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By Root 1856 0

throw back a Japanese attack. He had no illusions about the nature of his enemy. He saw the Japanese as “dissatisfied, proud, grasping and aggressive. They would stop at nothing to gain their ends.” But the South Pacific Area would be a difficult place to fight them. Coming to the Pacific from the confines of London under siege, with scarcely a chance to acclimate, Ghormley would seem overwhelmed from the start by the unbounded expanses of sea. As one of his deputies would discover as a matter of first impression: “Robinson Crusoe should be required reading for anyone who is setting up an advanced base in the South Pacific islands.… There is no such thing as living off the country in the South Pacific, unless you live on coconuts alone.”

The Pacific’s long swells carried the flotsam of frustrated Western colonial ambitions. The scattered failures of the English, French, Dutch, and Germans were announced by the mélange of place-names woven into the map, from New Britain, Hollandia, and Bougainville to San Cristobál, Choiseul, and the Bismarcks, and by the lack of civilization, or infrastructure. America’s legacy in the South Pacific was unwritten, but those who would begin to write it, for better or worse, were well on their way.

(Photo Credit: 2.1)

3

The First D-Day

ON JULY 22, MAJOR ELEMENTS OF THE OPERATION WATCHTOWER expeditionary force sortied from New Zealand. Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, whom King had promoted from his own staff, commanded the Watchtower amphibious force from his flagship, the transport McCawley. Out of Wellington’s Port Nicholson hove the invasion armada in a long single column, twenty-two transports and their destroyer screen, joined by an escort of cruisers, headed north toward the fleet rendezvous in the Fiji Islands. The combined task force’s Marine Corps accompaniment under Vandegrift was the largest modern amphibious force yet assembled.

Slugging along at eleven knots, the invasion force needed most of a day to steam beyond reach of the umbrella of friendly aircraft operating from New Zealand. An order went around to all personnel to destroy their diaries. Small things like that tended to work on a man’s mind. The frightful possibilities of the experience ahead were beyond what most unblooded marines and sailors could imagine.

From over the horizon came more muscle: two carrier task forces, bringing the Saratoga and Wasp into the game. The heavy cruisers Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes, and Chicago joined their Australian counterparts Canberra and Australia. The Enterprise task force was a day late for the rendezvous because Rear Admiral Kinkaid’s charts did not accurately show the International Date Line. It was not an inconsequential error. Things like that could keep an admiral from receiving additional stars. “We kept very quiet about it,” Kinkaid wrote, “and I doubt if Nimitz or Fletcher know it to this day.” To make up time and keep pace with the other task forces, Kinkaid’s Task Force 16 had one less day in port than it would have had, forcing the North Carolina to continue without refueling.

The merger of the far-flung task force in the Coral Sea swelled the order of battle for Operation Watchtower to fifty major ships. It would in the end number more than eighty. By comparison, the carrier groups that had raided Japanese positions on Wake and Marcus islands early in the war each had just ten ships. The Doolittle raid in April sailed with two dozen, as did the Midway flotilla. From horizon to horizon now the Watchtower armada stretched, silhouettes long, gray, cold, and sleek. “We were conscious of the fact that this was one of the largest and strongest groups of war vessels ever gathered, certainly the largest and strongest of this war to date,” Richard Tregaskis, a war correspondent, wrote. “The thought that we were going into our adventure with weight and power behind us was cheering. And our adventure-to-come seemed nearer than ever, as the new group of ships and ours merged and we became one huge force.”

Experience in wartime Britain made Ghormley wary about