Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [139]
The only feasible way the Japanese had to deprive their enemy of air superiority was to destroy Henderson Field’s air group with bombardment from the sea. And by that same reasoning, the only way the Americans could prevent a repeat of the devastating nighttime ordeal of mid-October was by pressing their surface forces into the fight and seizing control of the night. The wartime “food chain” circled right back to the ancient art of ships grappling with one another on the sea.
Halsey continued to reshuffle his decks as October wound to a close. On the thirtieth, he ordered Norman Scott to take his small task force—the Atlanta and four destroyers—and shell Japanese positions near Point Cruz in support of Marine units that were crossing the Matanikau River to secure Henderson Field’s western flank. The fleet had to get its guns into the fight one way or another.
IN A NOVEMBER 1 ARTICLE headlined, “Navies Manoeuvre for Big Stakes in Solomons,” New York Times reporter Charles Hurd wrote, “In the end, one side or the other of the Guadalcanal contestants will be cut off from supplies.… They now look toward the sea for the next great phase in the contest. That sea and air battle may be fought at any hour or it may not occur for weeks. In any event, we probably will not know about it until the issue has been decided.”
Certainly they wouldn’t if Admiral King had his way. He was no friend of the fourth estate. Hanson Baldwin, covering fleet maneuvers in Panama before the war, was chagrined to find the censors butchering one of his New York Times dispatches because it reported a commander’s golf score. Now that a war was on, restrictions were far more severe. It had been said that King’s preferred approach to press relations would be to remain silent until it was over, then announce, “We won.” “So far as I’m concerned,” King told a correspondent for Collier’s magazine, “information given the public is information which will almost certainly reach the enemy.… I have no intention of giving the enemy anything from which he can derive a shadow of aid and comfort. That’s the way I am, that’s the way I have always been, and that’s the way I always will be.” The secrecy was so tight that The New York Times made it front-page news in mid-October when the Navy officially acknowledged having bases in the New Hebrides and the Fiji Islands.
A Chicago Tribune reporter named Stanley Johnson learned one of the war’s most closely guarded secrets: the breaking of the Japanese code and the Navy’s ability to follow Japanese fleet movements. In an account of Midway appearing in his paper, he revealed the names of participating enemy ships—information that only Tokyo would have. Certain that this would betray the secret of its code-breaking success, the Navy brought charges against the paper, but didn’t seem to have considered the consequences. When the Tribune began editorializing about its persecution by the government—a complaint made plausible by the fact that Secretary Knox had been the publisher of its rival daily before the war—the Navy was unable to reply, since the grounds of its suit were sensitive state secrets. The possibility of a courtroom circus vanished when a grand jury refused to indict.
A fog lay low over fleet operations for the first two months of the South Pacific campaign. Chester Nimitz was a master of showing grace and easy hospitality to reporters who visited him without revealing actual newsworthy information. The Navy insisted that everything was progressing well toward a major U.S. offensive that would push the Japanese back north. When news of the Battle of Savo Island finally broke in mid-October, and word followed a few weeks later that the carrier Wasp was