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It was intolerable to battle-minded men that the aircraft carrier task force that was ostensibly covering the landing force and its escorts should forgo a sunrise counterattack on Mikawa on August 9. With more tempting targets available to the Japanese—transports and cargomen vulnerably shuttling between the Solomons and Nouméa—Mustin considered the idea “completely fantastic” that Japanese planes would be able to fly all the way down from Rabaul for a long-shot strike against carriers that were well defended and seldom precisely located. He didn’t think much of the fighting spirit of his superiors. “They’re so goddamned scared their lousy carriers will get hurt that the whole effective Pacific Fleet hauls ass at the mention of a few Jap planes,” Mustin wrote. “We have no high commanders capable of playing ball in the same league with many of the Japs,” he continued. “I wish to God Wild Bill Halsey were back here to put a little fire, drive, and action into things.”

The Enterprise, Saratoga, and Wasp, each of them irreplaceable in the near term, spent several days cruising the Coral Sea, four hundred miles southeast of the Solomons, taking turns drinking from the oilers Platte and Kaskaskia. Their screen, including the Atlanta, stayed faithfully by in their defense.

Wags in the Royal Navy were said to joke that if they ever came to blows with their cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, “all their fleet would have to do to insure victory would be to remain safely at ease in port for six weeks; at the end of that time they could sally forth to find an American Navy exhausted by its own frenetic maneuverings.” The frenetic idling was never greater than in the early days off Guadalcanal. As Admiral Ghormley occupied himself with the puzzle of supplying Vandegrift’s men, and as the carriers burned fuel and refueled north of Nouméa, a week passed then another without further appearances by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Finding planes to send to Henderson Field had been no easy thing given the jealous way Fletcher’s carriers and Ghormley’s island bases husbanded their aircraft, but on August 20, word spread through General Vandegrift’s perimeter that air reinforcements were finally on the way. Nimitz directed their deployment to the South Pacific as soon as the pilots designated to fly them finished their training. Ferried from Fiji by the escort carrier Long Island, two squadrons of Marine Corps pilots made a short two-hundred-mile hop to the island and landed amid cheers. Fresh from flight school and with scarcely a carrier landing among them, they included nineteen F4F Wildcats under Captain John L. Smith (Marine Fighting Squadron 223), and a dozen SBD Dauntlesses under Major Richard C. Mangrum (Marine Bombing Squadron 232).

Marines driving jeeps raced the planes down the runway as they arrived. “Our planes had come at last!—only thirty-one, but in that joyful moment they seemed to darken the sky,” a photographer, Thayer Soule, wrote. General Vandegrift, a reserved, even-tempered southern gentleman, was giddy. The arrival of the planes rated as “one of the most beautiful sights of my life.” With tears welling in his eyes, Vandegrift greeted Mangrum as he climbed down from the cockpit of his Dauntless, saying, “Thank God you have come.”

“That night we went to bed early and slept well,” Soule wrote. “The fleet that had sailed away so long ago had not forgotten us after all.” The preceding two weeks had seemed long indeed. The coming twenty-four hours would be longer still. For the Japanese chose that moment, the night after the pilots landed, to make their first concentrated stab at evicting the defenders of Henderson Field.

10

The Tokyo Express

CABLING JOSEPH STALIN TO APOLOGIZE FOR MISSING A CONFERENCE in Moscow, President Roosevelt acknowledged the urgency of the Eastern Front and declared, as politics seemed to require, that “our real enemy is Germany.” As Soviets reeled before the assaults of the Wehrmacht, and the transatlantic convoys meant to save them withered