Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [116]
At dawn, the unloading of Japanese transports continued within plain sight of the besieged Marine detachment but outside the range of their artillery. The Cactus Air Force cobbled together an attack from available aircraft, fueled by dribbles of remnant aviation gasoline salvaged or brought in to the airdrome via emergency means, and damaged three of the transports badly enough that their captains chose to beach them. Protected by an umbrella of fighter planes from Nagumo’s carriers, the Japanese beachmasters still unloaded forty-five hundred men and two-thirds of their cargo and supplies from the grounded ships.
The tenacity of the Japanese reinforcement effort and the power of its air cover compelled Ghormley to turn back one of his own convoys, scheduled to arrive that morning. On the morning of October 16, he ordered three tugs towing barges loaded with urgently needed gasoline to reverse course and leave the area. The destroyer that accompanied them, the Meredith—she towed a barge as well—was sent forward to Guadalcanal, only to be set upon by planes from the Zuikaku and quickly sunk. Her survivors, adrift for three days, lost well over two hundred of their company to sharks.
The success of the enemy landings underscored an undeniable truth. In the words of the coastwatcher MacKenzie, “It became immediately obvious that to hold Guadalcanal it was essential for the U.S. Navy to gain control of the sea.” Looking at his roster of ships after the Cape Esperance battle, Nimitz wrote to King, “SECURITY [OF] OUR POSITION CACTUS DEPENDS UPON ADDITIONAL FORCES NOT NOW IN SIGHT.” Vandegrift’s marines, he noted, had taken a heavy pounding from air and sea and “CANNOT REMAIN EFFECTIVE INDEFINITELY UNDER SUCH CONDITIONS.”
Despite the victory, Yamamoto, too, was feeling the despair of attrition. “I have resigned myself to spending the whole of my remaining life in the next one hundred days,” he wrote to a friend.
Nimitz wrote, “It now appears that we are unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.” As if to underscore his point, on the night of the fifteenth the heavy cruisers Maya and Myoko arrived off Lunga Point unopposed and turned loose on Henderson Field with more than a thousand shells. After this, the third consecutive night of naval bombardment, the Cactus Air Force found itself in possession of just nine Wildcats, eleven Dauntlesses, seven Airacobras, and no Avenger torpedo bombers—barely a third of its previous strength. Though the fuel needs of this diminished contingent weren’t what they once were, there was a desperate shortage of avgas as well. Rear Admiral Fitch, the new commander of SOPAC land-based air forces, delivered a grim assessment to Ghormley. The Marines, Fitch wrote, “CAN USE NO MORE AIRCRAFT UNTIL THE AVGAS SITUATION IMPROVES AND UNTIL DESTRUCTIVE ENEMY FIRE ON AIRFIELD FROM BOTH LAND AND SEA IS HALTED. SO LONG AS ENEMY SHIPS PATROL THE SEA AREA OFF LUNGA DAY AND NIGHT I CANNOT SEE HOW [DESTROYERS OR BARGES] CAN BE BROUGHT IN WITH REASONABLE CHANCE OF SUCCESS AND UNTIL THIS IS CHANGED, THE AVGAS SITUATION CANNOT BE IMPROVED TO ANY EXTENT. OFFENSIVE AIR OPERATIONS NOW LIMITED TO STRIKES FROM BUTTON [ESPIRITU SANTO].”
The delivery of fuel would proceed on the backs of some unlikely beasts of burden: submarines, barges towed by tugboats, and cargo planes. Ground crews picked through the skeletal remains of the planes destroyed in the bombardment to drain the last of their tanks.
With the service fleet, submarine force, and cargo aviators extending themselves to help supply the island, it was easy for the riflemen to wonder about the combat fleet. “The Japs have the run of the waters around Guadalcanal,” Marine intelligence officer Herbert Merillat wrote in his diary on October 15. “Where is our Navy, everyone