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By Root 1913 0

passageways of the fleet. The South Dakota was already known as a hard-luck ship. Some ascribed it to the state of South Dakota’s failure to follow the tradition whereby states presented their namesake dreadnoughts with a handmade silver service. The governor didn’t deliver, and the consequences were inevitable. During a shakedown run in the Chesapeake Bay, she went aground and lost electrical power. In speed trials off Casco Bay, Maine, the South Dakota collided dead center with a whale. Unable to slow down during the stringently prescribed test of the power plant, the ship ground the hapless mammal in half. Some of the chief petty officers said this heralded, somehow, good fortune. If good fortune was to be had, it belonged to Captain Thomas Gatch, for he might have been relieved of command on the spot had any of this made the papers. Now he had done it again, and his reward for putting an eighteen-inch-wide gash the full length of her underside was to be ordered back to Pearl for two weeks of repairs. It was a serious setback for the reconstitution of SOPAC’s surface striking force.

ON SEPTEMBER 7, Admiral Nimitz flew to San Francisco to meet with Admiral King and Secretary Forrestal at the St. Francis Hotel. On the agenda was a review of the state of the South Pacific command, partly occasioned by the defeat in the Battle of Savo Island. It would be more than a month yet before such matters became fodder for headline writers.

On that same day, on board his flagship Argonne at Nouméa, Admiral Ghormley composed a letter to Nimitz that he knew he had no business writing. He was in the grip of an exhaustion that seemed to color everything. It might have been cabin fever; he hadn’t left his flagship since his arrival on the first of August. He couldn’t stop himself from unburdening himself. “I have to spill this to somebody,” he wrote, “so I am afraid you will have to be the goat, but I hope you will burn this after it is read.”

By the time this reaches you, Mr. Forrestal will have seen you. I think for the time he was here, he got an eyeful and an earful. Whether he can do anything about it, I don’t know. Somebody said the last day or two, on the British first visit to Washington they burned it, on the second visit they occupied it. It looks so to me that we are doing their job all over the world and the Government is not backing us up down here with what we need, why, I don’t know. I feel sure that you have the picture completely, but I am very surprised from one or two of King’s dispatches, that I do not believe he appreciates it.

As between King and Ghormley, the doubts were mutual. King was growing skeptical about his SOPAC commander’s fitness for command. King asked Nimitz whether Ghormley could stand up physically to the strain of South Pacific duty. Nimitz had no way to know. He knew his friend was a seadog, a strategist, a diplomat, and a gentleman. But he would soon wonder if he had the one thing that was needed most in the South Pacific in 1942: a fighter’s heart.

“Our carrier situation at present is precarious,” continued Ghormley’s letter to Nimitz of September 7. “Some people are probably saying why don’t I send surface forces in strength to Guadalcanal at night. The simple reason is, it is too dangerous to suffer possible loss under the present conditions where they have submarines, motor torpedo boats, surface forces and shore based aircraft to aid them in restricted waters.”

The last sentence revealed that Ghormley didn’t really understand what confronted his men in the combat theater. If Japan’s change in radio codes left Navy intelligence snoopers poorly apprised of movements, it should have been clear by the second week of September that Japanese motor torpedo boats were not a major threat in the Slot, nor did they fly land-based attack aircraft at night. As for the restricted waters, they were, of course, no less restricted for the Japanese than they were for the Americans, who enjoyed the significant advantage of defending those waters instead of attacking them. While the Navy’s conservatism