Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [195]
The battleship Kirishima, which had left the fracas with Callaghan and company largely unscathed, would be the centerpiece of another powerful bombardment sortie. When Yamamoto ordered Admiral Kondo to take her back to Guadalcanal for another attack, Kondo gathered up two newcomers to the fight in the Slot, the heavy cruisers Atago and Takao, to join her. The light cruisers Nagara and Sendai were attached as well, leading nine destroyers. Yamamoto had only reluctantly approved the scuttling of the Hiei. Vengeance would belong, if at all, to the ship that sailed with her that night, the Kirishima. The IJN’s developing failure of nerve was now manifest. As the Kirishima headed back toward Guadalcanal under Admiral Kondo, it was telling that she was not joined by her mighty sister ships, the Kongo and Haruna, which Kondo left behind to screen the carriers. Committing battleships was the final gamble. Yamamoto chose to send just one of his three into the next fight.
Admiral Halsey would take a very different approach. Knowing from dispatches that another major naval attack was gathering, the SOPAC commander decided he could no longer play it safe with his sole remaining carrier, the Enterprise, and her powerful accompaniment of battleships. The men on Guadalcanal needed the fleet now more than ever before.
After the beating Callaghan had taken, Halsey knew that his cruiser striking force didn’t have much left to offer. His sole remaining carrier, the Enterprise, didn’t, either. When she was ordered north from Nouméa toward Guadalcanal, the carrier still had a crew of eighty-five repair technicians aboard, working to fix the disabled forward elevator. She trailed an oil slick. “This was the tightest spot that I was ever in during the entire war,” Halsey would write.
“If any principle of naval warfare is burned into my brain, it is that the best defense is a strong offense—that, as Lord Nelson wrote in a memorandum to his officers before the Battle of Trafalgar, ‘No Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy.’ ” Now there were few other options. Willis Lee’s battleships were his “only recourse.” Their long days of steaming as sentinels, protecting other ships instead of attacking the enemy, were over. Shortly before 5 p.m. on November 13, Halsey broke every lesson he’d learned at the Naval War College. He decided to send in his battleships. He directed Admiral Kinkaid, commanding the Enterprise task force, to turn loose his big boys to enter the fight.
When Willis Lee received the signal via blinker light from the Enterprise to detach his heavy combatants from Task Force 16 and run north, and further learned that Halsey expected him to arrive off Guadalcanal by early morning on the fourteenth, Lee broke radio silence to inquire, “What do you think we have—wings?” Lee was in no position to get there so soon. When the Washington and South Dakota, joined by the four destroyers that happened to have the most fuel—the Preston, Gwin, Walke, and Benham—left the Enterprise task force at sunset and set a northward course, they were about 150 miles farther south than Halsey thought they should be.
This was the consequence of Kinkaid misunderstanding the orders from Halsey that directed him where to operate. When he was instructed to keep his task force near a particular line of latitude, Kinkaid understood the line as a limit on his northern movement and stayed well south of it. Having paid a high cost for Halsey’s bold, some would say reckless, employment of the precious carriers at Santa Cruz—a cost that included not only the Hornet, but also his own reputation