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By Root 1851 0

carriers were being employed. “The way these carriers operate seemed chicken-hearted as hell to me,” the Atlanta’s Lloyd Mustin, now a lieutenant commander, wrote on August 8. “Ended the day down off San Cristobal, pretty goddamn far from Tulagi for fighter support, if you ask me. I wonder when we will ever get the nerve to really go after these bastards, seek them out to destroy them.” A line lieutenant from the Wasp, Thomas R. Weschler, said that his captain, Forrest Sherman, “was always trying to get Admiral Noyes’s attention about the kinds of things Admiral Noyes ought to be thinking about”—including reversing Fletcher’s decision to withdraw from Savo Sound after the battle of August 9. As the tactical commander of the carrier force, Noyes held an almost superfluous position given that Fletcher flew his flag in a carrier, too. Noyes seemed hesitant to embrace a leadership role. According to Weschler, “Three times during the night, Captain Sherman said to Admiral Noyes, ‘I recommend you tell Admiral Fletcher that we should turn around and go back in there. They need our support.’ But Admiral Noyes never sent a single one of those messages forward.” Weschler, who would serve as an aide to Vice Admiral Arleigh Burke and ascend to three-star rank himself, was unimpressed with Fletcher’s deputy. “I always thought Admiral Noyes was sort of afraid of his own shadow.… He’d walk up and down the quarterdeck, in greens, wearing his aviation pigskin gloves, and that’s really the only time I ever saw him. I always had the impression of him as being sort of a mannequin, rather than really being a flesh-and-blood naval officer who was in the thick of decisions and ready to take over and set the course.”

It was clear how far the fleet needed to go to beat the Japanese at a game the Americans thought they owned. The Navy entered the war with a xenophobic professional chauvinism prevailing at almost every level. They would have to overcome it in order to learn how to fight: to exploit new technologies; to change the way crews lived and worked aboard ship; to procure ordnance that actually exploded. More fundamentally, a spirit of “battle-mindedness” was needed in its commanders. Those who had been born with a fighter’s instinct would need little help. But for the majority of officers and men who had never experienced the sudden violence of ship-to-ship combat before, the Battle of Savo Island was a deeply unsettling lesson.

The U.S. Marines had won the initial draw at Guadalcanal and strung a tight defensive perimeter around the airfield. A thousand miles to the west, the Japanese had beaten MacArthur to New Guinea. With the parallel Navy and Army campaigns now joined in earnest, the critical points of contact with the enemy were established along 9 degrees South latitude. The lines of battle in the South Seas had been drawn.

FOR SOME OFFICERS, the hurdles to clear en route to getting their ships ready to fight were quite simple. One was no more complicated than getting the kids from Georgia off the battle telephones. The terse lingo of command had to run smoothly through a ship’s lines of communication. Regionally accented speech could block the instant recognition that a fighting crew needed in a scrap. Commander Joseph C. Wylie, the executive officer of the destroyer Fletcher, recalled that after the influx of patriotic volunteers to the fleet had taken place, only one in five of his men had ever been to sea before. Among them was a group of kids from the backwoods of the Peach State who had managed to sidestep boot camp altogether. They were fine and useful behind a squirrel gun, hunting in their native swamplands. In fights on larger waters, they were liable to foul things up. “We had to be very careful to have all or none of the Georgia boys on the telephone circuit, so that they could understand each other and we could understand them,” Wylie said. “There were a lot of special arrangements we had to make.”

One of them involved the communication of relative bearings. Typically these are given in terms of an imaginary compass