Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [21]
While the transports were rehearsing, the senior commanders of Operation Watchtower held a conference on board the carrier Saratoga. Later, people would say it was impossible to exaggerate the importance of this meeting, even if one thing that stands out about it was the absence of the theater commander, Vice Admiral Ghormley, who was still preparing to move his headquarters from Auckland to Nouméa in New Caledonia. Chaired by Vice Admiral Fletcher, the expeditionary force commander, the conference included Kelly Turner (commander of the amphibious force), General Vandegrift (the commander of the landing force), Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes (Fletcher’s subordinate in the carrier force), Rear Admiral Kinkaid (commander of the Enterprise task force), and Rear Admiral John (Slew) McCain (commander of land-based Navy aircraft in the area). Ghormley was represented by his chief of staff, Captain Daniel Callaghan.
Among the challenges the commanders faced was how to get the operation through the blind alley they had entered through haste. “From an intelligence point of view,” a Marine Corps historian would write, “the Guadalcanal-Tulagi landings can hardly be described as more than a stab in the dark.” When navigators found their charts of the Solomons and spread them across their dead-reckoning tables, they found that the documents had last been updated more than a generation ago, and were drafted on such a large scale as to be useless in operational planning. The direction of magnetic north indicated on them varied from present readings. Nor did they show topography. Sketches hastily produced from recent aerial photographs had large blank areas where clouds had covered the ground on the day the photos were shot.
It was at this meeting, for the first time, that the commanders saw their operation orders. Admiral Kinkaid wrote, “Some of us were until then unaware of the procedure to be followed. Plans had been made hurriedly and many details remained to be worked out.” Ghormley hadn’t yet seen the orders, either. Owing to the strict radio silence, the area commander would not actually receive Fletcher’s detailed operations plan until the campaign was about a month under way, leaving him in the dark about the specifics of the invasion even as he pulled up stakes and relocated to Nouméa.
The hostility that boiled over between Frank Jack Fletcher and Kelly Turner shocked the other participants. They spoke to each other like enemies. It was well known that Admiral King didn’t trust Fletcher’s competence. A junior member of Fletcher’s own staff had spread unflattering rumors of his intellectual ability. In this assessment, he was “neither sharp nor perspicacious,” “uninformed and to a certain extent uninformable,” and “antiquated to the extent that he was approaching senility.” Seeing as Turner was freshly detached from King’s staff, no doubt he shared these doubts about his competence. Fletcher had at least two things going for him that pushed him through the ranks and ensured his place in command: a track record of victory and Chester Nimitz’s favor. Nimitz stood against King on the question of Fletcher’s role, recommending him for promotion to vice admiral and appointment to task force commander.
The most contentious issue at the conference was the duration of the carrier air support Fletcher would provide the landing force. Nimitz’s directive indicated that the Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp would provide badly needed air cover over Guadalcanal for “about three days.” A fist-banging argument developed from that lack of specificity. Turner and Vandegrift had said they needed five days of protection to unload their transports and cargo ships at the beach, even though the operations plan called for the supply train to withdraw after three.