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By Root 1886 0

reserve, the Japanese plan envisioned a powerful two-pronged surge toward the airfield. Owing to fatigue, confusion, and poor communications, the attack was launched piecemeal. Conceived in general contempt for their enemy, the Japanese attack followed the same routes of the disastrous September assault. On toward Edson’s Ridge the Japanese charged now, poorly coordinated and straight into a murderous enfilade of artillery and rifle fire. Colonel Chesty Puller’s seven-hundred-man battalion from the well-seasoned 7th Marines, joined with a battalion of the newly arrived 164th Infantry under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall, put up a stout defense despite their lack of advance warning on enemy preparations. When the pup-pup-pup of small-arms fire finally faltered and died in the predawn hours of October 25, the first assault had failed.

The 17th Army’s announcement that it captured the airfield might have been a deep misapprehension. It might even have been a lie. But on came the Japanese fleet. Encouraged by false reports of the Army’s progress, Kondo and Nagumo kept their prows aimed south, searching for Halsey’s fleet while standing by to hit Henderson Field, too. Their carrier planes were reporting nothing but empty expanses of ocean. The land-based planes of the 11th Air Fleet, flying from Buin and Rabaul, made several sightings of Admiral Lee’s Washington task force near Rennell Island, but the American heavy was too far away for Japanese aircraft to reach her. A superior Japanese force was advancing on bad intelligence. What result would flow from it was an imponderable that only another deadly trial by fire would solve.

CHESTER NIMITZ HAD developed a general approach for confronting a superior enemy. “Having inferior forces,” he wrote early in the campaign, “we must count heavily on attrition, but losing no chance to come to grips with the enemy under the principle of calculated risk.” Still, the principle’s requirements were far from clear. How does one calculate, and what does one risk?

A doctrine so subjective offered little decision guidance at all. Its spirit was not prescriptive; it was merely advisory. But this seemed to be the American way of war. Commanders since the Revolution had enjoyed the freedom to act on their best personal initiative. This flexibility and discretion was the gift—and the burden—that Nimitz always bestowed upon his commanders. Admiral Halsey was free to act on his instinct now.

While Japanese scout pilots were revealing to their astonished command that Henderson Field, contrary to dispatches, had not been seized, Willis Lee’s surface striking force, including the Washington and the heavy cruiser San Francisco, marked time about thirty miles east of Rennell Island, ready to run north for a sweep of Savo Sound. On the twenty-fourth, Rear Admiral Norman Scott was transferred from the San Francisco to the antiaircraft cruiser Atlanta. His new flagship would soon be detached from Lee’s Task Force 64 and, leading a striking force of destroyers, be thrown directly into the fight for Guadalcanal.

Meanwhile, Halsey’s two carrier groups—Task Force 16, with the Enterprise and South Dakota, and Task Force 17, with the Hornet and a quartet of cruisers—under the overall command of Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid (who flew his flag in the Enterprise), moved toward the suspected location of the Japanese carrier fleet as if by the attraction of gravity.

LATE IN THE NIGHT of October 24, in his cabin in the Argonne in Nouméa harbor, Halsey prepared to adjourn his conference with General Vandegrift, Kelly Turner, and senior Army and Marine officers. The ground commanders articulated the woes of the long-suffering garrison on Guadalcanal. They said morale was deteriorating under constant attacks and a sure, intuitive sense that more enemy forces were massing at Rabaul and Truk. According to Halsey, “They began to echo the question that the public had asked in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, ‘Where is the Navy?’ ”

It was late by the time the litany of the riflemen ended. Halsey asked Vandegrift and