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By Root 1849 0

the threat of espionage. No doubt mindful of the role that spies played in the surprise attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Ghormley wrote his staff, “Loose talk is a stupid habit.… Some would risk the lives of their friends by a silly effort to impress others in public places.” There was good reason to fear leaks about ship movements, especially in places like Auckland, where peacetime protocols controlled the movements of merchant vessels into and out of port. The setup was so haphazard that it seemed a miracle operational secrecy was maintained at all. The act of gathering intelligence always came with a risk to the security of planning. Navy intelligence teams were seeking out planters and others who had been evacuated from Guadalcanal to interview for information about the island. Some of those former residents would travel with the invasion force to help identify landmarks.

In Wellington, Vandegrift’s intelligence staff had strewn tables in a hotel conference room with sensitive maps, documents, and aerial photographs. One night a drunken civilian reportedly wandered through the lobby and down a hall, passed two MPs at an open door, and blundered straight into Watchtower’s intelligence nerve center. “I have smiled many times at reports that only the general knew where we were going,” a photographer assigned to the intelligence section, Thayer Soule, wrote. “All headquarters knew. Why the word didn’t leak to the enemy, I will never know.”

After Midway, when the Japanese began changing their high-level operational code groups, U.S. cryptanalysts were left to deduce enemy movements from the patterns of radio traffic, instead of by deciphering their actual content. On July 30, New Zealand’s prime minister, Peter Fraser, was quoted in the Auckland newspaper as saying that an Allied offensive was imminent. Ghormley wrote, “I informed him of how this matter had perturbed me, as I feared it would put the Japs on their guard.”

Most of the sailors assigned to Watchtower needed no imagination to envision the destructive handiwork of their enemy. The men of the cruiser Astoria, at sea when Pearl Harbor was hit, had come home on December 13 to behold the Pacific battle line laid to waste and the docks of Ford Island lined with caskets. Ruined ships still burned, wreathed in a flotsam of shattered wood and human remains. Men from the battleships, many of them now without stations, were shuffled like spare parts. The Astoria filled out her increased wartime complement with these castoffs. Most of them were eager for a lick at the enemy. Some felt they had had enough. “I had experienced what the Japanese could do,” said a sailor who transferred to the Astoria from one of the stricken battleships, “and I wasn’t keen to go out and tangle with them again.”

The Astoria’s captain at the time took Pearl Harbor’s ruin especially hard. When the reality registered with Preston B. Haines about the battle fleet—and about his son, killed on board a destroyer—he was no longer fit for command. Detached for treatment at the naval hospital, Haines was relieved by Captain Francis W. Scanland, recently displaced from command of the battleship Nevada, hit in the attack. Another cruiser assigned to Watchtower, the Chicago, was commanded by an orphaned battleship skipper. Howard D. Bode was ashore when the end came for the USS Oklahoma. His life may have been spared, but the effects of this and coming traumas would weigh heavily on his mind, too.

Captains were fortunate to find help for their troubles. They were given command of a multitude and saddled with fault for their failings. The bargain they made for their privileged place was the right to be last off the ship if the worst came to pass. Burdens grew heavier the higher one ascended in rank. Captains concerned themselves with ships and crews, commodores with squadrons, task force commanders with objectives, and theater commanders with campaigns. The burdens of sailors weighed mostly on the muscles. The weight of leadership was subtler and heavier. It could test the conscience.

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