Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [119]
The next message Ghormley sent to Nimitz would be the final straw. Referring to aircraft sighting reports from Canberra indicating the presence of a Japanese aircraft carrier west of the Santa Cruz Islands, he wrote, “THIS APPEARS TO BE ALL OUT ENEMY EFFORT AGAINST CACTUS POSSIBLY OTHER POSITIONS ALSO. MY FORCES TOTALLY INADEQUATE [TO] MEET SITUATION. URGENTLY REQUEST ALL AVIATION REINFORCEMENT POSSIBLE.”
Lieutenant Ernest Eller was with Nimitz at Pacific Fleet headquarters on the night this message arrived. The mood was already tense. Nimitz was preparing, among other things, to inform his commander in the Aleutians that his roster of warships was to be stripped to fulfill the “overwhelming need for strength in SoPac.” His intelligence section, fresh from predicting one of the Japanese bombardments of Henderson Field, learned from radio intercepts that two enemy carriers were close by, north of the island. Eller called it “one of the few times that I really saw Admiral Nimitz excited, emotionally. He wasn’t demonstrative. But you could see it in his face and his eyes.”
Late one night Eller overheard a discussion that began behind the closed doors to Nimitz’s office and suddenly swelled and spilled out into the hall. Some members of Nimitz’s staff were speaking to their boss in vehement tones. “The situation looked very dark on Guadalcanal. It looked like the Japanese were about to overrun the airfield,” Eller said. “We’d had heavy ship losses. I guess it was toward midnight. I was still in the office working and came out to listen.” Nimitz’s staff, it seemed, was on the verge of insurrection.
There was a sense that the fleet was laboring under a hesitating, passive hand. As Nimitz’s intelligence officer, Edwin T. Layton, wrote, “It was evident to all of us at Pearl that Ghormley was faltering. His actions—or lack of them—had abdicated command of the sea to the enemy.” That difficult reality put Nimitz in a bind. Though “it was obvious that [Nimitz] felt that Ghormley had handed over command of the sea to the Japanese,” Nimitz told his staff that he wouldn’t tolerate gloom and defeatism. He certainly didn’t like their suggestion that Ghormley be relieved. This last recommendation, he said with uncharacteristic overstatement, was “mutiny.”
In fact, the possibility of Ghormley’s relief had come up at staff meetings as early as the first week of September. There were concerns about his health; candidates for his replacement were discussed. Nimitz was said to prefer Kelly Turner for the job, but a certain stigma had attached to the commander of the amphibious force following the early losses in his cruiser force.1 At the time, Nimitz deflected the conversation, saying he would visit Nouméa himself and check on Ghormley’s condition. Now, after long consideration of the style of his leadership and the content of his dispatches, Nimitz concluded not only that Ghormley was “too immersed in detail and not sufficiently bold and aggressive at the right times,” but that he was on the verge of an actual nervous breakdown. Nimitz was no clinician, but he was a perceptive reader of people. If his conclusion was too stark for him to record in its own day, many years later he would state this opinion in no uncertain terms.
A few days after Nimitz had decried their “mutiny,” Layton and some other staffers decided they needed to see their commander in chief again to press their earlier recommendation. Though the admiral was preparing himself for bed, he agreed to see them for five minutes. “We wasted no time spelling out what was on our minds,” Layton wrote. “The situation was so grave that he could not allow any thought of kindness or sympathy for a brother officer to stand in the way. Nimitz thanked us. He said he understood entirely why we had spoken so frankly. There was no further discussion of the painful issue.”
Nimitz had burdened Ghormley with his complete and unfaltering trust. It was painful to see his friend waver under it. Nimitz suffered a sleepless night on October 15 before notifying King of his doubts about