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By Root 1296 0

on the milk, heedless of implausible warnings that the Japanese might have poisoned them. Then they began to march inland, soon parched and sweating prodigiously. The Japanese, following another huge intelligence failure, had not anticipated the Americans’ arrival. In what would prove a critical action of the Pacific war, the landing force quickly seized the airstrip, christened Henderson Field in honour of a Marine pilot hero of Midway. Some men liberated caches of enemy supplies, including sake which allowed them to become gloriously drunk during the nights that followed. Thus ended the last easy part; what followed became one of the most desperate campaigns of the Far Eastern war, characterised by small but bloody battles ashore, repeated clashes of warships afloat.

Two days after the initial assault, at sea off Guadalcanal the US Navy endured a humiliation. Admiral Fletcher had signalled Nimitz that he believed local Japanese air power presented an unacceptable threat to his three aircraft carriers, and recommended their withdrawal. Without waiting for approval, he set course north-eastwards. Rear-Admiral Kelly Turner, commanding the transports inshore, made plain his belief that the carrier commander had deserted his post of duty, and Fletcher’s reputation suffered lasting harm. But modern historians, Richard Frank notable among them, believe that Fletcher made an entirely correct decision to regard the safety of his carriers as the foremost strategic priority.

In the early hours of the following morning, 9 August, Allied naval forces suffered a surprise which revealed both command incompetence and a fatal paucity of night-fighting skills. Japanese Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa led a heavy cruiser squadron into an attack on the offshore anchorage, which was protected by one Australian and four American heavy cruisers, together with five destroyers. The enemy ships had been spotted the previous afternoon by an RAAF Hudson, but its sighting report was not picked up at Fall River on New Guinea because the radio station was shut down during an air raid. Even when the Hudson landed, there was an inexcusable delay of several hours before word was passed to the warships at sea.

The Americans were deployed off Savo island in anticipation of a Japanese strike, but in the darkness Mikawa’s cruiser column steamed undetected through the western destroyer radar picket line. Within three minutes of the Americans belatedly spotting Chokai, the leading Japanese ship, at 0143 the Australian cruiser Canberra was struck by at least twenty-four shells which detonated, in the words of a survivor, with ‘a terrific orange-greenish flash’. Every man in the boiler rooms was killed and all power lost; Canberra was unable to fire a shot during the subsequent hours before being abandoned. There is some contested evidence that the cruiser was also hit by a torpedo from the American destroyer Bagley, aiming at the Japanese.

The destroyer Paterson found itself in a perfect firing position, but amid the deafening concussion of its guns, the ship’s torpedo officer failed to hear his captain’s order to trigger the tubes. At 0147 two Japanese torpedoes hit Chicago. Only one of these exploded, in the bow, but it crippled the ship’s fire-control system. Astoria fired thirteen salvoes without effect because she too failed to see Mikawa’s ships, and her gunnery radar was defective. The cruiser was wrecked by Japanese gunfire at a range of three miles, and abandoned next day with heavy loss of life.

Vincennes was likewise devastated, and already on fire when her own armament began to shoot. Her commanding officer, Captain Frederick Riefkohl, had no notion the enemy was attacking, and supposed himself a victim of friendly fire. As Mikawa’s huge searchlights illuminated the American cruiser, Riefkohl broadcast angrily over his voice radio, demanding that they should be switched off. Thereafter, he concentrated on trying to save his ship, hit by three torpedoes and seventy-four shells which reduced it to a flaming hulk. Only belatedly did the American