Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [240]
Stickling and insistent in some matters, Hepburn was laissez-faire in others. He didn’t worry about the lack of a battle plan: “Only one plan of battle was practicable, viz., bring batteries to bear as quickly as possible,” he wrote in his fifty-four-page “informal inquiry.” He continued, “In my opinion, the important causes of the defeat suffered in this action are to be found in reasons other than those discussed above, and which fall within the general category of ‘Readiness for Action.’ ”
Turner would angrily rebut the accusation that he had been passive in the face of Mikawa’s threat. “I have been accused of being and doing many things but nobody before has ever accused me of sitting on my arse and doing nothing,” he would tell his biographer. “If I had known of any ‘approaching’ Jap force I would have done something—maybe the wrong thing, but I would have done something.… What I failed to do was to assume that the g.d. pilots couldn’t count and couldn’t identify and wouldn’t do their job and stick around and trail the Japs and send through a later report. And I failed to assume that McCain wouldn’t keep me informed of what his pilots were or were not doing. And I failed to guess that despite the reported composition of the force, and the reported course, and the reported speed, the Japs were headed for me via a detour, just like we arrived at Guadalcanal via a detour. I wouldn’t mind if they said that I was too damned dumb to have crystal-balled these things, but to write that I was told of an ‘approaching force’ and then didn’t do anything, that’s an unprintable, unprintable, unprintable lie.
“Nobody reported an ‘approaching force’ to me. They reported a force which could and did approach, but they reported another kind of force headed another kind of way. It was a masterful failure of air reconnaissance and my fellow aviators.”
When misfortune came, no one’s career was safe from a sudden change in the weather. Gilbert Hoover lost his seagoing career in Halsey’s storm. Even Admiral Raymond Spruance, Nimitz’s chief of staff and widely considered one of the Navy’s most capacious minds, had taken lumps for what some critics deemed his excessive caution in the Battle of Midway. The experience soured him on second-guessing: “I have always hesitated to sit in judgment of the responsible man on the spot, unless it was obvious to me at the time he was making a grave error in judgment. Even in that case I wanted to hear his side of the matter before I made any final judgment.”
Hepburn acknowledged some of this. “There is generally a twilight zone lying between culpable inefficiency on the one hand and a more or less excusable error of judgment on the other.” But when he released his report on May 13, five weeks after finishing his interrogations and resuming his duties as chairman of the General Board, Hepburn’s conclusions shone like a harsh ray through that twilight.
“In my opinion the primary cause of defeat must be ascribed generally to the complete surprise achieved by the enemy,” he began. It was in the specific reasons for this surprise that culpable inefficiency lay. In order of importance, those reasons were: an inadequate condition of readiness on all ships to meet a sudden night attack, a failure to understand the telltale presence of enemy planes beforehand, a misplaced confidence in the radar pickets, delayed reports of enemy contact, and a communications breakdown regarding the canceled air-search mission. As a “contributory cause,” Hepburn cited Fletcher’s withdrawal of the carriers on August 9, which made necessary Crutchley’s departure to the conference, which enabled the confused command arrangement for the southern cruiser group.
Though Captain Riefkohl’s leadership of the northern cruiser group was “far from impressive,” plying a box-shaped patrol course that Hepburn deemed