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By Root 1918 0

the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge.” The founders of the U.S. Navy, having faced their own moments of decision, from John Paul Jones off Flamborough Head to Stephen Decatur against the Barbary Pirates, would have felt kinship with the men of the South Pacific Forces. There as everywhere, men in uniform fought like impulsive humans almost always have: stubbornly, viciously, brilliantly, wastefully, earnestly, stupidly, gallantly. At Guadalcanal, so distant on the ear, a naval legacy continued, and by their example in that bitter campaign the long shadows of their American quality reach right on up to the present.

The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

Operation Watchtower (as of October 18, 1942)

ADM ERNEST J. KING

Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH)

Washington, DC

ADM CHESTER W. NIMITZ

Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC)

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

VADM WILLIAM F. HALSEY, JR.

Commander, South Pacific Forces (COMSOPAC)

Nouméa, New Caledonia (USS Argonne)

VADM FRANK JACK FLETCHER

Commander, Expeditionary Force

Task Force 61 (USS Saratoga)

RADM LEIGH

NOYES

Commander

Air Support Forces

Task Group 61.1

(USS Wasp)

RADM RICHMOND

KELLY TURNER

Commander

Amphibious Force

Task Force 62

(USS McCawley)

RADM JOHN

S. MCCAIN

Commander

Aircraft (land-based)

Task Force 63

(Efate, New Hebrides)

VADM FLETCHER

TF 11 (USS Saratoga)

RADM NOYES

TF 18 (USS Wasp)

MGEN ALEXANDER

A. VANDEGRIFT

Commander,

1st Marine Division

RADM THOMAS

KINKAID

TF 16 (USS Enterprise)

RADM VICTOR A. C. CRUTCHLEY, ROYAL NAVY

Commander, Cruiser Covering Force

Task Force 44 (HMAS Australia)

(Photo Credit: P.1)

“It is better to be bombed into the next world than to live in this one as a slave to anybody or any foreign system. It is that attitude which, we believe, will eventually win this war.”

—Collier’s, “A United People,” January 17, 1942

1

Trip Wire

TWO YEARS BEFORE THE WAR BEGAN, AN OLD SPANISH PRIEST IN A Filipino village said to an American journalist, “The Pacific: Of itself it may not be eternity. Yet certainly you can find in it the scale, the pattern of the coming days of man. The Mediterranean was the sea of destiny of the Ancient World; the Atlantic, of what you call the Old World. I have thought much about this, and I believe the Pacific holds the destiny of your New World. Men now living will see the shape of the future rising from its waters.”

The vessel of that ocean held more than half the water on earth, its expanse larger than all the landmasses of the world. Its beauty was elemental, its time of a meter and its distances of a magnitude that Americans could only begin to apprehend from the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts. It was essential and different and compelling and important, whether one measured it by grid coordinates, assessed it by geopolitics and national interests, or sought its prospects above the clouds. And when war came, it was plain to see that the shape of the future, whatever it was to be, was emerging from that trackless basin of brine.

Whose future it would be remained unsettled in the first summer of the war. The forces of distant nations, roaming over it, had clashed briefly but had not yet collided in a way that would test their wills and turn history. That collision was soon to take place, and it would happen, first and seriously and in earnest, on an island called Guadalcanal.

It was a single radio transmission, a clandestine report originating from that island’s interior wilderness, that set the powerful wheels turning. The news that reached U.S. Navy headquarters in Washington on July 6, 1942, was routine on its face: The enemy had arrived, was building an airstrip. This was not staggering news at a time when Japanese conquest had been proceeding smoothly along almost every axis of movement in the Asian theater. Nonetheless, this broadcast, sent from a modest teleradio transmitter in a South Pacific jungle