Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [16]
President Roosevelt was eager for firsthand news on how the British people were holding up under the aerial siege. “Every day I was in London I felt more and more that England and, in fact, civilization was in great danger, and that the United States was the only country which could turn the tide,” he wrote. His was a diplomatically sensitive position, for Ghormley’s nebulous authority opened FDR to charges that the president was making “secret treaties” with Britain. In a presidential election year in which voices favoring isolationism were strong, the merest hint of an undeclared military alliance with England could have had complicated consequences.
In his personal role as an agent of the White House, Ghormley enabled President Roosevelt to bypass Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and the State Department in communicating with 10 Downing Street. Meeting frequently with the British Admiralty and Air Ministry, Ghormley helped negotiate the ABC-1 agreement, articulating the Allied grand strategy for confronting the Axis worldwide. He exchanged candid correspondence with the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, on a wide range of subjects: convoy routes, Atlantic naval bases, the state of play on the Eastern Front, new war technologies from magnetic mines to radar, and the efficacy of RAF bombers and fleet units against German warships. Ghormley was also a fierce partisan for his own Navy in its intramural wars with other U.S. service branches. He reported to FDR on the malign machinations of Hitler—and to Stark on the schemes of the U.S. Army Air Corps to establish a “United Air Force,” which the fleet viewed as a threat to autonomous naval airpower.
Influential though Ghormley was—some press reports lauded him as America’s premier naval strategist—his selection to command the South Pacific Forces came as a surprise to his peers. His last sea duty was in 1936, as captain of the battleship Nevada. He had never been to sea as a flag officer. Other admirals had much more experience afloat. Halsey and Fletcher had been successful carrier commanders. Nimitz’s first choice had been Admiral William S. Pye, the interim Pacific commander in chief after Husband Kimmel’s dismissal following the Pearl Harbor investigation, but King vetoed him. It is possible that Ghormley’s highest-ranking admirer, FDR himself, had a hand in giving him the job.
Ghormley left London in April 1942, stopping over in Washington to build a staff from the remnants of the dissolved Asiatic Fleet. He had a hard time finding men with suitable experience. His coding and communications staffs in particular were either untrained or reservists with no experience with current fleet procedures and doctrines. He chose as his chief of staff an officer with political connections, Franklin Roosevelt’s former naval aide, Captain Daniel J. Callaghan.
His appointment to command the South Pacific Forces carried him to the other side of the world with scarcely a week to sit still in one place. On his journey from Pearl through the necklace of South Pacific naval and Army bases—Palmyra, Canton, and Fiji, then to New Zealand and finally Nouméa—the yawning distances between points of strategic interest would unsettle him. East to west, it spanned the same distance as New York to Berlin. Its northern boundary was the equator; to the south, the South Pole. Ghormley hadn’t served in the Pacific in thirty years. It was unfamiliar terrain.
From his time at Main Navy, Ghormley was familiar with plans to