Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [23]
After the conference, Turner reportedly confronted Fletcher over the withdrawal of the carriers, hissing: “You son of a bitch, if you do that you are yellow.” The acrimony would only grow worse. Ghormley wrote Nimitz on July 29 with an update: “I sent Dan Callaghan and LeHardy up to confer with Fletcher. I am enclosing a copy of Callaghan’s notes which show some of our problems. The big one right now is fuel. We are working on that as hard as we can.… Some tankers are arriving behind schedule so it is going to be difficult. I fear any chance of advancing dog day is not possible.”
At the Saratoga conference, Fletcher called aside Captain Callaghan at one point and expressed his thanks that Ghormley had placed him in tactical command of the operation. Fletcher said he had thought Ghormley would exercise that function himself. What Ghormley expected of Fletcher’s carriers was unclear. An indication of SOPAC’s view of the plan to withdraw might have been a note Callaghan wrote in the margin next to his record of Fletcher’s announcement about his plan to leave after three days: a single exclamation point. As Ghormley’s representative, he did nothing to challenge this timetable at the meeting.
It was time for the fleet to move again. On July 27, south of Fiji, Turner’s amphibians rendezvoused at sea with the battle fleet for the run to Guadalcanal. “At first there was a mast astern of us—then another—and then several,” an officer on the destroyer Sterett wrote. “Soon superstructures came into view, and we became aware that we were joining a whole fleet of ships: transports, destroyers, tankers, minesweepers, cruisers, a new battleship, and two big carriers.”
The scale of the operation was now obvious to all. As various types of major combat ships hove into view with their escorts, captains gathered their crews and informed them of their destination. When skies cleared, the fleet’s aircraft resumed flying. Planes from the carriers and cruiser scout planes alike scoured the horizons. When the pilots returned to their ships, they were agog at the extent of the naval power that had been mustered.
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VICE ADMIRAL GHORMLEY arrived in Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, on August 1. The French island colony had never been envisioned as a springboard for major military operations. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, France’s last monarch, wanted it as a penal colony. Even U.S. naval planners didn’t foresee its importance until Japan’s rise as a power encouraged the development of a secondary path to Asia, across the South Pacific, as an alternative to the newly threatened primary Pacific route passing through Guam.
Named Port-de-France on its annexation by France in 1854, Nouméa featured a spacious inner harbor in Dumbea Bay. It was slow to develop. Nearly a century later, it had but a single large pier, and the marine railway serving it could handle only small vessels. Its yard could not repair damage such as Japanese battleships were likely to inflict. Arriving ships sometimes found no harbor pilots to guide them in, which was unfortunate seeing as the channels into Great Roads, the outer harbor, passed through a treacherous barrier reef ten miles to seaward and old French mines were known to be about. The progress of the world seemed to leave Nouméa behind. The energies of even the most vigorous empires seemed to fade in the fronded South Pacific.
American logisticians came to see that their cargoes would have reached Guadalcanal faster if they were routed through the more capacious facilities in Auckland, more than a thousand miles farther south. Nouméa’s principal value lay in its potential. Its location would be the foundation of everything