Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [233]
Yamamoto would borrow a page from a seldom-studied playbook: that of the Royal Navy at Dunkirk. Operation KE was an evacuation mission, and it would take place right under the noses of the pilots and ships and PT boats of the South Pacific Forces. Reluctantly approving the plans, Hirohito said, “It is unacceptable to just give up on capturing Guadalcanal. We must launch an offensive elsewhere.” But what was acceptable—and possible—was no longer up to the divine prince. The U.S. Navy had a great deal more to say about it. In the Solomons and in New Guinea, as elsewhere, momentum was swinging its way.
Secrecy was Operation KE’s byword. Its true purpose was concealed not only from the Americans, but also from the Japanese infantrymen who were its principal beneficiaries. It began the last week of January with the coordinated movement of troops to the coast near Cape Esperance. Avoiding pursuit and encirclement from General Patch’s army, which now numbered more than fifty thousand men, they hauled the last of their starving selves toward the shore on Savo Sound, sparing the dignity of potential mutineers with the cover story that they were gathering for a final offensive.
American planes were ranging well up the Slot now, hammering targets from the air base at Munda to Rabaul itself. Japanese aircraft, meanwhile, were newly recommitted en masse to their months-old drill: to make the long flight down to Guadalcanal, suppress the Cactus Air Force, block the sea approaches to the island, and cover the evacuation. In this final spasm of violence in the southern Solomons, a group of U.S. warships was set upon by Japanese torpedo bombers.
They came in at twilight on the evening of January 30, a flight of thirty-one torpedo-armed Betty bombers, bearing down from the starboard hand of Task Force 18 as it slugged a northwesterly course at twenty-four knots. Under the command of a rookie to the Pacific theater, Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen, steamed the heavy cruisers Wichita, Chicago, and Louisville, the light cruisers Montpelier, Cleveland, and Columbia, and six destroyers. The escort carriers Chenango and Suwannee slugged along to provide air cover.
Giffen had orders to rendezvous with four destroyers southwest of Guadalcanal and then patrol Savo Sound. To keep the rendezvous, and to escape a significant threat from submarines, he chose in favor of better speed and ordered the slow carriers to lag behind. At twilight on January 30, this force was fifty miles north of Rennell Island when air-search radars lit up with bogeys. Submarines had indeed been hunting him, not with their torpedoes, but with their snooping periscopes and radios. Though he had been sighted, Giffen, like Gilbert Hoover, was loath to break radio silence. He thus declined to transmit interception coordinates to the combat air patrol provided by the Chenango and Suwannee, standing off to the south.
Except for the fact that they arrived after sunset, it was a reprise of the November 12 air attack on Turner and Callaghan, with a twist. From the sky at dim twilight fell a kaleidoscope of burning colors, flares, expertly dropped to show the direction of the American force and color-coded to indicate its composition. The Japanese air forces were as much students of night warfare as their Navy, and the Americans were no less bewildered by this innovation than by the others the Japanese had employed. Still, shipboard antiaircraft gunnery was, as ever, very effective, aided by a technological wrinkle kept strictly secret: the use of “proximity fuzes” that used a radar transmitter in the shell to tell it when to explode. One of the burning Bettys fell through the night sky and passed ahead of the Chicago, crashing