Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [75]
Only the ships of the surface fleet could hold safe the nighttime supply lanes and finally ensure American control of the island. Only surface ships, the mobile heavy armor of the seaways, could stop the Tokyo Express after dark and hold control of the seas. All that remained was for the Navy to find the will and the opportunity to send them into action again against the reigning masters of the old way of naval war.
Thus far in 1942, six of the seven Allied heavy cruisers that had ventured forth and fought Japanese surface ships muzzle-to-muzzle lay at rest beneath a blood-warm sea. The Vincennes, the Quincy, the Astoria, the HMAS Canberra, and, four months earlier and far from the Solomons, the Houston and the HMS Exeter, had all been overmatched and destroyed by their counterparts. All seven might have been lost had Howard Bode’s Chicago entered battle on the night of August 9. This record was doubtlessly on the minds of all the skippers of the fast, multi-role ships that the Navy had long assumed would prevail in any direct action with Japanese surface ships. In the cold trade of naval warfare, such preconceptions held no value. There was but a single axiom that counted (now confirmed and amended by Gunichi Mikawa): Victory flew with the first effective salvo, and a second and a third didn’t hurt the cause either.
Training courses in evolving disciplines such as fire control were under furious revision. Certain courses, for radarmen for instance, were being designed from scratch. All these changes, the growth of manpower and the evolution of doctrine, were aimed at one thing: knocking Japan to the mat in what was shaping up to be an epic oceanic brawl. In the sweltering South Pacific, the hardware needed to do that was plowing relentlessly south, fresh from the proving grounds.
On the morning of September 6, the men of the light cruiser Atlanta, en route to Hawaii with the damaged Saratoga, arrived at Tongatabu and beheld a heartening sight. Two powerful new ships were in the harbor, the battleship South Dakota and the antiaircraft cruiser Juneau. News came that the mighty North Carolina’s sister ship, the Washington, was seven days out of the Panama Canal, due in the theater the following week.
The coming of the powerful (and more fuel-efficient) fast battleships raised hopes at a time when naval planners were intensely aware that Japan’s great 69,000-ton Yamato and several of the heralded 36,600-ton Kongo-class battleships were at Truk. No U.S. ship in the area could match them. “I cling to the fond hope that some one of our admirals, some day, will force the fight—will go after these bastards at a time of our choosing, and with forces arrayed to our satisfaction, and will blow the bloody bastards clean to hell. And the North Carolina and Washington are some of what it takes to do that job,” Lloyd Mustin wrote.
Lieutenant Commander Edwin B. Hooper, the alumnus of MIT’s fire-control course and an assistant gunnery officer in the Washington, proclaimed the fast battleships “a tremendous step forward in technology, orders of magnitude over the old battleships, even with their modernization.” The most dramatic improvement they offered over the older battleships was their high-frequency SG radar, the existence of which was still secret. The North Carolina had had her new apparatus installed at sea instead of within view of prying eyes in the shipyard. The ship’s Marine detachment stood armed guard over the newly equipped fire-control and plotting rooms. The Atlanta’s sailors had hardly gotten the dope on the South Dakota or greeted their counterparts on their sister ship, the Juneau, when the two newcomers were under way again. Then, oddly, just a few hours later they were returning to port. Misfortunate had struck the South Dakota. She had run aground on an uncharted coral head.
Reputations form fast in the cloistered