Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [91]
The logistical bottlenecks Arnold found at Nouméa appalled him. He found the practice of rerouting ships to New Zealand for unloading and reloading inexcusable given the shortages everywhere else. “At that moment the planners of Torch were going nearly crazy in their search for ships,” he wrote. In view of the accumulations of crated aircraft that he found at Nouméa, Arnold said that no more planes ought to go to SOPAC until the inventory had been unpacked and sent forward. The Navy’s principal problem, he told Admiral King, was a shortage not of planes, but of airfields.
Ghormley disagreed. “I presented the need for aircraft of all types, especially Army fighters.… I felt that our emergency needs should be met even if our commitments to allied nations, on lend-lease and our commitments to the African Campaign, which had not yet commenced, had to be slowed down somewhat.” Alas, the Army planners who allocated the service’s planes worldwide made decisions based on projected U.S. and Japanese air strength six months out, in April 1943. Since the planners estimated that the U.S. would have five thousand planes in the Pacific then, and the Japanese only four thousand, the more immediate needs of SOPAC were immaterial. The Cactus Air Force would have to make do in ’42.
Even though the U.S.–British Combined Chiefs of Staff had specifically agreed to divert fifteen Army air groups from Britain to the South Pacific, General Arnold successfully contrived to cancel it by arguing that any such reallocation, no matter how specific, was void because it jeopardized the “agreed strategic concept” of going on the offensive in North Africa.
As of September 1942, there was only one Allied offensive that stood in actual jeopardy, and it was far from the beaches of Casablanca. American forces on Cactus, Ghormley said, were “under constant pressure. Logistics supply is most difficult. We can send only one ship at a time and from the eastward there is only one channel.… The Japs are still getting in despite our air activity. Nobody knows exactly how many are on Cactus right now.” Ghormley made a worrying impression on his superiors. Nimitz took note of the discrepancy and the awkward second looks it caused around the room. Watching closely as Ghormley spoke, Nimitz found him worn, weary, and anxious. He couldn’t estimate enemy troop strength in part because he hadn’t visited the island himself to talk with the marines. Vandegrift’s intelligence section based their numbers on actual contact and behind-the-lines reconnaissance. When Ghormley mentioned that the island’s supply of aviation gas was down to just ten thousand gallons, Turner pointed out that the supply had actually been as low as half that volume.
After Arnold remarked on the pressing need for aircraft worldwide and observed that the South Pacific already had all the planes its airfields could effectively handle, Nimitz asked Ghormley a pointed question: Why hadn’t SOPAC’s naval forces been sent out at night to sink the Tokyo Express? The answer came when staffers interrupted the meeting twice to deliver priority radio dispatches to Ghormley. When he read them, his reaction both times was to say, “My God, what are we going to do about this?” In his voice were the echoes of the defeat at Savo, a generalized dread that manifested itself in defeatism. Ghormley saw the whole operation as standing on a precipice. As he later recalled, “If the Japanese desired to take a chance, with the major portion