Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [14]
The request, when it reached him, outraged King. He believed the offensive, on the drawing board for months, needed rapid execution. King told General Marshall, “Three weeks ago, MacArthur stated that if he could be furnished amphibious forces and two carriers, he could push right through to Rabaul. He now feels that he not only cannot undertake this operation but not even the Tulagi operation.” The admiral thought MacArthur, who was marshaling Army forces to dislodge the Japanese from eastern New Guinea, was pouting over the decision to remove Operation Watchtower from his domain. He was. King had outmuscled him and the first offensive of the war was going to be a Navy and Marine Corps show. The messianic commander of the Southwest Pacific didn’t like anything about that.
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THE AMERICAN FLEET supporting the Marines was gathering piecemeal. Dispersed all around the eastern Pacific by the demands of combat operations to date, from the Coral Sea to Midway to the Aleutian Islands, three aircraft carrier task forces were assigned to the operation. The Wasp and Saratoga, which had missed the battles at Midway and Coral Sea, would join the Enterprise, a veteran of Midway and the Doolittle raid, in the Operation Watchtower combat task force. Meanwhile, Vandegrift’s amphibious element was scheduled to rendezvous with them in the Fiji Islands to rehearse the landings.
During the last week of June, the Saratoga and sixteen other warships—four heavy cruisers, six destroyers, two oilers, and four transports—were under way south for Tongatabu, the fueling base in the Tonga Islands. On July 1, the Wasp departed San Diego with the transports President Adams, President Hayes, President Jackson, Crescent City, and a surface escort composed of the cruisers Vincennes, Quincy, San Juan, and seven destroyers. The Enterprise carrier force left Hawaii soon after the Saratoga did, conducting gunnery practice on the way. The rigidly programmed exercises, which involved firing on target sleds towed behind slow-moving fleet tugs, and then at sleeves towed by planes, did little to simulate what awaited them in the southern waters. For the gunners and fire controlmen in the cruisers San Francisco, Portland, and Atlanta, however, the chance to calibrate their radar and check the precision with which their directors aimed their remote-controlled guns was welcome. Everyone knew that a living enemy, long sought, would soon be near.
The streams of combat vessels flowing toward the South Pacific consisted mainly of “light forces,” as cruisers and destroyers were known. The battleship fleet was essentially confined to station on the West Coast. Many sailors wondered why eight months after December 7 those battleships, fully repaired and modernized, would have no role in the battle for the South Pacific.
On the eve of the war against Japan, the U.S. fleet had seventeen battleships in commission: fifteen prewar dreadnoughts and two of a fast new breed, the North Carolina and the Washington. Of the nine assigned to the Pacific, only the Colorado, refitting at Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, escaped December 7 unscarred. Two weeks after the attack, the three battleships whose damage was least, the Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, were under way on their own power for the West Coast. By early March, those three wagons were ready for war again, repaired, modernized, and joined with the Colorado. By mid-August 1942, Task Force 1, as the Pacific battleship squadron was known, had been bolstered by three transfers from the Atlantic, the Idaho, Mississippi, and New Mexico. By any measure this force of seven restored battleships was superior to the one that had been struck at anchor in Oahu.
Their tenure in Hawaii was short-lived. Only four days after arriving, the Tennessee was ordered to Puget Sound for