Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [19]
Ever since the triumphant visit of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet to Japan in 1908, almost as soon as Admiral Sperry’s squadron departed, attitudes between the Pacific naval powers had hardened. From then on, Japanese naval exercises were predicated on the idea of fighting the U.S. Navy. Soon after the Washington Treaty was concluded in 1922, limiting construction of heavy combatant vessels, the Imperial Japanese Navy began organizing its cruisers and destroyers into special squadrons trained in night combat with an eye toward waging and winning a war of attrition. The Japanese fleet, it was said, adopted a seven-day workweek for training—“Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday.”
Despite the unpleasantness over the Panay incident and the perking suspicions that would be the fuse to war, the diplomatic touches on that 1939 visit were extravagant. The Astoria entered Yokohama flying a Japanese naval ensign from her truck. Like the Great White Fleet before her, she traded salvos of greeting with Japanese warships. Though her photographer’s mates took furtive shots of naval installations along the way, espionage was not the order of the day. Intimidation always was. From the Astoria’s largest men, Captain Turner selected a two-hundred-man landing party. Dressed in shore blues and flat hats—including, to their dismay, some proud members of the shipboard Marine detachment—they provided the escort and funeral party for Ambassador Saito’s cortege. At a tea party hosted by the Foreign Ministry, Turner was photographed sitting next to a two-star named Isoroku Yamamoto.
The last U.S. warship to visit Japan before the outbreak of war, the Astoria made as strong an impression on the Japanese as the Rising Sun made on her crew. As one of the Astoria’s chief petty officers put it, “I never could figure out how one country could produce such nice women and such sons-of-bitches for men.” Those men (or their propagandists) would well remember the Astoria.
Turner cultivated the Astoria’s pride as a fighting ship during his two years as a captain in “the Pineapple Fleet,” as the Hawaiian Detachment was known. In peacetime, there were no battles to fight. His crew became connoisseurs of the varied pleasures of international ports of call: In Manila, girls. In Honolulu, girls—and ninety-nine enlisted competitors for every one, or so it seemed. The odds were far better in Hawaii’s “happy houses,” where the hosts, like their seafaring customers, were known to be safe because every week, until a controversy broke in the papers, it was the Navy’s own doctors who examined them.
A ship’s history was like a fine wine that gained character with age. The fact that the Great White Fleet had nearly stranded itself at sea for lack of fuel was long forgotten by the time its journey became the emblem of romantic naval adventure. The present was paint-scraping gray drudgery, the future an unguessable puzzle. Captain Turner was a distant memory by the time William G. Greenman took command of the Astoria and led her during the Guadalcanal operation.
At sunset, the sailors of the Astoria, like every other ship in Admiral Fletcher’s expeditionary force, found their gazes drawn high to the starscape that emerged