Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [13]
The convoy carrying forces from the 1st Marine Division, under Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, was three days under way when Ernest King informed George Marshall that these men would be the tip of the first spear he would throw at Japan’s Pacific imperium. On July 2, King sent Nimitz a “super secret” dispatch that outlined the Navy plan. Code-named Operation Watchtower, it was an invasion plan whose first stage, known as Task One, was the seizure of the Santa Cruz Islands, Tulagi, and “adjacent positions.”
Given a “golden opportunity” by the victory at Midway, King directed Nimitz to begin preparations to go on the attack. No one expected an offensive to begin prior to the late fall of 1942. According to cynics, King believed the surest way to draw more resources to the Pacific was to send thousands of infantry where the prospect of their defeat would be intolerable. But it was clearly a genuine strategic threat that moved him most. According to Vandegrift, “What he jammed down the throats of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that just possibly the mighty Japanese had overextended. He saw that just possibly a strike by us could halt their eastward parade.”
The signs were clear that the Japanese had their own aggressive designs on the deep South Pacific. There were new concentrations of submarines and air units at Rabaul. But with the airfield project revealed, King considered it “absolutely essential to stop the southward advance of the enemy at that point and at that time,” and stated his views forcibly to Marshall. Conferring with Nimitz, King accelerated planning and substituted Guadalcanal, an “adjacent position” not mentioned in the original plan, for Santa Cruz. “King’s reiteration of attack, seize the initiative, and do it now was beginning to take on the throbbing insistence of a war drum.”
King deflected General Marshall’s attempt to give Operation Watchtower to Army control. On June 25, Marshall had written to King that Guadalcanal and Tulagi fell within the sphere of Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command (SOWESPAC), rather than the Navy’s South Pacific Area (SOPAC). Recognizing that the key to any such operation would be Marine Corps infantry who would necessarily operate with the fleet, King quashed the idea immediately, responding to Marshall that the operation “must be conducted under the direction of CINCPAC and cannot be conducted in any other way.” Marshall conceded to the Navy the responsibility for the first of the three tasks in the seizure of the southern Solomons. He handed the second and third tasks, the capture of the rest of the Solomon Islands and the neutralization and conquest of Rabaul, to MacArthur. Marshall moved the line dividing SOWESPAC from SOPAC, originally drawn to run straight through the southern Solomons, slightly westward to give the fleet exclusive domain over Task One. There were still too many cooks in the kitchen, but the hot appetizer would be the Navy’s dish to serve.
Guadalcanal was thirty-six hundred miles from Pearl Harbor. Measuring distance from Pacific Fleet headquarters, an expedition to assault Yokohama would have been just as long. But King and Nimitz would beat Yamamoto to the punch. D-Day on Red Beach was set for August 1.
WHEN GENERAL VANDEGRIFT was at last given the details of Operation Watchtower, several days under way for his staging area in Wellington, New Zealand, he was aghast at the speed required of him. The timetable allowed precious little time for preparation and training: They were to set foot on hostile shores on August 1. His superior, the commander of the South Pacific Forces, Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, joined General MacArthur in Melbourne, Australia, on July 8 to advise a postponement because of a lack of preparation and the inadequacy