Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [29]
Operating in that vacuum of knowledge and understanding, Japan’s combat commanders relied on their warrior instincts. Even on that score, senior officers lamented what they found in the Southern Area. Admiral Mikawa was surprised by the complacent spirit that had prevailed among his peers. He was a sea dog of the old school, the most experienced combat commander in the IJN, and widely recognized for his judgment and courage. Third in his class of 149 at the naval academy at Eta Jima, he was known for a quick mind and a gentle spirit. Eight months into a war that had given them no reversals, the Japanese were showing symptoms of a contagion soon to be given a mordant diagnosis, “victory disease.”
Mikawa was taking nothing for granted. He decided to use his forces for a counterattack, and quickly. At noon on August 7, the 8th Fleet commander sent a dispatch to his cruiser captains outlining his plan to run south and strike the U.S. invasion fleet by night. He would make do with what he had: his flagship, the heavy cruiser Chokai, plus four other cruisers, the Kinugasa, Kako, Aoba, and Furutaka, based in the rear area at Kavieng, beyond range of air attack. Admiral Nagano considered the plan reckless and ordered it stopped immediately. After consultation with his staff, however, he decided to approve Mikawa’s plan and turn the cruisers loose.
Japanese forces at Rabaul would respond by air, too. Mere hours after the first word of the landings arrived from Tulagi, fifty-four Japanese planes of the 11th Air Fleet were aloft, including twenty-four twin-engine Betty bombers. Early in the afternoon of the seventh, Mikawa took the Chokai out of Rabaul’s Simpson Harbor, joined by the light cruisers Tenryu and Yubari and the destroyer Yunagi. The next morning, he ordered the four other cruisers to sortie from Kavieng and rendezvous with him by sundown. American radio intelligence intercepted his plan, but would not decode it for more than two weeks.
ON TULAGI, JAPANESE TROOPS put up a determined fight. On the smaller island of Tanambogo, several Marine Corps tanks were stalled at the water’s edge. As Ghormley saw it, though, the greatest risk to the success of the landings in their early phases was not ground resistance, but the threat of air attack. Cloud cover had protected his task force during the approach. On August 5–6, gray weather had suspended Japanese air searches from Rabaul and given the amphibious force the advantage of surprise. It was during the landings that the enemy fliers found their first opening to attack.
The aviators of the 11th Air Fleet arrived shortly after 1 p.m., sweeping in low from the east. The raid, numbering twenty-four twin-engine Mitsubishi G4M Betty medium bombers and sixteen Aichi Val dive-bombers, escorted by seventeen Zeros, came buzzing over Florida Island then dropped down low to the sea, the planes holding a tight formation with their shadows bounding over the wave tops. A timely warning from a coastwatcher had enabled Turner’s amphibious force to get under way before the planes arrived. The cruisers and the destroyers were fanned out in an antiaircraft disposition that placed the cargomen at the center of a great circle of warships. Overhead, eight Wildcats from the Saratoga piled in, joined by ten more from the Enterprise. Their combined fire was too much for the attackers. Just one Allied ship was damaged, the destroyer Mugford, hit in the after deck house with a bomb that took nineteen lives.