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By Root 1847 0

commander was to order the still-viable ships of Task Force 64 back into the fray for Savo Sound. The San Francisco, Helena, and Atlanta, joined by the heavy cruiser Chester and eight destroyers, refueled and departed at daybreak escorted by six destroyers. This powerful squadron was soon augmented by a true heavyweight. The 44,500-ton battleship Washington, Admiral Lee’s flagship, joined them under way. Plans had been drawn up for the Atlanta to go as well, but she received other last-minute orders. She drew an assignment to bombard Japanese positions off Lunga Point, in support of infantry operating behind enemy lines. When Captain Jenkins’s ship arrived on station, Marine officers motored out to her with field maps marked with Japanese troop areas and supply dumps. In just under two hours the Atlanta liberally salted the jungles of northern Guadalcanal with quick-fuzed anti-personnel projectiles that detonated on impact with treetops or the ground; with timed shells that sprayed airbursts across the jungle and fields; and with star shells that coughed burning magnesium that stuck to and scalded everything it touched. By the end of it, the antiaircraft cruiser’s decks fore and aft were blocked by piles of empty brass shell cases, more than four thousand of them all told.

The crew gave the visiting marines cigarettes and parted as brothers in arms. “They were just delighted at what we had done, and as far as they were concerned it didn’t matter whether we hit one single Jap in there or not,” Mustin said. “It had let the Japs know that there were other people to contend with than just the few marines on the island.”

1 The notion would arise that the defeat at Savo was the reason for Ghormley’s removal. Ghormley had no hand in the tactical dispositions that night.

21

Enter Fighting

WHEN ADMIRAL HALSEY BOARDED A BIG CORONADO FLYING BOAT on October 16 and took off from Pearl Harbor, bound for Nouméa, his orders were to take command of the task force that included his old ship, the Enterprise, now fully repaired and ready to rejoin the fight. With him in the four-engine aircraft was Nimitz’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, who was under orders to inspect conditions at headquarters and report to his boss on, among other things, the readiness for command of one William F. Halsey, Jr. The hero of the early-1942 carrier attacks on the Marshall and Gilbert islands as well as the Doolittle raid in April, Halsey had missed the chance to serve in the Battle of Midway because of a viral skin condition: herpes zoster, or shingles, a malady that was thought to have a psychosomatic component. Before he saddled him with a theater command, Nimitz wanted reassurance that Halsey could be depended on to reenter the war as his old effective self.

Gauging Halsey’s mood and temperament on the flight, Spruance liked what he saw and reported it to Nimitz. And so the final piece of Nimitz’s command reorganization was set into place. When Halsey’s flying boat touched down in Nouméa’s glistening harbor on the afternoon of October 18, a whaleboat came alongside. Admiral Ghormley’s flag lieutenant stepped out, saluted, and handed Halsey a sealed envelope. Opening it, he found another sealed envelope. Inside was a memo from Nimitz.

“You will take command of the South Pacific Area and the South Pacific Forces immediately,” it read.

The first words the “utterly surprised” admiral spoke in response were, “This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!” When Halsey boarded the Argonne and finally located his old friend and Naval Academy football teammate in a cramped cluster of steel compartments, hot and oppressive, he understood right away the need for his relief. Ghormley, to Halsey’s eye, was “burdened beyond my own personal capacity,” swamped in reports and data and plans, assisted by a single staffer in the massive task of overseeing operations. “I have always insisted on comfortable offices and quarters for my staff,” Halsey would write. “Their day’s work is so long, their schedule so irregular, the strain so intense,