Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [122]
The day before Halsey’s plane splashed down in Nouméa harbor, Ghormley received notice from Nimitz that Halsey was en route to relieve him. Ghormley acquainted Halsey with the facilities of his operations before taking his leave and boarding a plane for Pearl Harbor, then on to Washington.
The word that a new boss was in town passed quickly through the loudspeakers of every ship in SOPAC, and from tent to Quonset hut to tent ashore. Halsey’s arrival was electric. Ed Hooper, an assistant gunnery officer in the battleship Washington, said, “We were absolutely elated when we heard the news. It was a shot of adrenaline for the whole command; things had been getting pretty wishy-washy down there.” Even the junior officers had been fidgeting under the absence of inspiring leadership. “During wartime it’s important how the leadership, starting with the Chief of Naval Operations, gets a message across to everybody in every ship, submarine, airplane and shore station. You need to hear it said that this is an extraordinary moment in your life and in the life of the country, and that you’re not going to let it down,” the Atlanta’s Robert Graff said. “Until that day, we had received no such message.”
When Halsey had taken the Enterprise to sea in late 1941, he issued Battle Order Number One, which read: “The Enterprise is now operating under war conditions.… Pilots will sink anything they sight.” The declaration was unremarkable except for the fact that it was issued more than a week before the strike on Pearl Harbor. When Halsey was barely into his twenties, his Annapolis classmates referred to him as “A real old salt. Looks like a figurehead of Neptune.” His men liked his style. He had once said he was perfectly willing to divide the Pacific Ocean with Japan. “We would take the top; Japan would take the bottom.”
From a seagoing family, Halsey had sailed with Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet as an ensign on the battleship Kansas. While that experience had taught him to appreciate the symbolism of naval power, he did not generally speak the language of the diplomat. “He was a fighting man, sans fancy trimmings,” the journalist Joe James Custer wrote. “He slipped in deftly, and he hit and he hurt. He was adept and clever, and he packed a terrific wallop: he was the Jack Dempsey of the Pacific raiders, he poled the Japs for a goal, and he swung from the floor.”
Back in January, commanding the Enterprise during the raid on Japan’s Marshall Islands bases, he taunted the base commander over the radio: “From the American admiral in charge of the striking force, to the Japanese admiral on the Marshall Islands. It is a pleasure to thank you for having your patrol plane not sight my force.” Halsey’s public tauntings of the Japanese were so aggressive and frequent that a rumor spread that they had vowed to capture him and torture him to death. His colleagues Aubrey Fitch and William Calhoun reportedly embraced and gleefully spread this rumor. Sometimes when they saw Halsey they would mimic stirring a large cauldron, intoning, “Boiling oil … !” Halsey’s inevitable reply—“You go to hell!”
Halsey was neither a genius nor even a working scholar in any academic or technical field, but he had a quality of brilliance that may have been even more important in a combat capacity. He was, it was said, “brilliant in common sense.” He knew that battles and wars were won not principally with well-drafted paperwork or subtle diplomacy or high materials and engineering ratings aboard ship, but by something quite simple and direct: placing ordnance on target. He knew, working backward from there, that the quality of the mind and spirit of the men distributing that ordnance was at least as important as the mechanical state of the weapons themselves. And he knew that small and simple acts, trivial in themselves but intangibly powerful, raised