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the matter under advisement. It required little more of such treatment before Halsey went volcanic. He rode ashore with a contingent of marines, marched to the headquarters of Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, the surly haut commissaire, posted the U.S. colors, and, finding the Frenchman absent, took over his office and set out his guard. For his personal quarters, Halsey seized the former Japanese consul’s residence, a brick house with a view of the harbor. As construction battalions broke ground for new recreational facilities—until then strictly forbidden by the Free French—it was clear whose well-being Halsey was committed to, and whose loyalty he was out to win.

AS HALSEY WAS taking SOPAC’s reins in Nouméa, U.S. naval intelligence concluded that Admiral Yamamoto had assumed direct command of Japanese naval forces in the area. On October 19, radio snoopers noted something else that seemed ominous: High-precedence traffic had dropped to a level suggesting that the Combined Fleet was in “the final period of adjustment and preparation for action on a major scale.” The nightly runs of the Tokyo Express through the Slot had boosted the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal from six to twenty-two thousand men, nearly a match for the twenty-three thousand Americans there. Several hundred miles north of Guadalcanal, the main elements of the Japanese carrier and battleship fleet were marking time, preparing for a new assault on the island, coordinated with an attack by Japanese troops ashore.

Under pressure from the Joint Chiefs to lend more support to the Guadalcanal operation, Douglas MacArthur foresaw a dark future if the Navy did not meet Yamamoto’s challenge. “If we are defeated in the Solomons, as we must be unless the Navy accepts successfully the challenge of the enemy surface fleet, the entire Southwest Pacific will be in gravest danger.” MacArthur continued, “I urge that the entire resources of the United States be diverted temporarily to meet the critical situation.” The fleet would be left to exert itself piecemeal. On October 20, the San Francisco and Helena, joined by the heavy cruiser Chester and six destroyers, entered Savo Sound to throw shells into the jungle near Cape Esperance. The mission came at a prohibitive price when a Japanese submarine put a torpedo into the Chester, forcing her removal for repair.

As Imperial ground forces on Guadalcanal marshaled for a new assault near the Matanikau delta, Halsey decided to move his carrier task force into waters east of the embattled island. The Enterprise and the Hornet, escorted by the South Dakota, steamed northwest of Santa Cruz, casting search planes around the compass. At midday on October 25, a PBY Catalina spotted the vanguard of a large Japanese battle group. The return of two patched-up capital ships, the Enterprise and the South Dakota, and the arrival of a fiery new theater commander, put American forces in a position to be aggressive again. The rumblings of these events reached all the way to Pearl Harbor. “Today—our Saturday, 24 Oct—Halsey’s Sunday 25 Oct—will be a memorable day,” Nimitz wrote Catherine. “It is the start of the big long-expected push and we are as nearly ready as it is humanly possible to be.… Tonight and tomorrow will be critical in our history—and pray God they will be successful for us.”

WHEN GHORMLEY ARRIVED at Pearl Harbor with Spruance, they were, as Nimitz wrote, “tired, hungry and much in need of baths, which they had missed for several days while in our island staging points.” They soon got a bath: in the bright light of publicity. They arrived at Nimitz’s headquarters almost simultaneously with the morning paper announcing the change of command. “The view expressed in informed quarters here,” read Charles Hurd’s page-one story in The New York Times, “was to the effect that the new Solomons commander would be expected to turn that venture from a currently defensive operation into an aggressive fight.… Very little informed analysis of the basic meaning of these changes was possible here … in view of the complete silence on the part