Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [32]
Time was of the essence, but speed faced many obstacles. Many of the small craft used to bring in supplies were loaded so deeply by the head that they couldn’t make it all the way up the beach. When their ramps were lowered, they filled with water and their straining engines drowned. Compounding the trouble was the way the big transports offshore had been loaded in Wellington: for commerce, efficiently and in volume, not for combat, enabling quick access to food and ammunition. In the Chesapeake Bay area and on the West Coast, the Navy was still establishing specialty schools to teach these skills to their beachmasters. At Guadalcanal, on-the-job training would have to suffice.
Early in the evening of August 8, in his flagship McCawley, Turner was wrestling with these frustrations, minding the possibility of further attacks, when Frank Jack Fletcher did what Turner had been dreading for two weeks. In a message to Admiral Ghormley, Fletcher was requesting permission to withdraw his three aircraft carriers, now serving as Task Force 62’s umbrella and shield, from their supporting positions near Guadalcanal.
The reasons Fletcher cited were various—that his F4F Wildcat fighter force had, after two days of action against Japanese bombers, been whittled from ninety-nine planes to seventy-eight; that his ships’ fuel reserves were dwindling; and that the presence of torpedo-armed enemy aircraft posed a threat to his carriers. Fletcher’s reasoning was never clear or consistent. When he asked Admiral Noyes, the tactical commander of the carrier force, for his opinion about a withdrawal, a shortage of fuel was not among his expressed concerns. But when Ghormley notified Nimitz of the decision, fuel was the only concern he mentioned.
Turner never forgot the contentious planning conference on the Saratoga, where he and General Vandegrift pushed for the carriers to remain on station through August 9. Fletcher’s defenders say he only ever promised two days of air support—through August 8. Either way, the argument continued. Passions about the use of the carriers ran so high that they even got to the gentlemanly Marine commander. Vandegrift would be moved, in his memoirs, to accuse Fletcher of rank cowardice: “This was the Koro [Saratoga] conference relived, except that Fletcher was running away twelve hours earlier than he had already threatened during our unpleasant meeting. We all knew his fuel could not have been running low since he refueled in the Fijis.”
Though Ghormley approved his request solely on the basis of a fuel shortage, Fletcher’s carriers had enough fuel for several additional days at cruising speed. His destroyers were at about half capacity, with enough fuel for about thirty-six hours of high-speed operation. The larger ships on hand could have topped them off. Since he had yet to receive Fletcher’s final operations plan, Ghormley had no independent knowledge of the actual risks to the carriers and felt bound to take Fletcher at his word. “All knew that the enemy could arrive in force and catch our Task Forces short of fuel,” Ghormley wrote. “This had to be considered very seriously. When Fletcher, the man on the spot, informed me he had to withdraw for fuel, I approved. He knew his situation in detail; I did not.”
Weeks earlier, in joining MacArthur’s call to delay the invasion, Ghormley had expressed the need for a continuous presence by carrier aircraft. As MacArthur put it to King, “It is the opinion of the two commanders, arrived at independently