Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [57]
Coverage of the Slot on the afternoon of August 8 was a particularly egregious failure. Turner had asked the commander of land-based area air forces, Rear Admiral John S. McCain, to supplement MacArthur’s patrol coverage of the critical waterway. As it happened, McCain’s aviators were blocked by bad weather from flying the missions, but his message to that effect did not reach Turner until nearly midnight on the ninth. Had he known that his eyes in the sky could not fly, he might have alerted Crutchley, Bode, and Riefkohl to the possibility of a naval attack that night. He might also have requested that Fletcher use his carrier planes to fill the gaps in the search net.
Too often, fighter pilots could not communicate with the ships vectoring them, nor sometimes with one another. Bomber pilots couldn’t contact the troops they were flying to support. Search aircraft could not communicate with ships. Squadron commodores could not reach the ship captains under their command. There was no network. In the narrow windows of time in which ignorance was costliest, all too often the components of SOPAC were fatally out of touch.
As his screen was dying off Savo, Turner found he was unable to reach directly the only flag officer on screening duty that night, the capable Norman Scott. The TBS radio in Turner’s flagship, the McCawley, was partially shorted, and was effective only to about eight miles. Getting to Scott required him to go through Riefkohl on Vincennes. Turner couldn’t raise Ghormley, either. According to Ghormley, Turner’s radio frequency “could not be heard by the Commander of South Pacific Force. It is doubtful if all unit commanders of Task Force 61 could hear more than fragments of the blind transmissions on that frequency.” Ghormley could not hear Fletcher, either, and though the McCawley’s communications suite had been bolstered with the addition of sixteen field radios, Turner could not regularly monitor Fletcher’s frequency.
Plain bad luck joined wholesale system failure in plaguing the Americans. When the New Zealand Air Force search plane transmitted its sighting report at 10:25 a.m. on August 8, the radio station at Fall River was shut down, under air attack. After the pilot, Bill Stutt, landed the plane, he learned that his transmission had gone unreceived. He sped by jeep to the operations hut and delivered it in person. It sat there for nearly two hours before being sent to Southwest Pacific headquarters in Brisbane, and languished there for another three and a half hours before being routed to Canberra for area broadcast, and to Pearl Harbor for relay to the fleet. Turner did not learn of this important sighting of unidentified ships until the evening of the attack.
Waiting for Ghormley to approve his request to withdraw, Fletcher was still standing by with the carrier task force, some 150 miles from Savo Island and well within striking range of Mikawa. When the approval came and the carriers finally did turn south at 4:30 a.m. on the ninth, Fletcher knew nothing of the opportunity. Long into the morning as his carriers withdrew, Admiral Fletcher “was completely uninformed regarding the surface actions in Ironbottom Sound during their progress,” according to his subordinate Kinkaid. “Had timely and accurate information of the surface actions been received,” Kinkaid wrote, “it is possible that the carrier air groups could have made the dawn air attack on the Japanese cruiser force which Mikawa so greatly feared.” The carriers hadn’t yet flown. They simply never learned that an enemy was near. Mikawa got away with his kills.
Among Vandegrift’s men on Guadalcanal, adverse assessments of the Navy’s fighting spirit were not hard to find in the coming weeks. It wasn’t just marines who had doubts. Few were satisfied with the way the