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In early August, autumn had arrived for no one quite yet. The campaign for Guadalcanal had only begun. All the same, the first battle between major naval forces in the South Pacific left no doubt whose navy was master and whose was student. For Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and U.S. commanders all the way down the line, the residual sweet smell of the victories of spring had been borne away on a fell new breeze.

1 Given Nimitz’s fear of submarines, and the S-44’s success here, it is mystifying why U.S. submarines were not more aggressively deployed in the Slot. As Admiral William S. Pye, the president of the Naval War College, noted, “It would seem that this would have been an ideal area for such operations. It was like a well-baited trap. We knew the Japanese were determined to reinforce their troops and try to recapture the island. They had to come to us, and they did come, again and again, from the very beginning of our occupation. They had to traverse narrow waters” (W. S. Pye, President, Naval War College, “Comments on the Battle of Guadalcanal, November 11–15, 1942,” June 5, 1943). Ghormley wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in 1950, “No submarines were under my command. After I was detached, it is possible that Halsey had some assigned to him, but I doubt it.… I asked CINCPAC for submarines once or twice, but none were made available” (Ghormley to Morison, November 15, 1950, Ghormley Papers).

(Photo Credit: P.2)

Dead sailors rose from out of the deep,

Nor looked not left or right,

But shoreward marched upon the sea,

And the moon was a riband of white.

A hundred ghosts stood on the shore

At the turn of the midnight flood.

They beckoned me with spectral hands,

And the moon was a riband of blood.

—from “Iron Bottom Bay” by Walter A. Mahler, chaplain, USS Astoria

9

A New Kind of Fight

ON AUGUST 10, AT HIS HOUSE NEAR PEARL HARBOR, ADMIRAL NIMITZ hosted a dinner party with his staff in honor of a visiting dignitary, the commander of the New Zealand Air Force. He would not learn until much later that the inefficiencies of his guest’s own service branch contributed to the bloody fiasco in the Battle of Savo Island. Even if there were cause to blame him, the toast Nimitz lifted that evening to the common cause would probably have sounded the same. As the Pacific Fleet commander related it to his wife, Catherine, “We drank a cocktail toast to our Marines in the Solomons, who despite losses have done magnificently. I can sleep better tonight than I could for several nights past, although I am well aware we are not out of the woods yet.”

After the debacle off Savo, Nimitz was showing his knack for understatement. What Admiral Turner would call “a fatal lethargy of mind” still gripped his fighting surface fleet. After eight months of war, in which his carrier fleet had enjoyed striking successes learning its trade under fire, the surface forces still were not battle-ready. Cruiser captains were not focused on the kinetic realities of wartime. So long as the carriers were deemed too precious to risk, the campaign would hinge on getting the surface forces of the Pacific Fleet ready to win battles. Paradoxically, the problem was their overconfidence. According to Admiral Turner, the surface forces at this time were “obsessed with a strong feeling of technical and mental superiority over the enemy. In spite of ample evidence as to enemy capabilities, most of our officers and men despised the enemy and felt themselves sure victors in all encounters under any circumstances.” Complacency and timidity were first cousins as contributors to defeat.

And the problems were not just psychological. They were systemic as well. The radio links between units and commands were almost always unreliable. The fruits of the wide web of air searches, performed by PBY Catalinas and B-17s operating from bases on New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Santa Cruz, and Malaita, withered under pressure from bad weather, the shortcomings of human senses, poor coordination,