Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [86]
Commanders did what they could with local incentives. On the destroyer Sterett, the gunnery officer held a contest to see which of his mount crews was fastest in loading four hundred rounds into the practice-loading machine. The winning crew did it in less than thirty minutes, about four seconds per load, and their reward for their hustle was a four-thousand-dollar cash prize. In Task Force 64, much remained to be done. While it was running with the carriers, training for a surface fight “had practically lapsed,” Admiral Ghormley wrote. What was needed was an overhaul in readiness and spirit. And on both of those counts, Norman Scott, taking command of the flotilla in September 1942, was just the man for the job.
WITH THE ARRIVAL in the South Pacific of commanders such as Norm Scott, Gil Hoover, and Captain Edward J. “Mike” Moran in the Boise, and with the crown prince of shipboard gunnery, Rear Admiral Willis Lee, awaiting the arrival of the Washington at Tongatabu, the Navy was reshuffling its decks and getting the footing it needed for a new kind of fight. Distinctions were being drawn between officers who were battle-minded and those whose savage instincts were reserved for advancing their own careers. Qualities that got you ahead in peacetime were yielding to skills equally ageless, but prized only in desperate times: a glint in the eye, a forward-leaning, balls-of-the-feet bearing, a constitutional aspect of professionalized aggression.
The reach and impact of individual leadership was in flux in the machine age. According to legend, the eleventh-century Spanish general El Cid had such a powerful command presence that it survived his own death. With his corpse secured in his saddle, riding in the lead position, his army was said to have routed a foe by the mere illusion of his leadership. Innovations in the art of war could on one hand extend the reach and power of individuals. The commander of the carrier Enterprise pointed to a new dynamic in the age of airpower. “It is continually proved that the ability of a single individual can make or break the entire situation,” he said. Planes individualized war. The pilot at the stick was the guidance system of his ordnance. But teamwork had not gone out of fashion within the hull of a ship. Men who were battle-minded would win the day so long as their spirit had a contagious strain. Careerists would climb as they usually did: with or without the glory of victory. Though deciding who belonged to which camp was often a matter of private controversy—in 1942 the carrier commanders were the principal case studies in that debate—one thing was clear. The street fighters were coming into play in the South Pacific.
With his return to basics and a regimen that left little time for idle watch standing, the commander of Task Force 64 was winning over his men. “Scott had balls,” Robert Graff of the Atlanta said. “He was smart. And he was shrewd. Those three things usually make a fighter.”
His mission as September drew to a close: bow up to the Tokyo Express and give it its first bloody nose.
14
The Devil May Care
FROM EVEN A SHORT DISTANCE OUT TO SEA, THE FIGHTING ASHORE seemed remote, aseptic. As his destroyer, the Monssen, prowled the northern shore of Guadalcanal, Roland Smoot found himself thinking: So this is war. It’s nothing. It was, of course, hardly that. A captain’s thoughts seldom wandered far from the fact that the surface fleet was almost ten months into a war and had yet to win a significant battle.
The carriers and their pilots were proven winners. American submariners were emerging as world-beaters. The surface Navy—the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers of the traditional black-shoe fleet—would have their day. At Guadalcanal as ever, it was the most expendable members of the deep-sea combat fleet, the destroyers, that