Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [34]
“It is true, Marines will take a pounding until their own air gets established (about ten days or so), but they can dig in, hole up, and wait. Extra losses are a localized operation. This is balanced against a potential National tragedy. Loss of our fleet or one or more of these carriers is a real, worldwide tragedy.” There is little doubt Fletcher’s view of the situation off Guadalcanal took a serious accounting of the strategic significance of this scarcity of carrier power.
So would go the debate. The amphibious commanders met on the evening of August 8 to discuss what to do, Kelly Turner summoning Vandegrift and Crutchley to his flagship, the McCawley. Vandegrift arrived by launch from the beach. Shortly after 9 p.m., Crutchley, the cruiser force commander, pulled his flagship, the heavy cruiser Australia, out of formation in the southwestern covering force and set course for Lunga Point. This left the other two cruisers in that force, the Chicago and the Canberra, to guard that entrance to the sound. Crutchley left the commander of the Chicago, Captain Howard D. Bode, in interim command of his group.
The Australia anchored off Lunga Point, and Crutchley took a whaleboat to the McCawley. During the meeting, Vandegrift was struck by both Turner’s and Crutchley’s absolute physical weariness. There had been no break in the pressure they faced. Two days of air attacks and continuous difficulties with logistics ashore had worn them down to the threshold of exhaustion. Turner announced a tentative decision that he had been reluctant to make: In view of Fletcher’s withdrawal, he would remove the transports and all of the cargo ships from the area, too. They would leave at sunrise on the ninth. Turner asked Vandegrift if enough stores had been unloaded to last his forces for a while. He asked Crutchley whether the cruiser screen could hold for a day or two without the protection of carrier-based fighter planes. Turner heard their grumbling affirmations and let’s-hope-sos and adjourned the meeting at eleven forty-five.
As the commanders took leave of Turner’s flagship, the enemy’s torpedoes were already in the water.
6
A Captain in the Fog
IF COMMAND IS A LONELY MOUNTAIN, THERE WERE FEW PEAKS MORE desolate than Howard D. Bode, the captain of the Chicago. Largely, it seemed, he liked it that way. It was common practice for a skipper to take all his meals alone in his cabin. This suited the ship’s officers, because Bode’s manner was insulting and intimidating when he was not entirely aloof. He visited the wardroom only for meetings, and his presence always chilled the company.
Bode could wield the chilling power by proxy. “His officers were scared to death of him,” said his Marine orderly, Raymond Zarker. “The minute I would walk in there they would freeze, like a bunch of frightened rabbits.” According to an officer who knew him on another ship, “he was short and stocky and to a young ensign the most staggering thing about him was that he let his hair grow long enough so that it hung down over the collar of his service dress whites. He used to stick one of his hands in his blouse in front and he postured a little like Napoleon postured and looked a little like I thought Napoleon was supposed to look.”
On the Chicago, officers who stood by their captain on watch and tried to be helpful did so at their peril. To give advice to a tyrant was to suggest his fallibility and offer oneself as a scapegoat should things go wrong. There were a few senior officers whom Bode outwardly respected, but he treated most of them in line with his whispered nicknames, “Captain Bligh” and “King Bode.” Of the Pacific