The Conquering Tide (12 page)

T
HE
C
ANBERRA
,
AFLAME AND LISTING 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 sheer 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 Sealark 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 destroyers' attempt to sink her. The
Patterson
and
Elliott
had to fire 263 rounds of 5-inch shells and four torpedoes before she finally slipped beneath the waves.

There remained 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 foretop and sent them forward into the forecastle. 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 floatplanes, the boats, the paint locker, the mattresses and furniture in wardroom country, the clipping room ammunition, and shells on the 5- and 1.1-inch hoists. A welcome rainsquall 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 past noon she was gone.
⁴⁹

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 Tulagi 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 Savo Sound (which now took the name “Ironbottom 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 7 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 Sealark 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.”
⁵⁰

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 Tanambogo, and reinforcements had to be put ashore there. The diary of the cargo ship
Betelgeuse
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 ship's boats to assist in unloading of other ships.”
⁵¹

Meanwhile, Vandegrift had to fortify his shoreline against an expected enemy counterinvasion. 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 2nd Marines, which the admiral continued to insist on holding in reserve for possible deployment to Ndeni.

Throughout the morning, ships filed out of Sealark Channel. Hundreds of marines watched glumly as the battle-mauled
Chicago
, still smoking and with most of her bow blasted away, vanished beyond Taivu 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, antiaircraft 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 Three

A
DMIRAL
K
ING, SOUND ASLEEP ON HIS DOCKED FLAGSHIP
D
AUNTLESS
at the Washington Navy Yard, was shaken awake in the early morning hours of August 12. “Admiral, you've got to see this,” said his duty officer, who had never before interrupted the boss's sleep. “It isn't good.”
¹

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 Ironbottom 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 hobbyhorse, and his responsibility. He had insisted on the risky expedition with full knowledge that Allied shipping resources and airpower were strained to the snapping point. He had trodden 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.”
²

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.
³
The analogy to Pearl Harbor was impossible to ignore. The earlier surprise attack had inflicted greater casualties and material damage, but the beating at Savo 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. McCrea, who drove the dispatch from Washington to “Shangri-La,” the president's rural presidential retreat in Maryland (later renamed Camp David). The president, McCrea recalled, “was heartsick about it. There wasn't anything he could do about it.”
⁴

King ordered that news of the defeat be concealed from the press. He dispatched two trusted officers, Admiral Arthur J. Hepburn and Captain DeWitt C. Ramsey, to fly to Noumea 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 Ghormley. In a memorandum to the president on August 13, 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 Noumea. Two more cruisers would be transferred from Britain to the east coast and kept in readiness for possible transfer to the Pacific.
⁵
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.”
⁶
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 Noumea, 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 10, 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.”
⁷
How had it happened?

Hepburn and Ramsey'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 Ghormley and the other by MacArthur, had posed a communications hitch right at the vital boundary that Mikawa crossed on the night of August 8–9. 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 9. Admiral McCain's PBYs 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.”
⁸
The officers and men had been on Condition One Alert, with virtually the entire crew on watch, for more than forty-eight 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 8, which the Hepburn report called “a contributory cause” of the disaster. Had he stayed until the morning of the ninth, as previously planned, Fletcher could have done nothing to prevent the catastrophe off Savo Island—but it is possible that his air groups 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 even-tempered Vandegrift used the incendiary term “running away,” with its blunt intimation of cowardice, to describe Fletcher's departure.
⁹
Fletcher's decision was pilloried by the influential Samuel Eliot Morison 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 Morison'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 26 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.”
¹⁰
That was plainly inaccurate, as several other witnesses have attested.