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Vandegrift responded, “I can hold, but I’ve got to have more active support than I’ve been getting.” To this, Kelly Turner reacted defensively, pointing to difficulties of defending shoal-cluttered waterways with a fleet that was attriting as surely as the garrison was. Knowing no choice remained but to hold fast, Halsey took Vandegrift’s statement differently. According to the historian Richard B. Frank, “If Vandegrift had fired an arrow into Halsey’s chest he probably could not have wounded him more. It was simply unacceptable to Halsey for the Navy to be viewed by the Marines as not carrying its end.” He told Vandegrift, “All right. Go on back. I’ll promise you everything I’ve got.”

For starters, Halsey reconsidered a plan, long on the boards, to use Army troops to occupy Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands. Ghormley had authorized the operation even though General Harmon, the Army’s SOPAC chief, considered it a wasteful diversion. So Halsey canceled it, redirecting the soldiers earmarked for it to Guadalcanal.

Halsey’s more immediate task was deciding what to do about the threat from the Combined Fleet. Surveying intelligence and reconnaissance reports suggesting the approach of a Japanese carrier force, he concluded that “action was obviously a matter of hours.” He took stock of the needs of the Marines and the capabilities of his naval force. He liked his chances a great deal better now that two carriers were on hand. “Carrier power varies as the square,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Two carriers are four times as powerful as one.” In a two-carrier task force, one carrier could be designated as the “duty” carrier, sending out air searches and providing combat air patrols and anti-submarine patrols, while the other carrier held a fully armed and fueled strike ready on deck. One carrier operating alone could do none of those things very effectively, and her crews were especially hard-pressed to switch between roles. “Until the Enterprise arrived, our plight had been almost hopeless. Now we had a fighting chance,” Halsey added.

Determined to intercept Nagumo, Halsey ordered Kinkaid to ring up twenty-two knots and take the Enterprise and Hornet task forces northwest from their patrol position east of Santa Cruz. A reprise of Midway, a curtain call for Coral Sea, the next collision of American and Japanese carrier airpower would go down as the last aerial engagement between the fleets until U.S. troops were on the beaches of Saipan and in the hedgerows of Normandy.

Ashore, the Japanese hammer had struck the American anvil. It was the hammer that would crack. The fleets, meanwhile, prepared for their own reckoning.

Just before midnight on October 24, as his marines ashore were battling the Japanese assault, Halsey radioed his principal naval commanders, Kinkaid and Lee, with a galvanizing message that would echo through the passageways and compartments of every ship in the South Pacific Force. The four syllables, bereft of any operational specificity or doctrinal nuance and apropos of no particular target, placed a clean vector through everyone’s mind that ordered and oriented their next moves.

“STRIKE—REPEAT, STRIKE.”

23

Santa Cruz

EVEN WITH KNOWLEDGE THAT AN ENEMY FLEET WAS NEAR, LOCATING and attacking it effectively was no small challenge for a carrier commander. Aircraft fuel was dear, range limited, weather variable, and intentions of opposing commanders ever unknowable. The doctrines that governed the mechanics of carrier operations—how many planes to send out searching, how many to retain in reserve for a strike, and how many to keep aloft nearby as a defensive umbrella for the fleet—were in a state of constant experiment and evolution. Then there was nature to contend with: Given that strikes had to be launched into the wind to get heavy airplanes aloft, which compass heading did one need to pursue, and was the day too far gone to retrieve the aircraft during daylight?

The Americans had