Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [63]
Marine engineers co-opted steamrollers, tractors, and other abandoned Japanese assets to make the airfield serviceable for heavier strike aircraft such as Dauntless dive-bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers. Caches of ordnance and ammunition were buried along the perimeter of the strip. The violently variable weather made it difficult to operate. “It was dry and would raise a cloud of dust that you could see a mile,” Ernest M. Eller, one of Admiral Nimitz’s staffers, said. “It would block out any other plane coming along. An hour later it would rain, and you would sliver in just as if you were in a mud hole. Then the hot sun would dry the field within another hour or two.” As often as not in the early days, pilots would have to contend with Japanese sniper fire as they taxied or made their approach.
They were bitter about the Navy’s abandonment of them, and would tell stories ever afterward about how they persisted despite it. Well within extended range of the Japanese base at Rabaul, the marines had to contend daily with raids by Japanese bombers. The harassment did not end, not by day or by night. Japanese mortarmen and the odd artillery piece, too, worked long hours making their lives miserable. The small contingent of Japanese on Guadalcanal had fled to the hills when the Americans landed. They would serve mainly as a harassing force while awaiting reinforcements from Rabaul.
The pattern of fighting through June 1942 had suggested that carriers would play the deciding role in the naval war against Japan. What kind of fight this South Seas campaign would become remained an open question. Carriers would be important, but after the Battle of Savo Island it was clear that the “gun club” didn’t need disbanding yet. Admiral Ghormley knew in his bones the power of the battleships. His career was rooted in the big-gun fleet. He had served in the Nevada, the Oklahoma, in a prominent staff job in the Battle Force, and then in the Nevada again as her commander.
The fight that was taking shape in the southern Solomons was going to be neither a single, climactic World War I–style daylight slugfest nor a repeat of Midway, a dance of search planes and long-range naval air strikes. The South Pacific Forces would draw strength from a foundation of supply and reinforcement built far south of the point of contact with the enemy. And the point of the spear that dueled with the enemy would be the surface fleet—destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, aided by aircraft, whose job would be to seize control of the seaways from the enemy. Neither the Navy nor the Marines had fought a war like this before. Its finer points would be developed, tested, and adjusted on the fly over time.
On August 12, Captain Samuel Jenkins, skipper of the Atlanta, called together his officers and shared the story of what had happened four nights before, of how in the fog-swaddled night near Savo Island, flares, then searchlights, then plunging fire left a powerful squadron of U.S. heavy cruisers burning and helpless. As the Atlanta made circles with the carriers north of Nouméa, the inactivity bothered those who felt the ache for revenge. The fight for Guadalcanal had only begun. At least one report reached SOPAC suggesting that as many as forty Japanese destroyers were based at Rabaul. “There is going to be a bitch of a night session up here, some dark night, with torpedoes in the water as thick