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By Root 1819 0

admirals that advised the secretary of the Navy, Hepburn was the U.S. admiralty’s most senior man. He had served as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and had a deep expertise in the mysteries of the world’s largest ocean. As an ensign, after the Spanish-American War, he had participated in the U.S. Exploring Expedition, an oceanographic survey of the entire vast Pacific. He was serious, dignified, and reserved. As Hanson Baldwin wrote in a 1936 New York Times profile, “He is not a colorful personality; there are no legends about him on his flagships, no mass of Hepburn anecdota in the fleet. His record speaks for him; he is respected and trusted.” Hepburn served in another role, too, one that is seldom mentioned in the shadow of his other accomplishments: He was the Navy’s director of public relations, the sea service’s principal public affairs man. After reporting to King, Hepburn sat down with Vice Admiral Ghormley in Washington and interrogated him. Ghormley had been puzzled and perturbed since his relief that any specific fault might attach to him for the August 9 disaster off Savo Island. His interrogation by his former superior—Ghormley had been Hepburn’s staff operations officer after his tour in command of the Nevada—opened that wound again. On January 2, 1943, Hepburn reported to CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii. When illness forced Hepburn to the hospital for three weeks, his aide, Commander Donald J. Ramsey, began reviewing documents at the headquarters of CINCPAC.

WHILE HEPBURN WAS CONVALESCING in Hawaii, American intelligence analysts were starting to divine from movements of troops, aircraft, and ships that the Japanese might be shifting to the strategic defensive. But something in the radio traffic suggested otherwise. Stymied by a change in Japanese ciphers, they took what they could from the radio traffic. Again and again they heard references to something known as “Operation KE,” evidently planned to take place somewhere in New Guinea or the Solomons.

Nimitz believed Yamamoto might still have plans to strike at and reinforce Guadalcanal. When Halsey’s intelligence staff saw signs in the third week of January that at least three carriers, the Zuikaku, Zuiho, and Junyo, were at Truk, along with the super battleships Yamato and Musashi, there was good reason for vigilance. Confronted with the possibility of another major naval assault, Halsey resolved to finish the replacement of the war-weary Marine units on Guadalcanal while things were still relatively quiet. He ordered transports to bring in the last of the Army’s 25th Division and take off the marines. A powerful element of the South Pacific Area naval force was ordered to support them and cover the withdrawal.

In desperation, the Imperial General Headquarters had drawn up an even more ambitious plan. As forces gathered at the great naval base in the Carolines, Japan’s service branches were regrouping to defend the central and northern Solomons—and preparing to throw their fullest effort into Operation KE. After five months of attrition, Halsey and his staff were blameless in thinking it was another reinforcement effort.

Emperor Hirohito was sensitive about the public’s opinion of a campaign that had emerged as a showcase of the Japanese will to fight. In public he held to the view that an opportunity for victory lay for the taking in the Solomons. In an Imperial Rescript broadcast to the nation on December 26, the very same day that the Imperial General Headquarters decided to withdraw, the emperor declared that “dawn is about to break in the Eastern Sky” and announced that forces then gathering would head toward the Solomons for the decisive battle.

In a meeting with his high commanders a few days later, however, the Emperor decided to do what until then was unthinkable. The Imperial Army would not reinforce. It would withdraw. Compelling testimony of the morbid state of Japanese soldiers on the island came from diaries taken from the dead. In late December, when deaths by starvation were tolling at a rate of more than a hundred a day, a Japanese