Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [239]
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The Opinion of
Convening Authority
SOME OFFICERS SAW SUCCESS AND FAILURE AS PRODUCTS OF TEAMWORK. “No one man was responsible for our success in the Pacific,” wrote Charles W. Weaver, Ghormley’s assistant operations officer. “It was a team effort by many good men. Others, of lesser stature, are scrambling now in their memoirs to remind posterity that they won the war.” The Navy was now well along chasing something else: accountability from those who had marred its successful campaign with an avoidable defeat in the Battle of Savo Island.
The fleet seemed to find it irresistible to refight the battle. Retrospectively, wisdom abounded as to what commanders should have done, what risks they should have embraced or avoided. It had always been so. As a Roman general, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, observed in 168 BC, “In every circle, and, truly, at every table, there are people who lead armies into Macedonia.”
Admiral King’s flag secretary, Captain George L. Russell, noted that the exercise was significantly academic in nature. “The deficiencies which manifested themselves in this action, with particular reference to communications and the condition of readiness, together with erroneous conceptions of how to conduct this type of operation, have long since been corrected,” he wrote. Long after it had ceased to matter, the Navy would deliver a verdict on its failings. As salve for its own institutional pride perhaps, or for bereaved relatives still mourning their losses, Admiral Hepburn would find his “culpable inefficiency.”
A critic could find a long list of candidates to blame for the many errors of the Guadalcanal campaign: Riefkohl for failure to keep watch and his mystifyingly persistent belief that Mikawa’s cruisers were friendly. Turner for not understanding the limits of the radar he relied on. Crutchley for removing the Australia from her patrol station without communicating his intentions up or down the chain of command. McCain for failing to report the cancellation of a critical air search. Fletcher and his superiors for the inability to mediate, arbitrate, or otherwise control a serious disagreement about the use of the carriers on the eve of a critical operation. Ghormley for his absorption in detail and absence in body and spirit from the combat zone. Halsey for his spendthrift way with his carriers in October, and for his miscommunications with Kinkaid that prevented Willis Lee from moving north with the Washington in time to help Callaghan’s cruisers on the night of November 13. Callaghan and Wright for not exploiting a radar advantage against a surprised foe. The journalist and critic I. F. Stone would call the state of mind that permitted the Pearl Harbor attack “sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency.” That syndrome was at work on August 9, and the result was another virtuoso performance by the blitz-minded Imperial Japanese Navy.
The day before his relief by Halsey, Ghormley prepared a commentary that cast the defeat at Savo Island as a result of flawed battle doctrine. His preliminary conclusion was that Kelly Turner’s instructions to Crutchley’s screening force were “too indefinite in regard to what the units of that group were to do and how they were to accomplish their tasks.” Though Turner had written to Hepburn, “I was satisfied with arrangements, and hoped that the enemy would attack,” Ghormley observed that those arrangements were woefully inadequate. “No special battle plan was prescribed to cover the possibility of a surface ship night attack,” he wrote, also observing that Turner’s instructions to the two radar pickets, the destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot, “were faulty in requiring them to ‘shadow’ an enemy force and report them frequently.