Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [15]
The reason was their vast appetite for fuel. There were limits on the Navy’s ability to transport and store bunker oil in the Pacific. The success of Germany’s U-boat campaign required a massive redirection of the tanker fleet to the Atlantic to sustain the flow of oil to England. By the time the shuffle was complete, Nimitz had just seven tankers at his disposal. That was crippling to operations, given what fuel hogs the old battleships were. Task Force 1, including its escorts, burned three hundred thousand barrels of oil in a month—the total oil storage capacity of the entire Pacific in early 1942. A carrier task force was almost as thirsty. The Navy had enough fuel available to operate either its carriers or its battleships. As between the two, no combat commander alive doubted which choice to make. Admiral King urged “continuous study” of the problem, but Nimitz vetoed any proposal to operate the old battleships out of Pearl. The math simply didn’t work.
The sight of great battleships lolling at anchor in the harbor at San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, deeply chagrined the cruisermen and destroyer sailors who would carry the fight against Japan. “We’re up against a navy that doesn’t keep its battleships home,” the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin complained to his diary in May. When men from the smaller ships went out on liberty, it was hard to resist raising provocative questions with any battleship sailors they might meet in the bars. The responses were usually fielded with fists. Now the energies of the oceanbound sailors of the Enterprise and the Atlanta were directed toward another fight.
From Pearl, the route to Tongatabu traced the arc of 160 West longitude. Down this imaginary path went the Enterprise and, broad on her bows, the Atlanta and the Portland. Veterans of the Doolittle raid and victors at Midway, the ships of Task Force 16 were bolstered by the presence of a majestic newcomer churning the seas in the Enterprise’s wake. This was the North Carolina, the first of a powerful new type of battleship, fast, armed with nine sixteen-inch rifles and a steel forest of twin-mounted five-inch guns. She could keep up with the carriers at cruising speeds and burned 30 percent less fuel than did the older battleships.
But logistics were as important as firepower. As General Dwight D. Eisenhower huddled with his staff in London planning the North Africa landings, half a world away, in Auckland, General Vandegrift was figuring out how to get his ships loaded with men, arms, and two months of supplies, plan landings on a hostile and deeply unfamiliar beach, issue operational orders to his field commanders, and run dress rehearsals. The pressure on American planners to allocate scarce resources effectively was immense worldwide. What little cargo and tanker capacity could be thrown into the southern Solomons operation was a zero-sum deduction from the strength of the Atlantic convoys that kept Great Britain going. In both theaters, the Mediterranean and the South Pacific, America would proceed on a shoestring, and that name, Operation Shoestring, would emerge as Nimitz’s joking moniker for the Guadalcanal operation, even as the invasion fleet was being marshaled toward its faraway goal.
WHEN ADMIRAL GHORMLEY received Nimitz’s directive to seize Guadalcanal, he summoned a staff officer and asked for charts of the region. “What in the world does this place look like, in the scheme of things?” Ghormley wanted to know. “The knowledge of the geography of the Pacific was hazy to American citizens generally,” Ghormley wrote, “and even to many of those in high places who were vitally concerned with the war effort.… We were pioneers, and accepted that fact.”
The oldest of six children of a Presbyterian missionary from Portland, Oregon,