• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

19

All Hell’s Eve

WHEN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS RECEIVED NORMAN Scott’s dispatch about the battle that took place the night of October 11, Admiral Ghormley was hosting lunch in his flagship, the Argonne, with his chief of staff, Dan Callaghan, and an old friend from his days in London, Donald MacDonald. “Admiral Ghormley treated me like a son,” said MacDonald, then serving as the exec on the destroyer O’Bannon. “We had a nice lunch, and we talked about what was going on. Ghormley wasn’t exactly depressed, but he just thought he was trying to hold the line with very little strength. He said he wasn’t getting enough support, having to fight on a shoe string.” Among the problems the SOPAC commander articulated to his guests was one of combat leadership. “You know, Donald,” he said, “I don’t have any fighting admirals out here.” The statement seemed self-indicting. Until Scott took station off Cape Esperance, no U.S. admirals in Ghormley’s theater had been given an opportunity. Scott’s battle report provided an immediate rebuttal to Ghormley’s lament.

It has been said that an army is as brave as its privates and as good as its generals. In a navy, the dynamics are different. On a ship bound for battle, admirals and seamen alike stand equally exposed to the hazards of combat. Admirals must have the same degree of physical courage. “The ship and crew members will go where he directs them—discipline and training will guarantee that—but his is the choice of the hazard that all will incur,” a naval strategist wrote.

Historians like to tally victories for their own sake, like league standings or stock market prices. Combat commanders have a more pragmatic perspective on the consequences of battles. It is not the volume of the enemy’s hardware destroyed nor the number of his men killed that matters. What makes the difference is a battle’s impact on the will to fight, and on the ability to impose one’s will on an enemy in the future. Victory is in the mind, not the metal.

While the Battle of Cape Esperance was a U.S. win in terms of ships sunk and immediate objectives realized, its actual impact on the larger fight for Guadalcanal had yet to be determined as the battered ships of Task Force 64 returned to Espiritu Santo.

The future would belong to the side that most tenaciously maintained its will to fight. The Cactus Air Force at Henderson Field now boasted forty-five Wildcats, including the recent arrivals from the Saratoga; twelve Army Airacobra fighters of the 67th and 339th fighter squadrons; sixteen Dauntlesses organized into three bombing squadrons, two Navy and one Marine; and six Avengers of the Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron 8. Fighting within a comfortable radius of their home base, they held their own against the Japanese air forces opposing them from Rabaul, Buka, and Buin. The Japanese Navy’s 11th Air Fleet fielded a powerful armada of fighters and bombers: eighty-six Mitsubishi A6M Zeros and sixty-three Mitsubishi G4M Bettys, plus a handful of Aichi Val dive-bombers and Kate torpedo bombers. But the Cactus Air Force held the line.

Defeated on the ground and stalemated in the air, Admiral Yamamoto was enacting an ambitious plan to hammer down on Guadalcanal from the sea. Goto’s defeat at the hands of Norman Scott was a small setback. The rest of the big push he was preparing against the island continued on schedule. As Scott was finishing his scrape with Goto’s cruisers, two Japanese battleships, the Kongo and Haruna, were pressing down through the Slot toward their objective: bombarding Henderson Field.

NEAR MIDNIGHT ON October 13, the warning horn mounted in Henderson Field’s Japanese-built pagoda tower began sounding its forlorn, winding wail. A single-engine plane was heard overhead, and lightning was seen to flash. For half a second the grassy plain around the airfield’s perimeter was visible in bright relief. Then everything was black again. None of these events was remarkable. Nuisance artillery fire and petty air raids were