Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [92]
As it happened, what Ghormley feared was exactly the plan then being devised by Yamamoto and his staff at Truk. On the Imperial Navy’s drawing boards was an ambitious schedule of sustained reinforcements, to be coordinated in October with another major naval push.
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THE DAY AFTER the conference of high commanders on the Argonne, Chester Nimitz stepped into a B-17 Flying Fortress and flew to Henderson Field to tour the island battlefront. General Vandegrift was there to greet him. Nimitz promptly reaffirmed to him that his primary mission was to hold Henderson Field, as opposed to dislodging the Japanese garrison from the surrounding jungles and hills. Vandegrift had understood this well from the beginning, when he drew up his landing plan.
In the bamboo grove outside Vandegrift’s headquarters, Nimitz decorated several men. Colonel Merritt Edson, commander of the 1st Marine Raider Battalion and victor in the early clash south of Henderson Field, received the Navy Cross, as did the Marine Corps fighter ace Captain Marion Carl and Vandegrift himself. As Hal Lamar, Nimitz’s chief of staff, read the citations, Nimitz pinned them on each recipient. Among them was a tall sergeant who had captured a Japanese tank and blown up a couple of machine-gun nests. As Nimitz reached up to pin him with the Navy Cross, the sergeant fainted. “I never saw an admiral before,” he offered later.
When Nimitz returned to Nouméa, he met again with Ghormley and told him exactly what he wanted. He wanted all-weather airfields, more storage facilities for aviation gas, and Quonset huts, not tents, to shelter his pilots. He wanted better cargo-handling facilities, better roads, and more attentive aircraft repair services. “Planes are too expensive and too hard to get to let only minor damage render them permanently unserviceable,” he said. Nimitz wanted a salvage tug in the area, and improved radio procedures and better equipment. He wanted new doctrine for communications and more efficient distribution of mail.
In cataloging these things, Nimitz was showing Ghormley how he wanted leadership exercised. It would not prove helpful to Ghormley’s career that Nimitz visited Guadalcanal before Ghormley himself did. Gracious and subtle as ever, CINCPAC calmly told Ghormley something that might have been tinged with hellfire coming from a different commander: “I want you to go up and see conditions for yourself.”
At their second meeting, Nimitz learned that Ghormley had not responded to a request from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a schedule of planned offensive operations up the Solomons toward Rabaul. Ghormley said he had not responded because “I feel that our present operations have not yet reached a point where such a plan and schedule would be worthwhile.”
Ghormley’s failure to propose the requested schedule of future operations was a command failure of a high order. Nimitz was suspicious of commanders who found reasons to stay out of harm’s way. Typically he kept his judgments of people to himself, but after two months of fighting and no victories to show, he was in a mood for accountability. He instructed Ghormley to include in his final report on the Battle of Savo Island his view as to the responsibility for the results that night. “Such a blow cannot be passed over, and we owe it to the country to do our best to fix the responsibility for that disaster, and to take the action necessary to prevent a recurrence,” Nimitz said.
Back at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz would give a New York Times reporter a sunny assessment of his trip. He professed himself “satisfied in every way with what I saw.” His other remarks, artfully innocuous, sent a warning shot over his South Pacific commander’s bow. Nimitz told Trumbull, “It was just the kind of trip you would expect a senior officer to take from time to time to see what’s going on.”
Late one evening on Guadalcanal, Nimitz had said to General Vandegrift over a drink, “When this war