Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [220]
In the published version, Halsey added that “Hoover’s decision was in the best interests of victory,” even as he removed the mea culpa about the tardiness of his change of heart and recast his role, in his account of how the original judgment was reached, from skeptical lead inquisitor to reluctant rubber-stamper of a staff recommendation.
In Nimitz’s careful handling of the Hoover question, Halsey must have eventually seen the virtue of restraint in second-guessing combat commanders.1 Still, the Navy felt the need to arbitrate questions of culpability for defeat, even during wartime. Just as the Guadalcanal campaign was turning its way, it was preparing to launch an investigation into the causes of the fiasco that was the Battle of Savo Island.
DAN CALLAGHAN AND Norman Scott, in death, had shown an aggressive style that would carry the Navy’s surface forces to victory. Willis Lee continued in that spirit, refining the state of the art with his battleships. They and their fighting sailors had stopped the Tokyo Express cold in November. Still, there was plenty of fodder for recrimination, for the surface fleet’s first victories were won despite many avoidable errors.
Admiral Pye, from his billet as president of the Naval War College, criticized Callaghan’s preparations and dispositions. “Orders such as ‘Give them hell’ and ‘We want the big ones’ make better newspaper headlines than they do battle plans.… A study of the naval actions so far in this war gives the impression that such successes as we have had have been largely due to the individual excellence of our ships and their crews, and not to exceptionally good use made of them by the commanders.” Sharp words flew about what commanders did and should have done, but in death Scott and Callaghan were spared the indignity of inquiry. Concerning Callaghan’s performance, Pye finally concluded, “There is no telling ‘what might have been.’ In this case we seem to have got some of the breaks of luck that the enemy got in the Battle of Savo Island. On the other hand, we seem to have repeated some of the errors—even exaggerated them—made a month earlier in the Battle of Cape Esperance.”
The victories of November added new complexity to the arguments in Washington about where America’s principal worldwide axis of effort should lie and opened up new avenues of possibility to take the offensive against the Japanese. Nimitz and MacArthur would long argue how best to exploit these. On October 24, as the Battle of Santa Cruz was looming, President Roosevelt had said a diversion of resources to hold Guadalcanal was needed to “take advantage of our success.” Pressured by both Admiral King and General Marshall not to neglect the Pacific—“We cannot permit the present critical situation in the Southwest Pacific to develop into a second Bataan,” they wrote—Roosevelt agreed to a cutback of forces flowing to England. As Major General Thomas T. Handy of the U.S. Army General Staff confided to General Marshall, “our main amphibious operations in 1943 are likely to be in the Pacific” and called the argument about Germany-first or Japan-first “largely academic.”
Now one of the Army’s foremost strategists, Lieutenant General Stanley Embick, provided a forceful rationale for abandoning the worldwide strategy long held to, at least in name, by the American and British commands. He pointed out on November 20 that under the prewar ABC-1 agreement, Britain was supposed to take first responsibility for the Far East theater while the U.S. fleet diverted Japan by threatening its flank. In reality, of course, those two roles were inverted. In line with the realities of geography and heavy industry, the Americans had taken the lead in their western ocean. And the fact of that leadership, Embick believed, changed everything. “Having assumed this commitment the U.S. must therefore maintain their position as a first charge,” he wrote.
With even Army leaders advocating a Pacific-first