Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [90]
One of Nimitz’s staffers, visiting to investigate and report on the state of the supply chain, found Nouméa’s harbor a choked bottleneck of fully loaded cargomen waiting for dock space. The trouble ran all the way from San Francisco, where few seemed to know about the problems confronting SOPAC’s stevedores, to Wellington, New Zealand, where an untimely longshoreman’s strike was looming. Though Nouméa’s facilities could handle only twenty-four ships per month, often as many as eighty or more awaited unloading. The cranes in the harbor weren’t stout enough to haul away heavy loads such as PT boats. Serious thought was given to a crude remedy: sinking the merchantmen so that the Elco motor torpedo boats, seventy feet long and fifty tons each, could simply float free.
Admiral Nimitz had long been worrying about the chemistry of the SOPAC command. He decided to visit the theater personally to size up not only its materials but also its state of mind. On September 28, his seaplane set down in Nouméa harbor and he was promptly taken to the Argonne for an afternoon meeting of area commanders.
On his first arrival, Nimitz was disappointed to learn that the battleship Washington was still at the Navy’s fueling base at Tongatabu, eighteen hundred miles from Guadalcanal, “so far removed from the critical area,” he would scold Ghormley, “that she might as well have been in Pearl or San Francisco, insofar as taking advantage of favorable opportunities is concerned.” Nimitz also thought Ghormley was keeping Admiral Scott’s striking force on too short a leash, holding them too far south “to do much about visiting enemy ships.”
At 4:30 p.m. Nimitz sat down in the flagship’s ward room with a gathering of brass that included Ghormley, the SOPAC chief of staff, Dan Callaghan, Kelly Turner, Major General Richard K. Sutherland from MacArthur’s headquarters, and General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the Army Air Forces.
Arnold, a four-star, was Nimitz’s only equal in the room. Arnold was no friend of the Navy’s ambitions in the Pacific. Before leaving, he sought General Marshall’s advice on dealing with the rival service branch. Marshall’s advice was basic Dale Carnegie: Listen to the other fellow’s story. Don’t get mad. And let the other fellow tell his story first.
“We recognized the fact that the Navy was hard-pressed at Guadalcanal,” Arnold wrote. “They did need a ‘shot in the arm’—and needed it badly; but I was not sure that the way to give it to them was by sending airplanes that might better be used against the Germans from England.” He viewed the Navy’s demands for aircraft as a “separate intramural war” that was driven by “uninformed pressures” arising from public interest in the Pacific war. Arnold had been shocked by President Roosevelt’s posturing on the question of which theater should have priority. In private, FDR affirmed a Europe-first strategy. In public, he made statements that Guadalcanal had to be “held at all costs.” While Arnold didn’t argue with the idea that Guadalcanal should be held, he noted, “A natural word of encouragement from the President was at once seized upon as proof that he had changed his mind” about theater priorities. As Arnold would write, “It was obvious that the naval officers in this area were under a terrific strain. It was also obvious that they had chips on their shoulders.” Ghormley said that the pace of work had been such that he hadn’t left the Argonne’s flag quarters in about a month. When Arnold told him “that probably was the cause of some of his troubles, because no man—I don’t care who he is—can sit continuously in a small office, fighting a war, with all the complicated problems that come up, without