Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [72]
Because of the submarine threat, the carrier task force made a practice of steaming at just thirteen knots in order to optimize the efficiency of the sonar gear on their escorting destroyers. But that slow speed increased the ability of submarines to intercept and target them in the first place. On the morning of August 31, Commander Minoru Yokota, captain of the submarine I-26, stalked the Saratoga east of San Cristobál. When he chose his moment to attack, he closed so aggressively that his periscope scratched the hull of a destroyer in the U.S. screen. The Americans spotted his incoming torpedo wakes, but too late to evade. Shortly before 7 a.m., the carrier shook “like a house in a severe earthquake” as a torpedo struck her. The shock wave whiplashed the hull from below the sea to the flag bridge, tossing Admiral Fletcher up into the overhead and inflicting a forehead wound that would make him—much to his embarrassment—the highest-ranking U.S. naval officer to date to receive the Purple Heart. The blast tripped circuit breakers in the Saratoga’s turboelectric drive system, leaving her dead in the water.
The Saratoga was an exceptionally stout ship, built originally as a battle cruiser and converted after the conclusion of naval treaties. Her engineers righted the starboard list by transferring fuel between tanks. Then the cruiser Minneapolis took her in tow, gingerly bringing her along at seven knots. With a stiff headwind, Captain Dewitt C. Ramsey’s flight crews were able to perform the remarkable feat of conducting flight operations while under tow. Twenty-nine of Sara’s strike aircraft got off the deck and flew to Espiritu Santo while their ship was in this infirm condition.
The waters southeast of Guadalcanal would earn the bitter nickname “Torpedo Junction.” Whenever the sound of gunfire or the basso thudding of depth charges were heard, someone would inevitably remark, “Sounds like there’s a function at the junction.” With the Saratoga out of action for three months, Fletcher could no longer survive Ernest King’s acid mistrust. Fletcher’s caution paid no dividends now that his carriers’ favorite haunts, outside range of enemy air attack, were infested with submarines. His reward was a recall to Pearl Harbor in his damaged flagship and, before the year was out, to have his career as a carrier task force commander terminated by the COMINCH. When Leigh Noyes assumed command of Task Force 61, the U.S. Marine Corps no longer had Frank Jack Fletcher, the victor at Midway, to kick around anymore.
But they got plenty more planes. After the Saratoga’s disabling, her valuable air group, like that of the Enterprise, found temporary homes—on the Wasp, on Espiritu Santo, and on Guadalcanal as well. A Marine general with a keen sense of the absurd was said to remark, “What saved Guadalcanal was the loss of so many carriers.”
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What They Were Built For
IN THE WEEKS AHEAD, THE MOMENTUM OF ATTACK AND DEFENSE would swing daily, diurnally, as the Americans commanded the skies and seas by day, and the Japanese regained them by night. Neither side could effectively fight on the other’s terms. Whipped by Mikawa at Savo Island, the warriors of the U.S. Navy’s surface force would continue to spend much of the month screening carrier task forces or escorting convoys, not roaming the seas as the predators they were meant to be. “It seemed we were on the fringe of battle for months,” Richard Hale of the destroyer Laffey said. “I felt uneasy knowing the real war was only five hundred miles north of us in the Solomons, and we could have run up there in a day’s steaming.”
Ten days before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, a plan circulated briefly, never to be executed, providing for the creation of a “surface