• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1817 0

Wasp was lost,” Thomas Weschler said, “just as they didn’t want anyone to know the Lexington had been lost at Coral Sea.… The Japanese would have had a heyday if they really knew how close to the end we were.” The Wasp’s survivors, like the survivors of the Battle of Savo Island, were hidden away—quarantined—in Nouméa. The news of the carrier’s sinking would not be released until December, by which time the survivors, sworn to secrecy about the reason for their leave, were finally allowed to tell family and friends the rest of the story. Stories of unmitigated disaster were never helpful to morale. While the South Dakota was under repair at Pearl Harbor, her skipper, Thomas Gatch, tried to use the story of the Battle of Savo Island as a teaching opportunity, inviting the captain of one of the sunken cruisers to visit his wardroom. Telling of the disastrous battle against Mikawa’s cruisers, his guest spoke in tones that fell from solemn to dire. “I guess he and Captain Gatch were old friends, and I am pretty sure Captain Gatch didn’t know in advance what this captain was going to say. His talk was very pessimistic,” recalled Paul H. Backus, a junior-grade lieutenant on the battleship. “At the end, Captain Gatch had to get up and say, in front of this officer, that nothing like that was going to happen to the South Dakota, that our best defense against this kind of nonsense was our nine sixteen-inch guns—cut and dried—and then he escorted the officer out of the wardroom. It was kind of sad, because this guy had lost his ship, and the way he lost it had left a very discouraging impression on him.” That mood would persist until the fleet got off its heels and did something to turn around morale. Admiral Wright, with Task Force 64, had under his command the tools to do the job. But the tools are not the craftsman, and they would be of little productive use until the right men showed up to do the job.

13

The Warriors

IT TOOK CONSIDERABLE FORCE OF WILL TO OVERCOME THE PARALYSIS of the routine, the heavy inertia of predictability that almost every aspect of Navy life promoted, from the plan of the day to the formation plans drawn on the navigation board. It was easy not to notice how tiny elements of routine fused into a culture and made every day reassuringly like the last. The rhythm was made possible through a professionalization of the business of naval service that would never have existed but for previous great victories. In war, those comfortable rhythms needed to be violently overthrown if further victories were to be possible. Fast-thinking, quick-acting men would be needed to overthrow them.

The awareness that one was in the presence of such an insurgent came at a pheromonal level. He didn’t have to be brash or intimidating. If he had the right qualities, they carried through the air around him despite his quietude. Some men were fiery and motivational, leading with a barely restrained recklessness and a demeanor of perpetually fresh anger. Others were intellectual warriors, brains in circuit with the matrix in space where vectors flew toward other vectors and the results of battle followed from the nature of their intersections. The fighter’s way was elemental. It was not possible to cultivate it reliably in an academic meritocracy, or to gauge it by class rank. The woodsmen with their squirrel guns who beat the British at New Orleans rallied to Andrew Jackson’s readiness to fury, a scent that inspired fear, his instinct to abandon prudence and seize a sudden opening to kill. Such a man knew that a warship was not a lady but a platform of systems that fire projectiles that kill. Having tasted defeat, the Navy was starting to come back to appreciating the unpolished strengths of the Georgia farm boys who found themselves under gentle persecution on board Commander Wylie’s Fletcher. A rebel yell and a blast of powder. That and a little planning and technical proficiency would carry the day.

Rear Admiral Norman Scott was one of them. A 1911 graduate of the Naval Academy, he was known as “one of the best-liked