James d hornfischer neptunes inferno the u s na nal (v5 0)

Also by James D. Hornfischer
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004)
Ship of Ghosts (2006)


Bantam Books

New York

(Photo Credit: Title Page)


Copyright © 2011 by James D. Hornfischer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New
York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Excerpts from unpublished writings by Robert D. Graff copyright © 2011 by Robert D. Graff. Used by permission.
Endpaper map by Jeffrey L. Ward
Interior maps by Lum Pennington
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hornfischer, James D.
Neptune’s inferno: the U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal / James D. Hornfischer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90807-7
1. Guadalcanal, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942–1943. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American. 3. United States. Navy—History
—World War, 1939–1945. 4. United States. Navy—Biography. 5. Veterans—United States—Interviews. 6. Guadalcanal, Battle of, Solomon
Islands, 1942–1943—Personal narratives, American. I. Title.
D767.98.H665 2011

940.54’265933—dc22
2010027231
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1


In memory:
CHARLES D. GROJEAN
Rear Admiral, USN
1923–2008

Sailor, Leader, Teacher


Never have the gods of all the tribes put upon the seas such monsters as man now sends over them.… Their steel
bowels, grinding and rumbling below the splash of the sea, are fed on quarried rock. Their arteries are steel, their
nerves copper, their blood red and blue ames. With the prescience of the supernatural, they peer into space. Their

voices scream through gales, and they whisper together over a thousand miles of sea. They reach out and destroy
that which the eye of man cannot perceive.

But … all this terribleness will vanish, returning again into the inanimate whenever the capacity and vigor of the
guiding mind deteriorates or is worn down by the years that have stolen away the quick grasp of youth.
—Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (1909)


CONTENTS

Cover
Other Books by This Author

Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
MAPS
TABLES
PROLOGUE:

Eighty-two Ships
PART I

SEA OF TROUBLES
1: Trip Wire
2: A Great Gray Fleet
3: The First D-Day
4: Nothing Worthy of Your Majesty’s Attention
5: Fly the Carriers
6: A Captain in the Fog
7: The Martyring of Task Group 62.6
8: Burning in the Rain
PART II

FIGHTING FLEET RISING
9: A New Kind of Fight
10: The Tokyo Express
11: A Function at the Junction
12: What They Were Built For
13: The Warriors
14: The Devil May Care
15: The Visit
16: Night of a New Moon

17: Pulling the Trigger
18: “Pour It to ’Em”


PART III

STORM TIDE
19: All Hell’s Eve
20: The Weight of a War
21: Enter Fighting
22: “Strike—Repeat, Strike”
23: Santa Cruz
24: Secret History
25: Turner’s Choice
26: Suicide
27: Black Friday
28: Into the Light
29: The Killing Salvo
30: Death in the Machine Age
31: Point Blank
32: Among the Shadows
33: Atlanta Burning
34: Cruiser in the Sky
35: Regardless of Losses
PART IV

THE THUNDERING
36: The Giants Ride
37: The Gun Club
38: The Kind of Men Who Win a War

39: On the Spot
40: The Futility of Learning
41: Future Rising
42: Report and Echo
43: The Opinion of Convening Authority
44: Ironbottom Sound
Photo Insert
Acknowledgments
Ships and Aircraft Types of the Guadalcanal Campaign
Naval Battles of the Guadalcanal Campaign


Total Naval Losses at Guadalcanal
Source Notes
Bibliography
Photo Credits
Index
About the Author


MAPS

Pacific Ocean Area
The Slot

Battle of Savo Island

Battle of Cape Esperance
Cruiser Night Action

Morning After in Ironbottom Sound
Battleship Night Action
Battle of Tassafaronga


TABLES

The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal, August 1942
Order of Battle—Battle of Savo Island

Shipboard Gunnery and Fire-Control Systems
Order of Battle—Battle of Cape Esperance

The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal (as of October 18, 1942)

U.S. Navy Combat Task Forces in the South Pacific (as of October 26, 1942)
The Japanese in the Battle of Santa Cruz

U.S. Navy Combat Task Forces in the South Pacific (as of November 12, 1942)
Order of Battle—The Cruiser Night Action

Order of Battle—The Battleship Night Action
Order of Battle—Battle of Tassafaronga



PROLOGUE
Eighty-two Ships
by forty thousand sailors, shepherding a
force of sixteen thousand U.S. Marines, reached their destination in a remote southern

ocean and spent the next hundred days immersed in a curriculum of cruel and timeless
lessons. No ghting navy had ever been so speedily and explosively educated. In the
con ict that rolled through the end of that trembling year, they and the thousands
more who followed them learned that technology was important, but that guts and
guile mattered more. That swiftness was more deadly than strength, and that wellpackaged surprise usually beat them both. That if it looked like the enemy was
coming, the enemy probably was coming and you ought to tell somebody, maybe
even everybody. That the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of
nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.
Sailors in the war zone learned the arcane lore of bad luck and its many
manifestations, from the sight of rats leaving a ship in port (a sign that she will be
sunk) to the act of whistling while at sea (inviting violent winds) to the follies of
opening re rst on a Sunday or beginning a voyage on a Friday (the consequences
of which were certain but nonspecific, and thus all the more frightful).
They learned to tell the red-orange blossoms of shells hitting targets from the faster
ashes of muzzles ring the other way. That hard steel burns. That any ship can look
shipshape, but if you really want to take her measure, check her turret alignments.
That torpedoes, and sometimes radios, keep their own ckle counsel about when they
will work. That a war to secure liberty could be waged passionately by men who had
none themselves, and that in death all sailors have an unmistakable dignity.
Some of these were the lessons of any war, truisms relearned for the hundredth time
by the latest generation to face its trials. Victory always tended to y with the rst
e ective salvo. Others were novel, the product of untested technologies and tactics,
unique to the circumstances of America’s rst o ensive in the Paci c: that you could
win a campaign on the backs of stevedores expert in the lethal craft of combatloading cargo ships; that the little image of an enemy ship on a radar scope will inch
visibly when heavily struck; that rapid partial salvo re from a director-controlled
main battery reduces the salvo interval period but complicates the correction of
ranges and spots.
In the far South Paci c, you were lucky if your sighting report ever reached its
recipient. Even then, the plainest statement of fact might be subject to two or more
interpretations of meaning. You learned that warships smashed and left dead in the

night could resurrect themselves by the rise of morning, that circumstances could
conspire to make your enemy seem much shrewder than he ever really could be, and
that as bad as things might seem in the midst of combat, they might well be far worse
ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 1942, EIGHTY-TWO U.S. NAVY SHIPS MANNED


for him. That you could learn from your opponent’s success if your pride permitted it,
and that the best course of action often ran straight into the barriers of your worst
biases and fears. That some of the worst thrashings you took could look like victories
tomorrow. That good was never good enough, and if you wanted Neptune to laugh,
all you had to do was show him your operations plan.
This book tells the story of how the U.S. Navy learned these and many other lessons
during its rst major campaign of the twentieth century: the struggle for the southern
Solomon Islands in 1942. The American eet landed its marines on Guadalcanal and
Tulagi in early August. The Japanese were beaten by mid-November and evacuated in
February. What happened in between was a story of how America gambles on the
grand scale, wings it, and wins. Top commanders on both sides were slain in battle or
perished afterward amid the shame of inquiries and interrogations. A more lasting
pain beset the living. Reputations were shattered, grudges nursed. The Marine Corps
would compose a rousing institutional anthem from the notion, partly true, that the
Navy had abandoned them in the ght’s critical early going. But the full story of the
campaign turns the tale in another direction, seldom appreciated. Soon enough, the
fleet threw itself fully into the breach, and by the end of it all, almost three sailors had
died in battle at sea for every infantryman who fell ashore. The Corps’ debt to the
Navy was never greater.
The American landings on Guadalcanal developed into the most sustained and
vicious ght of the Paci c war. Seven major naval actions were the result, ve of
them principally ship-versus-ship battles fought at night, the other two decided by
aircraft by day. The nickname the Americans coined for the waters that hosted most of
the carnage, “Ironbottom Sound,” suited the startling scale of destruction: The U.S.

Navy lost twenty-four major warships; the Japanese lost twenty-four. Aircraft losses,
too, were nearly equal: America lost 436, Japan 440. The human toll was horri c.
Ashore, U.S. Marine and Army killed in action were 1,592 (out of 60,000 landed). The
number of Americans killed at sea topped ve thousand. Japanese deaths set the
bloody pace for the rest of the war, with 20,800 soldiers lost on the island and
probably 4,000 sailors at sea. Through the end of 1942, the news reports of
Guadalcanal spun a narrative whose twists required no ctionalizing for high drama,
though they did need some careful parsing and management, or so the Navy thought
at the time. Franklin Roosevelt competed with “Tokyo Rose” to shape the tale on the
public airwaves.
In their trial against the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the waters o
Guadalcanal, the Navy mastered a new kind of ght. Expeditionary war was a new
kind of enterprise, and its scale at Guadalcanal was surpassed only by its combatants’
thoroughgoing de cits in matériel, preparation, and understanding of their enemy. It
was the most critical major military operation America would ever run on such a
threadbare shoestring. As its principal players would admit afterward, the puzzle of
victory was solved on the y and on the cheap, in terms of resources if not lives. The
campaign featured tight interdependence among warriors of the air, land, and sea.
For the infantry to seize and hold the island, ships had to control the sea. For a eet


to control the sea, the pilots had to y from the island’s air eld. For the pilots to y
from the air eld, the infantry had to hold the island. That tripod stood only by the
strength of all three legs. In the end, though, it was principally a navy’s battle to win.
And despite the ostensible lesson of the Battle of Midway, which had supposedly
crowned the aircraft carrier as queen of the seas, the combat sailors of America’s
surface eet had a more than incidental voice in who would prevail. For most of the
campaign, Guadalcanal was a contest of equals, perhaps the only major battle in the
Paci c where the United States and Japan fought from positions of parity. Its
outcome was often in doubt.

This book develops the story of the travails and di cult triumphs of the U.S. Navy
during its rst o ensive of World War II, as it navigated a steeply canted learning
curve. It emphasizes the human textures of the campaign and looks anew at the
decisions and relationships of the commanders who guided it.
The novelist James Michener wrote long ago, “They will live a long time, these men
of the South Paci c. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be
remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the
Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure
them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge.”
The founders of the U.S. Navy, having faced their own moments of decision, from
John Paul Jones o Flamborough Head to Stephen Decatur against the Barbary
Pirates, would have felt kinship with the men of the South Paci c Forces. There as
everywhere, men in uniform fought like impulsive humans almost always have:
stubbornly, viciously, brilliantly, wastefully, earnestly, stupidly, gallantly. At
Guadalcanal, so distant on the ear, a naval legacy continued, and by their example in
that bitter campaign the long shadows of their American quality reach right on up to
the present.


The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
Operation Watchtower (as of October 18, 1942)
ADM ERNEST J. KING

Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH)
Washington, DC
ADM CHESTER W. NIMITZ

Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC)
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
VADM WILLIAM F. HALSEY, JR.

Commander, South Pacific Forces (COMSOPAC)
Nouméa, New Caledonia (USS Argonne)
VADM FRANK JACK FLETCHER

Commander, Expeditionary Force
Task Force 61 (USS Saratoga)
RADM LEIGH
NOYES
Commander
Air Support Forces
Task Group 61.1
(U SS Wasp)

VADM FLETCHER
TF 11 (U SS Saratoga)

RADM RICHMOND
KELLY TURNER
Commander
Amphibious Force
Task Force 62
(U SS McCawley)

RADM NOYES
TF 18 (U SS Wasp)

RADM THOMAS
KINKAID
TF 16 (U SS Enterprise)

RADM VICTOR A. C. CRUTCHLEY, ROYAL NAVY

Commander, Cruiser Covering Force
Task Force 44 (HMAS Australia)

RADM JOHN
S. MCCAIN
Commander
Aircraft (land-based)
Task Force 63
(Efate, New Hebrides)

MGEN ALEXANDER
A. VANDEGRIFT
Commander,
1st Marine Division



(Photo Credit: P.1)

“It is better to be bombed into the next world than to live in this one as a slave to anybody or any foreign system. It is
that attitude which, we believe, will eventually win this war.”

—Collier’s, “A United People,” January 17, 1942


1
Trip Wire
Filipino village said to an American

journalist, “The Paci c: Of itself it may not be eternity. Yet certainly you can nd in it
the scale, the pattern of the coming days of man. The Mediterranean was the sea of
destiny of the Ancient World; the Atlantic, of what you call the Old World. I have
thought much about this, and I believe the Paci c holds the destiny of your New World.
Men now living will see the shape of the future rising from its waters.”
The vessel of that ocean held more than half the water on earth, its expanse larger
than all the landmasses of the world. Its beauty was elemental, its time of a meter and
its distances of a magnitude that Americans could only begin to apprehend from the
California, Oregon, and Washington coasts. It was essential and di erent and
compelling and important, whether one measured it by grid coordinates, assessed it by
geopolitics and national interests, or sought its prospects above the clouds. And when
war came, it was plain to see that the shape of the future, whatever it was to be, was
emerging from that trackless basin of brine.
Whose future it would be remained unsettled in the rst summer of the war. The
forces of distant nations, roaming over it, had clashed brie y but had not yet collided in
a way that would test their wills and turn history. That collision was soon to take place,
and it would happen, rst and seriously and in earnest, on an island called
Guadalcanal.
It was a single radio transmission, a clandestine report originating from that island’s
interior wilderness, that set the powerful wheels turning. The news that reached U.S.
Navy headquarters in Washington on July 6, 1942, was routine on its face: The enemy
had arrived, was building an airstrip. This was not staggering news at a time when
Japanese conquest had been proceeding smoothly along almost every axis of movement
in the Asian theater. Nonetheless, this broadcast, sent from a modest teleradio
transmitter in a South Paci c jungle to Townsville, Australia, found an attentive
audience in the American capital.
The Cambridge-educated agent of the British crown who had sent it, Martin Clemens,
had until recently been the administrator of Guadalcanal. When it became clear, in
February, that the Japanese were coming, there had been a general evacuation of the
civilian populace. Clemens stayed behind. Living o the land near the village of Aola,

the site of the old district headquarters, the Australian, tall and athletic, took what he
needed from gardens and livestock, depending on native sympathies for everything.
Thus sustained, he launched a second career as a covert agent and a “coastwatcher,”
part of a network of similarly situated men all through the Solomons.
Holed up at his station, he had radioed word to Townsville on May 3 that Japanese
troops had landed on the smaller island of Tulagi across the sound. A month later, he
TWO YEARS BEFORE THE WAR BEGAN, AN OLD SPANISH PRIEST IN A


reported that they were on Guadalcanal’s northern shore, building a wharf.
Then from his jungle hide, Clemens saw a twelve-ship convoy standing on the
horizon. Landing on the beach that day came more than two thousand Japanese
construction workers, four hundred infantry, and several boatloads of equipment—
heavy tractors, road rollers, trucks, and generators. Clearly their purpose was some sort
of construction project. Having detected Clemens’s teleradio transmissions to Australia,
the enemy sent their scouts into the jungle to nd him. As the pressure on Clemens and
his fellow Australian spies increased, he kept on the move to elude them, aided by a
cadre of native scouts, formidable and capable men. The stress of avoiding enemy
reconnaissance planes overhead worked on him. He read Shakespeare to settle his mind.
“If I lose control everything will be lost,” he wrote in his diary on July 23. His radio
batteries were nearly depleted, and his food stores thin, when he spotted a gravel-andclay airstrip under construction on the island’s north-coast plantation plain and
reported it from his hide in a hillside mining claim. He had sent many reports. This one
would bring salvation.
When the commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King, learned from
radio intercepts that Japan had sent air eld construction crews to Guadalcanal, a new
impetus to action came. He and the Army’s chief of sta , General George Marshall, had
already struck a compromise that would send U.S. forces into the South Paci c with the
ultimate objective of seizing Rabaul, the great Japanese base in New Britain. The rst
phase of that operation would be the seizure of Tulagi and adjacent positions. With the
arrival of the news of Japanese activity on Guadalcanal across the sound, however, the

design of America’s rst major o ensive of the war was redrawn, set to begin on Martin
Clemens’s forlorn hideaway.
It was as if Japan’s expansion southeast from Rabaul had struck a hidden trip wire—
the lines drawn on Navy charts tracing the paths of sea communication across the South
Paci c to Australia. As anyone could see by taking a compass and drawing a 250-mile
radius centered on Guadalcanal’s airstrip, it would, when operational, enable Japanese
planes to threaten the sea-lanes to Australia, whose protection was long one of the
Navy’s core missions. Construction of the airfield might have been low-order business for
Japanese forces spread thinly along a multi-continental oceanic perimeter, but its
discovery would draw the fleet straight to Guadalcanal.
The island, shaped like Jamaica, with about half its area, had come to the attention of
Westerners long ago. Explorers from the old Spanish priest’s homeland, passing through
the Solomons in 1568, named it after a town in Andalusia, sixty miles north of Seville.
When Captain James Cook arrived 220 years later, he claimed the Solomons for Great
Britain, which hung on for another 154 years, until Japanese troops landed. The
novelist Jack London visited near the turn of the century and doubted his heart was cold
enough to banish his worst enemies to a place so dire, where “the air is saturated with a
poison that bites into every pore … and that many strong men who escape dying there
return as wrecks to their own countries.”
A mountain range ran its entire length like a spine, with summits as high as eightythree hundred feet. On the southern coast, the mountains fell steeply into the sea,


making that shoreline a barrier to trade and to war. The north coast’s tropical plain was
more inviting. Cut through with rivers and forest growth, it was well suited to
agriculture—and air elds. The narrow northern beach, guarded by palms and
ironwoods and covered in kunai grass, stretched for miles, overlooked by scattered coral
ridges, some of them five hundred feet high.
From the British government outpost at Aola to the small Catholic missions in the
west, the human settlements were small and prehistoric. The climate, the insects, and
the rampant disease made the place hard to tolerate. A coconut plantation owned by

Lever Brothers, the world’s largest, drew its employees from the nine thousand resident
Melanesians, traditionally divided by culture but now joined imperfectly by one of the
few useful things that Britain had brought there: pidgin English.
The U.S. Navy would not have greatly concerned itself with the Solomons, with a
census roughly that of Trenton and a population density of ten people per square mile,
if not for the accident of its geography, astride the sea-lanes to Australia. Tulagi, the
British administrative capital, had the best anchorage for hundreds of miles around. On
that rocky volcanic islet nestled against Florida Island, huge trees and mangrove
swamps lined the shore where they hadn’t been cut back to accommodate the trappings
of Western empire: a golf course, a commissioner’s o ce, a bishop’s residence, a
government hospital, a police barracks, a cricket club, and a bar.
Guadalcanal lay about twenty miles south of Tulagi. It marked the southern end of a
broken and irregular inter-island corridor that meandered northwest between two
parallel columns of islands and dead-ended, about 375 miles later, into the island of
Bougainville. As the principal route of Japanese reinforcement into Guadalcanal, this
watery path through New Georgia Sound would acquire an outsized strategic
importance. It would be nicknamed the Slot.
fty-six, the grandson of a German hotelier from the Hill Country of
central Texas, was born to a rare style of leadership: gentle but exacting, gracious but
hard and fearless, like a mailed st in a satin glove. There was no ruthlessness in him
unless one counted as ruthless his willingness to burden the people he relied on with his
complete and unfaltering trust. That burden fell heavily upon the men who worked for
him, but one of his gifts was an ability to turn the burden into a source of inspiration
and uplift for those who shouldered it. The U.S. Navy never needed a leader of his kind
more badly than in the months following the treachery of December 7, shortly after
which he took command of the Pacific Fleet.
Nimitz’s will was ferocious, but held inward and insulated by a kindly temperament
that made his ascent to high command a surprise to connoisseurs of four-star ambition.
His intensity was apparent only in his close physical proximity, where the heat from his
eyes, it was said, could be felt on the skin. Nimitz was an unusually e ective

organization man, stoic and controlled but demanding. Ascending to theater command
had never been his ambition, for ambitions, he felt, were meant not for personal gain
but to pursue common goals within the established order of a group. In 1941, a year
ADMIRAL CHESTER W. NIMITZ,


before circumstances forced him to accept it, he had turned down the appointment to
become commander in chief, Paci c Fleet (CINCPAC). He had done so out of respect for
the system, unwilling to vault past the twenty-eight o cers who were senior to him. But
after the attack on Pearl Harbor his own commander in chief gave him no choice.
Franklin D. Roosevelt plucked Nimitz from his post as the Navy’s personnel boss and
installed him as leader of the most important naval theater in the world. It was a call to
duty that allowed no humble refusals. The president told Navy Secretary Frank Knox,
“Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won.” The Paci c
war would be America’s war. Running it would be a lonely charge. A commentator for
Collier’s magazine would call the Paci c “an unshared front where America’s production,
her strategy, her skill and valor must stand the acid test alone.… Our national feeling
with regard to the Paci c burns with a purer ame. We seem to realize that here is not a
war rooted in the age-old hatreds and grudges of Europe. Here, rather, is a war to
resolve new and inescapable problems.” Those problems would be many and their
owner, as far as the Navy cared, was Chester Nimitz.
Nimitz’s chief of sta , Raymond A. Spruance, would call him “one of the few people I
know who never knew what it meant to be afraid of anything.” His duties were of the
kind that exhausted the conscientious and the caring. After the Oahu attack, he had to
sort out its myriad administrative consequences—three thousand letters to send to
bereaved families, untold gatherings of men and machines to reassign to useful tasks. As
head of the Bureau of Navigation, which handled personnel issues, he had tendered the
applications of the ambitious and the vengeful, including more than one U.S.
congressman who phoned him after December 7 to lobby for an enlistment.
Overwhelmed and sleepless, Nimitz was said to have told his congressional supplicants,

“Go back and vote us appropriations. We’re going to need them.”
On December 19, Nimitz left his o ce on Constitution Avenue and returned to his
apartment on Q Street to share the news of his appointment with his wife. Sensing his
reluctance, Catherine reminded him, “You always wanted to command the Paci c Fleet.
You always thought that would be the height of glory.”
“Darling,” replied Nimitz, “the fleet’s at the bottom of the sea. Nobody must know that
here, but I’ve got to tell you.”
He had grown to dread the assignment, and would have even if it didn’t entail
commanding a wounded squadron, the battleships of Task Force 1, whose lifeblood,
their oil, still seeped in rainbow ribbons from their broken hulls o Ford Island. He
would have dreaded it because he knew his promotion was a zero-sum transaction; it
required the demotion of someone else, and that person happened to be one of Nimitz’s
closest friends, Husband E. Kimmel. Pearl Harbor had burned on Kimmel’s watch, so
Kimmel paid the price. If the charge of negligence failed by the standard of a trial court,
and if the proceeding that tarred him was driven more by political expediency than by
examination of a fuller truth concerning who had what level of warning and when, it
was also the verdict that the code of naval leadership required. A captain was expected
to go down with his ship; why not an admiral with his base? The principle was clean,
simple, and predictable in operation. It was the Navy way.


Within a few short years America’s eet would be more powerful and capable than
any before it. The same could be said of Nimitz’s superior in Washington, the leading
U.S. naval commander of the day. Though he worked in guarded isolation, giving
subordinates little direct access, no admiral had ever wielded the same degree of
personal in uence on wartime policy as Ernest J. King. As the commander in chief of
the U.S. Fleet (COMINCH) and chief of naval operations (CNO), he was preeminent in
both planning and command. His in uence and his formidable personal nature made
him a gure to be reckoned with within the Navy Department bureaucracy. Ensconced
on the front corridor of the fourth oor of “Main Navy,” the large headquarters building

on Constitution Avenue, he was memorably unlike Nimitz. “Subconsciously he sought to
be omnipotent and infallible,” his biographer wrote. “There were few men whom he
regarded as his equal as to brains; he would acknowledge no mind as superior to his
own.” He was abrupt and unyielding, visibly intolerant of those he deemed fools.
Though his rst re ex was always to reject even the best advice, he did once concede to
a staffer, “Sometimes my bark is worse than my bite.”
King penalized caution wherever it surfaced. In March, he was outraged to learn that
one of his admirals in the South Paci c, Frank Jack Fletcher, had decided to return to
base to refuel his carrier rather than stand ready to intercept enemy shipping gathering
near Rabaul. During the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, he took a dim view of Fletcher’s
refusal to release his destroyers to pursue the retreating Japanese carrier force. When
Nimitz subsequently recommended Fletcher for both a promotion and a medal—taking
pains to defend his judgment to King by pointing out Fletcher’s shortage of destroyers to
protect his carriers—King refused to approve either.
King reduced all issues to their impact on keeping his eet ready for war. No other
considerations counted. When o cials at the Department of the Interior’s Fish and
Wildlife Service informed him in June that Navy units were targeting whales and other
marine mammals during gunnery exercises, King quickly put an end to it, writing
Nimitz, “Undoubtedly these acts are committed lightheartedly by the crews without
realizing that the killing and injury of whales results in the destruction of valuable war
materials of which there is a wholly inadequate supply.” King was indi erent to the
concerns of marine biologists. To him it mattered only that his eet needed whale meal
and lubricants, resources that the West Coast whaling eet, thinly drawn by a twoocean war’s demands on shipping, was struggling to provide.
Most people who crossed King’s path came to fear him for one reason or another, but
t h e New York Times war correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin, no stranger to the
COMINCH’s high mercury, saw something else in his bluster. “His greatest weakness is
personal vanity,” Baldwin wrote. “He is terri cally sensitive and in some ways has
many of the attributes of a woman.” This remark probably revealed more about Baldwin
than about King, whose virility was actually a mark against him. Women avoided sitting
next to him at dinner parties because, it was said, “his hands were too often beneath the

table.”
King’s personality was famously and not atteringly likened to a blowtorch. Some
people turned that metaphor to his favor, saying he was “so tough he shaved with a


blowtorch.” That nuance would have been lost on him, for he was never willing to
propel his career by cultivating people’s favor. After facing o with King at a meeting
once, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his diary, “One thing that might help win
this war is to get someone to shoot King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a
deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully.” King liked his tough
reputation. When he was called to Washington to replace Harold Stark as CNO, King
remarked, “When things get tough, they call for the sons of bitches.” It marked the style
of King’s intellect and independence, and not necessarily for the better, that he
mistrusted the judgment of anyone but himself. Those he deemed lesser minds included
some formidable gures, including General Marshall, whom King deemed provincially
Eurocentric and ignorant of seapower and the Paci c generally, and the one o cer who
would prove to have the keenest judgment of all the ag o cers in the Navy: Chester
W. Nimitz. King soon learned that he could give his Paci c Ocean Area chief some space
to operate, but in the early days he was known to treat Nimitz as he did other
subordinates. Of Nimitz he had once said, “If only I could keep him tight on what he’s
supposed to do. Somebody gets ahold of him and I have to straighten him out.”
Apparently leery of Nimitz’s accommodating way, King sent him unsubtle signals about
his expectations. Once he wrote to his Paci c commander, “You are requested to read
the article, ‘There Is Only One Mistake: To Do Nothing,’ by Charles F. Kettering in the
March 29th issue of Saturday Evening Post and to see to it that it is brought to the
attention of all of your principal subordinates and other key o cers.” So overriding was
his will to action that for a time King made a practice of bypassing Nimitz in
operational matters. If this was a test of fortitude, Nimitz passed. Finding the
discourtesy intolerable, he confronted King during one of their many meetings and told
him the state of a airs had to change. King let Nimitz run the Paci c naval war

thenceforth with little overt interference.
Fair, gentle, courtly, and vigorous, Nimitz was a match for any of the blustery egos
surrounding him. He would emerge in time as the Paci c war’s essential man, the gure
through whom all decisions owed, on whom all outcomes re ected, and whose
judgment was respected from Main Navy all the way down the line. He lay like a valley
of humility between two mountains of conceit: Ernest King and General Douglas
MacArthur, the commander of the Southwest Paci c Command and the Navy’s stalwart
intramural rival. The divided Army–Navy command would be a continuing complication
in the war ahead. King and MacArthur had enough weight of will to pull major
commanders into their orbits and hold them in place by their gravity. Nimitz, in time,
became their fulcrum.
Nimitz generally reserved his thoughts for himself. Complaints he harbored that had
no bearing on plans, fruitless reprimands, second and third guesses—he held them
within. The emotional pressure they created often left him sleepless. Most nights he
awoke at 3 a.m., read till 5:30, then went back to bed. The pace of work at CINCPAC
headquarters needed just a few months to exhaust him utterly. By spring 1942 his mind
was a turmoil, his spirit gripped by pessimism. The repair of the battle eet and the
reconstitution of Pearl Harbor naval base were moving more slowly than many wanted.


He feared his supporters were turning sour. “I will be lucky to last six months,” he
lamented in a letter to Catherine.
But the season of spring was like a lifetime in that war. Though grievous damage to
the eet was still visible at Pearl, the loss was never as great as it had seemed. All but
two of the battleships were sent to the West Coast for repair and modernization and
made ready for war within months. The war, of course, did not wait for them.
Reconstituted around its aircraft carriers, and under the leadership of new commanders,
the Pacific Fleet struck back in the spring.
The carrier eet’s surging esprit de corps, such a novelty for the battered warriors of
Pearl Harbor, carried Chester Nimitz through the six months he had most dreaded. The

Paci c Fleet’s attops, under Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., ventured forth and
struck targets from the Gilberts to all the way to Japan’s home islands. A task force with
the carriers Enterprise and Hornet, the latter playing host to a ight of strangers, twinengined Army bombers, launched an audacious raid against Tokyo. After Lieutenant
Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s had done their work, the Combined Fleet’s commander
in chief, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, won army backing for his plan to draw out and
destroy the nuisance-making U.S. eet once and for all by seizing Midway and the
Aleutian Islands, then targeting Hawaii itself. He also continued the push from Rabaul
south toward the stronghold of Port Moresby, New Guinea. He meant to isolate
Australia, then continue southeast to threaten U.S. bases as far away as Samoa.
In early May, a carrier task force under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher intercepted
a Japanese invasion eet bound for Port Moresby. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, the
U.S. Navy sank the Japanese carrier Shoho, damaged a second, and turned back the
invasion. Though the Lexington was lost and the Yorktown damaged, American pilots
relished their victory and soon re-formed for another crack at the Combined Fleet.
During the rst week of June, after Nimitz’s codebreakers detected an enemy plan to
invade Midway Island, a pair of carrier task forces under Fletcher and Spruance sprang
an ambush. By the time iers from the Enterprise, Hornet, and hastily repaired Yorktown
called it a day on June 4, Japan’s thrust toward Hawaii was parried, with losses that
included four frontline aircraft carriers and 110 pilots. The victory put the U.S. Navy in
position, for the first time, to carry the fight to the enemy.
The old plan for a Paci c o ensive envisioned parallel drives toward Tokyo, one
running from New Guinea toward the Philippines, the other through the Central Paci c
to the Marianas. Which path received priority for supply, equipment, and reinforcement
would depend on the outcome of an important battle yet to be fought—between the U.S.
Army and the U.S. Navy. General Douglas MacArthur advocated the New Guinea route;
Nimitz and the Navy, the Central Paci c. Though the interservice rivalry was well
established, the outbreak of war pitted them in competition for scarce weapons and
matériel. As the rst American o ensive of the war took shape, the warriors in the
Paci c would be constantly pleading their cause to those in Washington who rationed
the resources. As it happened, King’s ambitions faced obstacles from those who

outranked even MacArthur. FDR himself was said to favor European operations.
As King saw it, the events of early June provided the longed-for opening for a Paci c