Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [22]
Though Turner did believe he could unload his transports in the time offered by Fletcher, he worried about the cargo ships. In New Zealand, there had been no time to reconfigure their loads for combat deployment. They had arrived in Wellington loaded to fill every hold as efficiently as possible. Combat loading was a different art that required the most urgently needed items—ammunition and food—to be loaded last so that they could be unloaded first.
The Marine commanders at the meeting, General Vandegrift and his assistant chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Merrill B. Twining, were aghast as Fletcher explained his intention to pull out the carriers after August 9. Vandegrift didn’t think Fletcher was well briefed on the landing plan. That plan promised to leave the Marines unprotected against air attack, except for what they themselves could muster from the island. “My Dutch blood was beginning to boil,” Vandegrift would write, “but I forced myself to remain calm while explaining to Fletcher that the days of landing a small force and leaving were over. Although Turner heatedly backed me, Fletcher curtly announced that he would stay until the third day. With that he dismissed the conference.”
The argument was a product, too, of the unwieldy table of organization. Fletcher, the commander of the whole expeditionary force, was also the commander of the Saratoga carrier task force, one of three such groups in the larger force. He was, in effect, conducting a symphony from the second chair in the violin section. His conflicting responsibilities created at least one perverse incentive, and an errant expectation. The expectation was that Fletcher would place priority on what was best for the overall operation. The perverse incentive was that he was and always would be a carrier man whose first thoughts were given to the well-being of his flattops. Thus a certain tension arose whenever Fletcher sought to apply Nimitz’s principle of calculated risk. What risks deserved his highest concern: the risks to the expeditionary force (and by extension the landing force, which was the whole outfit’s reason for being), or the risks to his carriers, the ships that the Navy valued most?
The Navy had been cautious with its carriers since hostilities began. During planning for the Wake Island relief expedition, which was launched and then abandoned, Admiral Pye decided that the carriers were more important than Wake itself. With that decision, the Navy had won the resentment of every marine in the fleet. Was Guadalcanal any more important than Wake? Presumably it was, for many reasons. But these questions, never addressed authoritatively, were left to surface unbidden at the Saratoga conference on July 26.
Fuel was another concern that urged limited exposure in the theater. The heavy ships had fuel to operate for three days at cruising speed, or fifteen knots, and four more days at battle speed, or twenty-five knots. With three days left to travel at the time the estimate was made, the fleet would have just enough fuel for four days of combat operations. For a cautious commander such as Fletcher, whose concern over refueling was well known and had already earned him the wrath of Admiral King, those were numbers worth paying attention to. Turner and Vandegrift would take all the protection Fletcher would give them. Every twenty-four-hour interval was critical. That he insisted on withdrawing after D day plus two was a continuing frustration to them.
In a March 26 memo to King titled “Strategic Deployment in the Pacific Against Japan,” Turner had written