The Conquering Tide (10 page)

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 a colonel commanding the 7th Marines. “Ships' 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.”
²⁶
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 Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands) refused his request for a replacement battalion to provide beach labor. Not until the morning of August 9 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.

A
DMIRAL
M
IKAWA, 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 responsibility for garrison defense of New Britain and adjoining territories, while the Twenty-Fifth Air Flotilla controlled all air operations, but a cold rivalry divided them and rendered any effective cooperation unlikely. The Seventeenth 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 six 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 30, 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 7, immediately after receiving word of the American invasion in the lower Solomons, Mikawa mustered his surface naval forces for a counterstrike. The Seventeenth 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 U.S. 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.
²⁷

Mikawa intended a surprise nighttime raid into Savo 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-Gen Sakusen
, “attrition operations.”
²⁸
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
Senken Butai
, or “Advanced Force”) were held to be the most essential component of
Zen-Gen Sakusen
. The Japanese had devoted intense efforts to developing the weaponry, doctrine, and training of
Senken Butai
for these
all-important night torpedo attacks.
²⁹
The fruits of their labors included first-rate night optical rangefinders and spotting sights, the skillful use of night illumination tactics (including star shells, searchlights, and flares dropped by cruiser floatplanes), and the exceptional aptitude of Japanese lookouts, chosen for their superior eyesight. In addition, the Type 93 “Long Lance” oxygen torpedo, which was 24 feet long and weighed more than a ton, carried a 1,100-pound high-explosive warhead and could travel at 50 knots to a range of 24,000 yards, or at lesser speed to a range of 48,000 yards. 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 two months earlier, Mikawa knew his planned dash into the Savo-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 miles 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 8. Though Mikawa did not know it, his force had also been reconnoitered by an American submarine, S-38.

Passing the island of Choiseul 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.
³⁰
He hoped to be at least 120 miles up the Slot by first light.

A
T DUSK
, A
DMIRAL
C
RUTCHLEY'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 Savo Sound, Sealark Channel, was deemed a less likely route of attack. It was left in care of the light cruisers
Hobart
and
San Juan.

At eight 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 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 Ghormley asking permission to withdraw the aircraft carriers to the east. Ghormley had assented. Having previously committed to stay for two days (less than half the time Turner thought necessary to unload), Fletcher was now pulling out eight 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 airstrikes on August 9. 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 degrees. That misidentification—two seaplane tenders—led Turner astray. The admiral assumed they would anchor in Rekata Bay off Santa Isabel Island, about 200 miles 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 1st Division command post correctly deduced that it was a cruiser floatplane, “and not ours.”
³¹
Lieutenant Charles P. Clarke, officer of the deck on the
Quincy
, warned the executive officer that the strange planes must be enemy, as all Allied cruiser planes had been recovered earlier in the evening. But the executive disagreed and declined to awaken Captain Samuel N. Moore. Clarke later wrote that the brusque dismissal “was such that I was made to feel as if I were a jittery school boy.”
³²
(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 forty-eight 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 8, 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 mid-watch,” then went to sleep.
³³
Physical and mental fatigue had exposed the fleet to precisely the sort of surprise attack that Mikawa was preparing to spring on them.

Between 12:44 and 12:54, Japanese lookouts first reported a visual fix on the destroyer
Blue
at a distance of about five miles. Mikawa ordered a slight northerly course change and cut his column's 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 cool-headed 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 1:31, he signaled, “Every ship attack.”
³⁴