Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [115]
The Japanese tide was so high, their appetite for bombarding U.S. shore targets so strong, that even Espiritu Santo was not safe. On the morning of October 14, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Segond Channel and opened up on the airfield with its deck gun. That day Yamamoto declared Henderson Field “suppressed.”
In the days following Admiral Scott’s return to base after the Battle of Cape Esperance, U.S. naval forces were largely powerless to challenge what seemed an unceasing tide of Japanese ships. Pilots of American patrol planes were reporting more enemy vessels carving southerly wakes. On the morning of the fourteenth, two groups were spotted heading toward the island. One was especially foreboding: a force of six troop transports escorted by destroyers. The other was a pair of heavy cruisers and an escort of two destroyers.
The only available U.S. carrier, the Hornet, was far from the theater of action, fueling northwest of New Caledonia. The Washington and the Atlanta were en route south, a day from reaching Espiritu Santo.
On Guadalcanal, a lieutenant colonel from the headquarters of the Marine air commander on Guadalcanal, General Roy Geiger, paid a visit to one of his squadrons and described a dire and potentially disastrous situation. In the midst of intermittent Japanese artillery fire from the hills, he told them, “We don’t know whether we’ll be able to hold the field or not.” He said another task force of enemy warships and troop transports was headed their way. “We have enough gasoline for one mission against them. Load your airplanes with bombs and go out with the dive-bombers.” If on their return to base they landed in the midst of a pitched battle against newly landed Japanese troops, the pilots were told they would no longer have the luxury of fighting with wing-mounted machine guns, thousands of feet above their targets. “After the gas is gone we’ll have to let the ground troops take over,” he said. “Then your officers and men will attach themselves to some infantry outfit. Good luck and goodbye.”
As instructed, the pilots flew off under the bright South Seas sun. As it turned out, speeches were speeches and their momentous mission was no Hollywood film. Planting a thousand-pound bomb with a delayed-action fuze into a speeding, veering destroyer was difficult even for a pilot who was not strung out after sleepless weeks of air attacks and artillery bombardment. Though even a near miss that fell seventy-five feet away could inflict damage, the Dauntless dive-bomber pilots, flying in pickup squads that sometimes numbered as few as two to four planes, were seldom effective. The two waves of air attacks the Cactus Air Force sent out on the fourteenth damaged only a single enemy destroyer. Meanwhile, the six heavily laden Japanese transports, with major elements of the Combined Fleet standing off far to the east, plunged toward Guadalcanal.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF October 14, Ghormley informed Nimitz that the Japanese transports would land on the island that night, that enemy carriers and cruisers were on the move, and that he had no carriers to intercept. “THE SITUATION IS CRITICAL AND ENEMY REINFORCEMENTS MUST BE STOPPED IF OUR POSITION IN CACTUS IS TO BE HELD.”
That night, the defenders of Henderson Field were given no peace for rest. Admiral Mikawa, in his flagship Chokai, with the heavy cruiser Kinugasa, accompanied a convoy to its unloading point off Tassafaronga, then detached the two cruisers to roam off Henderson Field. As the transports anchored offshore and began disgorging troops to the beach,