Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [71]
Nimitz and his staff read these words in bewilderment. Just four days earlier, Ghormley deemed his situation “critical.” Now he was requesting “freedom of action” and professing not to see the direction of the Japanese thrust. Retiring his carriers—and with the Enterprise ordered back to Pearl Harbor for repairs—he was promising to stand ready to defend a twenty-five-hundred-mile front, and assuring high command that the threadbare Cactus Air Force—which by Ghormley’s own count at month’s end had just eight fighters capable of intercepting Japanese bombers and which was struggling to fend off destroyers, much less the entire Combined Fleet—could hold off Nagumo’s still-potent carrier force. In London he had learned, following British operations off Norway and in the Mediterranean, that “surface craft, unless heavily protected by fighters, cannot stand up against shore based aircraft.” But now he was expecting far more than the gallant fliers and ground crews of Henderson Field could deliver.
As it happened, the Japanese had newly settled on the thrust of their “main effort.” With their traditional invasion convoys unable to land by day in the face of American air attacks, and too slow to sneak in and out by night, Yamamoto abandoned sending reinforcements via troopships altogether. As his chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki, wrote, “It is apparent that landing on Guadalcanal by transports is hopeless unless the enemy planes are wiped out.” A new way to bring troops to the embattled island would have to be found. Raizo Tanaka would be asked to repeat his exploit delivering the Ichiki detachment again and again, using not slow transports but swift destroyers and other fast combatants to carry the Japanese Army south.
Several days before the Japanese reinforcements began running, Ghormley wrote MacArthur to state his preferences as to the types of ships he wanted the Southwest Pacific Command’s pilots to strike. Ghormley reckoned that the “greatest immediate threat to success” came from the Japanese surface fleet, and that the highest-priority targets should be aircraft carriers and troop transports. Destroyers were last on his list. Ghormley was not alone in underrating the value of enemy destroyers. That he expressed the thought so clearly on the very day the Japanese settled on them as their principal means of carrying arms and men to Guadalcanal was no small irony.
On the evening of August 28, seven Japanese destroyers approached the island. Sallying within range of Henderson, their vanguard was greeted brutally by the Cactus Air Force’s dive-bombers, who exacted a steep price: the Asagiri sunk, the Shiratsuyu rendered unnavigable, and the Yugiri badly damaged with her commander mortally wounded. It was a remarkable performance against the small, difficult-to-hit ships. The rest of the Japanese flotilla turned back after the grim news was reported. A “perfect failure,” Ugaki called it. But in the week that followed, bad weather prevented the boys from Cactus from blocking the Tokyo Express. Stubbornly maintaining his pace of nightly runs from Rabaul, Tanaka finally landed the last of Ichiki’s and Kawaguchi’s forces—more than five thousand men. Through piecemeal assembly, the Japanese had at last marshaled enough men to undertake their first general counteroffensive on Guadalcanal.
Yamamoto now resolved officially to make Guadalcanal, not New Guinea, the “principal operational zone of the Southeast Area” and postponed the drive to capture Port Moresby. On Guadalcanal, General Kawaguchi’s troops had gathered and, fading into the jungle near Lunga, began planning a renewed assault on Vandegrift’s perimeter.
On August 29, as the bomb-damaged Enterprise steamed toward Pearl Harbor, Admiral Ghormley ordered his remaining carriers, the Wasp and the Saratoga, to take turns reprovisioning