels."

The truth was that neither of the big battleships was of much use as a combatant vessel. In any theater of the war, they would likely come under air attack long before they could bring their guns to bear on an enemy ship. More significantly, the two super battleships drank so much fuel (each had 6,300-ton tanks) that operating them at sea would strain the Navy's resources, especially as the American submarines were beginning to take a bite out of the seaborne oil supply line.

Admiral Ugaki left a running daily assessment of the war in his personal diary, which fortuitously survived the war. The invaluable document is a candid, firsthand account of the Guadalcanal campaign as viewed from the flagship. In earlier pages covering the beginning of the war through the Midway operation, Ugaki often recorded Yamamoto's decisions and directives. By the summer of 1942, however, the commander-in-chief appears to have taken a step back from the management of daily operations, leaving his chief of staff to pick up the slack. Ugaki began to write in the first person, "I decided," "I ordered," and often issued directives in his own name rather than Yamamoto's.

On August 7th, Ugaki presided over the news that Marines had landed on Guadalcanal and opined in his diary that they must be driven off at once. But a month passed before he grasped that the struggle for Guadalcanal was the decisive campaign of the Pacific War and that it must take precedence over every other operation, even if it required suspending the offensive against Port Moresby in New Guinea. He complained of poor radio communications which caused delays in orders sent and reports received aboard the Yamato. All along he was plagued by a recurring toothache which seemed to multiply his despair at the repeated failures to recapture Henderson Field.

Was the key to Guadalcanal the air war, the ground war, or the naval war? In Ugaki's rolling analysis, he vacillated. On August 13th, 6 days after the invasion, he wrote, "The most urgent thing at present is to send a troop there to mop up the enemy remnant, rescue the garrison, and repair the airfield." A week later, on August 20th, he was convinced that the most urgent thing was to render the airstrip unavailable by launching air raids and night bombardments. Four days later, he concluded that air reinforcements for Rabaul were as urgent as troop reinforcements for Guadalcanal because the Japanese must destroy the enemy air arm on the island as soon as possible. He grasped that the great distance from Rabaul to Guadalcanal was encumbering the air campaign, but he was willing to accept heavy air losses. On September 1st, however, he concluded that the American forces must be defeated on the ground. "In the end, Guadalcanal must be secured by land warfare, even with sacrifices. There is no other way."

After the indecisive carrier skirmish of August 25th, Ugaki wanted the Japanese fleet to remain in the forward area so that it could engage any new American attempt to resupply Guadalcanal by sea. He noted that Tokyo had finally become aware of the gravity of the situation and was rushing ships, aircraft, and troop reinforcements into the theater. But the supply problem was growing more critical, especially with respect to oil. Tankers were in short supply, and the major fleet movements into the lower Solomons had consumed a tremendous quantity of fuel. Truk did not yet have any fuel storage capability ashore. Ships sometimes drew alongside the Yamato and drank from her cavernous tanks.

Betraying a naval officer's archetypal disdain for the army, Ugaki blamed a lack of aggressiveness on the ground for the repeated failures to break through Vandergrift's lines. When Ichiki's forces were wiped out on August 20th to 21st, he assumed that the men had fallen under attack on the beachhead and should have advanced recklessly. The admiral had it exactly wrong. Ichiki had indeed advanced recklessly against a heavily fortified riverbank, and his 800 men had been annihilated by the Marines' withering defensive fire.

After what the Marines called the Battle of the Bloody Ridge in mid-September, when General Kawaguchi's forces were repulsed with heavy losses and forced to retreat to the west, Ugaki's army liaison seemed at a loss about what to do. Ugaki surmised that the army had made light of the enemy too much, which was true enough, but neither he nor his army counterparts suspected that their estimates of American troop strength on Guadalcanal were too low. The Japanese believed that about 7,500 Marines were on the island. Actually, there were more than 11,000, and another 4,000 arrived on September 18th.

With growing naval and army forces at their disposal, the Japanese commanders prepared an all-out campaign to break the six-week deadlock and seize the airfield. The pressure for a decisive victory emanated from the throne itself. After the war, Hirohito would portray himself as a powerless figurehead. But in September and October of 1942, he continually goaded his army and navy ministers to take the offensive and drive the Americans off Guadalcanal. Appeals from the Showa Tenno, Emperor of the era of illustrious peace, light, and harmony, were tantamount to commands handed down from heaven. But neither the army nor the navy needed much encouragement. The struggle for the island had become an issue of national will. The Japanese army in particular had suffered an intolerable loss of face. Two elite Japanese army detachments had been defeated by enemy troops that they had insisted on holding in contempt.

In early October, Imperial General Headquarters committed a full division of the 17th Army, some 20,000 troops, to the campaign. The Navy's 11th Air Fleet was heavily reinforced. A new fighter strip at Buin on southern Bougainville was made operational. And a new commander-in-chief, Vice Admiral Ginichi Kusaka, was dispatched to assume command in Rabaul. The Navy would redouble and intensify its night bombardments, dispatching the battleships Kongo and Haruna with a large escort of cruisers and destroyers to pulverize Henderson Field with 14-inch anti-personnel shells.

On October 11th, 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, 10 cruisers, and 30 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."

Chester Nimitz, the 57-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 7th, 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 into 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: 2 and a half million men and more than a thousand ships. So these daily meetings were an imposition 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."

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 Gormley 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, CINCPAC threw everything he could into the operation. He knew that the position on Guadalcanal was precarious, but he thought Gormley'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." He could have made the same point about the struggle for Guadalcanal.

On September 24th, 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 lock and staggered into the sky, then banked south and set a heading for tiny Palmyra, 960 mi 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 crosswinds, 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 mi, but it was strongly armed and therefore better prepared than the Catalina PBY to ward off unfriendly advances by enemy fighters.

Less than 200 mi 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 mi southwest of Palmyra, passed without incident. And there, Nimitz rendezvoused with Admiral McCain, who had been relieved as COMAIRSOAPAC and was on his way north. McCain gave CINCPAC his views about the airfight for Guadalcanal. He was more upbeat than Gormley, 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 Nouméa on the afternoon of September 28th and went straight into a conference on Gormley's flagship, the transport Argonne, at 4:30 p.m. Gormley did not look well. Nimitz had seen symptoms of fatigue in leaders before. In May, Admiral Halsey had been laid low by a skin breakout after several months of continuous command of a carrier task force. It was typically manifested in weight loss and a slightly manic gleam in the eyes. Gormley 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, Gormley had chosen to run his command from his overcrowded and sweltering flagship berthed at a pier in Dumbéa Bay. Nimitz learned that Gormley had not left the ship in a month. When a staff officer handed Gormley 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?" The COMSOPAC's nerves were brittle. He was not looking after his physical or mental health.

The September 28th 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 Gormley, Turner, and Major General Millard F. Harmon, commanding general of US Army forces in the theater. General Henry "Hap" Arnold, the ranking officer of the United States Army Air Forces 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 Gormley and asked for a briefing on the state of play.

The chief problem with Guadalcanal, said Gormley, 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 ship's manifests did not provide an accurate record of what cargos they carried or where they were stowed. A lack of advanced port facilities in Nouméa 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." 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.

The 3-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. Gormley's naval forces should operate farther west, he said, to counter Japanese moves toward those positions. Excerpts from CINCPAC staff notes summarize the exchange that followed:

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

Sutherland: General MacArthur wants Gormley to cover the whole area. Fleet shouldn't be restricted to a line. Should base more ships on Australia, including TF1, the battleships, which would be better located strategically than at Pearl.

Nimitz: TF1 must remain in Hawaii.

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

Nimitz: The [Japanese] is not happy. Shipping losses 1 million tons. AG gas 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 Gormley covering MacArthur, we must counter air with our carriers which cannot operate in restricted areas. We now have only one Hornet. Enterprise will be ready October 6th.

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 coming 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.

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 air power 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 air power 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.

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 11 to Africa. In a strongly worded private memorandum to Harry Hopkins on September 3rd, 1942, Arnold expressed growing apprehension over the dispersal of American air power to peripheral theaters and reminded Hopkins that the war was to be fought according to the Germany First strategy. "I can 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 the air campaign against the industrial heartland of Germany. 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."

Churchill was receiving similar jeremiads from his RAF commanders. Nor was this the attitude of Pacific localism limited to the Navy. When Arnold met with MacArthur in Brisbane the following day, the imperious Commander-in-Chief of the Southwest Pacific Area demanded 500 more planes of any kind. When Arnold referred to commitments in Europe, MacArthur offered his professional opinion that a sufficient number of air bases could never be established in England to provide air cover for a second front. Arnold was incredulous. Germany First was the sanctioned basis of the Allies' entire global strategy. And here was a major Allied theater commander who did not accept it, even in theory. All subordinate commands, Arnold concluded, ought to be indoctrinated with the idea that "there is a United States plan, an Allied plan for winning the war, and all must conform to it."

On the afternoon of September 29th, Nimitz boarded his Coronado for the three-hour flight to Espiritu Santo, the advanced air and supply base that provided direct support to the garrison on Guadalcanal. There he was greeted by Admiral Aubrey "Jake" Fitch, who had succeeded McCain as the commander of SOPAC Air Forces. Nimitz could not have been surprised by the retrograde conditions at Santo. He had been well informed of circumstances on the airfield since it had been hewn out of the jungle 2 months earlier. Still, to see it with his own eyes must have made an impression. There were no circulating runways, no traffic control, not even a control tower. The aircrews lived in primitive huts and tents, getting very little recreation or rest. They were plainly exhausted, and many were sick. At Segon Channel, he watched as fuel drums were dropped from the transports and swam into shore, then lifted onto the backs of trucks and dispersed to uncovered fuel dumps. Every day, 20,000 gallons of aviation fuel was landed on the island by these grueling means.

Nimitz awarded decorations to several Marine and Navy pilots and a Distinguished Service Medal to Fitch. Then he and his retinue boarded an Army B-17 provided by Fitch for the 620-mi hop to Guadalcanal. The B-17 had plenty of range to make the flight, and in case of a sudden ambush, the Fortress was a rugged and well-defended airplane, but the young pilot flew into a weather front and soon admitted that he was not sure of his position. That was a gentle way of saying he was lost in the lowering white mist. All hands scanned the seascape below. Lieutenant Arthur Lamar fished a National Geographic map of the South Pacific out of his bag and tried to match it up to the contours of passing islands. They found Guadalcanal and flew up the north coast. Finally, they glimpsed the small, muddy airfield littered with junked airplanes and surrounded by bomb craters and tent camps. A torrential rain was beating down as the aircraft sloshed and skidded to the edge of the runway. Nimitz stepped down into the downpour and was greeted by Vandergrift.

As the skies cleared that afternoon, the general took the admiral on a tour of the defense perimeter. Nimitz met several of the regimental commanders who spoke in low tones about the action they had seen and their preparations for the future. He observed the still unburied hundreds of Japanese dead strewn across the hill south of Edson's Ridge. In the Pagoda, General Geiger briefed him on the air campaign, and Nimitz took in the exhausted and hunted appearance of the airmen who had been on the island for a month or more. At the field hospital, he spoke to men wounded in battle and men laid low by malaria or other tropical ailments. "The grim appearance of the command noticeably impressed him," Vandergrift wrote of his visitor. "I was not exactly sorry, since I wanted Nimitz to see what we were up against."

The next morning, Nimitz was to award decorations, and Vandergrift's staff was up late that night writing citations. Lieutenant Herbert L. Marilat found the entire process shockingly arbitrary. The number of decorations to be handed out, he noted, was not determined by any impartial standard of heroism, but by the number and types of medals the admiral totes along. Officers lobbied on behalf of their units and horse-traded so that each received its share. Marginal cases were dressed up, and many deserving men were undoubtedly neglected. Marilat confided to his diary that he was relieved he did not have the responsibility to decide the awards because "there are so many real heroes here."

The ceremony took place at 6:30 a.m. in a bamboo grove in front of Vandergrift's shack. Lieutenant Lamar read the citations as the admiral went down a line of Marines and pinned medals to chests. The solemnity of the occasion was broken by some singing and shouting of Marines up the hill who were ignorant that a ceremony was taking place and had to be told to quiet down. A sergeant keeled over in a dead faint as Nimitz approached to pin a medal on his chest. When he came to, he apologized and explained that he had never seen a four-star admiral before and he was scared to death. Vandergrift was genuinely surprised and moved when he received the Navy Cross.

The flight back to Espiritu Santo was delayed by the condition of Henderson Field, which remained a quagmire after the previous day's downpour. 1,000 ft of the runway still lacked steel matting. The first of the two planes to attempt takeoff, it carried Nimitz, could not get airborne. It skidded down the last unmatted section of the strip, did a ground loop, and came to a stop at the edge of a ravine. Nimitz descended from the plane and went to lunch with Vandergrift. They would wait for the sun to dry the strip. At midday, they tried again, and this time the Fortress wobbled into the sky and droned away to the east.

The Marines endured. They suffered the enervating heat and humidity, the endless torture of insects, the hours of pelting rains that swamped their foxholes and tent camps. They sweated and shivered through the malarial fevers. When they had an hour or so of relief, they took a bar of soap and went down to the Lunga River. With their mates manning machine guns and watching for enemy soldiers or estuarine crocodiles, they scrubbed their bodies and their dungarees, washing themselves as thoroughly as they could in the brown water. But no amount of scrubbing did away with the jungle rot, the blisters and open sores that accumulated on their wrists, in their armpits, under their testicles. Scratching made it worse, and they warned themselves and each other not to scratch, but sooner or later the temptation overcame the will to resist. The prickly heat, as it was called, was just another inescapable annoyance of life on the stinking, god-forsaken island.

The Marines carried away their dead and buried them respectfully, marking their graves with wooden crosses or a stick with a helmet slung on top. They stripped the Japanese dead of whatever valuables or interesting souvenirs were found on their persons and even smashed out their gold teeth and pocketed them as spoils of war. The stench of their rotting flesh wafted on the breeze. The unburied bodies were overrun with ants. In time, nothing would be left but polished bone.

Since August 9th, they had been asking one another, "Where's the Navy?" It was a rhetorical question, of course.

They were Marines. They could rely on no one but themselves. The First Marine Division had become the First Maroon Division. USMC stood for Uncle Sam's miserable children. They had been played for suckers.

By training and doctrine, they were elite shock troops, amphibious specialists brought in to storm an enemy beach and secure a beach head. They had done their job. They were not supposed to be left to defend that beach head for months on end. The plan, as the officers and men had always understood it, called for the army to come in behind them and take over the position. The Marines would be pulled back to a rear area for a period of rest, recuperation, and additional training, and later deployed to another amphibious attack on another island closer to Tokyo.

2 months after the invasion of Guadal Canal, a new question was on the lips of every marine. Where's the army? It was another rhetorical question. Of course, it was their lot to be left behind as they had been at Wake Island. They were George, and the sister services had agreed to let George do it. Singing voices rose in bitter unison from the foxholes. Their profane anthem had been adapted from the old British expeditionary soldiers song, Bless them all.

They sent for the navy to come to Tulagi. The gallant navy agreed with 1,000 sections in different directions. My god, what a up stampede.

"Them all. Them all. The long and the short and the tall. All the swabies and dog faces, too. All the generals. And above all, you. So, we're saying goodbye to them all. As back to our foxholes we crawl. There will be no promotion on MechAthur's ocean, so cheer up Marines. Them all."

Turner's handful of suitable attack transports continued irregular runs between Numea, Port Villa, Eat, Espirus Santo, and Guadal Canal. But the supply shortfalls were endemic. Food was often in dangerously low reserve, and although the Marines were never reduced to a starving condition, they were required to subsist on reduced rations, which sapped their energy and strength. Everyone lost weight, as much as 20 to 30 lb.

Ammunition was landed on Lunga Point and then distributed to caches as directed by the quartermaster. The reserves were usually low enough that the Marines had to be warned not to waste a shot unless they were sure of hitting an enemy soldier. Even when the transports arrived in Ironbottom Sound, always a welcome sight, unloading them into the rudimentary port facilities at Lunga Point required meticulous attention and backbreaking labor. Constant harassment by Japanese air attacks required the ships to raise anchor and maneuver at high speed in the sound, losing precious hours.

The single most critical shortage in early October was aviation gasoline. So critical was the AG gas situation that 55gall fuel drums were flown into Henderson on DC3 transports.

The Tokyo Express, variously known to the Marines as the Cactus Express or the Tojo Express, landed small numbers of Japanese troop reinforcements and supplies on the beaches west of the American perimeter night after night. Tanaka's fast destroyers continued to do double duty as transports. Their speed allowed them to hang back until nightfall far up the slot beyond the flying range of the Hendersonbased bombers and then race in under cover of darkness. If they unloaded quickly enough, the destroyers managed to lob a few shells into the marine perimeter and then race westward to be out of range again by daybreak. But Tanaka's destroyers could not land an entire division, at least not on the timetable demanded by the ambitious Japanese plans.

Lieutenant General Harukichi Hayakutake, commander of the 17th Army, needed proper troop transports to do the job. The Japanese had learned through bitter experience that they could not bring transports into Ironbottom Sound as long as planes based at Henderson Field could attack them as they approached. It followed that the Japanese must find some means of putting Henderson out of business long enough to land a division of troops. They had been trying to do exactly that for 2 months and thus far failed. This time they would not fail, or to put it more precisely, they could not fail because the emperor himself had insisted that they succeed.

Vandergrift repeatedly appealed for more troop reinforcements, but Admiral Turner, who stood above him in the chain of command, held very different ideas about the deployment of ground forces. Again and again, the two commanders found themselves at cross purposes. Turner was inclined to disperse ground forces across many islands or beach heads, whereas Vandergrift and his staff preferred the virtues of concentration. The admiral obstinately insisted on holding back the second Marines assigned to replace the seventh Marines which had been deployed in Samoa for a subsequent landing on Indeni in the Santa Cruz Islands 300 m east of Guadal Canal. Vandergri's officers thought Indeni irrelevant and urged Turner to hold troops in reserve to reinforce Lunga if the fight grew hotter than expected.

Only after the admiral had personally witnessed the ferocious combined ground assault and naval bombardment of Henderson on September 11th, taking a bottle of scotch with him to his foxhole, as one Marine staff officer noted, did he agree to deliver the regiment to Lunga. As for the Marines already on the island, Turner believed that they should take the offensive on September 28th. He urged Vandergrift to storm across the Matonic River and hunt down the nests of enemy troops lurking along the coast to the west. "I believe you are in a position to take some chances and go after them hard."

The embattled Marines were understandably irked by the suggestion that they had been too passive. Moreover, a ground offensive at that stage of the campaign was neither feasible nor sensible. The first division lacked the equipment, weaponry, and ammunition to pursue the Japanese down the coast. The Marines controlled the island's only airfield, and their overriding priority should be to defend that asset and keep it supplied with adequate air power. The Japanese, true to form, would continue to hurl themselves against the well-fortified American lines. And if those lines held, the attackers would suffer disastrous losses as they had in the past. But Turner would not be dissuaded.

In early October, the argument flared up again over the deployment of the 164th Infantry Regiment of the US Army's America Division. Vandergrift wanted the regiment on Guadal Canal as reinforcement. Turner wanted to land it on Indane. Gormley at first gave tentative approval to Turner's plan, but General Harmon on October 6th weighed in strongly in favor of sending it to Guadal Canal. "In Denny, he told Gormley, would be a diversion from the main effort and dispersion of force. He warned that the is capable of retaking Cactus Ringbolt Guadal Canal Tagi and will do so in the near future unless it is materially strengthened." Gormley overruled Turner and the 164th was landed at Lunga Point on October 13th.

The landing of the American troops led to another night naval action offso island. Eerily similar to the battle of Tsavo Island 2 months earlier, but with a result more pleasing to the Americans. The transports carrying the Americal troops had been accompanied by a small task force of four cruisers and five destroyers under the command of Rear Admiral Norman Scott. On the night of October 11th to 12th, Scots warships ambushed a Japanese column of three cruisers and two destroyers as they headed into Iron Bottom Sound to bombard Henderson Field. The surprise attack destroyed a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer and heavily damaged another cruiser. The Japanese commander, Rear Admiral Aitomo Goto, was critically wounded and later died. Scott lost a destroyer, the Duncan, and suffered damage to the cruisers Boise and Salt Lake City.

The short, vicious fight, which would pass into history as the Battle of Cape Esperants, known in Japan as the second battle of Tsavo Island, was a tactical victory for the Americans, though not by the margin they apparently believed. Scott reported that he had sunk three Japanese cruisers and four destroyers. That inflated result was reported as fact in the American press. But the victory, such as it was, did little good for the Marines. Later the same night, another of Tanaka's convoys successfully landed troop reinforcements and supplies, including artillery field pieces, near the Cape that gave the battle its name. Two nights later, a larger Japanese surface force would pour the heaviest barrage of the campaign down on Henderson Field.

Between bombing raids by day and naval shelling by night, nothing could be done to stop the Japanese from punching holes in Henderson Field. But the airfield was kept in reasonably good repair by the diligent exertions of the CBS who filled in the craters as soon as they appeared. Each CB unit manned a repair station directly alongside the airfield. When a bomb landed on the runway, the nearest unit raced to the smoking hole, tore up the ruined Marston matting, and hauled it away. They dumped dirt and gravel into the hole from a dump truck, then hauled in the replacement steel, and laid it over the fill. "We found that a 500 lb bomb would tear up 1,500 square ft of a Marston mat," said one. "So, we placed packages of this quantity of mat along the strip, like extra rails along a railroad." When the work was interrupted by low-flying strafing zeros, they dived for cover into trenches alongside the field or into the bomb crater itself, if that was possible.

Marine, Navy, and Army Air Reinforcements flew in every few days to replace aircraft lost or damaged beyond the possibility of repair. The Cactus Air Force now included more than a dozen USAF pursuit planes, but the workh horses of the air campaign remained the carrier type aircraft, F4F Wildcats, SBD Dauntlesses, and TBF Avengers flown by Marine and Navy air crews. Aircraft designed to operate from carriers were equipped with landing gear that could sustain plenty of punishment, and that suited them to a beaten up airfield like Henderson. In a month on Guadal Canal, the Navy pilots flew more combat hours than they would fly during 6 months of typical carrier operations. The bombers and torpedo planes flew long daily scouting missions to the Northwest. In the late afternoon, they might discover Japanese shipping inbound for Guadal Canal, the Tokyo Express coming down Broadway, and if they did, General Guyger launched an air strike with whatever planes he could muster.

Those long daily flights up the alley were grueling and dangerous, and not only because the Japanese shot back. In the Solomons, visibility could deteriorate quickly and at any time. Swed Larson badgered his VT8 pilots to write down their navigational checkpoints. Memory was unreliable, especially under the strain of combat flying. "You would see points of land in low visibility when the Russell Islands or the lower tip of the New Georgia Islands would look like Cape Esperants. The first thing you knew if you were not actually checking yourself in speed, time, and distance, you would be lost. It's very easy to do." When the cumulus clouds descended almost to sea level, the aviators flew on instruments in formation shrouded in mist and rain showers. They struggled to maintain contact with their wingmen, keeping their eyes locked on the blue exhaust flames of the planes ahead. When one young TBF pilot lost visual contact with the plane ahead, he would rudder back and forth until I felt the slipstream, and then I crept slowly straight ahead until I picked the exhaust up again. Planes in formation drifted apart, lost contact, and turned back alone. Now and again, flashes of light cut through the gloom. Were they gunfire flashes, lightning, flares? Was a friendly plane flashing his running lights to guide his wingmen back in? It was often hard to tell. Under the stress of such flying, pilots sometimes misread their altimeters and flew into the sea.

Four or five weeks of daily combat flying was about the limit of the aviator's endurance. The routine was physically, mentally, and emotionally punishing. After 6 weeks, even the toughest among them seemed to buckle under the strain. Aviation and medical authorities were coming to accept that pilot fatigue was a real and unavoidable syndrome that must be countered by rotating squadrons out of the theater every 4 to 6 weeks. Aviators pushed past the limit, became listless, haggarded, and holloweyed. They lost weight rapidly, even if well-fed. They crashed more often or made navigation errors and got lost. Their reflexes slowed and their aggressiveness diminished. In extreme cases, pilots were known to crawl under the wings of their airplanes, curl up in a fetal position, and cry like children. When coaxing and threats failed, they had to be literally kicked until they staggered to their feet and climbed back into their cockpits.

Admiral Kelly Turner had once dismissed talk of pilot fatigue, supposing it sounded too much like coddling, but now he declared himself a believer. "When the Medicico used to tell us about pilot fatigue, I used to think they were old fuds, but now I know what they meant. There's a point where you just get to be no good. You're shot to the devil and there's nothing you can do about it." Joe Foss, one of the mentally toughest aviators in the South Pacific, told a Navy panel that pilots could endure no more than 6 weeks in combat. "The fourth week you start to slip," he said. "And the fifth week, you'll lose a lot of men that are really good men that just get a little bit tired and dope off. So that will result in their being shot down." Moreover, Foss added, "When pilots were rotated back into the theater after an extended rest, you'll find that you tire a lot easier. On our second trip in, I noticed that the second week the boys seemed to be failing again."

The Stoic Larsson took a less forgiving view. He believed the fault was to be found in poor training and leadership. Fear was natural and inevitable, but it had to be managed. If the pilots understood their own fear and anticipated it, they would be better prepared to master it. Speaking for himself, Larsson observed, "I know that I felt a reaction to my first engagement for a couple of days afterwards. You get filled up with a lot of nervous tension which gradually wears off. After we had made a few attacks on Guadal Canal, however, the nervous reaction would last only from 10 to 15 minutes after you landed. That is, you were excited and keyed up. Then it would die away and you wouldn't feel especially tired." Larsson suggested a whiskey ration at the end of each flight. "I know that might sound strange, but if you give a man a drink of whiskey after an attack, he thinks it's fine. Those little extra privileges make the men feel a hell of a lot better."

Afterward, the Marines would remember it simply as the night. It was the night October 13th to 14th when the battleships Congo and Haruna stood into Ironbottom Sound and rained 14-in shells down on Henderson Field for an hour and a half. The Marines had long since grown accustomed to night bombardments, but never before had they been on the receiving end of such monstrous projectiles, which made every previous encounter seem pickyune by comparison. Each of the two battleships had been armed with 500 rounds of a new type of shell designed to inflict the greatest possible damage on parked aircraft and fortified positions. Firing tests in Truck Lagoon had demonstrated that these shells, a thin casing loaded with incendiary and shrapnel instantaneously fused, were most effective when striking the target at an angle of 25°. That gave the Congo and Haruna their ideal firing range, 16,000 m or about 10 mi. At that distance, the American shore batteries had no prospect of returning effective fire.

The night had been preceded by an afternoon of relentless and unusually heavy air strikes. For some reason, coast watcher alerts had not been timely, and several F4F Wildcats were caught on the ground and destroyed. Aerial bombing punched craters in Henderson Field and the auxiliary grass field at Fighter 1. An avas fuel dump took a direct hit and went up in a mushroom cloud of blue orange flame. At sunset, when the western sky lit up in a typically majestic palette of tropical colors, a new sound was heard to the west. Pistol Pete, the Marine's nickname for a Japanese 150 mm artillery battery, was shelling the airfield from an unseen position at the base of Mount Austin. General Guyer ordered his grounded planes to taxi to Fighter One out of range. As darkness fell, Japanese float planes circled overhead and dropped stray bombs here or there. Nothing more obnoxious than usual. Shortly after 11, the sirens signaled condition green, all clear, and men dragged themselves out of the foxholes and dugouts and back to wherever they were sleeping. Pistol Pete was intermittently active throughout the night. Men snatched sleep in 20 to 30 minute increments. At about 1, the siren sounded condition red, and men went wearily back to their shelters. At 1:30 a.m., a cruiser plane dropped a flare, and then a star shell fired from a ship offshore, burst directly over the airfield. Then came an ascending scream, often compared to a freight train's whistle and a series of gigantic detonations that seemed to turn the night into day. They were, Lieutenant Marilat recorded in his diary, the heaviest blasts I have ever heard. Each explosion gouged a truckload of soil out of the ground and flung it into the air. Entire trenches were buried in showers of earth and rock. The air was choked with dust and smoke that worked its way into the men's noses, ears, eyes, and throats.

Enson Mirs was in a foxhole with several other pilots. "We could see the flash from a salvo light the sky, hear the report, then the whistle of the shells, and finally the terrible crack crack of the shell exploding. Coconut trees split off and crashed to the ground. Shrapnel worred through the air. A few duds came crashing and bounding through the jungle without exploding. We smelled the powder of detonating shells. The sky was now ghostly, now brilliant with fires which had been started and with pinwheel star shells. Some of the shells hit not more than 20 or 30 ft from our dugout. When a big one struck, the walls of the dugout trembled the way chocolate pudding does when someone spats it with a spoon." Even in the deepest and best constructed bomb shelters, the immense concussions lifted men into the air and hurled them against the walls. A crowded dugout was preferable to an empty one. Where there were enough men, they could hang on to one another for mutual support. But if a man found himself alone, a CB noted, "you'd rattle around in your foxhole like a pingpong ball."

General Vandergrift and several of his staff were in the command posts bomb shelter when an explosion outside bowled us down like a row of tenpins. The general picked himself up unheard except in dignity. Each salvo shook dirt loose from the coconut log roofs. Colonel Twining recalled that the earth seemed to turn to the consistency of jello, making it difficult to move or even remain upright. At the height of the barrage, some of the men in Mess's shelter laughed uncontrollably. One pilot was overcome with violent trembling. Another struggled physically to burrow under the other men. The top of a nearby tree was severed from its trunk and crashed down across the foxhole.

When the big guns fell silent at about 3:00 a.m., men on the ground could make out the familiar rattle of washing machine Charlie overhead. Bombs continued to fall at erratic intervals for the rest of the night. Those blasts were puny compared to the battleship shells, but they were steady and dangerous. No one slept.

Vandergrift vowed that he would never judge a man suffering from combat fatigue or shell shock. "No one who has not suffered under that kind of bombardment," he wrote, "can easily grasp a sensation compounded of frustration, helplessness, fear, and in case of close hits, shock."

Dawn exposed the carnage. Blur-eyed men stumbled out of their trenches and dugouts, some dressed and some half- naked, some barefoot and some bleeding. They gratefully sipped coffee brewed in fuel drums, the bitter brown fluid comforting their jangled nerves. Sifting through the wreckage, men found heavy steel base plates larger than dinner plates, and sections of 14-in casing, some weighing nearly 20 lb. Dugouts adjoining the airfield were entirely buried by earth and trees torn out of the ground and men still trapped inside had to be excavated. Martin Clemens discovered within a 100yard radius of his position, six tremendous craters, any one of which could have hidden a jeep.

Blackened, smoking, deformed lumps of aluminum wreckage occupied the aircraft parking areas around Henderson Field. An inventory of the Cactus Air Force revealed that five SBDs and perhaps seven or eight Wildcats remained in flyable condition. No Avenger could fly without major repairs. VT8's chief mechanic judged all but three TBFs a total loss. And of the three that might be salvaged, only one could be repaired inside of a week. The surviving planes had to be dispersed to less vulnerable positions and if possible hidden from the enemy. Wrecked planes were lined up in neat rows, wing tip to wing tip, in hopes of diverting the enemy's attention. A new aircraft parking area was established near the eastern extremity of the perimeter and a strong force of Marines posted to guard it.

Several of the Avenger airmen, made redundant by the loss of their machines, walked back to their camp and found it a near complete loss. Every tent had either vanished or been left in a heap of shreds, and all their contents of mosquito netting, CS, tables, and papers and luggage had been riddled and tangled and scattered by shrapnel holes and explosions. The survivors were tense, but also a bit giddy. Enson Robert E. Ree Jr. drew a laugh from his squadron mates by pulling the corners of his eyes toward his ears and saying, "So sorry. Which way to Henderson Field, please?"

Hundreds of drums of precious a gas had gone up in flames. An urgent appeal went out to quarter masters and supply officers to hunt down any reserves. Many small fuel dumps had been dispersed and hidden in small caches around the field and in the woods. Several hundred drums were discovered and another 200 were transferred from Tulagi. At one point, Guyger reported that his entire reserve had been pumped into the tanks of the flyable planes on the island. Another night of similar bombardment, he warned, might put the entire air force out of action.

41 men lay dead. That figure was lower than it might have been, a testament to the depth and strength of the bomb shelters and the determination of all to keep their heads down for the duration of the barrage. One dugout took a direct hit, killing nine men at one blow. A newly arrived Marine dive bombing squadron had lost both its commanding officer and its executive officer. Heavy air attacks, artillery fire, and nighttime naval barges, though not by battleships, continued throughout the next several days and nights.

On the morning of October 15th, Americans standing on the bluff above Kukum watched six Japanese troop transports brazenly unloading off Tasapuranga about 10 mi west. Japanese destroyers patrolled protectively in the sound little more than a mile offshore. Clemens observed the incoming troops through his field glasses as they mustered in smart lines. He could not tell how many there were, but their numbers certainly ran into the thousands. Guyger managed to throw his few operable SBDs against the Japanese transports and set to a fire, but only after they had unloaded their cargos and troop reinforcements.

That midocctober was the bleakest moment of the campaign. The long shadows of Baton and Wake Island were cast across the Lunga perimeter. Many men seemed dazed and listless and gazed vaguely off into the distance. The Marines called it the thousandy stare. Aviators who had lost their planes collected whatever weapons they could find and join the infantry men in the trenches. Since August 7th, the besieged Marines had buckled themselves up with mortant humor and a brrawy espree decor. Now increasingly they flared up at one another and exchanged heated words over small annoyances. "Everyone made mistakes," wrote Colonel Twining. "Orders miscarried. Communications failed. Execution was sluggish."

The Japanese army, now heavily reinforced on the western flank, began probing attacks along the Matanic River. Vandergrift fortified his lines, but he was not entirely confident they would withstand a concerted assault. Retreat and even surrender became a thinkable prospect. D2, the First Division intelligence staff, began burning their classified records. Units made plans to melt into the jungle hills, live off the land, and wage a guerilla war as long as they could. "We all feared defeat and capture, I think," recalled Tony Bick, an F4F crew chief. "We were afraid they were going to leave us there." A Navy air officer, Lieutenant Commander John E. Lawrence, recalled the insidious effects of the hopelessness, the feeling that nobody gave a curse whether we lived or died. "It soaked into you until you couldn't trust your own mind."

According to Twining's postwar memoir, Gormley authorized Vandergrift to surrender his forces if the position became hopeless. No such dispatch has survived, but it is precisely the sort of document one might expect to slip into oblivion. Among the first division staff, there was hush talk of a last stand. Vandergrift ordered contingency plans for a fighting retreat up the Lunga River. Twining studied the issue and recommended another option, moving the Marines down the coast to the east, where they could establish interim defensive lines at each river and preserve the possibility of evacuation by sea.

The despair reached all the way back to the United States. The New York Times wrote about the Guadal Canal campaign in a validtory tone. Speaking to reporters in Washington, Secretary Knox refused to guarantee that the island could be held. He had been embarrassed by his boastful confidence immediately before the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor and was determined not to commit another such gaff.

If the grim dispatches from Guadal Canal were not enough, Admiral Gormley was badly shaken by an October 16th aerial sighting report placing a Japanese aircraft carrier just to the west of Indeni, an island that lay 330 mi east of Henderson Field dangerously near the supply route between Espirto Santo and Guadal Canal. The report was an error and was soon corrected, but not before it elicited from Gormley a pitiable kur to Nimitz and King. He cabled. "This appears to be allout enemy effort against cactus, possibly other positions also. My forces totally inadequate to meet situation. Urgently request all aviation reinforcement possible."

The embattled South Pacific commander had never really bought into the Watchtower offensive. King had thrown it into his lap when he was still setting up the rudiments of his new command before he had assembled an adequate staff or even established a permanent headquarters. His logistical problems were undoubtedly more severe than those faced by any other Allied theater commander. But Gormley had made a bad habit of asking for reinforcements that he knew did not exist. From the start of the campaign, he and his staff had seemed stressed and uncertain. When the French colonialists at Numea had resisted providing an administrative building, he had accepted the rebuff with a born diplomat's equinimity and operated from the cramped and fetted precincts of his flagship. He had failed to appear in person at vital command summits, particularly the planning conference on board the Saratoga July 26th that preceded the landing at Guadal Canal. Unlike McCain, Turner, Harmon, and Nimttz, he had never set foot on Guadal Canal.

During his recent inspection tour, Nimttz had observed his old friend closely. His observations confirmed the reports that he must have been gathering from many sources. Gormley was not up to the job. He would have to be relieved and replaced.

No less a figure than FDR bore a share of the responsibility. Gormley had been special naval observer in London until he was replaced in that job by Admiral Harold Betty Stark who in turn yielded the job of Chief of Naval Operations CNO to King. Stark's transfer to London in April 1942 was really a face-saving demotion that allowed King to wield simultaneously the two most powerful commands in the Navy, CNO and Kinch. But it put Gormley out of a job and that didn't sit right with the president who had known the admiral for more than a quarter of a century. FDR asked his naval aid, Commander John L. McCrae, "What's going to happen to Gormley?" McCrae had no idea and said so, adding that Gormley was likely to lose his temporary three-star rank and revert to his permanent rank of Rear Admiral. FDR replied, "Well, tell Ernie King for me that I think it rather unfair because we have to find a place for Stark that Gormley is to lose his rank as vice admiral." Coming from the commanderin-chief, that amounted to an order to find Gormley another three-star billet.

In retrospect, Nimttz should probably have relieved Gormley in September during or immediately after his inspection tour to the South Pacific. There is evidence that King and Nimttz had discussed a change at SOPAC as early as their meeting in San Francisco on September 7th. But Gormley was an honorable officer who had given 40 years of his life to the service. He had been one of the stars of his class, a man like Nimitz and King whose talent, dedication and hard work had marked him at an early age for rapid promotion. There was no way around the fact that relieving him would leave the stain of failure on his career and legacy. It was a painful duty to strike such a blow against a brother officer and Nimttz hesitated to do it.

In a meeting at Pearl Harbor on October 15th, senior members of the Sinkpack staff put the issue to their boss with a forcefulness and cander that crept up to the edge of insubordination. According to fleet intelligence officer Edwin Leighton, they urged that personalities should be set aside and that the commander South Pacific should be replaced by someone who could do a more effective job. Whatever the merits of their case, that was not the way things were supposed to be done in the Navy, and Nimmits hotly reprimanded them for mutiny. Undeterred, a delegation of officers reiterated their case later that night during a visit to Nimitz's Makalapa quarters where the Sinkpack greeted them in his pajamas. Bill Hollyy had orders to take over command of the carrier task forces and was at that moment on route to the South Pacific. It would be a simple matter of directing Hollyy to Numea and then ordering him to relieve Gormley as Koopac. Nimitz was subdued but non-committal.

The following morning came Gormley's dispatch 160440 bewailing his totally inadequate forces. Nimttz fired off an ultra secret dispatch for King's eyes only. "In view Gormley's 160440 and other indications including some noted during my visit. I have under consideration his relief by Hollyy at earliest practicable time. Request your comment." King briefly replied approved. Hollyy overnighting at Canton Island was directed to fly directly to Numea. His Coronado let down in the harbor at 2:00 p.m. on October 18th. A whaleboat carrying Gormley's flag lieutenant came alongside and the lieutenant handed Hollyy a sealed envelope inside of which was another sealed envelope marked secret. It was a dispatch from Nimttz directing Hollyy to relieve Gormley as comm soapac immediately. One of Hollyy's staff recorded the admiral's exact words. "Jesus Christ and General Jackson. This is the hottest potato they ever handed me."

Chapter 6. The memoirs, diaries, and oral histories are unanimously agreed. The news that Hollyy had taken charge brought a sudden upwelling in morale through the theater. "I'll never forget it," recalled the Navy air officer on Guadal Canal. "One minute we were too limp with malaria to crawl out of our foxholes. The next we were running around whooping like kids. If morale had been enough, we'd have won the war right there."

Hollyy was known as an aggressive, emotional, risk-taking warrior who loved nothing more than to attack. The Marines called him a rough brush, that is, an artist who painted in big strokes rather than a draftsman who drew fine lines. He would not be deterred by subtle arguments of strategy and tactics. He would simply throw everything he had at the enemy and slug it out until the issue was decided. The rough brush was an old and venerated tradition of American naval leadership dating back to John Paul Jones's "I have not yet begun to fight," James Lawrence's "Don't Give Up the Ship," and David Farragut's "Damn the Torpedoes Full Speed Ahead." In October 1942, it was precisely the attitude needed in the South Pacific. It lifted men's spirits and gave them hope.

But it is also worth considering how close the Allies came to the brink of ruinous defeat in the Solomons. If the fortunes of war had turned a bit differently in the climactic naval battles of late October and November, American sea power might have been garited and the Marines cut off and overrun. In that case, Hollyy's characteristic daring and aggression would have been condemned as unreasoning and rash, as indeed it would be two years later in the battle of Lady Gulf.

At the very outset of his command, the new come Soac faced a stark choice. He could push all his chips into the middle of the table, or he could fold and wait to be dealt a better hand. It was his duty to give due consideration to the second option, demoralizing as it was. His long-term chief of staff, Admiral Robert B. Carney, maintained that Hollyy was never quite as mad cap or impulsive as the newspapers like to portray him. His garish boasts and his exhortations to kill more Japs and keep them dying were always aimed down the ranks as a spur to morale.

When Vandergrift flew into Numea for a command summit on October 23rd, Hollyy listened more than he spoke. He listened to Vandagramrift, then to Turner. He let silence fall over the wardrobe while he smoked a cigarette, drumed his fingers on the table, and turned the issues over in his mind. Finally, he asked the general without fanfare. "Can you hold?" "Yes, I can hold," Vandergrift replied. "But I have to have more active support than I have been getting." Hollyy promised to send everything he had.

It was evident that a big Japanese naval offensive was shaping up. Communications intelligence was far from perfect at the moment, but the new comm soapac knew the Japanese fleet would include more than two flattops, perhaps as many as four, and a large force of surface ships, including at least four battleships. Holly had two carrier task forces built around the Hornet and Enterprise. The latter, having been damaged in August and patched up at Pearl Harbor, rendevued with the Hornet northwest of Espiratu Santo at 3:45 p.m. on October 24th. The two groups were combined into Task Force 61 under the command of Admiral Thomas C. Concincaid. The two carriers, the battleship South Dakota, six cruisers, and 14 destroyers. That force was little more than half the size of the Japanese fleet descending on the region.

In an aggressive and potentially dangerous move, Hollyy threw virtually everything he had into the fight. Concincaid was ordered to sweep north of the Santa Cruz Islands and seek battle with the enemy.

Radio monitors on the Yamato had picked up a United Press report broadcast from Hawaii referring to plans in the making for a major sea and air battle soon near the Solomons. It did not escape Admiral Ugaki's attention that Americans were about to go to the polls for midterm congressional elections. Would FDR order a major operation to coincide with America's Navy Day, October 27th, in hopes of stirring up voter support for his party? That chain of reasoning was badly flawed, but the combined fleet staff had nonetheless surmised correctly that Holly would throw all available naval forces into the defense of Guadal Canal.

The Japanese army and navy gathered strength for an allout sea air ground offensive with the dual ambitions of seizing Henderson Field and wiping out the American fleet. The Japanese fleet was the largest assembled since the Midway offensive. Two fleet carriers, two light carriers, and four battleships with many supporting cruisers, destroyers, and auxiliaries. 61 ships altogether. As at midway, the Japanese plan called for a partition of naval forces into several widely separated groups. The advance or van of the Japanese fleet would be led by Vice Admiral Nouake Kondo, who flew his flag in the cruiser Atago and would include two battleships, five cruisers, 10 destroyers, and a light flattop, the Juno. A scouting line and decoy force of surface warships and one light carrier would steam about a 100 miles ahead of the two big fleet carriers, Shokaku and Sui Kakaku. As in the August battle, the Japanese commanders hoped that the Americans initial carrier air strike would fall on the scouting line. The various elements would converge on Guadal Canal after the Japanese army had broken through Vandergrift's perimeter and overrun the airfield.

The Japanese army was in force on Guadal Canal, but it continued to operate under the heavy disadvantages of poor communications and the rigors of an unforgiving jungle terrain. The scheduled assault on Vandergrift's lines was twice delayed from October 22nd to October 24th. local date. And when it began, it quickly deteriorated into a series of small, confused unit encounters. The Marines held their well-fortified lines and exacted a bloody toll on the attackers who suffered casualties at the ratio of about 7 to1.

At dawn on the morning of October 25th, however, a Japanese soldier thought he saw green white flares over Henderson. The agreed signal that the airfield had been captured, and the Japanese army radioed the defective information to Rabbal. It was relayed to Ugaki and Yamamoto, and the Yamato's towering radio antenna told Kondo and Nagumo to charge south toward the island and seek battle with the American fleet. The advanced force passed through Indispensable Strait north of Malaya. There it was intercepted by five SBDs from Guadal Canal which planted bombs on a destroyer and a light cruiser, the Yoda. The ships turned tail and ran, leaving the stricken Yoda to be abandoned and scuttled.

Task Force 61 had meanwhile advanced along the northern shores of the Santa Cruz Group and then turned southwest toward a point just east of Sun Crystal Ballal. Throughout the long daylight hours of October 25th, the two fleets steamed toward one another as air patrols reached out and probed ahead. A PBY spotted two big Japanese carriers at 11:03 a.m., but in a position 355 nautical miles from Task Force 61, far out of range. At 12:50 p.m., the sea plane tender Curtis relayed a sighting report from one of her sea planes, reporting two Japanese carriers to the northwest 360 mi away. Closing on the enemy at near maximum speed, Concaid made the chancy decision to launch a 29 plane composite strike. The planes went out to the end of their search vectors, continued 80 mi to the northwest, and finally turned back in the failing light. The F4F pilots of Fighting Squadron 10 flew for 3 and 1/2 hours at 17,000 ft, exhausting themselves, their oxygen supply, and their fuel. As they spiraled down through broken cloud cover, the Enterprise was nowhere to be seen. Running on fumes, they descended to just 15 to 20 feet above the sea until Swede Vetasa caught sight of an oil slick reflected in his own running lights. The wild cats followed that greasy trail for 45 m and found the ship. Several were forced to ditch at sea due to fuel exhaustion or crashed while trying to land on the Enterprise in darkness.

A full moon rose in the east and threw enough light across the sea to accommodate nighttime air searches. PB wise from Indeni continued to blanket the area. At 3:10 a.m., one spotted the long darkened flight deck of the Tui Kaku. Concincaid cocked his air group for a night bombing attack, and the air crews remained in their ready rooms all night. But without further confirmation of the enemy fleet position, the admiral prudently chose to keep the strike on deck until dawn.

At first light on October 26th, the two groups were only about 200 m apart. The weather was fair with clear visibility above and below a 2,000 ft layer of scattered cumulus and stratouulus clouds. The sea was smooth and the northwest breeze less than 10 knots. Passing rain squalls would continue throughout the day. Two dauntlesses ofQincaid's morning search flight discovered the Tuiho at 7:40 a.m. and attacked her directly. Both dive bombers scored, pitching their 500 lb bombs into the middle of her flight deck. The little flattop survived, but could neither launch nor recover aircraft for the remainder of the battle. About 10 minutes later, some miles north, two more Enterprise SBDs discovered the Shokaku and Sui Kakaku. They radioed the contact report and prepared to dive, but defending Zeros broke up the attack. Both planes escaped by dodging into a cloudbank.

Nagumo andQincaided now hurled their principal air strikes at one another. Strung out over 50 or 60 mi in three separated groups, the American planes were vulnerable to the concentrated attentions of the Zeros passing on a reciprocal heading. Nine Japanese fighters dived unseen out of the sun on the Enterprise torpedo planes of VT10 and sent three TBFs down in flames before the American air crews had even registered the enemy's presence. Misleading oddments of radio chatter confused and misled aviators in the trailing squadrons. The surviving Enterprise Avengers had lost altitude in their tussle with the Zeros, thus shrinking their visible horizon. Finding no carriers, they attacked the Chicuma, inflicting heavy damage on the Japanese cruiser, but failing to sinker.

At 1050, the first wave of Hornet planes converged on the Shokaku. Lieutenant Commander William J. Gus Widhelm, commander of the Hornets VS8, kept his tracers centered on a Zero coming directly toward him in a head-on run and blew the plane apart, then dived sharply to evade the oncoming debris. A second Zero darted in from a high side and fired two or more 20mm rounds into his engine with a full deflection shot. Wid Helm's engine emitted black oil smoke, then seized, and he dropped out of the battle. He ditched safely and was recovered later with his radio gunner, George D. Stokeley. Though he had been roughly handled by the Zeros, Widhelm's determination to manage his aircraft like a fighter rather than a dive bomber had diverted the enemy's attention from the remaining Hornet SBDs, which reached their attacking positions and pushed into their dives. The Shokaku, according to a VB8 radio gunner, was lit up all along her length by anti-aircraft fire like a Christmas tree. But the Dauntlesses plunged through the flack and released their 1,000lb armor-piercing bombs. They smashed through the flight deck and exploded in the interior of the ship with spectacularly destructive effect. From the bridge of a screening destroyer, Captain Tameichi saw two or three silver streaks which appeared like thunderbolts reaching toward the bulky carrier. "The whole deck bulged quietly and burst. Flames shot from the cleavages. I groaned as the flames rose and black and white smoke came belching out of the deck." By 10:30 a.m., the Americans had knocked two Japanese carriers out of action. An impressive score, even if neither ship was destroyed.

In the meantime, however, more than a 100 Japanese planes were converging on the Hornet and Enterprise. The American radar sets first detected the incoming Japanese strike at 9:05 a.m. and the task force raised speed for evasive maneuvering. The Combat Air Patrol first made contact with the enemy planes at 959 when they were at 17,000 ft altitude about 40 mi northwest of the task force. The Enterprise managed to take cover in a passing rain squall, but her disappearance diverted the full brunt of the enemy air attack to the Hornet. "Standby for diveb bombing attack," warned the Hornets loudspeakers at 9:09. And down came a long convoy of steeply diving Aichi Val dive bombers. Tearing through the sea at 28 knots, the carrier S turned radically and her anti-aircraft guns threw up a dense barrage, but several planes made accurate releases at the near suicidal altitude of 800 ft. Three 250 kg bombs crashed through the Hornet's flight deck in quick succession and exploded in the lower decks. A damaged Aichi dived vertically into the island. Its pilot apparently determined to trade his life for a chance to destroy the ship's brain center. The burning plane glanced off the stack, sheared through the signal bridge, and crashed into the flight deck amid ships. Saturated with burning aviation gasoline, the Hornet's entire superructure burst into flames. According to Alvin Kernan, stationed in a repair shack just below the island. "A bright red flame came like an express train down the passageway, throwing everything and everybody flat."

At about the same time, low-flying Japanese torpedo planes approached on the starboard and port sides simultaneously. They attempted to fly over or around the screening ships to get to the Hornet. One of the South Dakota's 40mm quad mounts destroyed an oncoming Nakajima when it was just 30 yard away. "Sawed the wing right off it," a witness recalled. Another enemy plane hopped over the South Dakota and crashed, apparently deliberately, into the port side of the Hornet. Burning wreckage skiittered across the flight deck and fell into the number one elevator pit. Two aerial torpedoes slammed into the wounded carrier's starboard side, lifting the entire hull and shaking it violently. Propulsion, fire, main pressure, power, and internal communications were lost, and the Hornet listed 10° to starboard.

At 950, the Enterprise CXAM radar detected a second wave of incoming enemy dive bombers. The Enterprise and her nearby escorts put up a prodigious barrage and destroyed half the Aichi in that first dive, but the survivors pressed the attack with skill and determination and planted three bombs on the flight deck. The first struck near the bow, destroying one airplane and ejecting another off the Enterprise, then punched through four layers of steel plating before detonating just outside the bow. A second hit just after the forward elevator on the center line of the flight deck and exploded below the hanger deck. A third bomb was a near miss to starboard, causing the entire ship to shutter and tossing another plane overboard. Those heavy blows did not slow the Enterprise at all. And even while maneuvering radically, the ship somehow managed to recover several of her returning planes. But the second explosion jammed her forward elevator in the up position, reducing her plane handling capabilities by at least 50%. Damage control parties put hoses on the fire and fitted steel plates over the holes on the flight deck. The hanger was a mess, however. The entire deck was bulged upward and strewn with bodies and parts of bodies and blazing aircraft wreckage.

15. Dark green Kate torpedo planes approached the Enterprise at 11:35. They divided into two groups and maneuvered to set

Up an anvil attack on both boughs. Captain Osborne B. Hardison ordered the helm hard right, turning the Enterprise toward one group and leaving the other far a stern. Floyd Beaver watched from the signal bridge as the second group attempted to overtake the ship. Flying parallel on the beam at about 1,500 yd range, strung out like tin ducks in a shooting gallery. The 40mm bofers quadruple barrel mounts cut them down methodically one by one. The second group released their torpedoes and Hardison deafly turned the ship toward the oncoming tracks and threaded them neatly. Men in the port gun galleries looked down and watched one of the long black cylindrical shapes speed away in the opposite direction just beneath the surface.

At 12:20, the injured Enterprise took cover in another passing rain squall. With the Enterprise severely damaged and the Hornet crippled, and with new Japanese air strikes arriving every 30 to 60 minutes, Admiral King sensibly chose to put some distance between Task Force 61 and the enemy. All ships but the Hornet and a cohort of her screening destroyers and cruisers steamed away to the southeast and disappeared over the horizon. The Hornet was a blazing, listing, foundering wreck. Her engineering spaces were heavily flooded and her propulsion gone.

At noon, the cruiser Northampton was summoned to tow the ship. A steel cable run from the cruiser to the carrier's anchor chain promptly broke. Two hours later, another attempt was made with a 2-in cable stowed on the Hornet, muscled up to the bow by the sweaty, backbreaking effort of more than 500 men. With a 15° list then on the ship, "This was pretty difficult," one officer remarked. "There was foam all over the hangar deck, so it was slippery as hell." The Northampton gradually got the listing giant underway at 3 to four knots.

But in the ensuing 7 hours, a relentless series of air attacks fell on the ship. When the last torpedo hit the Hornet at 6:15 p.m., Commander EP Kan was in one of the repair shacks below. The deck on the port side seemed to crack open, and a geyser of fuel oil, which quickly reached a depth of 2 ft, swept all personnel at repair 5 off their feet and flung them headlong down the sloping deck of repair 5 compartment to the starboard side. Floundering around in the fuel oil, all personnel somehow regained their feet, and a hand chain was formed to the two-way ladder and escape scuttle leading from the third deck to the second deck. The escorting destroyers drew in close and began removing wounded men from the fan tail. Pitching and rolling on the waves, the little ships clanged violently against the carrier, and their rigging fouled into the Hornet's catwalk, tearing away their radar and fire control equipment.

With the list increased to 25°, posing an imminent danger of capsize, the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. Most went over the side, either down knotted lines or by simply swimming from the hangar deck, which was a wash along the length of the starboard side. In the water, the swimmers stayed together and kept excellent discipline. One officer was impressed to see 30 men on a small life raft paddling toward a destroyer, singing Sidewalks of New York at the top of their lungs, and badly out of tune.

The destroyers Mustin and Anderson were given the grim order to scuttle the ship, but it was no easy task to sink an aircraft carrier, even one as badly damaged as the Hornet. The two tin cans put at least 16 torpedoes into the ship, nine of which detonated. They followed with hundreds of rounds of 5-in ammunition, anti-aircraft fire, and even star shells aimed at the AGA storage tanks. These efforts set the ship ablaze, but they also apparently flooded the port side of the ship because she returned to an even keel, albeit much lower in the water. At last, the two destroyers were called away to the south so that they would not be sitting ducks for a morning air attack. The Japanese destroyers Makiumu and Akigumo finally delivered the Kudigrass, putting four torpedoes into the burning ghost ship at 1:25 a.m. on October 27th. As the enemy sailors watched, she slipped beneath the waves and set out on her journey into the abyss.

The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, as it would be called, was the fourth carrier battle of the war and the last until the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. As at Coral Sea, the contest would go into the books as a tactical victory for the Japanese, but a strategic victory for the Americans. The destruction of the Hornet left the Allies with just one carrier in the theater. In exchange, the Americans had damaged two Japanese carriers, but destroyed neither. Plane losses were roughly comparable. 81 for the Americans, 99 for the Japanese. But the Americans, as usual, did a much better job of recovering their downed aviators. They lost only 26 airmen, while the Japanese lost 148. And among the latter's dead were 23 squadron or section leaders, all prized veteran flyers who could not be easily replaced.

The Japanese claimed and apparently believed that they had inflicted catastrophic losses on the American fleet. Admiral Nagumo in his postaction report to Yamamoto stated that four American carriers had been attacked and sunk. The commander of cruiser division 8, crew div 8, reported three carriers sunk, including the Enterprise, the Hornet, and a third vessel that may be the Saratoga. The Crew Div 8 report also claimed sinking the South Dakota, three cruisers, and a destroyer. In fact, the Americans had lost the Hornet and the destroyer Porter and suffered damage to the Enterprise, the South Dakota, the cruiser San Juan, and several destroyers. The Japanese press reported another triumph, and the rank and file cheered another fantastic victory. But the senior commanders of the Navy privately acknowledged that the result had been at best a pirick victory.

Cumulatively, in the four carrier fights that took place in the five months between the battles of the Coral Sea and the Santa Cruz Islands, the Japanese had lost more than 400 carrier airmen, more than half the number that had been on active duty at the start of the war. Admiral Nagumo was well aware that the recurring carrier slugging matches were draining away the Imperial Navy's strength. Considering the great superiority of our enemy's industrial capacity, he told Tameichi, "We must win every battle overwhelmingly." This last one, unfortunately, was not an overwhelming victory. Nagumo was relieved of his command and transferred back to the home islands where he would assume command of the Sabbo Naval Station on the southern island of Kyushu. The encounter ended as all previous carrier duels had ended with a mutual retreat of all naval forces from the area.

The Enterprise, severely damaged, though she was, was patched up in Numea and put back into action in time for the climactic naval battles in Ironbottom Sound. Less than 3 weeks later, the two injured Japanese flattops, Shokaku and Juno, had to limp back to Japan for repairs. Shokaku, the more valuable of the two, would not return to action until June 1943, half a year after the campaign to recapture Guadal Canal had been abandoned. With postwar hindsight, Holly summed the battle up thus. Tactically, we picked up the dirty end of the stick, but strategically, we handed it back. The judgment seems incontrovertible.

Tanaka's indehaticable Tokyo Express managed to put more than 20,000 troops ashore in mid-occtober and the first week of November. Those reinforcements brought Japanese and American troop strength to approximate parody. Although the Japanese chronically underestimated the size of Vandergri's force and by November believed they had superior numbers. But the rapid buildup of Japanese troop strength also left them more vulnerable to air and sea attack because it was no easy task to hide 20,000 men and their supplies under jungle canopies and in dark ravines. Day after day, the Cactus Air Force worked over their encampments, fortifications, and supply dumps with bombs and lethal strafing runs.

Since September, the Japanese had often brought their big naval guns into Iron Bottom Sound to shell Henderson Field and the American positions on Lunga plane. On the night of October 29th to 30th, the Americans gave their adversaries some of the same consideration. The light cruiser Atlanta and four destroyers shelled Japanese camps inland of Port Cruz for 8 hours. Five nights later, the cruisers San Francisco and Helena trained their guns on Japanese positions east of Kohi Point and laid waste to newly landed supply dumps. Troops bivowacked in the area were forced back into the jungle where the harsh toll of starvation and disease would gradually cull their numbers. The Japanese army now had many more mouths to feed on Guadal Canal, but it lacked the logistical capability to provide for them. Men living on fewer than 500 calories a day could not be expected to work or march, let alone fight.

On November 1st, Vandergrift ordered an offensive to the west aimed at overrunning the headquarters of the 17th Army located near the coast just west of Point Cruz and capturing enemy supplies recently landed at Tasa Faranga. Six battalions of the fifth Marines led by Colonel Merritt Edson crossed the Matani River on Pontoon Bridges and attacked the Japanese Army's fourth infantry regiment. In two days of hard fighting around Point Cruz, some 400 Japanese were killed and the rest retreated across the Poha River. The route secured Henderson Field from the enemy's artillery fire. But Tanaka's destroyers continued to land troop reinforcements on the island's western beaches. And these fresh troops, not yet weakened by hunger and tropical diseases, were deployed to positions around the mouth of the Poha. For the moment, that stymied any further near-term progress in that direction.

The Marines remembered October 25th as dugout Sunday. The sirens churned two or three times an hour, signaling, "Condition red. Enemy planes approaching." Japanese bombers were overhead for much of the day, and the Zeros flew a relentless series of strafing runs, riddling the parked planes and dugouts and field installations with incendiary ammunition. Torrential rains in the preceding days and nights had made a mud bath of the landing fields and prevented the fighters from getting a loft until midday after the sun finally dried the field. When the Wildcats managed to take station at high altitude, however, they gave a good account of themselves, and the Army P400's pounced on zeros winging in at 10,000 ft or less. Clemens fondly remembered the sight of a zero blown to pieces above Henderson Field. The tail plane floated down, turning over and over like a falling leaf, and so it went on all day.

The balance of power in the air war had shifted gradually but decisively in the Americans favor. The long daily milk run from rebel wore the Japanese airmen down and reduced their chances of returning to base. They were no less susceptible to fatigue than were the Americans. But the Japanese Navy did not systematically rotate their veteran pilots out of the combat zone. "They won't let you go home unless you die," was an unofficial motto of the Japanese Naval Airore. The Yamato spirit, a nationalist creed rooted in the emperor's divinity, would sustain the energy and determination of every warrior. So it was said and believed. As combat attrition reduced the numbers of veteran aviators, they were replaced with green men recently graduated from truncated flight training programs. The newcomers did not press home their attacks in the face of anti-aircraft fire and were more easily shot down. Their formations tended to come unglued during the long southbound flights and they were more likely to get lost when visibility was poor. The long return to Rabbal was a deadly disadvantage.

Belatedly, the Japanese began to build or expand airfields between Rabbal and Guadal Canal. Cahili on southern Bugenville, Balale Island in the Shortland Group, Bukah Island north of Buganville, Lei on New Guinea. But none of these achieved the status of a major forward air base and they were most often employed as emergency strips for aircraft staggering back toward Rabal. Japanese construction battalions were underequipped and manned by largely unskilled drafties from Korea, Okinawa or Taiwan. Lieutenant Commander Yoo Fujitta, a zero pilot based at Rabbal, recalled that in the last extremity, pilots were told to ditch their planes near islands occupied by the Japanese army. Unfortunately, there was no guarantee that you could get back to your home base from there.

The Bugganville-based coast watchers continued to send their priceless forewarnings of southbound enemy air formations. Jack Reed, whose beard had descended almost to the neck of his shirt, enjoyed the afternoon ritual of watching the surviving remnants of Japanese flights as they flew overhead in groups of two or three. The Japanese knew perfectly well that two Allied coast watchers were hiding in the bush at the northern and southern ends of Bugenville and were determined to get rid of them. Paul Mason learned from native spies that a 100 Japanese troops and a number of tracker dogs had gathered at Buouan and would soon come after him. He called in an air strike that killed the dogs in their cages. Both men had remarkable success in holding a tenuous grasp on the loyalty of native villages. Though their presence was known by hundreds of people in dozens of villages, none betrayed them to the Japanese.

In Washington, Hap Arnold told his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the South Pacific was over supplied with air power. He had returned from his inspection trip through the region, armed with statistics purporting to show that Hals and MacArthur's theaters held a commanding margin by number of aircraft over the enemy. His accounting was close to the mark, but the rapid attrition on both sides required constant reinforcement. Guadal Canal was becoming the sinkhole for Japanese air power that Admiral John S. McCain had advertised, but the scale and ferocity of the South Pacific air war could be sustained only by drawing down commitments to Europe, especially to Britain. As Washington's most tenacious custodian of the Germany first principle, Arnold was impatient to expand the bombing campaign against the Reich. He had opposed the North African invasion torch on the same grounds.

Admiral McCain, having been succeeded as Commair Soopac by Aubrey Fitch, returned to Washington to assume command of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics. there. He instigated a quiet campaign to relieve Arnold of his job. McCain told anyone who would listen that the United States Army Air Forces did not know how to operate over the sea, that they have not been trained for this work, and that instead of admitting their failure, they were trying to discredit the performance of the Navy's air arm. In budget talks for 1944, the two services were at loggerheads over the expansion of naval shore-based aviation. McCain believed the army would put up with aircraft carriers, but was determined to control all landbased aircraft, even those engaged in attacking the enemy's naval forces. The admirals were irritated by the Yusoft's tendency to publicize exaggerated claims of bombing success. 10 months of warfare had established that bombs dropped from altitude almost never hit ships operating at sea. In defiance of the evidence, the army's public communicates declared large numbers of Japanese fleet units sunk or probably sunk by B7s or other army bombers. When those same ships later appeared off Guadal Canal, the Navy was not amused.

But the political winds were blowing against Arnold. Admirals King and Lehey, two of the four joint chiefs, had the ear of the president. While preparations for torch progressed in secrecy, the South Pacific was the only theater in which American forces were heavily engaged. As the site of the first offensive taken by the Allies in any theater, the Solomons had attained outsized symbolic and political importance. The raid on Pearl Harbor was being avenged on Guadal Canal and the American people heartily approved. On October 23rd, FDR backed Lehey's request for 20 more 7,000 ton cargo ships to resupply the South Pacific. That same day, when news reached the White House of the sinking of the Hornet, the commander-in-chief penned a strongly worded memorandum to his military chiefs. "My anxiety about the SW pack is to make sure that every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadal Canal and that having held in this crisis that munitions, planes, and crews are on the way to take advantage of our success. We will soon find ourselves engaged in two active fronts and we must have adequate air support in both places. Even though it means delaying our other commitments, particularly to England, our long range plans could be set back for months if we fail to throw our full strength in our immediate and impending conflicts."

After the war, Arnold acidly observed that the president, with a stroke of his pen, had upended the Europe first strategy. "But what could he do but swallow his pride and obey?" "I had to begin throwing punches almost immediately," Hollyy wrote Nimmits shortly after assuming command at Numea. There was no transitional period, no time to attend to the details of setting up his headquarters or staff. Urgent decisions confronted him right away. Gormley had never visited Guadal Canal, and Hollyy was not about to make the same mistake. On November 8th, he flew into Henderson Field. Vandergrift met him at the airfield and conducted him on a jeep tour of the front lines. The admiral's uniform was nondescript khaki, so many of the marines in the trenches had no idea who or what he was until he disembarked from the jeep and stood among them. Security required that the arrival of such an exalted figure as Tom Sopac never be announced in advance. There was no pmpkin village effect, no sprucing up, no turning the men out in their best uniforms, no parade ground reviews. Urged by his staff to stand up in the jeep or to wave as he passed, Hollyy refused. "It smells of exhibitionism. To hell with it."

The Marines were dumbruck by the three stars on his collar, but the admiral quickly put the men at ease. He asked questions and listened. He noted their malarial emaciation and witnessed the deplorable conditions in which they lived and fought and agreed with Vandagramrift that they must be relieved by the army as soon as possible. In impromptu remarks to the island's press representatives, Hollyy first coined the bloody-minded motto that would make him famous. "Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs." Asked if victory would require an invasion of the Japanese home islands, he replied that he hoped so and looked forward to the carnage such an operation would inevitably entail. For all his bravado, Hollyy did not mind owning up to his own fear. When a Japanese destroyer in Ironbottom Sound exchanged fire with Marine artillery, Hollyy could not sleep. "It wasn't the noise that kept me awake," he wrote. "It was fright. I called myself yellow and worse, and told myself to go to sleep, you damned coward." But it didn't do any good. I couldn't obey orders.

Admiral Turner rushed a convoy of fast transports accompanied by cruisers and destroyers out of Numea and Aspiritu Santo between November 8th and 10th. Sighting reports and intelligence estimates suggested that another major enemy naval force would descend on Iron Bottom Sound the night of November 12th to 13th, and Turner wanted his ships clear of the area before they arrived. Turner's plan depended on the rapid unloading of the transports and cargo ships. At all costs, the troops and supplies must be put onto the beach by Thursday night, November 12th. The cargo ships and transports were supported by two cruiser destroyer squadrons commanded by Rear Admirals Daniel J. Callahan and Norman Scott. In hopes of avoiding air detection, they would approach Guadal Canal by the long route south of Sun Crystalall. The first elements entered Iron Bottom Sound in the small hours of November 11th.

Later that morning, the Enterprise threaded the intricate channel out of Numea Harbor and put to sea. The carrier was still licking her wounds sustained in the battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Her forward elevator remained jammed in the up position. Her hull was taking on water and the warren of corridors and stateaterooms known as officer's country remained a blackened and misshapen wreck. In company was task force 64 under the command of Rear Admiral Willis A. Ching Lee. The two fast battleships, Washington and South Dakota, with supporting destroyers. By Hollyy's orders, the combined task forces, still under the overall command of Admiral Concaid, were designated Task Force King. They were to take station well south of Guadal Canal, avoiding the better traveled sealanes to the north in hopes of eluding submarine predators and enemy reconnaissance flights.

On November 11th and 12th, the transport fleet anchored off Lunga Point and carried out their race against the clock unloading procedures. On the afternoon of the second day, a flight of torpedo armed Mitsubishi Type 1 planes approached low over the Green Hills of the Ingala Islands. They fanned out into two groups, skimming over the water at an altitude of 30 to 40 ft, evidently intending to attack simultaneously from the north and south. The fleet threw up an anti-aircraft barrage so thick that it appeared almost as a wall of black smoke. The San Francisco's 5-in guns, fired at near maximum depression, took down two planes in the first salvo. The Mitsubishi veered right and left, maneuvering radically to avoid being hit. Lieutenant JG Flavius J. George of the Pawne left a contemporary description of the raid in his diary. "One plane, then another, and another exploded in a burst of flame or nosed over into the sea with a tremendous splash. In a matter of seconds, only four were left, and these launched their torpedoes wildly and frantically banked away from the deadly fire." Of the four torpedoes dropped, none registered a hit on an American ship. One porpisted and then seemed to dive. Another made a circular run and did not detonate. One actually rebounded off the sea and nearly struck the plane that had dropped it. Anti-aircraft fire from the ships and the Guadal Canal based fighters destroyed all the planes save one which managed to dodge into a low bank of dark cloud. But one of the damaged aircraft suicide crashed into the San Francisco's superructure and exploded into a ball of fire. The attack killed 15 men and wounded 29, most of whom suffered grievous burns.

Air searches up the slot revealed several inbound columns of enemy warships, including Congo class battleships. Turner pulled the fleet out through Seark Channel at sundown. He placed his cruisers and most of his destroyers under the tactical command of Admiral Callahan, who would be left behind to grapple with the incoming Japanese force. Lacking battleships, Callahan's 13 warships would be badly overmatched. But if they could inflict enough punishment on the enemy, they might at least spare the Marines another holocaust of 14-in bombardment. Concincaid's group could follow the next day to desoil the enemy's planned troop landings. American officers who knew of the reported presence of Japanese battleships were none too happy. The captain of the destroyer Fletcher remarked costically, "Seems funny to be fighting battleships with destroyers and a few cruisers." Kassen Young, captain of Callahan's flagship, San Francisco, was overheard telling the admiral that the mission amounted to suicide.

At exactly midnight, Callahan's ships crept back into Iron Bottom Sound. It was a dark night with dense overcast and no moon. There was no breeze and the sea was as smooth as a mill pond. Men could barely make out the other ships in the column, though they were only about 500 yd apart. The glowing greenish phosphoresence stirred up by their wakes trailed away to the south. The date was Friday the 13th. The enemy revealed itself only gradually. Radar scopes showed blips in the northwest at ranges between 27,000 and 32,000 yd. The Japanese seemed to be arranged in two parallel columns of four and six ships and Callahan steered toward the gap between them. When the radar range had dropped to about 1100 yd, American lookouts first perceived vague silhouettes moving across the land masses of the islands to the north. The action began when a powerful search light suddenly illuminated the upper works of the San Francisco. Both sides opened fire simultaneously, and the battle quickly degenerated into a general melee with ships drifting out of position and firing indiscriminately on whatever enemy units they could bring to bear. Callahan ordered odd ships fire to starboard, even to port, but it was often difficult to distinguish friend from foe. The scene was intermittently lit by search lights, flares, muzzle flashes, star shells, streams of tracers, and the yellow thunderclaps of exploding ships. Lieutenant C. Raymond Calhoun of the Sterret was reminded of a no holdsbard barroom brawl in which someone turned out the lights and everyone started swinging in every direction, only. This was 10,000 times worse. Shells continued to drop all around us. Star shells and flares flung overhead. Tracers whizzed past from various directions. And everywhere we looked, ships burned and exploded against the backdrop of the night sky.

The American TBS circuits became overloaded and confused, and not all the ships heard the instructions coming from the officer in tactical command, OTC. Destroyers altered course to bring their broadsides to bear on enemy ships, deranging the American formation. The destroyer Oannon had to steer aggressively to avoid her sister, the Sterret, but her movements placed her in the course of the cruiser Atlanta, which also had to execute an emergency turn. The San Francisco fired on and badly mauled her sister, the Atlanta. At 1:51 a.m., Callahan ordered a ceasefire and attempted to identify his own ships. The order went out by TBS. "Turn on lights for about 3 seconds," but the circuits were badly overloaded. And in the deadly chaos, the order did not get through to most American ships. On the whole, it was now a case of every ship for herself. "Occasionally, a blinding flare and rumbling blast would indicate that some ship had blown up," wrote Lieutenant George in his diary. "And we would catch momentary glimpses of black and smoke shrouded shapes belching flame." An observer on the beach at Guadal Canal thought the scene resembled a door to hell opening and closing, opening and closing over and over.

The San Francisco headed off to starboard and became separated from her sisters and then found herself staring down the giant 14-in barrels of the battleship Heay. She opened fire and struck first and the he was slow to respond, possibly because she could not depress her guns quickly enough. Several American destroyers also crossed paths with the Leviathan. The Cushing fired six torpedoes at the Heay from a range of 1,200 yd, scoring perhaps three hits. The Oannon added three more torpedoes. The Laffy crossed the Hea's towering bow with barely a few yards to spare and was almost overrun by the monstrous ship. She fired two torpedoes, which failed to arm before they were stopped by the Heay's hull, then followed with several 5-in rounds, fired into the battleship's bridge structure. From a range of 1,000 yd, the Sterret poured nine salvos of 5 in into the Heay's bridge, 36 shells, and every one hit. The Sterret crossed her bow at a range of only about 500 yd, close enough that the crew could see Japanese sailors running along the deck with their clothes on fire. The hea burned brightly from stem to stern. Explosions rippled along her length. Men leapt from her decks into the sea and burning debris rained down on ships all around her. The abandoned Cushing drifted and burned out of control. The Oannon steered wildly to get out of the way of her sister, the badly stricken Laffy. A torpedo struck the destroyer Barton and tore her in half. Her bow section bobbed one way, her stern the other, and both sections sank within seconds. About 40 of her crews survived and swam through her debris and the oil slick she had left on the surface. Some were overrun and drowned by other ships or killed or injured by depth charge explosions in the water nearby. Both the Portland and the Juno were struck by torpedoes and made their way out of the action as best they could. The Portland circled aimlessly, her steering and propellers damaged, but she still managed to fire a few salvos at a damaged Shigori class destroyer south of Tsavo Island. The Helena, in better shape than most of her sisters, fired at strange ships off her starboard beam. The San Francisco drifted through the center of the action, bruised, but not knocked out, firing everything she had at the hea. In turn, however, the hea planted several large caliber shells on the San Francisco, including one that struck the bridge on the starboard side and killed Admiral Callahan and most of his staff. Both Captain Young and his executive officer were grievously wounded and died within a few hours. One of the senior surviving officers went up to the navigation bridge and found not a living soul. Then went looking for Admiral Callahan or his staff and found them all in one heap on the starboard side of the signal bridge. All apparently dead. Lieutenant Commander Bruce Mccandas, officer of the deck, took the con and made for Cape Espirants, taking the badly mauled cruiser out of the line of fire. But the San Francisco's main battery continued pumping out one salvo after another until the hea silenced her entirely.

Dawn revealed an awful scene. Iron Bottom sound was littered with burning wreckage, oil, and floating bodies. Hulks of ships drifted and burned. Their smashed super structures leaning drunkenly over the sea. Their gun turrets collapsed and hanging over the halls. Hundreds of oils saturated survivors clung to debris and called for assistance. Small boats pied to and fro picking them up. With rare exceptions, the Japanese sailors in the water refused to be picked up and some attempted to drown themselves rather than be taken prisoner. The hea was seen brightly of fire moving slowly north of Tsavo Island, apparently without control of her rudder, accompanied by several smaller ships. Lieutenant George of the Pawnee, detailed to take survivors off the Atlanta, described the mortally wounded ship. "Her entire super structure had been shot away, and her three forward turrets were like shattered egg crates, out of which stuck distorted and twisted guns. Her main deck was almost a wash, and on it huddled the grimy and dazed remnant of her crew." The survivors were taken off by landing boats, and a demolition party went aboard to set charges in the engine room. She sank shortly after 8:00 a.m. The Helena, least damaged of the American cruisers, led a column of six smashed ships towards Seark Channel. The San Francisco appeared so badly maimed that it seemed incredible she could make way at all. One witness on another ship counted 26 shell holes in her side. Dead men were buried at sea in hasty ceremonies. Crewmen, utterly exhausted, snatched short periods of sleep wherever they could find a place to stretch out.

The Juno was running low in the water, her decks almost a wash. She could make only 13 knots and was slow to answer her helm. At 11:01, some miles east of Guadal Canal, a torpedo fired by Japanese submarine I26 struck the ship in the port side and touched off the torpedo warheads in her magazine. The blast was so powerful that it blew men standing on the San Francisco flat on the deck. Men glancing up from the other ships saw entire 5-in gun barrels and large sections of the Juno's superructure hurled high into the air. An enormous cloud of mostly yellow smoke hung there for several minutes, obscuring her position. Gradually, as the cloud rose off the surface, observers on the other ships scanned the sea and saw nothing. "There was not a stick or a spar or a boat or a life buoy, nor was a single man visible," recalled an officer of the ster. "I strained to see a head or a body, but as the smoke cleared, I could see absolutely nothing." Lieutenant Graham C. Bonell of the San Francisco agreed. "I looked over to the spot where the Juno had been and saw only a large cloud of smoke. And in a short space of time, this smoke had completely cleared and you could see nothing but a wake going along and immediately stopping." The destroyers could establish no sonar contact on the submarine, nor was there any sign of it. Captain Gilbert Hoover of the Helena, eyeing the danger posed to the other ships, made the hard-headed decision to keep the remnants of the task force on course and underway. Officers would later say that they did not believe a single man on the Juno could have survived the attack, and that impression was echoed by dozens of witnesses. In fact, 120 of her crew did survive the sinking. They drifted at sea for 5 days, clinging to three rafts connected by life nets and dying one by one. 10 survivors washed up on Santa Catalina Island on November 18th.

Admiral King Cade on the Enterprise about 270 mi south of Guadal Canal launched his dawn search on a wide arc from north to west with the planes ordered to fly to a range of 200 m. The still wounded flight deck of the Enterprise was kept cocked to launch a large air strike should enemy carriers be discovered, but the search found nothing. Later that morning, Conincaid decided to send his torpedo planes on an offensive sweep up the slot with orders to land at Henderson Field and place themselves at the disposal of General Vandergrift's air department. The Cactus Air Force, thus reinforced, turned its attention to the burning listing he was drifting north of Tsavo Island. The once mighty battleship had absorbed about 85 shell hits and six or seven torpedoes. Her after turrets were smashed and hanging limply over her side. Smoke poured out of ruptures in her upper works and her forward turret. The Enterprise Avengers dropped torpedoes on her, scoring two hits on the port side and one on the starboard side. Several more flights from Henderson of both Marine and Navy planes assailed the Smoking Hulk, but she was a remarkably tough customer. At sunset, she was not only still afloat, but still making way. At dawn on the 14th, however, there was nothing to be seen but an enormous oil slick almost 2 mi in diameter.

Henderson Field had come under bombardment that night by cruisers and destroyers, but the shelling was not particularly unnerving to men who had endured much worse. PT boats operating from Tulagi fired torpedoes on the hostile fleet and apparently drove them away. The Japanese ships were chased and taken under attack the next morning by Enterprise and Hendersonbased planes, which probably scored some hits on one of the cruisers. Most important, however, was a sighting report at 9:49 that morning. An Enterprise scout spotted a large Japanese force north of New Georgia Island headed toward Guadal Canal at 14 knots. The pilots saw destroyers and many enemy transports. This was Tanaka's latest attempt to land a major reinforcement. 11 troop loaded transports screened by 11 destroyers on a course of 140°. By decree of Vandergrift, the transports were the overriding target for all Allied aircraft that could reach them. Throughout the afternoon, every plane that could fly from Henderson was fueled, armed, and sent up the slot to attack. The pilots ignored the destroyers and concentrated all their efforts on the troop ships. One Enterprise aviator judged that afternoon to be the most hectic, frantic period of many that took place at Henderson Field. A coordinated effort between the Navy carrier pilots and their marine brothers in arms combined with a superhuman effort from the aviation ground support personnel kept a steady stream of SBDs and TBFs carrying bombs and torpedoes shuttling back and forth from the field to the convoy targets. The slaughter was cold and meticulous. Jimmy Flattley's VF10 fighters dived at 60° angles and rad the crowded troop ships with their 50 caliber machine guns. Japanese soldiers leapt over the sides to escape the onslaught. Army B7s flying from Aspiritu Santo got into the act later that afternoon. A torpedo dropped by a TBF ripped out the bowels of a 10,000 ton transport which rolled over and sank in minutes. Planes circled overhead, then flew low over the debris and strafed the troops struggling to stay afloat. "There were rafts and boats all over the sea, floating on an oil scum amidst chunks of wood and other stuff," recalled one of the Avenger pilots. "There were three transports still afloat when we opened up with our guns. We strafed the transports, the boats in the water, and everything else we saw. And so did the fighters. It was hideous work, even sickening, as one pilot said. But not all the aviators were so squeamish. Some proudly held themselves as the Buzzard Brigade." The Enterprise Action report observed that the work was done with methodical and devastating effect. By the end of the day, four troop ships were sunk and three more were on fire and limping back up the slot toward Rabal. Two more sank that night. Admiral Tanaka later reported that only 400 troops were killed, but that number seems unrealistically low.

In sharp contrast to the methods of his predecessor, Admiral Hally chose to move the chest pieces around the board on his own initiative. By his prior instruction, the partially disabled Enterprise and her screening vessels remained well away to the south of Guadal Canal to avoid crossing paths with enemy aircraft or submarines. At 3:42 p.m. on November 14th, Holly detached the Washington and South Dakota and directed them to proceed north, skirting the western edge of Guadal Canal to take station south of Tsavo Island. The two big battle wagons accompanied by four destroyers were designated Task Force Love, commanded by Admiral Lee. They were to intercept enemy surface forces expected to enter Ironbottom that night. Zigzagging north at 23 knots, Lee's force rounded the western shores off Guadal Canal and arrived off Tsavo at midnight. He did not have to wait long for the enemy fleet to reveal itself. Strange lights were seen in the sky above the horizon to the west. Officers speculated that they might be the fires of burning ships around the Russell Islands. Radio monitors tuned in to the enemy's low power ship to- ship frequencies and caught some excitable Japanese chatter. Two lagi based PT boats zoomed around Ironbottom sound and Lee's staff radioed urgent identification messages to avoid taking a friendly torpedo in the hull of one of his ships. It was another calm night. A light breeze blew from the south. A quarter moon was setting in the west and visibility at sea level was good. At midnight, the newly installed SG search radars began to pick up blips in the northwest. As the enemy ships came down the slot, they entered the radar shadows of the land masses of surrounding islands. Soon, the American spotters, peering through optical sights, made out distant shapes moving on the horizon. Admiral Lee altered his course to 300° and ordered the South Dakota to open fire once she obtained a good firing solution. At 12:16 a.m., when the first ship in the enemy column was at a range of 18,500 yd, the Washington's 16in batteries spoke up. Her first salvo of 16-in armor-piercing shells straddled the target. The splashes could be seen on radar, and the gun elevations and trains adjusted accordingly. The second, or at least the third, salvo connected. The South Dakota opened up about a minute after her sister. With the benefit of radar fire control, she landed her first or second salvo on one of the closer ships in the Japanese column at a range of about 15,700 yd. The target blazed fiercely, providing a gratifying spectacle to the spotters. South Dakota turned her guns to the second ship in the column and scored several more hits. The Japanese task force was slow to respond and scored no hits in this first phase of the action. The four American destroyers had held fire because the range was near the extreme limit of effectiveness of their 5-in guns.

At 12:20 a.m., a column of Japanese destroyers and light cruisers emerged from the southwestern edge of Savo Island. The Walk, the first destroyer in the American van, opened fire first, followed quickly by the Benham, Gwyn, and Preston. One or more targets appeared to burst into flames, but the quartet of American destroyers soon took heavy punishment in turn. Several 6-in projectiles landed on the Preston, laying waste to her fire rooms and killing dozens of her crew. The Preston's stack collapsed, crushing the ship's search light. A Japanese heavy cruiser managed to sneak up on the port side of the four destroyers and added several 8-in rounds to the Preston's tally of woe. The little ship burst into flames, listed deeply to starboard, and began going down by the stern. Her captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. As the men were going over the side, fires reached her magazine and she went up in a yellow thunderclap. Debris rained down around the ship. At about the same time, the Benom was struck by a torpedo on her starboard side. The foundering destroyer executed a sluggish starboard turn and limped away from the action. The walk solded on, pumping 5-in rounds at enemy ships off the south coast of Tsavo until she was silenced by a series of heavy shells fired by an unidentified cruiser. Violent explosions blew slabs of her superructure into the sea and set fires raging along her length. Her ready 20 mm ammunition began cooking off and her deck began to buckle. Captain Thomas E. Fraser ordered the men to abandon ship as she began to go down by the head. She sank at 12:42 a.m. Her depth charges had been set to safe, but a few apparently detonated as the ship went down, injuring or killing several of her surviving crew. The Gwyn took a heavy salvo in her engine room. As her damage control parties struggled to save the ship, her captain ordered an emergency starboard turn to avoid the sinking remains of the Preston. She took more shell hits as she limped out of the battle.

The Washington spotters, blinded by their ship's 16-in muzzle flashes, lost visual contact with the enemy. Like their counterparts in the destroyers, they found the enemy by scanning the horizon for his muzzle flashes and targeted them in return. The Japanese ships seemed to retreat beyond the black conicle silhouette of Tsavo Island, perhaps fleeing the catastrophic punishment inflicted by the Washington's 16-in shells. A brief lull in the action followed as repair crews scrambled to correct electrical failures apparently caused by the concussion of the Washington's own guns, and her spotters scanned in vain for suitable targets. Where were the Japanese battleships? The Washington increased speed to 26 knots and turned onto a course of 282°. Her radar identified four large enemy ships coming into range south of Tsavo. While the Washington passed through and around the wreckage of the several crippled destroyers of the American van, her crew dropped life rafts over the side. The destroyers were in no condition to continue the fight and the officer in tactical command ordered them to withdraw toward Guadal Canal as best they could. South Dakota surged ahead at 26 knots on a course of 290°, firing on targets offso at a range of about 14,000 yd. The blast force of her tremendous weapons set her own float planes on fire and then blew them off their catapults and over the side. Circuit breakers tripped and power was cut to much of the ship. At about 12:45, steering clear of the sinking remains of the van destroyers, the South Dakota drew up on the Washington's starboard quarter. The two battleships without screening vessels continued to the northwest, but the South Dakota diverged onto a more northerly course which took her into illumination range of Japanese search lights. That was a tactical blunder as it would render Moot the American advantage in fire control radar. The Washington's main battery fired on the battleship Kirishima, the first ship in the enemy line. The Kirishima returned fire and the two behemoths duled for the next several minutes at what amounted to close range for guns of that caliber. The superstructure of the South Dakota, illuminated by search lights, was pounded by shells of many different calibers. The salvos destroyed much of her radar and communications equipment. She was unable to hail the flagship or even to see her. She was taking on water. Her turret 3 was inoperable. Her fire control systems were seriously impaired and she was leaking fuel. A sailor recalled that her decks were stacked high with dead and sharp, jagged edges from ripped steel were everywhere. All the Japanese guns fell silent at about 1:10 a.m. and the ships that could still make way began withdrawing to the northwest in apparent disorder. The Washington continued to pound away at the Kirishima and her screening vessels as they retired. Admiral Lee gave chase for the next 20 minutes, and his ship continued to land shells on the enemy, but he was wary of a torpedo attack, and at 1:33 a.m., he decided to turn south. Dodging the odd torpedo track launched by the retiring Japanese ships, or perhaps even American PT boats, the Washington made radar contact with the South Dakota and the surviving American destroyers. Lee coaxed them in via TBS. At 6:49 a.m. after dawn, Lee received a radio dispatch from Hollyy ordering him to pull his wounded ships together and bring them back to Aspiritto Santo. Lee had routed the enemy. The Japanese had brought a stronger force into the action, but it had been taken by surprise and been beaten by superior gunnery. The American advantage in radar fire control systems was readily evident. The Japanese systems were at least a year behind. Six Japanese ships were lost, including the Kurishima, which sank at 3:25 a.m. Five more were damaged. The survivors were in full retreat. The Washington had come through the action without significant damage. The South Dakota had been roughly handled but would be repaired and returned to service. The American destroyers had been decimated. Three of four sunk with heavy loss of life. But they had played an essential part in the action by absorbing much of the enemy's punishment, both gunfire and torpedoes, allowing the battleships to concentrate their guns on the larger Japanese ships. Henderson Field was spared another shelling and Tanaka's four surviving transports would be obliged to attempt a landing without naval protection. Tanaka judged that his only hope of unloading the four ships was to run them ground near Tasaparanga Point. He asked for permission to do so and received an affirmative reply from Rabbal. As November 15th dawned, the Americans could plainly see the four hulls propped up on the beaches to the west. About 2,000 troops got ashore before daylight, and stacks of crates and rice bales were left in and among the palm groves just inland of the beach. Hendersonbased planes worked over the ships and supplies throughout the morning. Except for brief and largely ineffective resistance by a few float plane zeros, the Japanese had no air

protection. A marine 155 mm artillery piece even managed to reach the nearest of the four ships breached near the mouth of the Poha River. By midmorning, all four ships were burning fiercely, and by early afternoon, they were little more than charred husks emitting columns of greasy black smoke. TBFs flying from Henderson targeted the supplies on the beach with the incendiary weapons nicknamed Molotov bread baskets. A dauntless pilot detected a trail leading from the beach inland to a circular clearing. Guessing it was an ammunition dump, he aimed his 1,000lb bomb in the middle of that clearing. He had guessed right. A titanic explosion turned the heads of Marines at Lunga, several miles away, and a column of smoke reached up to a height of 2,000 ft. The fire burned all night and was still burning 16 hours later.

Chapter 7. In the 3-day struggle known to history as the naval battle of Guadalcanal, the Japanese Navy had been soundly defeated and driven back up the slot. But Admiral Tanaka's beleaguered Tokyo Express, relying on fast destroyers darting into Ironbottom Sound under cover of darkness, had achieved the single feat of putting more than a division of fresh troops ashore on the island. Added to the remnants of the Kawaguchi Corps, Japanese troop strength on Guadalcanal reached approximately 30,000 in mid-November. The Imperial General Headquarters had not anticipated that so many sons of heaven could fail to overrun the American position, but every successive assault on Vandagrift's lines had been bloodily repulsed. Now the immediate problem was logistics. It was becoming terribly clear that the Imperial Japanese Navy, having strained its capabilities to put so many troops ashore, had no practical means of feeding so many mouths. Even as early as September, Japanese units on the island had begun to waste away for lack of provisions, medicine, and other supplies. By the first week of December, they were succumbing en masse to plague and famine. Guadalcanal for its Japanese inhabitants had become starvation island. The name is a play on the term "gateau," the abbreviated Japanese name for Guadalcanal, and "ga," which translates as hunger in certain inflections.

Newcomers who came ashore at Tasapuranga point were taken aback. Wraithlike soldiers approached and begged for food. Their uniforms, little more than rags, hung from emaciated limbs. Their hair had grown long and crawled with lice. Their skin was dirty and pocked with open sores that were fed on by flies. Many had thrown away their rifles because they either felt too weak to carry them or had no ammunition. But the Japanese stationed along the coast were among the most prosperous on the island. There they could fish or forage for coconuts or plunder the meager supplies of rice brought ashore from the destroyers. Units posted deeper in the jungle had been reduced to eating lizards, snakes, worms, roots, grass, and insects. Trails into the hills were littered with the bodies of dead or dying men. Those immobilized by malaria, dengue fever, or beriberi were often abandoned to die where they lay. As one officer observed, "Food was the overriding obsession of starving men. All senses except hunger went out. No laugh, no anger, no tear."

Japanese soldiers' diaries captured during and after the Guadalcanal campaign told a pathetic story of deteriorating morale and wasted hopes. The malnourished soldiers were repeatedly exhorted to stir themselves to greater efforts. "We must by the most furious, daring, swift and positive action deal the enemy annihilating blows and foil his plans completely. It is necessary to arouse the officers and men to a fighting rage." But the officers made too many promises they could not keep. A fleet of Japanese transports laden with food and other supplies was always just over the western horizon. Japanese warplanes would soon darken the sky. One more banzai charge would cause the cowardly Marines to throw away their weapons and run for their lives. But for days or even weeks at a time, no Japanese aircraft appeared overhead, and no Japanese ships were seen offshore. "Every day, enemy planes alone dance in the sky, fly low, strafe, bomb, and numerous officers and men fall," noted a diarist on December 23rd. 3 days later, he added, "Oh, friendly planes, I beg that you come over soon and cheer us up."

Discipline collapsed. Soldiers bickered over their poultry rations. Food was stolen and hoarded. Enlisted men accused their officers of diverting extra portions to themselves. They refused to work, fight, or march unless fed. From the summit of Mount Austin, where a detachment of about 450 Japanese troops kept watch over Henderson Field, the lookouts watched miserably as American cargo ships anchored off Lunga Point and delivered a seemingly limitless quantity of supplies, weapons, and fresh troops into the American lines. A sub-lieutenant posted at the top of Austin devised a mortality table to predict each starving soldier's remaining lifespan. "Those who can stand upright, 30 days. Those who can sit, 3 weeks. Those always lying down, 1 week. Those who pass urine lying, 3 days. Those who cannot speak, 2 days. Those who cannot wink on the morrow." On December 8th, the 17th Army headquarters on Guadalcanal reported that only 4,200 troops, about 15% of the total on the island, were strong and healthy enough to fight. Combat deaths were running at 40 to