Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [142]
The Japanese seemed unnerved by this aggressive use of U.S. naval might. The Tokyo Express, stretched as it was, did not have the stomach to confront American cruisers without heavier support from the Combined Fleet. According to Turner, captured documents and diaries suggested that the presence of U.S. warships at this time deterred the IJN from bringing in thousands more reinforcements for an attack on Henderson Field.
Its desperate position on Guadalcanal led the 17th Army to beseech the IJN for emergency reinforcements and support from the 11th Air Fleet. At first light on November 5, Admiral Tsukuhara’s aviators swarmed aloft. The twenty-seven Bettys and two dozen Zeros were foiled from attacking by heavy cloud cover over the airfield. Naval forces had better luck. That night the light cruiser Tenryu led fifteen destroyers to their unloading points off Tassafaronga and Cape Esperance, where they dropped a regiment of troops, which promptly rallied to confront Vandegrift’s advance. These men were just the first wave of a far more ambitious effort. U.S. snoopers monitoring radio transmissions from Truk and Rabaul had hints of a scheme that entailed forces much larger than the Tokyo Express runs did. Yamamoto was marshaling resources to deliver an entire division to the embattled island.
The next day a coastwatcher in southern Bougainville reported thirty-three Japanese vessels off Shortland Island. Two days later, on November 8, another coastwatcher warned of a dozen transports steaming southeast through Buka Passage, on the northern tip of Bougainville.
On November 8, Halsey landed on Henderson Field for a tour of ground zero in the ongoing campaign. He knew that an all-out enemy attempt to retake the island was near. As he considered his own next move, it was time for him to confront the consequences of his gamble off Santa Cruz a few weeks earlier. The decision to throw his only two carrier groups at a superior Japanese force had cost him the Hornet and made the damaged Enterprise too valuable to lose. The inestimable value of that lone remaining carrier would keep Willis Lee’s battleships, the Washington and the South Dakota, the most powerful available surface unit in the entire Pacific Fleet, tethered to the Enterprise for protection. Once again, the marines ashore would be left exposed for lack of robust carrier support. And once again, it would be the Navy’s light forces that mustered to their defense.
Receiving Halsey for dinner, Vandegrift instructed his mess attendant to serve his superior the best meal possible. “I know we haven’t got much, but make it good for the Admiral,” he told them. On a disease-ridden mud pit of a battlefield, a can of Spam is four-star cuisine. Vandegrift’s cook took some beans and dehydrated potatoes and added chunks of the canned meat to make a salty gray stew. He followed that coarse course with slices of cooked Spam with boiled beans. A peach cobbler made from soggy canned fruit was dessert.
As the plates were cleared, Halsey said, “I’d like to compliment the cook on our dinner.” So Vandegrift summoned a big, red-faced sergeant who appeared to have been pulled from the front lines for this special duty. Halsey said to him, “Son, I want to compliment you. That’s as fine a dinner as I could have got in the Waldorf-Astoria. That soup was out of this world. I’ve never had Spam or meat cooked like that. And those beans were just right on the spot. That pie you had, that cobbler, why even my mother couldn’t have made that.” The sergeant grew redder and redder in the face as Halsey spoke, and finally all he could say was, “Aw, Admiral, horse … stuff.”
That night a Japanese destroyer approached Guadalcanal’s shoreline and gave the South Pacific boss a sterner rebuke. Without any protection from his