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22

“Strike—Repeat, Strike”

ON GUADALCANAL, “SOMETHING IS IN THE AIR,” HERBERT MERILLAT wrote. “I am not sure what it is but can make the obvious guess. All signs point to increased Jap activity, and soon. I expect it will be a pretty mighty blow—the climax of their efforts to retake this place. They have powerful naval forces to the northwest and have been building up a reserve of planes for more than two weeks. So look out for bombs and fourteen-inch naval shells and artillery. I’ll bet they open up with field artillery from the hills. In short, it looks like a very hot time for the next few days. Operations officers and the command have suddenly become very secretive. There is an undercurrent of excitement in the CP.”

The new theater commander did not long ponder how he would use the discretion Nimitz had allowed him. Just six days into his tenure as South Pacific commander, his desk covered with sighting reports of enemy ships in the waters northeast of the Solomons, Halsey ordered the Enterprise and Hornet to venture farther north than they had gone since August and seek battle. Doubling down on his aggressive willingness to take risks, he stood ready to send Rear Admiral Willis Lee’s force, the battleship Washington and his cruisers, all the way up the Slot to bombard Japanese harbors south of Bougainville.

Lee, commanding the surface striking force from the flagship Washington, with the cruisers San Francisco, Helena, Atlanta, and ten destroyers, operated separately from the two carrier groups. Cruising south of Guadalcanal and east of Rennell Island, he prepared to sortie at sunset and enter Ironbottom Sound from the west. His force would sweep the area off Cape Esperance and around Savo Island and—as the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin put it in his diary—“smash anything we find.… Maybe a close-range, shotguns-across-the-dinner-table sort of affair.” The convoys would get whatever ragtag escort Turner’s staff could manage. The fleet’s heavies had at last been unleashed to go hunting.

They didn’t catch any prey on their first run, but they made their presence felt hundreds of miles to the north. Word that an American battleship was in Savo Sound led the 8th Fleet’s planners to cancel the Tokyo Express bombardment run scheduled for the night of October 25–26.

The naval forces the Japanese were bringing down from Truk dwarfed anything the Americans had seen in the South Pacific to date. It was the full-scale seaborne counteroffensive that the 17th Army headquarters at Rabaul had been envisioning since the failures of September: an Advance Force under Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, including battleships and cruisers earmarked to support the Army’s triumphant capture of Henderson Field, and the aircraft carrier Junyo. (Another carrier, the Hiyo, should have been with Kondo, too, but she had suffered an accidental fire on October 22 that forced her return to Truk.) With them, steaming two hundred miles to their east, came Chuichi Nagumo’s Striking Force, comprising the carriers Shokaku, Zuikaku, and Zuiho. South of Nagumo plowed Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe’s Vanguard Force, including the battleships Hiei and Kirishima and three heavy cruisers.

Imperial plans were better coordinated than they had been two months ago leading into the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the campaign’s first clash of carriers. They called for a bold combined assault: the heavy combatants descending on the island while the Army mounted an assault on Henderson Field, and the carriers sweeping the seas of American naval power. The fleet would move south and engage as soon as the Army sent word that it had seized the airfield. Yamamoto and his staff relished the thought of avenging Midway and luring the elusive American carriers to their destruction.

The commander of the 17th Army, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, had planned to launch a multipronged assault on Henderson Field on the twenty-second. Personally commanding the Japanese forces there—consisting of the 2nd (Sendai) Division, two battalions of the 38th